Lately I’ve been practical. My son survived heroin addiction. My daughter, nineteen now has survived successive poses of “good daughter”. My marriage is broken, beyond repair. I wonder, how many people contemplate social service as I do. And is the field as satisfying to them as it is to me? I find human psychology full of gross mistakes. I find love as simple as a brush of moonlight across a second-hand kitchen table.

I was born at the tail end of the sixties. Freedom is something I’ve always been taught yet never understood.

Forgive me. I loved you because of my attitude. I refused to be sidelined into a crowd of onlookers. I loved you because I believed in you. I loved you for my own ideas about nobility and achievement.

The Amnesty compilation has its moments.

The songs remind me of you when I was first learning of you.

I will always love you. Ask any eternal god.

Contrary to favorable beliefs, I think of each person as an individual soul. I think judgement is a whim people have. People are products of their environments and how sad is that?!

Forgive me. I’ve been reading too much.

All my life I have considered ways to get beyond all the things life has to offer, including myself and my placating existence.

I’m returning to school. Again. Not that I have an unquenchable desire to be part of the norm as it pertains to displaying a degree in a pretty oak frame but because I’m finding myself unable to secure a job. Which makes me emotionally anxious. By turn, makes me rely on specific behaviors I don’t want to depend on. Which causes me to reflex and research and read books that once again form assumptions and beliefs.

I’m studying behavioral health.

That’s all I’ll voice about that announcement for now. I’m too naive and influenced to voice any true opinion.

It distresses me that “they’ve” been calling you a plagiarist lately. I happened to view some of the photographs, mainly out of this innate want to know. The paintings and the photographs are shockingly similar. I don’t think you’re a plagiarist. I simply think you saw something worthwhile and painted it. People balk for credit and yes, I understand why.

I decided, throughout my latest educational endeavors, that addiction is largely a matter of misplaced energy.

You see, I’m a plagiarist too!

I read that sentence in a book. A book I tend to agree with in print and the privacy of one’s own mind. In actuality, my son was a mess. If he was sober enough to read it, he’d be okay. This is a book for those interested in saving. In social work. In endeavors of the heart and soul.

God bless us all for trying.

I’m studying behavioral health especially as it pertains to addiction. Here comes the word “susceptibility” again. Sometimes I believe what I’ve been fed since birth, but as I age, and quit worrying about youthful things, I find myself seeking information, resources, an advocate of sorts to show me the road(s).

A paradise to improve the quality of my life. All these hours spent on the computer, nose buried deep inside of books. The entire time, With God on Our Side playing on a loop.

Pessoa writes: Everything unpleasant that happens to us in life – for example, when we appear ridiculous in the eyes of others, behave badly or lapse from virtue – should be considered merely external events without the power to touch the depths of our soul. We should think of them as the toothache or the corns of life….

In my own personal experience I have found my unpleasantries to fall on me as swiftly as night falls across the ground once the sun goes down. Not merely a toothache, but a possible truth that embitters my soul, to its depths no doubt.

I devote myself fully to my failures and accidents. I re-examine every mistake I have made until its qualities mutate.

I never forget what I feel or what I have felt.

I hope you’re doing well.

I saw your performance at the Grammy’s.  I must have watched it twenty more times online.  I read that you’ll be in Costa Mesa, California in July.  If you could summarize, in your own words, what heart means, I think I would believe you over any poet alive or dead.

You wouldn’t even need to have tone or detail, I’d simply rely on your explanation.  I miss you.  You looked beautiful on t.v.  Like a parrot full of shadows and deep wisdom, or an owl perhaps, full of soul like a pilgrim.  Every year your loveliness increases.

Like usual, I’m lurking, late and full of schemes.  The formulation of my life shows God intermittently, the world in its middle life and you, my own sense of spiritual history, as the answer between both.

love, lisa

So then, you conceive your thoughts and I mine and the great task of daily living falls on each of our shoulders in different ways, in different cities, States, perhaps even countries, for all I know, I know nothing.

So it’s the heart.  All my life I’ve been thinking it was my intuition that drove me, my keen sense of perception, my isolation at knowing others’ distress, when all along it’s been my heart, knocking about, fully exposing itself to false alarms.  Everything I do not know, concerning you, and I really do not know, unlocks in me this constant riddle between my head and my hand.  A letter!  I think.  A letter!  I’ll write a letter.  Only my head just sits there and my hand is put to work.  No, I can’t get rid of my heart.  To do so would cause the rest of me to disappear.  I’d be nothing left.  A wardrobe maybe, a mop of uncontrollable hair.

Why are you sad?

Sometimes (again with this sometimes!) I can’t think of anything to write.  Even ‘hello’ sounds hollow.  The fact is that my life has become too full.  If I were a tea jar I’d have burst by now under the sun, under the question of foolish people who place me in a path of imminent extinction.  Bless these people then.  For either keeping me alive, with their selfish exclusivity or wanting me dead, for my objective opinions.  Either way.  I’m neither here nor there.

Here’s where my energy leads:  you.  Your paintings currently being displayed in Denmark.  My favorite, of which I’ve seen via the internet, what was it called?  The red room?  The red door?  Something red.  Only bitterness resides in Denmark.

Everywhere I go.  Every circumstance that leads me someplace new, I walk as any citizen of this world walks, under the light of the sun (you) or the light of the moon (also you) and the sky (you) and its stars (filaments of your breath).  Therefore where am I? But under the safety net of you.

Somehow I’ve forgotten or misplaced my reason.  For this letter, for my faithful happiness, for my deprivation or courage (depending on which side the coin lands), for how limited my understanding is.

I find your paintings and drawings very wonderful.  Compelling.  Places I’ve never been are suddenly thrust (perhaps not thrust but placed….gently) before my eyes.  Of course, you’ll always find me favorable.  Life changes.  Love does not.

From Vegas to Ontario.  From Seattle in early September  to Ft. Lauderdale in October.  This, of course, is just a silly little discourse of my desires and selfishness.  I wish you’d come to Phoenix.  Just now the heat is finally starting to abate, if ever so slightly.  I read about your unattainable distance and wish for a miracle.  God grant me this and I’ll never let falter enter my steps again.

You must also consider, when you are not here, you are still here with me.  I see your face in the clouds and in my heart, an entire room has been set.

And how sweet it was.  You walked into the room.  How calm you were!  As if you were coming down.  I knew better but I was overwhelmed.  You wore a long coat.  It reminded me of a doorway.  Or a figure in a poem.  It took all my strength not to open it.  I overheard a woman’s voice.  She said:  when my children were born, they were born into a room like his.

I woke up then.  Sipped some water.  Made my mark on the world the next day by being one of the people taking up vehicular space on the freeway.  I was a celebration of movement at work, industrious and vocal.  I was a cloud during the evening, quiet but pressurized.  I fell asleep while reading My Friend Leonard, the saddest book in the world.  I didn’t dream of you again.

Though I think about that dream.  And believe it is now embedded in my memory.  And sometimes I like to think about it like a seed vacationing in my womb.  No, it’s not nostalgia.  Life is not that simple.  You still spin me into knots.  You still entice me fully into being.  My adoration for you is as redundant as a rising sun.  It comes every morning.  Without fail.  For as long as I can remember and for as long as I do not know.