Good Monday Morning, Reader

Yesterday I wrote a letter to a friend of mine in my journal. I'll never send it as it was really just for me, but I re-read it this morning to revisit whatever semblance of human I was embodying at the time, and I came upon this paragraph:

"Sometimes I think of us running together down the beach on the sand without shoes. You're fast but I'm faster. I see us in my mind's eye laughing about something stupid. I see you trying to catch me but I haven't the foggiest idea what the vision means."

Maybe in the moment, perhaps that was true that I didn't know what the vision meant. But today, I know perfectly well that what I wrote about was joy. ✨

I love the idea of running like some child on the wet sand next to the setting sun. I see it often in my mind.

In the summer months, I sit by the water and stare aimlessly most mornings. I wake up early to write and work, and once the sun has decided to take its rightful place in the sky, I run, and then I sit. My mind becomes passive in the sun, and it begins to quiet. I wait all year for warm days.

Sometimes I dream of going to a place without seasons, and then I know how precious it is to be cold, to be fluffy, to hibernate and then to be born again.

I took a naked photo of myself yesterday and I find what I saw to be delightfully padded and beautiful. In three or four weeks that will all succumb to marathon training, and I'll become ravenous with a desire to tear apart the flesh of charred red meat in my teeth like the animal that I am.

I hate chicken, by the way. Always have. It took until my 30s before my mother believed me. There's chicken in my fridge right now. I can't explain the chicken, but when I was eating it the first time I felt it humorous enough to send her a text about it. I'll finish it but I'd rather throw it out.

Last year, I was high of the wave of summer sex and scent, connecting for the first time with someone new. It can almost become an addiction to crave newness, because the truth is, you only get that high wave once. Then, you get smaller waves. Some people don't love the smaller waves, they're not as exciting, but you can only build your boat when you're not being plummeted to the shore every other moment.

Joy for me is the beauty in a face you can look at for years, watching someone you met young sprout silver hairs. Watching someone walk their courageous path and standing there, bearing witness to it.

Do you ever think about the ocean, and how every drop of it has probably passed through a human urethra? I wonder when I run by the estuary just how many droplets have seen the inside of a human kidney.

When I think of joy, I think of music.

I love music, and I played for many years, until I knew I was not a musician, and that was possibly the first great loss of love I experienced as a young adult. I knew my path even though I couldn't conceptualize what it meant, and sometimes when there's deep love, we also know we aren't going that way.

I'm drinking drip coffee. I started this in the year I was so poor my mother was buying my toilet paper for me.

Before, like the New York City hedonist I had been, five dollar coffees from mediocre beans were a common expense, usually consumed rapidly to quell the effects of my booming hangover. I begrudged giving them up, but now, I look forward to the act of brewing my own coffee, even though I can certainly afford to not. I sit and drink it and honor the pain in my arthritic right thumb from all the years I poured liquor.

Do you like mangoes?

I love to eat food. It does not escape me that I might not be able to enjoy all foods forever, whether because I won't be able to chew them, or digest them. I love to hear the elaborate conversations humans make to decorate our act of sustaining ourselves. I love fanciful meals. I also can just as well eat a bowl of beans.

Do you understand, my friend, what I'm writing about?

I have not been explicit. I love to be alive, in love, in joy, here and now.

And that's how it is meant to be, for us to dance together, not rushing off to an endpoint, but in wonder, curiosity, and bliss.

We're not meant to be in this revved up engine always always. It's a dance. Will you dance with me? Chase me down the beach with bare feet on the wet sand, laughing about something stupid.

And after I'll probably want some french fries.

I can't see a greater point to life than that.

Stay beautiful, and have a great week

Andee