bird by bird

Beauty and mess go hand in hand. The Good can look like a sunrise, or like the winner in an Ugliest Dog contest, all Dr. Seuss spots of hair, and buck teeth. This goodness is the only thing that can ever save us. It is what grace looks like, this unmerited, freely given spiritual WD-40. Grace means that love is bigger than any dark weird shit life can throw at you, or even that we can throw at our nutty, tender, worried, exuberant, baby selves. All truth is paradox. For instance, I miss my mom; and she is also right here. AL

I love when kids get on the subway and they immediately go to an open seat and sit up on their knees so they can look out the window. They stare out the plexiglas with sincere curiosity and are surrounded by adults who hardly look up from the personal device in hand. I smile every time I see a child do this. It makes me feel less sorry for those kids who never get to experience a train the way that I did as a kid, running up a hill at the sound of a grain train coming so I could count the cars with my cousins and cheer for the caboose. That's what it meant to see a train as a kid in South Dakota. As an adult in NYC, now I ride a train every day. I hardly ever glance up from the personal device in my hand, but every once in a while, I look out the window and see the train like a child.

Getting over a broken heart is a lot like growing out your hair. There is no way to speed it up, no miracle solution or process. There are stages. Things get ugly. You just have to live your life while you wait, and just when it seems like you've been waiting forever and ever with no progress, you look back at a picture of yourself that someone took 1 year ago, and you realize: "Oh, it did grow." It was a nice thing to realize this weekend, that without really noticing it, my hair grew and so did I.