Thinking and loving this morning over coffee and poetry as our darling son put on a cape and flew around the living room and practiced being a bat and hanging from his toes. Reading Mary Oliver. Thinking how a certain dear friend, so charismatic, so successful, is so completely herself. And so many people love her for her successful talent. But I love her because she is so truthful - so faithfully and so exactly and so constantly and so inescapably herself. All. The. Time. How could she be anything else? No matter, she is a beautiful stained glass window in this world. Isn't that lovely? Don't you want to sigh with the satisfaction of it all?

The Kingfisher

The kingfisher rises out of the black wave
like a blue flower, in his beak
he carries a silver leaf. I think this is
the prettiest world--so long as you don't mind
a little dying, how could there be a day in your whole life
that doesn't have its splash of happiness?
There are more fish than there are leaves
on a thousand trees, and anyway the kingfisher
wasn't born to think about it, or anything else.
When the wave snaps shut over his blue head, the water
remains water--hunger is the only story
he has ever heard in his life that he could believe.
I don't say he's right. Neither
do I say he is wrong. Religiously he swallows the silver leaf
with its broken red river, and with a rough and easy cry
I couldn't rouse out of my thoughtful body
if my life depended on it, he swings back
over the bright sea to do the same thing, to do it
(as I long to do something, anything) perfectly.

~~Mary Oliver

Then a lightning bolt from Buddha. So is my mother exactly herself. Isn't that as beautiful in its truth. So many of us running around expressing perfectly, our dysfunction. Or more truthfully, our perfection. What's not to love?

Damn Buddha.