All Of It*

The apple I eat, the mosquito I slap, the cat I feed, the squirrel I hit with my van, the woman I give groceries to, the insects splattered on my windshield, every soldier that has ever died on any side of every conflict, women, men, other, more, less, in between, the tree I burn in the fireplace, the flowers I plant, the old woman and the infant boy, the well, the sound, the whole, the beautiful, the sick, the crippled, the shattered, the ugly, the feline, the canine, the equine, the avian, the bee and the butterfly, the squash and the carrot, the microbe in the dirt and the zooplankton in the ocean, the people I loathe, the people I love, the builders, the destroyers, the imaginative, the literal, the white, the black, the red, the yellow, the brown, long hair, short hair, no hair, fat, thin, tall, short, median, clothed, nude, naked, nekkid, wise, foolish, wealthy, poor, the givers, the takers, the singers, the silent, the life that I consume and the life that I nurture into being and the life that I live and the same, the same, THE SAME goes for you and you and you and every other being of any kind that lives and shines and is glorious and marvelous and overwhelming and complex and one tiny, tiny piece of this whole damned thing, and every, every, every life matters because lose one piece and the puzzle falls apart, and I love you, yes you, in all your glorious youhood.  

I matter.

Me.

You matter.

You.

We matter.

We.

We are all of us the whole.

We are all of us...

...all of it.




*Sometimes she speaks to me and I try awfully hard to take the hugeness of her voice and put it into these shallow human words but ours is a paltry language in the face of her tremendous love, and how does one capture the song of the universe and make it over into into a single note?