I am grateful I am alive. I wash open in the tide in the morning light.

So much sorrow and anxiety careened last night through my blood stream. But this body, this vessel, can digest anything. My carburetor purrs. What’s shifted is that when my old habits yell: “Time to panic! Time to give up!’ I recognize these as responses to fear and simply be with the fear with my heart’s presence. What begins then is the re-connection with life as redemption: Every minute is a waking miracle. The secret is to keep returning to the presence of the present moment. My flesh pours out around me. I welcome my laziness, as it’s part of this now that sings to me and that makes me happy. A magpie calls from the trees.

I dreamt of this great new carpet, made of recycled plastic. We slept 8 hours on it. But the boy next to me kept saying in two years it all falls apart. You may think it’s great, he’s saying, and it is, for now, but then… In my dream I was unfazed. I believed him, of course, but what’s now is everything.

I daydream about the shift from moonlight into pedestrian malls and people walking, walking everywhere. That’s all that’s needed, really. The prescription: Keep it up. You’re doing terrifically.

This marks the first time where I can look at my desperate trembling terrified need to unplug and recognize it as only part of the truth. I am the motion of life, and I do not wish to separate anymore. Nature helps me recover my balance. Thank you. I sip tea and shake with awe and gratitude. I say yes to my life and to me inside it. Dear body, I’m so sorry about the tension you carry. I love you. How is the balance possible?

Inside us. Inside the moment.

Yes because that’s where we let go of little life with its thousand demands and embrace big LIFE, which is God. Thank you.

My terror at expanding blooms open like a plum tree. The dusk unfurls to reveal oyster beds awash in the light. I wonder how I find my way home? How am I with my beloved? How is Hannah whole and happy and empowered and how are we a happy family?

How?

My shoulders burn with tension. Fatigue lacerates me. I hunger for the wide-open breath of the magnitude of falling seas. Because first there is the plummet of the town-sized iceberg, an avalanche and tsunami in one. So first, our seas fall before they rise and take by storm millions of lives. I live at the dawn of the plague. I see it coming as surely as the beauty of this dawn lulls me. But I’m not relaxed. My recycled plastic carpet will fall away in the yellow of disintegration. And then where will we rest?

Again, inside this moment. For in the end, and in the beginning, there was always only this sea. And this rising warming dying sea is Thee.