She plays with her children. It begins with being tugged on by the smallest—her children’s cousin, who speaks a little more softly than the others, looks hesitant and willing to believe that sky could bend down and suck him away simply for the pleasure of changing something. He tugs on her shirt and looks up at her, his eyes drenching her in, finding her stability and leaning a little closer towards it. This is his rock, this is his belief. He tugs, he tugs, he tugs.

She is okay with the tugging, but she suddenly wants it to go somewhere, and not just exist as another sign of a person’s proximity, but also as signifier of proximity’s ability to change into gravity and interplay. She swoops down on him and whisks him up in her arms, runs out from under the concrete awning into the green grassing footing of the lakeside trees and fields and swampy moist waitings. Her children—a boy and a girl, both thin & exiting childhood for adulthood—see her carting their cousin off. They are leaning against a piling, their eyes trained and following. Their eyes trained and following for a few seconds before the boy lets out a whoop and follows running.

These two are at the age when they need to be reassured that growing up doesn’t mean letting go of everything good about life. They want to see her laugh and romp. They want to see her toss their cousin about in the air and fall down on top of him, tickling and crazy talking and yeah. They join, and joining, they join something more. A continuum of growth, the firm declaration that age has nothing to do with bitterness, seriousness or stodgy carport sittings. They join and roll and rotate. First it’s a dog pile, and in dog-piling they imagine a pile of dogs. Why would a group of dogs be piling? The boy imagines nipping his cousin’s ear, licking it like the bone of play that all the dogs are grappling for. The woman yips and growls, stuffed in between tight sweaty giggles and chortles that can quite make it past the something in throat. The girl isn’t sure; she is getting older and if her friends…she releases and rolls, wags her tail.

Part of the scuffle is claiming hurt, claiming the pain of an arm in your face, or the rim of a pelvis slicing through your abdomens. Griping about the… and then being rolled with a finger prod for griping about the…

I stand and watch from the concrete awning. My family is around me, gossiping, drinking, telling tall-tales and slurping oysters that have been shucked and dragged through a deep pot of butter and lemon.

A best friend, and once-girlfriend, has flown from a great distance away to come and join the melee, to drink with us, and swim in the lake when P cries to swim, when the water beckons cool, when the frisbee lands far afield. My shorn-haired friend is sitting in a plastic lawn chair, watching everything, her eyes bigger and more concerned than they used to be. To a certain extent, I know she is watching me, and she is watching me watching others. It feels okay, it feels like I don’t have to be talking to everybody at once to have them all inside me.

I feel so full watching my silver friend with the children who I met in the strangest of moments, when I think about it. She was a student of mine who had gone back to school. I was a uniquely-focused ‘professor’ of the one-art of writing. Strange because I feel so young and needy, like I could easily be the one pulling on her shirt, and yet I was once her teacher and there is still the tendril of teacher-admiration in the energy between us, and still, I know it’s not through fluke or mischance that I was her teacher, but because life isn’t about, isn’t about, truly and really isn’t about

Linear Movement Through Time.

We are all such babies and professors and teenagers shifting from childhood to adulthood. We are all sitting under the awning slurping life and watching, or rolling under the sweet late-summer sun as her hair flows down through the arcs in pine-tree limbs. And I am perfectly, not nearly-perfectly, but perfectly… happy, here with everyone around me, so many that I care for, people in various states of crisis or stasis or dynamic underfolds.

People who have left the safety of the homes and near-love they have had for more than half of their life. Top that, I think to myself, as I admire the bold traces of courage that float off a woman who leaps into the lake and swims around, near-hysteria and tight-edged intensity whipping out of her voice every time she speaks. This is a person I want to roll into the sun and roll and roll until the sun finds hers and sweeps her up tightly and floats like a feather, back forth, back forth. Brinkism inscribes itself across her face, and I can read it because I’ve been there, swimming near to drowning in high-fly joy and high-fly low. The courage to live, to get up and face it all even when every drop of assurance that this is the right thing has fled, and all that is left in its place is an intangible, inexplicable, indefinable faith that dancing is the best thing to do when the music is loud and extreme.

And people who are worn out and worn down, bled dry by their own old tendency to offer their wrists up, or tilt the old head on its swiveled neck. Their own old tendency to give the world more than themselves and always ride further on the fact, the absolute solid fact, that they are more than they ever thought they were. Until one day they wake up and look back and wonder where the turning point was. The sensation of pure empty, the fear that one’s self has been poured out, and the cup no longer runneth. Hard to convince a river with no current springs that water will run again. But it will.

And so, I stand here, watching her, watching her play with her children. Watching her energy spiral around and fill the children who are rolling around in the picnic grass with her. Something changes in me a little bit. Something is found in the fact that this person lives so overtly wild and unbroken and yet still so connected to everything around her. Swear to god I think what I’m feeling inside me wears the lop-sided grin of genuine hope. Hope that maybe I can be so full as she is, that one day I will roll on the grass with a doggy-piling world, that I won’t feel like a spirit broken, a bull ridden rough in what I thought was a rodeo, but really was a hard-edged brutal game where the bull gets eaten once the spears find their place.

I remember a few nights ago, camping on the beach under milk and light flow of campfire, with this friend who is now dragging a child by his shoe. I remember talking and walking around in the dark, feeling unexpectedly held in the gentle patter of our voices from her here to my there.

Maybe, I think, if these moments feel so damn good and also so damn real, maybe the bone marrow of my self will keep moving. Will finish up the job of merging split lands into one again. Maybe, I think suddenly startled by the thought, I’m there. Maybe it’s time to stop thinking of healing like it's something bound to happen sooner or later, and start thinking like this is who I am, goddamn it, and I’m gonna claim her.

(Evil, juvenile thought that breaks through my gentle reverie and yet still has a Place in the Meditative Field: “No matter what some shittyass nitwits, who can’t figure out why people feel the way they do because these shittyass nitwits haven’t yanked their heads far enough out of their own pleasurable bungholes to start employing the type of empathy that comes with looking around outside of their own bowels, think.”)

Part of the scuffle is claiming hurt, claiming the pain of an arm in your face, or the rim of a pelvis slicing through your abdomens. Griping about the… and then being rolled with a finger prod for griping about the…

And so, I am feeling spunky again. I am feeling a little more like my own self. Like things are changing and maybe Practically Perfect might just shuttle down out of a hard northwest wind, carting her umbrella with her. Energy is a’blowin and revelation is in the immensely-large cheeky grin of spicy dark-haired woman who joins into the crews and crews of family all around me.