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September 23, 2014

I had not intended to fall in love.

I had just entered this stage as a casual traveler, to observe.  I had watched the little kids use their slings to kill mockingbirds, and chase rabid dogs in the streets with angry bats.  I had awakened from sleep to coughing guns in front of my house and had witnessed the heavy feet of hatred boot the streets where I was born.  All that my father accumulated had been abandoned with his irrelevant career.  I had mirrored my mother’s face drowning under tears when the rough oceans swallowed her eighteen year old virgin cousin.

The bitter taste of childhood wounds linger, insisting this Earth is not the right place for love. 

I had not planned to fall in love.  Even as the gun withdrew from snuggling against my skull, hesitantly shaking in the hand of the teenage burglar on that Los Angeles summer midnight, my mind begged not be saved, not for unrealized romance, but for the meaning of life.

Of Doppler effect and Bernoulli principle, of states of matter and Coriolis Force, of refraction and greenhouse effect- all pushed me away from you.  But as I dug deeper, Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle was my scientific suicide.  Your gravitational pull beckoned.  And then, you seduced me.

In college, I met luscious lips whispering words of kindness.  I remembered my hands soothed by my mother’s flowing hair when I was four.  The smell of corn in front of the park where I had “booo”ed my parents while skating returned.  Those lost names and conversations began to coalesce like tiny droplets of mercury- restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed.

You placed on my path my wife, her dark hair, her sensual smile, the gentleness of her soul.  We built a home together.  As much as I struggled, I sunk deeper into the quicksand of your trickery. 

You changed my rods and cones.  Each ray of sunshine began to sing, and art, even abstract art burst out like autumn leaves growing on, then falling from the playful trees, and my heart was overjoyed in crushing them, not to hurt them, but to know that I too was part of your plans.

And the poetry that I blindly recited as a child within my constricting skin started to dance and flow into words which hung from the thousand veils behind the animal shaped clouds and over the promised rainbows in your skies. 

Then, you gave me children.  And I learned to lose myself in a hug.  Daughters teach fathers to listen to the quiet rhythmic breathing of the night, a return to the womb, a return to the garden whose gates cast out all threat and the soul learns to simply be.  I taught my son to swim and I was once again a salivating dog in your world begging for more.

Now, I can hardly wait for tomorrow, for each new day, to be reborn. 

I had not intended to fall in love with Your Earth…But You seduced me.

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