this evening

I wandered up to the local bookstore of note (Barnes & Noble) this evening, intent on just getting out and breathing. I purchased a cookie and an iced tea (I refused to ask for "Venti", I called it "large") and sat for an hour or so, perusing recent magazines: Discovery, Make, Mental Floss, and others...

when I finished my snack I wandered outside.

There, in the gloaming sky, was a great greyness of an approaching rainstorm. And the wind that heralded its approach was charged with an ionization not unlike my beloved Santa Ana Winds.

And it was good.

For just a moment I stood at the edge of the parking lot, my face turned to the sky, feeling the soft tingle of the winds as they passed over me and passed onto and into me their energy. I smiled. I smiled and knew things I only know in those moments. Wordless poems and tuneless songs and thoughts in dimensions and colours and textures I do not have words for.

I celebrated the birth of my children, every woman I've ever kissed, every poem I've ever written. I mourned lost friends and lost friendships. I wondered of past lovers that are no more and loves that never were. I remembered a voice I'd forgotten and the feeling of a suede skirt against my hand. The smell of a stranger's perfume. The taste of a snowflake.

And I was reborn, recharged and transfigured, in that moment.

Thanks, God.

Friends may pass away. Children may turn away. Lovers may lie. Poems may be lost between synapse and pen-tip. But you have never failed me.

I am most, most grateful.