Love Plants Seeds in the Ashes of Doubt

Sometimes you have to love like the rocks of the shore love the ocean

Knowing you will not leave this life unblemished or whole

Content that everyone disintegrates eventually and you are eroding alongside something beautiful.

Sometimes you have to love like the sky loves the sea

So dearly you reflect the colors of your heart on to all of their surfaces

It will be hard to tell where the horizon begins and ends

You must know that it is alright to falter and fear

You are still an unfathomable source of all that is gorgeous and fearsome and fiery and soft.

Sometimes you have to accept that love can end in a forest fire

Each summer smoke smothers the wild skies 

It looks like a graveyard with smoking husks of tree trunks piercing the clouds like grim skeletal turrets

But rebirth stirs beneath the falling ashes

The Jack Pine tree requires fire to kindle the seed of life

It reproduces in the blazes of destruction

In this way, we all sometimes create charred and crumbling shells of the things we most hold dear

Burning each other to the ground with our regrets

We must remember the green sprouts kissing the morning air

Born of choking gray and the crackle of death

So instead of fearing the power of our own hands and hearts

We may breathe deeply and start anew.

Sometimes you have to navigate love like a blizzard

Blind eyes blinking, caked with heavy snow 

Feet cumbersome and numb as you stumble on

Wind chafed cheeks and frozen noses 

Howling wind disorienting your already exhausted senses

You will reach a lull in the storm

Have faith in the beam your heart offers

It cuts a small but potent light through the chaos

Sometimes love lacks the tranquility of a meadow

And the flowers forget to grow

But for all the days when it is a volcano

When it is a lightning strike in a dry field

When it is a hurricane

There will also be days 

When love splashes curtains of light across the arctic skies

And the miracle of it drags half finished words from your frosty lips

When it casts fragmented rainbows through the mists of waterfalls

When millions of rivers reach to touch endless seas 

When the sky spills life on to the desert sands

When the clouds clear and stars are signposts along the twisted path marking the best of all the memories.

Nature is a terrifying but beautiful metaphor

We have to learn that 

Our love is a force too unwieldy for the brittle bones of our hands to always carry alone and

Hearts cannot predict fate any more than they can predict earthquakes

So we have to learn to love like the rocks of the shore love the relentless currents

If we will one day be set adrift by the forces that slowly crumble our bones and strain our beating hearts

Why not fall apart in the best ways 

Why not love like the sand loves the pounding waves

And trust these things that can so easily scatter us 

To pull us together once and a while