Everything is love
Everything-
The rounded infant surprised by her mother’s face,
The alert chipmunks that skitter away from oncoming traffic,
The infinitely deep brown of the eyes of the one I love,
The perfect compass of the chinook as it travels through the mouth of the Columbia, and the Willamette, and the Santiam, to the pebbly bottom of a discreet unnamed creek,
The uncanny strength of ants,
The boiling eye of Jupiter before the elegant rings of Saturn,
The wavering path of the dragonfly,
The hand with its four fingers and opposable thumb each marked with its unique swirling signature,
The cacophonous silence of the redwoods at Jedediah Smith State Park, its cathedral half light at noon,
The fairy tale dazzles of the sun orphaned in the reflections of Bear Creek, across the horsetail shimmers of pacific rollers with no land in sight.
It would be easy to say everything is not love.
To say the endless possibility of a child’s distended belly crushes it,
Or the cancerous tumor, the savage choked, violent, debased world we sometimes inhabit kills love as easily as thoughtlessly it kills each and every one of us.
Even in the worst of times
It speaks to us
If only in the ever changing pallet of the sky.