This is an epistolary piece for the third week of advent.
Take a few slow breaths.
Allow your soul a minute to catch up to your body.
There’s a vulnerability to your face. It matches the exhaustion of your life. Have you ever wondered if those dark circles are there because you never stop seeing? Even your dreams prevent respite from an awareness that has cost so much.
Your heart beats to a rhythm of not enough, not enough, not enough, and you’re searching for a new song.
Mostly it’s confusing, oftentimes frustrating. To be told you just have to choose when you never had a choice.
That it’s a fight, when you can’t conflict.
It’s there all along and your eyes just don’t notice or your mind won’t stop.
How can you miss something you’ve lost everything to find?
Let me tell you what’s true, about me.
You know my sister, sorrow, well. Everyone meets her first. She’s not a secretary granting access to presence, she is a shield to the sacrament of hope.
Too many people with glasses half full want to water me down. I like the empty ones. The deep wells with tall orders; willing to risk the fragility of desire.
The ones who will walk by a thousand shrubs in scorched places and not pretend they’re aflame. Who wait for the spontaneity of the senses and don’t fake a climax.
My sister walks with them through the waves of grief and longing.
Sometimes they stay, she is more familiar than I; I push the expectant into deliverance.
This is going to be a transition.
Take another slow breath.
I am not a possession. You will never have me.
I can be noticed in mundane places, but I think that perception arose from the fear of too much—it pulses like a bass line that calls out the primal: too much, too much, too much.
You know only the deep breaths make love and bring you into the cadence of passion.
These empowered glimpses whisper eternity's secret, with visions that invite a long, slow dance in the desert. I am not a mirage.
I’m ready to tell you today what you’ve waited a lifetime to hear.
These wild beliefs, expansive hopes, and great expectations are real.
I do exist.
I’m in those places you have never been, but known before.
I will always call you by your real name.
And you know something.
You don’t ever need to see, have, hold, fight, choose, present, conform, or offer anything to experience me. Otherwise I wouldn’t be free.
And I am free.
There’s only one thing you need to know. It’s the melody I sing through time into your measures of not enough and too muchness.
I see you. I see you. I see you.
Always.
~Joy
"You can feel it in the air," -Of The Night, Bastille