My New Address

For the time being, I am not living on Facebook Lane, where most of you are used to finding me. I have moved, with great reluctance, because a dear friend suggested to me that I needed to love and tend to myself, rather than continue to give myself away on Facebook. He was not saying there is anything wrong with Facebook. Only that I needed to focus on self-love. Since I trust him, I am opening up a new street in Blog Land. I shall simply call it The Lane of Love. As Kabir said “the lane of love is narrow.”

I haven’t decorated it yet; there is just the bare minimum of a bed and table.

Here I shall come to terms with what I am leaving, and that is the sense that I belong to the world in any way, shape or form. My body came forth from the world, but not my essence. And I am essentially myself.

Here I can write poems and prose and reflect on what really matters.

Here are a few lines etched into nothing.

The June air is a solitary confinement for the lungs.
Inside the air conditioner runs.
I, no stranger to the heat,
have come to love the coldness of being indoors.

There is no consolation prize for moving
into a solitary place with a single mirror.
No pay-off for being myself.
No comments to collect and paste into a scrapbook.

I am real and unreal at the same time.
It hurts and it doesn’t hurt.
God is real and unreal.
So we orbit around each other endlessly
with dogs and cats in close pursuit.

I feed scraps of love to myself
as if orphaned from the flock
and its flack.
Weary and original,
I sit here in a burst of bewilderment.

Vicki Woodyard