What if you decided to want all of it?

The start of summer, here in the northern hemisphere, always comes with a tinge of melancholy, as each day's light begins, ironically, a new cycle of decline.

Is it only me, or do you feel it a bit, too?

Just a few days past the solstice and today, where I live, will have 39 seconds less of sunlight. Doesn't sound like much, though as you know, life has a way of creeping up on us. By the next solstice in December, that difference will swell to 5 hours and 52 minutes.

It's human to linger in, to honor, that feeling of melancholy—and the truth that daylight really will be leaking away from me for the next 6 months.

Still, the earth will spin and revolve around the sun whether I'm exuberant or bewildered or too tired to feel anything but tired.

Still, the world is always flashing it's miraculous feathers like a wild turkey strutting for attention—and who wants to miss that? It's only when light, the tiniest bit of light, hits those dark feathers just so that you get to see the stunning iridescence.

Recently I came across a quote by Grammy-winning, R & B singer-songwriter, Frank Ocean, "When you're happy, you enjoy the music. But when you're sad, you understand the lyrics."

Yes, I thought. So let's welcome it all, letting the body spin happy in it's own song, letting the mind make meaning out of all those still and lonesome spaces that come with every journey around the sun.

It's in this spirit that I share this week's piece. Namaste.

All I'll ever want

Two decades from now, if I am still here, all I’ll want is his warm palm and fingers fitting between my ribs, the sound of his broken breath, how it pauses for long, silent seconds, then the huff, the deep sucking-in of air, bearing the scent of wet earth through the window, the heat of our sleeping skins, the fact of the tabby with a tongue full of fur.

I’ll want this estrangement of being together yet alone, lying in darkness, in this fragile tempo, the gasps then the gaps …10 seconds, 20 seconds, 40 seconds.

I’ll want this worry that the next breath won’t come, this peace-relief when it does, and the tension between readiness to let him go and holding on fiercely.

I’ll want the way the dead visit his dreams, our little dog, long gone, trotting out of his sleeping into a morning murmur, “Good dog.”

I’ll want the way, in the wee hours or in an afternoon of napping, he says, “If someone knocks on the door, don’t open it.”

I’ll want how much I hate that he expects me to be the gatekeeper between his life and his death that keeps approaching.

This is one way to love pain, exhaustion, despair, grief, ugliness, loneliness, anger—to remember how much you’ll want it all back while you still have it.

Already I want so much that is behind us.

How one morning we walked into a woods. Doug firs, Ponderosa pines, Madrones, Manzanita. And he said, “Use more than vision—we lean too much on our eyes.”

So instead, I smelled how those sun-warmed needles and leaves were spicy.

Then he explained how one way to see a bird is to listen, “Some birds you may never see, only hear.”

My mind, as he spoke, was a spider with eight busy legs and two still-searching eyes, spinning so much coming in from all those senses.

Below, I saw the lace of his left hiking-boot undone. I need to tell him, I thought. Above, I realized how the forest is the first act of Kintsugi, tree limbs instead of gold, poured upward, keeping the blue sky whole.

Listening, what I heard was mostly my own voice, So we are each a song in the leaves to be believed-in, to count, even when the flesh and feathers are nowhere to be seen.

When he told me to stand quiet and focus, I wondered if my mind was so loud that I was disturbing the trees, the birds, the beetles bustling in the understory, this man I’d just begun loving.

All I’ll ever want is that moment back.

How his beard carried a flake of bread crust, his forehead glistening, as the sun rose and the day heated, the sound of his biologist-vest, all those pockets full of field guides, a notebook and mechanical pencils, gauze, that tiny red jar of Mercurochrome, granola bars and a baggy of grapes, that shhhh, shhhh, shhhh against his body with each step.

How it was a new trail then, and we had no idea where we were going.