Falling Back in Love with Being Human: Letters to Lost Souls

i have questions about heaven. i have questions about the Revolution. those questions are the same: upon whose bones do you intend to build your paradise?

a body is skin wrapped around stories, is tissue filled with veins that the truth runs through, is a box of bones with a voice inside. i don't want to be a volcano. i want to be a garden full of flowers bursting open toward life, all of them singing, i'm here. i mean something. i want to live.

a monster is a creature made of the truth no one else dares to speak.

it's time to be curious about what lives in the ocean of you beyond the island of other people's needs. caregiver, are you curious? what if i told you: you don't need to heal others to heal yourself. you can just heal yourself. you do not need to give love to others to love yourself. you can just love yourself. within healer and helper, there is warrior, there is priestess, there is holy whore. who knows all the things you could be?

a child who keeps secrets to survive becomes a soldier in their soul.

for the teens who were the first one that classmate with the wild hair and the dark makeup and the frightened eyes told about the things that were happening at home. the secret keepers, the unpaid crisis responders, the ones who took frantic calls at all hours of the night and went to the high school guidance counselor ostensibly for assessment for therapy, for support for the scars on their arms, but mostly to figure out how to become therapists themselves, because no adult can help a kid the way another kid can. for the ones who grew up to be social workers and nurses and psychologists and any other flavor of professional helper, because they were already doing the helping, so they might as well get paid for it too. because helping and holding and listening and caring were the only times we felt we knew what we were doing, even though we had no idea. because that was the way that other people loved us. because maybe, we thought in our secret hearts, that’s all we were good for. caregiver, i see you.

i want to dream of a world where instead of building prisons, we build healing temples. i want to sing the stories that tell not of the cleansing power of blood, but the transformative power of tears. somewhere out in the vast universe, there must be a place where the exiled gather in humility and honesty to tend to the wounds in our souls and the wounds in the world. a place beyond punishment or even redemption. a place where all things can be seen and held for what they are. and in this life or the next, someday i’ll meet you there.

i know that we are more likely to survive in a world we make together, don’t you?

in the midst of all this monstrosity and sacrifice and terror and loss, there is still something worth fighting for.

the way i grew up, violence was like the weather: a lightning strike, a monsoon, ferocious and tragic, yes, but also something to be expected. you prepared for it, you endured it. you picked up the pieces and moved on. so that’s what i did. and the fury that stayed with me wasn’t about the assailants, the abusers, the perpetrators. it was about everyone around me who watched and did nothing.

you do not need to build a grand and glorious temple to love. your body is the temple to love.

our world keeps breaking, over and over again. i have no choice but to believe that a new one is being born.

because helping and holding and listening and caring were the only times we felt we knew what we were doing, even though we had no idea. because that was the way that other people loved us. because maybe, we thought in our secret hearts, that's all we were good for. caregiver, i see you.

find the lie in your heart. the one you tell to yourself and all the world, sometimes without even knowing it. pare that lie down to its barest core, strip back the skin, and behold the truth: i am worthy of love and capable of loving. i am capable of loving and worthy of love.

your divinity is not found in any book. your divinity comes from within.

words came pouring out like a rainstor, like lava, like fire pouring out from deep within. tell me about the pain of a body that knows its life means nothing. i am learning more and more about what that means. I know i'm not alone in the least.

i guess somewhere deep inside, i hoped that if i said something elegantly enough, it would come true. that if i spoke the language of beauty maybe God would finally start listening...

i’m not a praying woman, but poetry has always been my hotline to the universe. i guess that somewhere deep inside, i hoped that if i said something elegantly enough, it would come true.

i’ve never worried about dying. it’s the world we live in that i fear

i’m not a praying woman

i’ve always been good at speaking the word, because you see, i know about words. their mystery, their power. their shadow side, their wickedness. i was born with a forked tongue, a limp wrist, a mysterious dark mark on my skin. i know deceit and temptation. i know commandment and judgment. i know the flaming sword and the angel. i know conditional love and what it takes to keep it. the

The sex is good. Jesus likes getting picked. He looks younger in the mist of pleasure, and sometimes after sex he cries, and I don’t know if he is just happy to reconnect or sad because we both know things won’t work long term. I wanted to be saved but I am not that kind of girl. There is something sharp inside of me that even the son of God can’t smooth out. Sometimes it is me who cries afterward, and he just holds me, my Jesus, and strokes my hair with his carpenter hands that still bear scars where they nailed him to the cross, and I say, tell me something I don’t know, and he says, grace is the divine love that all beings are worthy to receive in light of all we’ve done wrong.

flowers still grow from the scars in the earth marred by poisonous flames. love still endures. love survives. love revives. love redeems. love forgives. space and time themselves might end and the essence of what we are would still remain in a place beyond reckoning.

we were a generation of sidekicks with no heroes to guide us—where did they go? so many were killed, murdered, lost to the virus. others were disillusioned, brokenhearted, burned out of the fight. some sold out and went corporate. others fought on, but our numbers were legion, and theirs were too few to get to us all. so we fought by ourselves. sidekicking our way toward the shining light of the Hero Headquarters satellite in the stars. so many of us never made it. we were just kids. what did we know of justice? what happens to a teenager whose identity is grown around a battle for something greater? dear Dick Grayson, what would you have been if you never met Bruce Wayne? would it have been better or worse? i still can’t decide. thirty years of the struggle and i’m still that kid, scanning the skyline for someone to swoop down and teach me to fly. and yet another part of me knows i’m too old for that kid stuff now. i fly on my own just fine.

Justice is what love looks like in public. —cornel west

i wanted to be saved, but i'm not that kind of girl. there's something sharp inside me that even the son of God can't smooth out. and it hurts, because I once wanted so much to be the kind of girl who was worthy of salvation, who could just let herself be saved.

to them, you are a mirror. they look at you to discover themselves. they will never see you because that's not what they came to find.

The only way to leave love was alone.

you don't need to heal others to heal yourself, you can just heal yourself. you do not need to give love to others to love yourself, you can just love yourself.