I feel the weight of you like the weight of the world.

Tomorrow, maybe not.
But now, here I am.

Sometimes it feels heavier than the grief I hold in my heart for you.

But I have to remember that grief is my friend.

It protects me from the possibility
that you never existed at all.

What is it about losing someone
that frightens us so deeply?

Deeper than the darkest night of the soul.
Deeper than the silence that came after the last word was spoken.

Why do we cling so tightly to the idea of someone
when they are no longer here?

Maybe because an idea is something we can hold.

We can give it a name.
We can return to it.
We can tell ourselves this story over again and again
until the story becomes almost as real as the person we lost.

But a feeling cannot be held.

A feeling moves.

It comes like the gentle wind through trees,
and then it is gone.

It rises in the chest,
finds its way into the throat,
settles somewhere behind the eyes.

And for a moment,
there you are.

One teardrop at a time.

Not the idea of you.

Not the memory of you.

But you...

Perhaps that is what frightens us most about grief.

Not that we will forget them,
but that we will eventually stop needing the memory
to prove they were ever here.

Maybe we are not afraid of losing the person.

Maybe we are afraid of losing our connection to them.

Afraid that one day
the sound of their voice will become a sound we can no longer hear,
their face will become a photograph we no longer can see,
their touch will become something the body can no longer feel.

So we hold on.

We hold the photographs.
The clothes.
The places.
The stories.

We hold the idea of them
because the idea does not change.

But love was never an idea.

Love was a feeling.

And feelings were never meant to be held.

They were meant to be felt, and to move through us.

Maybe grief is how love continues to move
after there is nowhere left for it to go.

And maybe that is why I call grief my friend.

Because when I hurt for you,
I know you were here.

When I miss you,
I know I loved you.

And when grief finally becomes quiet,
perhaps it will not mean that I have forgotten you.

Perhaps it will mean
that I no longer need the weight of it all
to know that you existed.

You are already somewhere deeper than memory.

Somewhere that can not be lost. 

Only felt...

When someone dies—or when a relationship changes so profoundly that the person we knew is no longer available to us—we often mistake holding on for remembering.

We think if we loosen our grip, something will disappear. So we hold tighter. We hold the image of their face, the sound of their voice, the places where they sat, the things that they said. We revisit the past because the past feels like the last physical territory where they still exist. But there is a strange paradox in grief: The more tightly we try to hold someone in memory, the more aware we become that they are no longer there.

Memory becomes a substitute for presence. And eventually, perhaps, something else happens. The person begins to move. They move from outside of us to inside of us. Not as an idea. Not even as a memory. But as something we embody. The way they changed you. The things you learned from loving them. The ways you still speak because they once spoke to you. The way you respond to a thing because of something they taught you. A gesture you make that you don’t remember learning.
A laugh that sounds like theirs. A particular way of looking at the world. Even the pain they left behind.

This is where I think the sentence “grief is my friend” becomes much more profound. Because grief initially says: Don’t let go. If you let go, they will be gone. But perhaps, with time, grief begins saying something different: You don’t have to hold them anymore. They are already here with you…

That is a very different kind of letting go. It isn’t abandonment. It isn’t forgetting. It isn’t acceptance in the tidy sense we sometimes use that word. It is integration.

The person becomes part of the landscape of who you are. And maybe this is why the distinction between the idea of someone and the feeling of someone is so important. The idea is something we construct. The feeling is something we experience.

The idea says: This was who you were.

The feeling says: This is what you still are within me.

And that second one is much harder to explain. Because you can’t prove it. You can’t photograph it. You can’t put it on a shelf. It simply arises.

A smell…

A song…

A particular light at the end of the day…

The sound of wind moving through trees…

And suddenly there is no distance between then and now. For one breath, there is no before and after.

There is you…

And this is what I have been circling around in my writing about silence. Because silence is often where the constructed version of things begins to fall away. We stop telling the story. We stop trying to make sense of it. We stop naming what is happening. And underneath it all, there is simply the feeling.

The silence between sound feels connected to this. The sound is the memory.

The silence is what remains when the memory stops speaking.

And perhaps what remains isn’t emptiness at all. It is just presence without form.

That’s a beautiful place to go. Not toward “I have learned to let go,” but toward something much more mysterious:

I thought grief was the thing keeping me connected to you.
Only later did I realize it was simply teaching me that I no longer needed to hold on.

Xo

Paul

There is nothing like the sound of silence 
between gusts of wind and the billowing clouds.

For a moment, everything seems to stop.

The creek moves below me, but its sound 
doesn't seem to belong to the water anymore. 

It echoes somewhere beyond the trees, 
and sky.

beyond the place where sounds becomes silent, and 
silence becomes something I can feel, if I become still enough.

It opens into an infinite universe inside my head.

Then the still breeze moves through the trees and I am pulled back into this world again.

Here…

Now…

The creek is still flowing.
The trees are still breathing.
The clouds are still billowing.
The wind is still passing through it all.

And somehow I am both completely inside 
it and yet so impossibly far away.

I reach for it, though I don't know what it is I am reaching for.

My hands open.

My fingers loosen, yet I grasp.

There is nothing to hold… it slips away. 

Perhaps that is what silence has been trying to tell me all along. 
Some things are not meant to be grasped…

They are meant to pass through us.

I’m writing today from one of my favorite places here in Cornville, AZ. I have been coming to the Selah Care Farm for the last three years. It’s a place I truly feel honored to be at. I’ve talked and written a lot about Selah over the past years. It never gets old for me. Only more inspiring the more often I come. I come out here to help and volunteer with anything they may need help with. Although, there is less volunteering and more silent time. Time for me to catch up with the chaos of life long enough to let it go. There is no chaos here. It is only just a lot of memories for so many people. They come here to grieve and honor their losses. To live the lives and memories of the loved ones they have lost. I come here to honor my people too. To says there names so I can hear them speak back to me. Here, there are many ways to speak, to be heard, and to hear back if we can be still enough. Quiet enough. On the property here there is a “wind phone” it is a real, old-school rotary phone that is mounted on a wall against a tree and in a quiet space on the property. It is used to place a call to a lost loved one and have a conversation about anything you need. Anything that was left unspoken. Or just to say their name. And if you listen hard enough you can hear their voices wrestling the branches, and the leaves of the trees. It is as real as you want it to be. As real as you need it to be.

Lately, more than ever I have been struggling with the many losses in my life. There is nothing to figure out or to fix. It’s just that we need to be with all of it. That’s the struggle. It’s so easy to want to move away from any pain let alone the pain of loss. But it doesn’t work. It will always find you. Wherever you go it will go with you. So for me, coming here is a way of honoring my people and what they still mean to me. Tomorrow, which will actually be today, as I am writing this on a Sunday, I am heading over to Yarnell to hike along the Granite Mountain Hotshots Memorial Trail. It’s somthing that I started doing in 2019. I do it as an honoring of the 19 men who lost their lives in the Yarnell Hill Fire in 2013. It’s something I really look forward to doing every year. I do it as a way of giving something back for their sacrifice.

We will never know how much time we have left of this life. But what we do know, whether we can admit it or not, is that it will one day run out. We can’t run from that. We can’t grasp for something we’ve no control over. That is the distance between longing and surrounding.

Xo

Paul

I lived here once.
Now I live on the outside.

Memories in this old field…
It is full of them.

and so is this old house with the
broken walls, broken bottles, and
broken dreams.

Promises I made to you that I never kept
were the promises of yours that never stayed!

Now, we live our lives as though it never
existed. But I don’t, I have the proof.
The footprints in the settled dust are not just mine.

They are of all those who passed
through this way. You, me, even this old
tree, with the life of its own
life, that was never cut down.

It whispers now.....
“it was never meant to be”
It says… can you even hear it?
I can!

and I’m still here, listening.
Reminded that it is the grieving that
heals us, and not the forgetting.

Forgetting is our darkest killer.

There are always places we return to—not for answers, but because something of us, within us, still lives there. This field, this house, this tree… Whatever it is.

They hold more than memory. They hold the weight of things unspoken—
promises made and promises broken, grief that outlasts time, and love that never learned how to stay because it never learned how to fly. We don’t come here to these places to forget. We come here to witness. We come here to let the silence say what we can’t.

Some stories live in the dust. But all healing begins in the heart.

Xo

Paul

We think we spend our lives listening.

The wind moving through trees.
Birdsong greeting the morning.
The distant hum of life all around us.
Those familiar voices that call our name.

But we don’t pay attention.

Silence, we imagine, is simply what remains after a sound has ended.

But what if it was never the absence of sound at all?

Perhaps silence is what allows sound to exist.

A single musical note has no meaning without the pause before it
or the pause that follows it. If every note arrived at once, music would
disappear into the chaos, the noise.
It is the silence between each note that gives the sound its shape.

Conversation is no different.

The deepest moments between two
people are often found in what
neither person ever says at all.
But in the glance held just a little longer.
The hand held just a little tighter.
The shared breath in the quiet moment
that asks for nothing at all.

Where words communicate information.
Silence communicates presence. Stillness.

I have spent much of my life listening for answers.

In meditation I listen for the moments
that lean into enlightenment.
In grief I listen for those voices I have lost.
In prayer I listen for my God.
In loneliness I listened for someone to tell me I was never alone to begin with.

It took me years to realize this.

I had overlooked what had been holding the answer all along.

Our minds behave much like a crowded room. Thought after thought arrives without any invitation at all.

Memories.
Plans.
Regrets.
Arguments that never happened.
Conversations we replay until they lose all resemblance to what was actually said.

We become so fascinated with each thought that we mistake them for ourselves.

But every thought has a beginning.

Every thought has an ending.

And between one thought leaving and the next arriving is something so subtle we rarely notice it.

An opening.

Not empty in the sense of lacking something. But empty in the
way the sky is empty. The stillness between each contrail.

The sky is never diminished because clouds pass through it.

The mind, when left undisturbed, is much the same.

Thoughts drift across it like the weather.

Joy comes.
Grief comes.
Fear comes.
Love comes.

But none of them stay.

And yet the space in which they arise has always been there.

Perhaps this is why silence can feel so unsettling.

When the noise falls away, there is nothing left to distract us from ourselves.

Perhaps there is no self to find there at all.

Only awareness.
Only openness.
Only the vastness we spend our lives trying to fill.

I have come to believe that wisdom is less about collecting
answers than becoming intimate with those open spaces.

To stop chasing every word.

To stop believing every thought.

To discover that the mind, like music, is most beautiful not because of what fills it, but because of what allows
everything to appear within it…

The silence between sound is
The openness between thoughts.

The immeasurable space in which an entire life unfolds.

Perhaps this is what we have been searching for all along… not another voice to follow, but the quiet that has never even left us at all.

Xo

Paul

Not many people know that I had a brother with the same name as mine, only Scott for his middle name. I never met him, obviously, and he never met me. He was born three years before me in 1962. He died only a couple of weeks after birth. He never left the hospital. Pneumonia is what killed him. Back then, it was easy to die from something as simple as pneumonia. The thing is, I never met him, but I always felt connected to him in the deepest of ways. My mother never spoke about him. In fact, I never even knew he existed until I was old enough to ask questions about why I had a grave stone with my name and yet I wasn’t even dead.

My mother used to joke with me about me being an accident. I was never planned. She found me under a rock. My mom and dad wanted three children, in whatever order they happened to occur, so they took me in. I thought they should have stopped with the million-dollar family: I thought to myself, my brother John and my sister Donna. I could never stop feeling like I was the mistake.

As time went on, and I got older, I used to love going to the cemetery and visiting my deceased family members. Most I never met. It was my affection for the dead. An enduring emotional bond that transcends physical absence. Rather than diminishing with time, this love often transforms into a cherished inner connection sustained by memories, traditions, and the psychological processing of grief. Every time I was there, I would feel pulled to sit by my brother Paul’s grave. I felt such a deep connection to him. A kindred connection. A soul connection. I often wondered… what if it was I that was born into his life in 1962, and upon arrival, I just wasn’t ready to face this world yet, jumped back into the “Upside Down”, and I waited until the time was right. 1965. Maybe I was born twice! I often wonder what it would be like if he had never been born at all, or I had never been born at all. I so often wonder why I feel like this. It turns out that there is actually a thing called Genetic Continuity: Where we share the same parents and DNA blueprint as my dead brother or my dead sister. And that physically and biologically, I am the closest possible reflection of who he would have been had he wanted to. Who he could have been.

Parents who lose a child often carry an invisible, heavy grief. Even if they never spoke of it, children subconsciously absorb their parents' unfulfilled hopes, dreams, and trauma. Psychologists often note that children born after a loss of a sibling, whether they knew each other or not, often experience survivor's guilt. Perhaps I might have felt like my existence was conditional on his death… that if he had lived, I might not be here. I would not be here! I have heard that this can lead to a strange, echoing feeling that I am living his life, or that his soul somehow merged into mine. Its exaxtly how it feels to me much of the time. Maybe I needed three more years to understand the world more deeply. Maybe the world wasn’t ready to understand me at all? Whatever it may be, it feels real to me. It lives in me. In my bones and in my heart. It keeps me close to him and to all my family who have passed before me.

I wake up from a dream sometimes to the face of a stranger that I know I have never met, but that he knows I am part of him. Like one of these dreams where we know who the person is, but their body and face are different. Like a doorway that has opened into a winter frost. We want to close it, but we can’t shut it out. Or a sudden breath that touches the cold rim of the world, and loses the courage of the soul to let it pass. But I did. He did. For whatever reason, this lives in me, and is reason enough to live it out knowing in my heart that… I am the echo of the boy who went, the patient voyager who learned to wait… Two lifetimes into one brief body sent, arriving safely, three years late.

Xo

Paul

There are a thousand words
I could say to you,
but I won’t.

Instead, I’ll let you read them
for yourself—
in between the raindrops
and the clouds.

Where the sky loosens
and the light breaks open
without asking for permission.

Where silence keeps
what the mouth cannot hold,
and longing learns
to speak in the patterns 
of the weather.

If this is all I can offer you, 
please, let it be enough:
the ache of what remains,
the grace of what passes,
and the small, trembling of hope
that you will know me there
another day.

I haven’t told anyone this yet, but I am dying… You are dying too, whether or not you know it! Whether or not you accept it. Any breath could be your last. Why is it so hard to hold this? Is it fear? Is it despair, or is it just the truth that scares us?

Most goodbyes do not end when they are spoken. They linger in the body, in the breath, in the long afterlight of memory. To witness death without turning away is to stand in the presence of what cannot be softened, yet remain open to sorrow, to dignity, to the full and difficult truth of another life ending. We live as though death belongs to someone else, a distant stranger, or to an unfortunate story, or a tomorrow that will arrive long after our own.

We have been dying since our first breath… the first inhale that was given to us by the very persons who gave us that life. For me, and many of us, they’re gone now too. So why is it so hard for us to speak about it? Perhaps because death asks us to acknowledge something the ego resists accepting!

When someone we love dies, we don’t simply lose a person. We lose a version of ourselves that existed only in relationship with them.

A child loses a parent.

A parent loses a child.

A friend loses the person who knew a particular chapter of their life.

A spouse loses the witness to a shared history.

Every death creates an invisible landscape of absence.

Most of the deeply loved lives in my life have ended. Not because I have lived an unusually long life, but because to live is to experience endings. The child I was is gone. The people I loved who shaped me are gone. The places I once called home exist now mostly as memories. The conversations that once filled rooms have become echoes against those very walls. To witness death without turning away is to stand in the very presence of what cannot be softened...

To be a witness to death is an act of love. It is not fixing. It is not explaining. It is not making it better. It is simply saying: “I am here. You do not have to leave this world alone.”

There is something deeply human about accompanying another person through the threshold we will all cross one day. Yes, even you… That same breath that began our life is also teaching us how to let go of it if we are willing to see that. Maybe the reason we struggle to speak about death is that death is not really about dying at all. It is about loving. It is about everything we have touched, everything that has touched us, and the unbearable beauty of knowing that nothing was ever ours to keep.

We were given this breath.
We were given this moment.
And someday, we will give it all back.

This is the practice of saying goodbye.

Xo

Paul

Last year this month, I flew out to a small town named Cornville in North Central Arizona, situated just about one and a half hours north of Phoenix and twenty minutes west of Sedona. I went to spend some respite and time at the Selah Carefarm and to be of service in any way possible.

Last September, I was there for a 5-day certification training in Compassionate Grief and Bereavement Counseling. I fell in love at first sight with the place. It may have been something to do with the 20 acres of farmland or the 6500 square feet of housing facilities, four large open-air barns, and absolutely beautiful spaces- filled with both love and sorrow- all around the carefarm. Or the 50-plus various types of animals, from Horses, Cows, Goats, and Sheep to chickens and roosters and two sweet but very protective dogs, and of course, Tarantulas, Snakes, and Javelina (but they’re all wild), All the animals on the carefarm have been rescued from abuse, neglect, torture, or homelessness. So it was truly an easy place to fall in love with for me. I decided that whether it was to go back once a year for continued training or just to volunteer, that is what I am going to do. It will become part of my grief ritual.

A quick history of the Carefarm, as stated directly from the website, is as follows.

“In April of 2015, Dr. Joanne Cacciatore, founder of the MISS Foundation, rescued a pack horse in the Grand Canyon from horrific torture and abuse. She named him Chemakoh. Grieving clients with whom Dr. Jo worked were deeply moved by Chemakoh and found their time with him to be ineffable- very powerful. She eventually began to research an idea: Connecting tortured, abused, and lost animals with traumatized humans in a therapeutic carefarm environment. That’s when she met Dr. Rich Gorman in the U.K., who was already researching care farms. The two of them met in Sedona, Arizona, and for two weeks, planned the first carefarm for traumatic grief in the world. Now we have more than 50 animals rescued who live in our sanctuary and welcome grieving people and families from all around the world, including Thailand, Canada, Ghana, and Egypt.”

It truly is a magical place. Aside from just wanting to get away and be of service, there was another pull to this place for me deeper than just the space, but it’s what happens within this space that is hard to describe. My clearest intention was to just get away and be around the animals, do some writing, and some hiking, and just get to know the facility better and let them get to know me better as well. Or so I thought.

Every morning, I would walk the labyrinth as part of my Zen practice. Traditionally, you have to walk the labyrinth to get to the center and then retrace your steps back out to exit. However, this labyrinth has one way in and one way out to what is on the other side. In this case, it leads to “The Quiet Place,” which is a space for families and loved ones to honor and grieve their loss. It is a place of contemplation where you can sit in silence and quietude and leave something behind on the altars of stone for your loved ones as a remembrance if you so choose to.

It was such a beautiful ceremony and ritual to practice every morning while I was there. On the second day, I was walking the labyrinth, and I started getting this nagging feeling that I was forgetting something, but it quickly occurred to me that I was in Arizona and only 2 hours from Yarnell, which is home to “The Granite Mountain Hotshots Memorial State Park,” and I realized that I can’t leave without going back there and hiking in again. So I made the plan to do it the following Monday, the day before I came back home. It began to feel like it was the greater reason why I came to Selah in the first place.

Some of you may remember that in November 2018, I came all the way out here just to do this hike in their honor, and at the time, the park had just been built. The tragedy, which took place in 2013, moved me so deeply that I became emotionally fixated on it from the moment I heard about it. It felt as though it happened to me. So I wrote a blog in 2018, which is included below, but with some edits. I feel pulled to share my most recent experience this past month with you, so I will include some new photos as well a several narrated videos so you can perhaps feel the experience along with me.

This is the original blog I wrote from my first visit (with edits)

June 30th, 2013 at 4:42 pm MST was the last radio transmission from Eric Marsh, the superintendent of the Granite Mountain Interagency Hotshots crew, an elite team of wild land fire fighters that were deployed that morning to fight what was supposed to be an “I’ll be home for dinner” fire that started in the weaver mountain range, just west of the small town of Yarnell the evening before. Within days, the blaze expanded to over 8,400 acres and destroyed more than 100 structures, incurring approximately $900 million in damage by its end, and tragically, 19 of the 20 hotshots never made it home for dinner that night. I don’t know why their story touched me so deeply, but when I heard about it on the news and read about it further, I felt as though I had lost 19 of my very own brothers. Nine years ago, the town of Yarnell and the City of Prescott, AZ, (where The Granite Mountain Hotshots were from), through private donations and fundraising, built “The Granite Mountain Hotshots Memorial State Park” to honor these fallen men. Six years ago, in November 2018, was the first time I felt compelled to journey out there and pay tribute to the 19 men who lost their lives. Two weeks ago, I journeyed back once again to honor them once more.

The park consists of a 3.6-mile hike in and through the Weaver Mountain Range to an observation deck that overlooks the Boulder Springs Ranch, which was their fallback and safety zone, and just 200 yards before was the actual deployment site where the men were overcome. The deployment site memorial consists of 19 stone-filled gabions, chain-linked together to symbolize their everlasting bond. Inside the circle are 19 bronze crosses buried where each of the men had fallen and were found; each cross bore the name of the fallen Hotshot. Strewn all over the gabions are many trinkets to honor and memorialize these men, such as patches from other firemen from all over the world and hats and T-shirts from various fire companies across the United States and many other countries.

From the observation deck is the final one-mile hike into the box canyon, which they called “The Journey Trail,” and traces the final steps they took to their death. I hiked down into the fatality site and was fortunate to be the only one there at the time, as I knew it would be emotional. I made some pictures and video and sat for some time just taking all of this In. I never posted any of them. Maybe they just felt too personal to share, or maybe I was just waiting for what felt like the right time. Today feels right. This is just my small tribute to 19 men I never met in person, but wish I had. The Yarnell Hill fire was the 6th greatest loss in firefighting history, but the greatest loss since September 11, 2001.

In 2018, Sony released a film called “Only the Brave” based on the actual events of this tragedy and these men. They paid good tribute.

What follows are some experiences from my latest trip out to the Memorial Park in photographs and narrated videos and I wanted to share with you. Please read the captions under any photos as well as they also contain descriptions.

I hopped in my car at 4:45 AM to head to Yarnell by way of Prescott. It takes about 2 hours total, but I made a stop in Camp Verde along the way for essentials… a Grande Dark Roast in a Venti cup with extra whole milk on the side and three sugar in the raw (but i only use two), also on the side (In case anyone ever wants to buy me a coffee)… then I made my way on. I passed through Prescott, one of my favorite cowboy towns in Arizona besides Tombstone, at around 6:20 AM with about 35 minutes through the Prescott National Forest to go on Route 89. Route 89 is one of my favorite roads (besides Route 66) to drive on. It’s winding and twisting and straight and narrow. It’s just a fun road to drive on. I got to the entrance of “The Hotshots Memorial Park” at 6:55 AM.

I was the only person there so far. There are only 12 parking spaces, but it was Monday in July, and it was already 80 degrees at 7:00 AM, so I pretty much knew that I was the only crazy dude to be doing this in July!! But so be it…

I started up the trail, which is about a mile or so of steep switchbacks. Along the way, every 1/8 mile or so was a memorial plaque embedded in the natural rocks, with each of the 19 Hotshots being honored. Like the photo below. Each plaque honored the Hotshot with an obituary. The one below was of Eric Marsh, the GMHS superintendent. For the sake of time, this is the only stone I will be highlighting. But at the very end there is a link to learn more about all of the men who lost there lives that day.

So I continued up the trail, and the following narrated videos will explain the rest of my journey. (Pardon my shortness of breath in some of these… November 2018 was much different at 60 degrees… lol) At this point, I’ll note. I’m still the only person on the mountain.

So I sat at the bottom for 20 minutes or so and reflected on what had to have been going through each of these men’s minds as they deployed their fire shelters. Their family and loved ones. At some point, you have to realize that we are in this and not coming out of it. These are the things we as humans take for granted. Until we can no more.

I made it out on this day and the last time. 19 out of 20 men did not on June 30th, 2013. It makes me wonder why? What is the purpose of it all? I don’t know. I’m not here to figure it out, but I feel like I need to feel it. So I will. My ritual, going forward, will be to come back every year to pay honor and homage to these men that I never got a chance to meet, but truly wish I had. I am beginning to realize that if I had never decided to come to the Selah Carefarm this visit, Granite Mountain would not have happened. This is a special place…This place where grief came to rest with me.

And by the way, I had the whole mountain to myself this day. There were two older folks that I passed on the way up from the fatality site, and that was it. And this made it even more special for me. Until the next time.

Here is the last 3:00 of the radio transmission between Eric Marsh and the base. It is gut-wrenching to listen to.

And last but not least, here is a beautiful tribute to the 19 men

Breathing Lotus Living Arts will be hosting our annual retreat this October at The Selah Care Farm. For further information, click here.

Five years ago, I wrote a book of poetry. It was called “Things I Need to Tell You Before I Go.” It was a meditation in photography and prose, and was created as a way for me to personally transmit some of my life learnings and lessons to my daughter, Samara. It was meant to be a glimpse into the beauty of life as seen through an artist’s eyes. Through my eyes. And in the event I died before she had an opportunity to get to know that side of her father, I wanted something to have documented my thoughts, feelings, and love for her. I got the idea from one of my favorite movies from 1993 called "My Life”, starring Michael Keaton. In the film, Keaton plays a successful Hollywood executive who is diagnosed with terminal cancer. Because he discovers he will die before his first child is born, he spends his remaining months filming a series of personal videotapes filled with life lessons and love for his unborn child. Well, I wasn’t dying per se, but I could have been. Anyway, you either get the point, or you don’t. It took me four years to give it to her just before she left for Army boot camp last year. I thought maybe it would keep me close to her. I like to think that it did.

Today, she leaves us for the next 49 weeks to enter into her Advanced Individual Training at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, TX. She will study to become a radiology specialist. So now she is leaving me (for real) to become the person she has chosen to become all by herself. I wrote a letter to her that I want to share openly. I left it with the instructions “do not open until you are on the plane or at least at the airport.” She has not read it yet, as of this post, but I felt the need to share it with you because this is the anticipatory grief that I speak about so much. We all feel it but most can't name it. A person does not have to die to grieve their loss. Just a piece missing is all it takes. Anyway you see it, it is still a loss, but in this case, as they say… “One man’s loss is another man’s gain”. If I could have wrapped up the book I wrote into one page, this would have been it.

Xo

Paul

                                                                                                                   June 22, 2026

Dear Sam,

There are moments in a life that seem to arrive all at once, as if time, patient for years, suddenly gathers itself and moves forward in a single breath. This is one of those times.

Eighteen and a half years. Just enough time for me to still see the child you were in the way you laugh, and more than enough time for the world to recognize the woman you have become. I keep thinking about thresholds. Doorways. The invisible lines we cross without ever quite seeing them. Your graduation was one. Today will be another. You step across it not just with courage, but with a kind of quiet certainty that humbles me and makes me so proud of everything you have become. You have chosen a path that few would take. It asks so much of you: discipline, strength, resilience, and yet I know you will meet it not by becoming harder, but by becoming more fully yourself. If I could give you anything to carry with you, it would not be advice so much as reminders…

Remember that strength is not the absence of fear, but the decision to walk forward into it anyway…

Remember that kindness is not a weakness, even in places where it is rare; it is a form of bravery all its own…

Remember that wherever you go, you do not leave behind who you are or where you come from. You carry it with you, always, quietly, like a steady beacon of moonlight on a dark and distant horizon… always, follow that home.

And know this: no distance, no uniform, no new name, or title will ever change the simple truth that you are my daughter, and I am endlessly proud of you. There will be days when the world feels larger than you ever expected, and nights when it feels smaller and colder. In both, I hope you find your footing. I hope you trust your instincts. I hope you allow yourself to grow without losing the parts of you that have always been so unmistakably yours.

I will miss you in the ordinary ways: the absence of your voice in the next room, the shape of your presence throughout the day, and you telling me how annoying I am, but those small absences are made so meaningful by a much larger truth: you are going where your life is calling you. A father could not ask for anything more. 

So go with courage. Go with grace, and go knowing you are deeply loved by every person who has crossed your path and remained.

With all my heart, I love you to the moon and back…


Dad <3

"All the beauty of this world is wet with the dew of tears."  

~Theodor Haecker

There is a grief we feel before a loss occurs. It is called anticipatory grief.

It often arises when someone we love is dying, living with a terminal illness, experiencing dementia, or moving toward an inevitable ending. The grief begins while the person is still here. We know what is coming and, in knowing, begin mourning before the loss arrives.

What I didn’t know is that anticipatory grief can arrive in far quieter ways.

For the past five years, I have felt it with my daughter.

Not because she was sick.
Not because she was dying.

But because she was growing up.

Each year seemed to carry away some small piece of the little girl I once knew. Mimi, a favorite stuffed animal left untouched on a shelf. The last time she asked me to play. The gradual closing of her bedroom door. The growing need for friends instead of a father. Tiny departures so ordinary that they often went unnoticed, yet together they formed a slow goodbye.

Last week she graduated from high school.

Next week, she leaves to begin a life of her own in the Army!

I have known this day was coming since the day she was born.

Still, knowing does not lessen the ache or alleviate the pains.

People tell us this is what we want as parents. They are right. We want our children to become independent. We want them to discover who they are and build lives larger than the ones we imagined for them.

Yet no one speaks much about the grief hidden inside that success.

For years, I thought I was grieving the day my daughter would leave home.

Now I wonder if I have been grieving something else entirely.

The young girl I once carried on my shoulders is gone. The child who reached for my hand without thinking has disappeared into just memories. In her place stands a young woman, confident and capable, preparing to step into the world... without me.

I am so proud beyond words. But I’m also heartbroken.

How strange that both can be true at the same time.

Perhaps this is one of the sacred contradictions of parenthood: our greatest accomplishment is to make ourselves less necessary.

We spend years teaching our children how to leave us.

Then one day they leave, and we want them back.

How does a parent reconcile this?

For a long time, I thought reconciliation meant finding peace with her leaving. Accepting that this is simply how life works. Now I am not so sure. Perhaps there is nothing to reconcile. Perhaps the ache is just evidence that I love deeply. Perhaps grief is not a sign that something has gone wrong, but a sign that something precious has been lived and lost in some ways.

I look at the young woman standing before me, and I see every version of her at once. The little girl running across a playground. The teenager discovering her own voice. The daughter packing her bags for a future I can no longer follow in the same way.

None of them are gone…

Yet none of them remain.

They live somewhere between memory and this present moment.

Maybe that is the burden and the blessing of parenthood. We become keepers of all the versions our children have ever been, long after they have moved on to become someone new.

The child leaves.

The memories stay.

And the heart somehow learns to hold both.

This repost was a project I wrote and created in 2022, addressing this very circumstance. Below is the original post (along with the video).

Dear Friends,

Some of you may know that a couple of years ago, I embarked on a journey of studies with the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care in their Foundations of Contemplative Care program. “Foundations” was a transformational 9-month training for integrating spiritual practice with care. “The program has supported people from around the world in bringing a contemplative approach to care into their intrapersonal, interpersonal, and professional lives.” Something I definitely feel we all need more of.

More so, it has taught me personally, how to hold more deeply, a compassionate way of living for myself and also for others in my life, my care partners. Being in the community for those months, truly brought up so many different and difficult feelings for me. Especially, feelings around grief. I am no stranger to loss, and I have often wondered if loss was part of my dharma path this lifetime. About needing to learn to kindle a deeper and kinder relationship with grief and loss and become better friends with it, instead so many of us make it our enemy.

Upon completing the program we were called to present something to the cohort, our mentors, and our guiding teachers, a final project, expressing just how the program moved us and then sharing something we learned from it that deepened us as individuals. I decided that my project was to be about grief and its ambiguous nature. It was to be about grieving not just the people or things in our life that had physically gone from it, but more about the losses that are still living in it, in all their weird and mysterious little ways.

So, the central theme of my project speaks to my relationship with my 16-year-old daughter, now almost 17, whom some of you already know. As I have watched so many small pieces of her die away as she transitioned from childhood, into adolescence, and now into adulthood, reminding me that a person does not need to die in order for us to feel a loss.

Some of you also know that writing poetry and photography is an umbilical cord to some of my deepest thoughts and feelings. So, what better way to express it than through that medium? So, I created a video presentation using some of my spoken poetry, prose, and of course, photographic art to tell you the story of me and the loss of my living daughter. Some of you may have already seen it, so my hope is that it brings up a deeper sense of feelings for you. For those who are seeing this for the first time, my wish is that it simply moves you to contemplate a deeper relationship with grief and all the losses left behind…

With love and deep gratitude…

Paul

My whole life, I lived in the memories
of the things that were.

It was how I escaped
the things that are.

I kept waiting for something
within the silence to tell me
something different.

Only later did I realize
It already had.

God once told me

That in the stars
is all the truth
we will ever need.

Being a seeker,
I looked.

I listened.

I waited for a revelation.

None came.

The stars remained stars.
The silence remained silence.

And still,
they taught something.

There is a sadness in everything.

Not a sadness birthed from despair,
but from impermanence.

The leaf falls.
The bird grows quiet.
The evening light disappears
just as it arrives.

Nothing stays.

Everything dies.

Perhaps this is why sadness
feels so familiar.

It is life reminding us
that everything we love
is just passing through.

And somehow,

this is also what makes
everything so beautiful.

This knowing that
sadness teaches us
how to let go gently

How to bow.

How to die
before we die.

This is the art of living.

At least,
this has been true for me.

Xo

Paul

Night is night because we call it night.
Day is day because we call it day.
The only thing that separates the two is time,
which feels ironic, really.

Because time has a strange habit
of separating things
that were once whole.

My childhood felt endless once.
Summer afternoons stretched wider than the sky.
Trees stood like giants.
Houses felt enormous.
A scraped knee felt like a tragedy.
One hour could hold an entire world in suspense.

And memory…
Memory kept all of it contained
like pressed flowers between the pages of my life.

Until years passed.

And one day I returned
to roads that seemed smaller,
to houses that somehow shrank,
to places I could have sworn
were larger than life itself.

Not because they changed,
but because I did.

So now I wonder
if memories are a little like dusk;
not entirely day,
not entirely night.

Not illusion.
Not truth.
But something in the in-between.

A place where time gently lays its hands
on what was once real
and whispers:
you do not have to stay exactly as you were
to still belong to me.

As children, we live before names arrive.
Before we understand distance.
Before we know, the world can disappear.

Everything feels endless then.

Maybe that was the first illusion,
or maybe the first truth.

And growing older is simply learning
that memory does not preserve life;
it keeps repainting it,
adding shadows here,
more light there,

until we can no longer tell
whether we are remembering the world
or remembering ourselves…

Xo

Paul

Grief makes a life…

What if grief makes a life, not because suffering is beautiful, or because loss is desirable, but because grief reveals the depth of our participation in loving at all? To grieve is evidence that we allowed ourselves to belong to something greater than ourselves. To someone or something other than ourselves. Grief becomes the shape love takes when it no longer has a body to touch, a hand to hold, or a face to kiss.

Loss makes love visible…

Because love often disappears into ordinary moments while we are living them. We miss its shape while inside it. Then something leaves—a person, a season, a pet and maybe even a version of ourselves, and suddenly love appears by its absence, the way stars become visible at dusk. We realize: there it was. It had been here all along.

Silence makes intimacy…

Silence is often mistaken for emptiness. Distance. Absence. Yet in grief, silence can become the place where language stops performing and something more honest begins. You sit beside someone after a funeral, and there are no words. You hold a photograph and say nothing. You stare at the empty chair.

Somehow, in that silence, something profoundly intimate occurs. I think it is because intimacy may not be the exchange of words at all. It may be the willingness to remain present where words fail us.

We spend years believing silence means no one is speaking to us. Then one day, we suddenly realize that silence makes the whole conversation, just like snow makes a mountain.

In the hush of our solitude, our grief finds a voice, not in all the clamor but in the unspooling of our quiet breath. In that stillness, we meet the full weight of our bones and the echoes of what was lost. And from that quiet, a seed of renewal may rise…gentle and unseen—calling us back into the dance of living, tenderly held by the world, and by each other. And that is a perfect world.

Xo

Paul

At this moment, the warm sun
has shown its face through the
cracks in the window’s shade.

It dances for me, as if I’m the only
one watching. Sliding across the
room slowly, and so determined

to make it across the floor without
getting stepped on and without
being ignored.

Beyond the window, just on the
on the other side, I can hear children
at play, the sounds of their toy trucks
on the gravel road, and the
laughter and the chatter.

Although I can’t see them,
I feel them, viscerally, like I’m right
There with them. A sudden
flashback to a time in my own childhood.

My childhood was not always
fond memories. But it is how I got so
good at being alone. It’s funny how just
a sound, just a scent, just the simple
awe and wonder of something so innocent,
can spin us back so many years in time.

This is my version of time travel.
I close my eyes, plug in the coordinates,
hit navigate, and I’m there.

Sometimes I wonder if it really
is a memory, or if it’s just an illusion of
one that I created in my mind. I don’t think
memories are meant to preserve the world
perfectly. Maybe they exist to preserve
what it felt like to be alive inside it.

To be awake.

And then you grew up and realized nothing
is as fixed as we imagined it to be, and reality
Is more fluid than we ever believed.
For me, it becomes more intimate once
the fantasy falls away.

I think maybe this is the joy of
cutting through illusions…

Grief moves through us.
identities soften us.
pain transforms us.
And then moments become precious
precisely because they pass

Nothing can stay, and
Suddenly, nothing matters more.

Xo

Paul

I love all the things that fall from 
the sky. It reminds me that someday, 
we all have to die… 

And sometimes, it reminds me that life 
comes, and life goes, and of all the 
things I cherish the most, a single 
golden orange leaf. 

Reminding me that my place in 
the natural world is right here, right 
now, right at this moment.

Then the next... 

Teaching me that healing is an act 
of communion, and communion is 
an act of learning to live while we die.

I have been thinking about dying a lot lately.

There is something honest and yet dangerous in naming death as a teacher. It strips away the embellished language we often wrap spirituality in. Dangerous, because it asks us to stand close to what most people spend their entire lives avoiding. Until they can no longer.

Death has become a primary spiritual teacher for me. It didn’t come through abstraction. It came through as a sense of rupture, but there is an odd sense of joy in the not knowing of what’s next as well. And through the feeling body, a knowing of something before the mind can organize it. Through the moment when time doesn’t just pass, but breaks. That kind of learning doesn’t feel like insight at first. It feels more like an undoing, or an unraveling.

Death teaches in a language that doesn’t negotiate. Because there is no negotiation.

It teaches:
not everything is ours to keep
not everything can be repaired
not everything will make sense

And yet, it also teaches something quieter, more subtle, and almost hidden beneath the devastation of it: that what is here becomes unbearably vivid and intolerably uncomfortable.

People who haven’t sat close to death often talk about presence as a practice. Something to cultivate, something to work toward. But when death enters your life in a real way, and we fully embrace it, presence is no longer optional. It arrives uninvited. Sometimes, with anger and rage so vengeful that it pins you into the moment, not as an idea, but as a condition of your survival. To me, this is the practice of living. Softening!

Then, we may begin to notice strange things: the way light falls on a wall,
the sound of someone breathing in the next room, how fragile and temporary even joy feels.

Death refines attention in a precise way, and sometimes rearranges value. Things that once felt urgent become strangely irrelevant. And things you may have overlooked, touch, eye contact, silence, begin to carry a kind of sacredness to the moment.

Death doesn’t only teach through the loss of others.
It teaches through the ongoing experience of losing versions of ourselves.

That person we were before a certain grief… gone.
The assumptions we held about safety, time, and permanence… gone.

In that way, death becomes less of an event and more of a process I am living inside of. A continual shedding, a quiet, relentless invitation to let go of identities that can’t survive what we’ve seen.

And that is all I have to say about death for today.

Xo

Paul

I would love to live like 
the setting sun.

Retire into nothing
only to arise the next day into
something potentially even more beautiful.

This is the great joy of living and
this is also the great joy of dying…

I want to live awake in this life.
Live in my truth, whatever my truth is.
Feel the emotion of everything.

Taste the flavors of the 5
senses. Feel the sunshine on my face.
The sweetness on my tongue.
Live as though I mean
too; not as though I have too.

We will never find a world of
perfection, yet we will keep on
trying, still. And it’s right before
our eyes already, moment by moment.
All this, already…

The world is the way we see it…
One can only hope to see it rightly.

Words, to me, are a threshold into something more deeply beautiful about a person. Photographs are almost always the foundation of my story. Both find a deeper intimacy within a person who finds it difficult to be vulnerable at all. It took me years to step into an idea of who I am and who I want to become, and I still don’t know. I want to be like the setting sun. Knowing we need to die before we can live.

My grief lives in the stillness of my words. It lives in the silence of my photographs. It is much easier for me to create from a visceral feeling than to think about it. I think as humans, we are all the same in that respect. We just don’t know it… yet.
There is a kind of listening that happens beneath language. The body knows before the mind does, always. We just need to be quiet and listen.

For me, there is a moment within my grief where movement feels like a betrayal, and stillness feels like drowning. It is always the in-between that I seek. where silence seeks expression and stillness seeks movement, and grief seeks to alchemize into something different, and finally, with holding on, we seek the letting go. Or maybe we don’t. Maybe I should have titled this “The World Is The Way We Feel It” Instead. Because we see with our eyes, but we feel with our bodies.

Do not rush toward the next thing; let it linger just long enough to feel what is already here. Because what is already here is almost never perfect. Who wants to be perfect anyway?

Xo

Paul

The other day, I was having a conversation with a friend of mine about starting a podcast that would focus on talking about heavy topics like life, death, grief, trauma and other things we all have a tendency to turn away from. Deep and thoughtful questions. We somehow landed on the subject of enlightenment. It led to a question she had asked me, and it has stuck with me since. The question was… to me, “What was the difference between being awake and being enlightened?” My first thought came from the gut. My answer was, being awake is to be present in this very moment and then the next moment, and so on. Coming back to where we are at every moment. And for enlightenment, I said to her, I believe we are all already enlightened, we have just forgotten how to be it, or we learned how not to be. The question stuck with me enough to want to spend some time with it.

Over the past few weeks, I have been struggling with my Zen teacher about the practice of counting my breath in zazen (seated meditation). I told him, It’s so boring!! Why do I have to do this? Why can’t I just do what I want to do? I mean, I’m still meditating!!! But am I really? I mean, I’m being wakeful? But am I really awake?
Wakefulness (being awake) is active, perpetually earned, and rooted in our body… in our breath, sensation, the weight of our feet on the floor, or our sitz bones on the cushion. Whatever it is, it always requires a return. You drift off, and you come back to where you left. You drift, you come back. You drift, you come back. It is the practice of perpetual arrival (and departure) into what is already here in front of us.

Enlightenment, by contrast, in many spiritual traditions, is not achieved but recognized, more like uncovering the layers than climbing the mountain. The Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki spoke often about this; he would say, “the beginner’s mind is already the Buddha’s mind. We don’t become it. We stop insisting we’re not it to begin with.”

The Paradox at the Heart of Our Distinction: The Body as the Site

As a somatic therapist, the body is my jam!! Our insistence on this very body of ours is so important and unconventional in much of the spiritual writing today, which tends to treat the body as something to transcend. But presence is always embodied… We can’t be present in the abstract. The abstract is what distracts. Therefore, we can only be present in a body that hungers for something, that aches, and that notices light changing in a room.

If enlightenment is our nature, it doesn’t hover above the body… it breathes through it. The body is not the obstacle. It’s the doorway that leads to our intentions.

Here’s where it gets interesting: if enlightenment is what we already are, then being awake might be the act of remembering that — moment by moment, breath by breath. Not arriving at some permanent destination or altitude, but refusing the amnesia, the forgetting. Wakefulness as the ongoing gesture of un-forgetting.

This reframes the spiritual life entirely. It is not an ascent. It is an excavation.

The Danger of the Enlightenment Concept

And also, there’s a shadow side worth naming. “Enlightenment” as a noun can become a destination that actually prevents arrival: always ahead of you, justifying dissatisfaction with where you are vs where you want to be. The concept of enlightenment can be the very thing that keeps us from being awake at all.

Meanwhile, wakefulness: humble, ordinary, just this breath: asks for nothing special. It is available right now to everyone, even without credentials.

Let’s consider the image of forgetting and remembering as the rhythm of a human life. We are born awake — infants are astonishingly present, right? — and then we learn to abstract, to project, to protect, to narrate ourselves away from what is now. The spiritual life isn’t learning something new. It’s a long homecoming to what we never stopped being in the first place… we just forgot.

Enlightenment is the home. Wakefulness is the act of walking through the door…

again, and again, and again.

I have come to realize, after all the arguing with myself, that I’m right and he’s wrong, the importance of counting my breath in zazen is in fact the practice of wakefulness… To concentrate, and to keep coming back to that moment… the inbreath and then the outbreath. That is the remembering… that is the enlightenment.

Xo

Paul

Before the very first words we spoke, there was an unknown stillness inside of us.
Not emptiness, emptiness is what we call it when we’ve forgotten what it is to begin with. We already intuitively know what this is. This is something much older: a deeper and more grounded tone the body carries without knowing it even carries anything at all.

The soul does not learn this silence, this quietude. It returns to it. The way breath, at the end of an exhale, pauses — not waiting, not holding, just being at the bottom of itself before the next rising comes without even needing to ask. That pause is not just anything. That pause is where we actually live… in our souls.

The contemplatives knew this. Sit long enough, and the noisy world loosens its grip — thought by thought, breath by breath. like leaves falling gently from a branch. Not because you’ve conquered anything, but because the quiet was always there underneath, the way soil is underneath everything growing, right now, indifferent to seasons, patient beyond patience. Like a lotus flower grows from mud.

Grief knows this, too. In the weeks after loss, when the world keeps insisting on its ordinary noise… sounds of traffic, birdsong, someone’s laughter in another room… There are moments when all of it drops away, and you find yourself in a stillness so complete it almost resembles peace. It is not peace. But it is in the same country. Silence does not discriminate between sorrow and rest. It simply receives whatever there is. Here and now.

A stone in a river would not fight the current. It is the stillness that the current moves around. Perhaps the soul is like this as well: not seeking silence, but being what silence always points toward — the still thing at the center, unchanged by everything passing through.

We talk too much. We fill all the empty spaces with noise. It’s understandable — language is how we reach toward one another across the distance of being in our separate selves. But the reaching is not the arrival. Sometimes the most honest thing is to stop, to let the words fall away like water off of cupped hands, and notice what was there before you opened your mouth.

It was always silence…

It was always home…

Xo

Paul

There is a particular quality to light in the late afternoon of summer — the way it falls through the still green leaves, still whole, still unaware that autumn is already forming in the cold and calculating turning of the earth. I have stood in that light many times and watched my daughter play, her laughter spilling out of her like something inexhaustible, and I have felt two things at once: the pure sweetness of that very moment, and the ache of knowing that it is already gone.

This is the anticipatory grief that comes before the loss of someone — It is not mourning what has gone, but mourning what is moving forward, stepping into the future, toward the leaving that has not yet arrived but is as certain as a season following a season. The Buddhists call impermanence anicca: the teaching that all conditioned things are in ceaseless flux, that nothing we hold onto can be held forever. Including our loved ones. I used to receive this as a philosophy. Now I receive it as a father’s body-knowing, felt somewhere in the center of my chest.

She does not know this about herself yet. This is the tenderness and innocence that undoes me most. She does not know that I am watching her the way one watches the last, slowly burning embers of a fire — not to put it out, but because something in us needs to witness the beauty before it shifts into a different form. She runs, she laughs, and I pray she comes to me still with the whole of herself, trusting that I will simply be here in the best ways that I can. She has not yet learned the reckoning of departure as she is now: that growing toward something always means growing away from something else, even if it’s me. And for me, this is a place of reverence. A devotion so deep it borders on obsession, attempting to honor the sacredness of her “not knowing,” and letting her be who she needs to be.

Xo
Paul

We were never easy with each other —
I tried too hard, you tried too little.

Two rivers that shared one source
but ran in different directions,
carving into different stone.
I knew the shape of your stubbornness
the way a hand knows a familiar scar:
without even looking, without needing to.

And then the road narrowed…

Autumn came early into your body
and suddenly, there was only
the one path,
and we were both on it.

I learned your silences differently then —
not as walls, but as rooms
you had never let anyone enter.
Perhaps, you learned that I would stay.
That I would keep walking beside you
even when neither of us knew the words,
even when the old arguments
rose up like inclement weather
but passed by like a quiet storm.

There is something that happens
when you walk someone toward the end of a life —
a sort of holy inconvenience,
a love that stops performing itself
and simply shows up,
Tuesday after Tuesday,
carrying whatever is needed, yet holding onto nothing.

I watched you get smaller
and somehow more yourself.
The friction burned away
and what was left
was just a man —
my brother, briefly, plainly,
sixty-four years folded
into an afternoon of thin golden light.

Now grief arrives not only as loss
but as a kind of unfinished sentence.
There was more to say.
There was, I think,
the beginning of a different language
between us —

one we had just started learning
when the lesson ended.

I carry that with me now.
The distance we covered.
The distance we didn’t.
The road we finally walked together,
side by side,
at the very end of it.

We were different…
I think I made my peace with that.

It is never easy to say goodbye to the people we love, no matter how much indifference we have for them. Anybody who really knew my brother knew his simple complexity on the subjects of life. It was his way and only his way. Until it wasn’t. I saw through the smoke and mirrors he laid before us all. And I saw his big heart that he had towards others, but somehow always made so small for me.

This poem speaks somewhat to the relationship we had together. The time I was so fortunate to spend with him at the end of his life were some of the best times in a really long time. And trying to make sense of it all now is senseless. But is there really any “sense to it all” or is it just what it is?

Xo
Paul

Life takes its shape as we arrive…

like a soft light through a dense wooded
forest— sudden, warm, but bewildered.
The world pressed its palms into our faces
and said: here. begin. now.

We learned the names of things we love
before we learn to lose them.
Every door we open leads to another
already closing behind us.

Still, how green the grass grows
between the stones of what we’ve buried.
How stubbornly the body wants its
mornings— coffee, and light, and someone near, but not too near.

· · ·

And then the tide begins its pull on us.
Not sudden— but slow, the way a candle
does not go dark so much as
It surrenders to the room.

We are given back to the earth
the way a river gives itself to the sea—
not lost, but changed,
dispersed into something larger.

Perhaps that is the lesson of it all:
we were never separate from the dark.
We were the light it briefly borrowed,
shining for the sake of shining.

Breathing for the sake of breathing…

About a week before my brother John passed away, we had probably one of the most profound and in-depth conversations I was ever able to have with him in his life.

I suppose being on your deathbed surrenders us in a way that allows us to think and feel beyond our ego, I would imagine.

He asked me questions like what do you think happens after we die? and do you believe in God? and what’s the thing about Buddhism that you like so much?
I thought to myself as I was listening to him… thinking, really, John, now you want to have this conversation? on your deathbed!!! But I couldn’t say anything. accept,
“I don’t know”… then at that moment I was reminded of an old Zen saying… “Not knowing is most intimate.”

I was just grateful we were having a conversation like this at all, so this poem is a manifestation of the contemplation and pondering over the last few weeks after he died.

Xo
Paul