Today’s Words:
Labrador retriever
misty
helium
dismiss
wind sock
rune
spank

I’ve never bonded to a dog. I’ve never gotten misty over a poodle or a Labrador retriever.

I’m listening to this song by Savage Garden that has a line:

I believe we place our happiness in other people’s hands.

Perhaps that is why people love dogs so fervently. They love you back, perfectly. Placing your happiness in a dog’s hands is a good bet. They won’t wake up one morning and realize that they don’t love you anymore and have to find themselves out on the road.

Although they might wake up one morning and get hit by a car. But so might a person.

I guess my point here is that a dog’s not going to betray you. It doesn’t have the capacity for betrayal. You can’t really resent a dog. Which is perhaps why I’ve never had one. Love for me has always co-existed with resentment. Sometimes I wonder if I’m able to love without also hating, just a little bit, the object of my affection.

I’m in a dark mood today. Need some helium to lift my mood. Like a cheery wind sock, patiently detailing the shifts in the weather. That makes no sense. but I like the sentence so I’ll leave it.

When moods like this come upon me, I am loathe to dismiss them. I feel that if I could decipher the runes of my heart I would find some beautiful and elusive treasure. I feel that the key is always in these dark places, in the underbrush of my sanity. And yet I’ve also learned that is an illusion, that the darkness will swallow days and offer up nothing in return. That I can walk around the pit, can climb out on a ladder made of little blue or purple or white pills. What is real? Did not Persephone descend to the pit? Where is our understanding of the dark, of the shadow, of the beneath-places? I want to embrace it, to love it all. I want to be bigger than it, not sacrifice it to the pharmaceutical gods of happy-go-lucky. I want to hold it and let it cry. I want to feel its power and know it, all of it. I want to transcend depression, not fix it. I want to wrestle it and win, to stand triumphant against the teeming hordes of goblins and ghouls that live in my subconscious.

And yet, I’ve learned not to toy with it. You don’t play games with the tide. The Sage treats all men as straw dogs. There is no battle, only the ego that wants to be a white knight. There is only the day, the moment, and the precious happiness that lives in the breathe. The epic battle is an illusion. There is no enemy. There is only me, and you, and all the sadness and brokenness between us. There are all the cracks and there is the salve, and there is our work, to heal the broken places. There is no glory, no sacrifice, no tragedy to fight. There is only love and today, and the next day and the next. There is no good that comes from the fight, there is only the good that already is, that sometimes we feel a and sometimes we don’t but it never leaves. There is just that.