Here you go, Amber

One of my first and likely, who am I kidding? only literary pilgrimages was to William Faulkner's house in Oxford, Mississippi, where my dad, brother, and I drove from Los Angeles. Took "the Ten" all the way.

Have you listened to his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech lately? Some of the terms are of course out of date, but the way he speaks of endurance and the writers duty to write the truth is phenomenal. It's the heart gut where it hits you. The reminder to live life in tandem with the truth you write, with the weight and the levity of the written word. Every word doing it's full potential, its work on the page. Read it.

 As far as all this goes ...all the daily endurances: dodging people on walks, the chess game it has become, the online gamble for groceries, the waiting for fresh greens, the waiting in general, the ones who aren't social distancing, the climate, all those who are suffering, the hoarding and the lack, the chaos at home, the endurance we all must have, as we wait. The need to have repair people over, the broken appliances and too long grass in the yard.

There is all that, yes, and  I find what I'm having to endure the most, the most challenging, is my own mind, my own habits, ingrained thoughts, all of me right in my face. And when there's nowhere to go to release or relate or filter through or bounce off etc, it really all becomes a constant meditation practice. Here I am face to face, breath to breath with my fear, my gray area, my  inabilities, my stuff. My stuff I said I'd work on, my weaknesses I thought I'd strengthen, my despair, my apathy, my hunger and my longing. Here it is.

Here it is. Here's my childhood bedroom and the way it felt at 3 p.m. or 4 p.m., when no one else was home and the LA light, desert desert light, frosted my bedroom with succulent filtered sunshine, gauzy through all that protection between me and a lemon tree. Here it is.

Here's that time on Venice Beach walking with Lisa in 11th grade and those biker guys with long greasy hair who always sat in that one spot with their shirts off drinking, next to the skate shop, yelling at us you ugly goth hippie motherfuking cunt, freak fuckers. Go home. And the missiling of crudities that ensued every time we walked that patch of the boardwalk, where we could feel it coming, feel our bodies slacking with shame. We endured then.

Here it is. Here's my cat Cleo in my arms and here's me so happy. Here's her a year later living at the neighbors and here's the pain I endured.

Here's the pain. Here's the joy.
Here's the moment.

Here's the one thousand nights I've wondered how I'd make it to morning and here's the evidence, as I write, that I did, that I endured. That we've been here before. We've moved through it. We've transformed and let go and what was once something we endured becomes something we miss, something we're grateful for.

So here it is. Here we are. Enduring. Endurant. Endurons. Not too far off form endearing, now is it?

Endearing ourselves to ourselves and one another as we endure. Otherwise, why bother with any of it?