Follow These Where

#62 of the first 100 blessings is this right here.

This circle of bloggers and readers.

The blessing is you writing in a voice all your own — meditative, manic, academic, vibrant, raw, irreverent, sweet —  and moving your readers to strike their own singular chord.  And you who reads, you who lets the words snake in with your breath, who may even follow one whispering trace to its source.

Below is a handful from the catalog of blessings. The list is in random order and many are missing.  It’s only in the compiling that the sheer magnitude of the community becomes apparent.

What a marvel it is to play in this riot of worlds.

• dmf and the others over at Synthetic Zero.  “There are many ways to live among and from the ruins”
• N Filbert at Becoming Imperceptible. “The fierce splittage that occurs.  Rife.”
• Silverleaf at The Silverleaf Journal. “A silent city wilderness hides, moss-covered and leaf-whipped”
• Cindy Milstein at Outside the Circle. “For us many, solidarity is an especially strong weapon. It is probably our best one.”
• Math with Bad Drawings. “Just look at these lovely unit fractions, swaying back and forth, an alternating sequence as lulling and seductive as Marvin Gaye’s best.”
• Beeseeker.
  

  Comes a time
  When the trees, like the clouds,
  The waves, the mountains
  No longer answer your questions.

• Ned Hixon at Ned’s Blog.  “When you find yourself force-feeding Pepto Bismol into your child’s constipated hamster, you figure you’ve faced one of your greatest challenges as a parent.”
• Matthew Fray at Must Be This Tall to Ride. An extended passage here, because his 13-volume Open Letter to Shitty Husbands series is too potent to parse.

It’s an involuntary sort-of apathy she feels now. Because you robbed her of the passion she once had for you. And she resents you for it.

This isn’t the life she’d hoped for. The one you’d promised her curled up in the sheets and one another on a Saturday morning when you were young and nothing else mattered.

She can’t want you now. Because the fire’s gone. Extinguished.

And the pain and frustration of that realization is almost unbearable for her. That you don’t love her anymore. That you don’t want her anymore. That she matters so little to you now that your job, or your friends, or your video games, or your drinking, or your golfing, or your TV watching, or whatever, has taken priority over her. You’re the person she chose over her parents. The person she trusted with the rest of her life.

Because you’d rather play Call of Duty or watch reruns on the couch, than tell your wife she looks sexy, than clean up the kitchen for her, than spend a couple hours making her climax over and over again.

Right now, maybe you’re nodding your head.

“Yeah, Matt. I would rather do something for myself.”

1. You’ll regret thinking that.
2. You deserve what’s coming.

• Barton Smock at kingsoftrain.  “I am the photo my visions take.”
• Alyssa Moore at Dear Lily June. “Someday, I’ll set the memories, just as he’s set the bottles, down, and I won’t feel the need to drown myself or anyone else, including you (I am so sorry) in their contents anymore.”
• Leesha at Prolix Me. “Push through that struggle and sucker-punch that shitty day in the face.”
• MorgueticiaAtoms at Take a Ride on my Mood Swing.”For Mother’s Day, I got a tantrum from my kid who said, “I want to kill you!” Charming, no? All because I told her I didn’t have the money to take her out to lunch.”
• Kimberly Harding at Soul Healing Art.
• Josh Wrenn at My Friday Blog.
  

  I have decided to offer my exclusive poor people tips to you.  You can use these tips to either save your half-dollar or make it go further.  I ask that you only use these tips if you are poor.  This is the honor system, which likely means plenty of the richest people are going to use these tips as those people have no honor.  For the rest of you, please, do not use these tips and ruin it for those of us living in the abjectness.

• Black(ness) in Bold: Black Professors, Black Experiences, and Black Magic. “a dialectical display of revolution, research, ideas, theory and love”
• Writers Without Money. “As the sun goes down on the world capitalism made, I prepare to read capitalism’s manifesto.”
  

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  Image: “Changing Water – Gulf of Maine,” Sculpture by Nathalie Miebach