spring can really hang you up the most

What to say after all this time? I have not written in months.

My weeks have been filled with dark mystery, one of those mythic human rites of passage--the death of my father.

Even now, the past few weeks remain a ragged slash of time that hardly feels real. I don't dare attempt to write with any clarity about those confused and aching days.

In fact, there seems to be a shroud of linen wrapped around the empty place in my heart. It veils a sensation beyond hurt, beyond grief, beyond absence. It's grave silence. A black hole. A no-fly zone.

And so I am left, in this wet sunless spring that limps doubtfully toward summer, to take stock of where I stand.

So much has changed. Deep, profound cracks shift parts of me I would have never expected to be affected by anything relating to a parent.

I am slowing down. For the past couple of years, I have been hurtling along at breakneck speeds, taking on more and more responsibility, hiding myself in an elaborate machinery of work and obligation. Now I am feel an urgent need to stop.

As much as these past two years in recovery have been an expedition back to the land of soul and spirit, the death of my father has certainly granted me permanent citizenship.

Early on, my Bliss led me through a wondrous landscape of art, poetry, music, passion, spirituality, and sexuality. Coming of age for me, however, meant paving over much of that landscape, civilizing it, commercializing it--for who would dare presume to live responsibly as an adult in a place that wild? Not surprisingly, the poltergeist of alcoholism quickly emerged rearranging my kitchen chairs. You can't build a suburban house on sacred ground without serious consequences from spirits...

Now I walk in a world that is benignly strange to me again. A Tarot moon lights my sky--stretching perspectives, shifting horizons, warping the road ahead into a looped and twisted sigil of summoning.

All bets are off. I don't know what's coming. I don't know where I'm going. I do know nothing can ever be the same again.

Passion, beauty, and love, folks--24 hours at a time...