“The price of kissing is your life…” – Mevlana Rumi
There is a cost for everything: loving, not loving, oil, guns, greed, laughter, sharing food with friends, driving kids to soccer practice, school, no school, backyard chickens, factories, ants hard at work, no ants at all, war, no war, the argument, no argument, that kiss, no kiss, sunshine, rain, drought, seeds, people, airplanes, telephones, computers, turning soil, tea, flannel sheets, running water, practice, no practice, bodies, health, sickness, red wine, mango juice, glass windows, central air, heat like a wet blanket on skin, pollen, wasps, ripe apples, music… life.
“Let’s not try to figure out everything at once.”
We are in trouble, and perhaps have always been. He asked me, “Why this struggle?” and I replied, “Because this is how we learn.”
Are we? Will we? Do we?
Let us keep trying. Together. Let us fail, again and again. Let us. This is how we learn.
What is success? Getting up again. Teaching each other to waltz as empire fades. The only perfection is now. Regrets? Get up again. Triumph? Do the same. Every action is just that: an action. Meaning is the threaded story of our lives.
I love you. That’s a risk I’m willing to take. Even when I feel I don’t even like you, or even know you: even when you are a politician or multinational CEO, so easy now to blame. I’ll keep getting up again. Trying to wake up to what feels basic and true. Despite economic decline, flooding, earthquakes, fire, people starving, bats dead on cave floors, jet fuel spewing, oysters gone… still, we shall make music. Still we shall make love. Still, we shall risk knowing.
Let us think together, and choose what price we are willing to pay. Today.
[This post is dedicated to my friends, and to everyone else struggling to show up.]
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