The year's almost over. I'm feeling such a strong thread so recently cut in my heart, and its absence has left an empty space in my chest.

Gi Melin, and a Merry Christmas

I love you.
Yes, you, this letter is addressed to everyone, you being a part of everyone.
I don't know if I could really say anything to make you understand just how much and how deeply I love you. Because, my dear, I. Love. You.
I wish all the very best for you, I feel your pain deeply, I celebrate your every joy. I understand you are not perfect, and I love you all the more for that. I want to see your every beauty, I watch you carefully, you are instilled in my memory. You are so beautiful, in every way, so, so beautiful.

I love you unconditionally, completely, purely.
I Love You.

Just venting

My heart is broken; my dog is weak and seems in pain. He is thirteen years old, a goodly age for a purebred German shepherd to reach, and he has lived a great amount of it in comfort and health. He has seemed relatively happy, even as his body began its descent into the universe, but these past few months, and suddenly today, he has become miserable.
My heart hurts to see him so unhappy today, even though he is still so beautiful. His eyes are so sharp, even though he is quite blind, they seem to plead with me, pain in their very depths. I feel it is very nearly his time, and I am actually much more at peace with it than I have ever been. I am so very grateful to have had him in so much of my life, my companion, my big brother, and now my grandfather. He is a beautiful soul, and my only sadness now is his pain, his decay, though I am not sad for his decay. He is still so regal and peaceful and beautiful. He is still himself.
My heart is broken.

Observations on Spirituality in the Desert as Prompted by a Poem I Read Today

"...Yet something that is neither sand nor stone/
Nor blazing sun nor sprawling toppled rim/
Of distant mountains, something vast and dim/
Broods on this desert, silent and alone,/
And is within me, is the interim/
Between the wasting rock and wasting bone."
~an excerpt from "The Desert", a sonnet by Arthur Sampley

It seems to me that the desert is free from some vast divide between us and whatever it is that forms life and thought and love. We are stripped bare of our pretenses and masks and curtains in the desert, the things that separate us from God and men.
I believe this 'God' exists everywhere and anywhere, unconfined to temples or churches or holy places, though those are made holy because god is easier to hear there. But when you are among men, god is hard to hear, hard to feel. You have to listen closely, you have to make an effort; you must have time.
In the desert, none of this is a problem, though you may not, you feel like you have all the time in the world. God is loud and easy to hear, and comes freely in a way which is easy to notice.
Vast, beautiful, uninhabited, that which brings you closer to the universe and that force within and all around you.

Hiking in the cold

The scrape scrape slip slip slide of sneakers on an icy trail
(Probably half these photos will turn out to be trash.)

Decay

Three

Prayer

Bless us to bless each other

Old photos from Autumn