It’s Steve’s birthday.  He’s 71. We wake at 4:30, grateful for our lives.  

I snuggle in, lie flat on my back in bed, feel myself as a garden, feel myself as soil.  My brother’s passing 51 days ago is fertilizer, liquid fertilizer, liquid love, seeping into the soil of my being, blood and bone, circulating.  Plants hold roots as we hold hands. Life and death do the same.

I lie in bed allowing the space in my head to open.  Eyeballs breathe, nourish on roundness. Legs part like legs of a frog.  The soles of my feet touch.

I lie there receiving. My legs make a heart with soul, pelvis a cauldron receiving what comes now.   

An owl calls who, who, who, and insides reply, “all here”, and outside fog holds a veil of mist, and ridge and ocean, though unseen, are here. Gratitude completes.