The tears were gratitude, every one.

In my morning time yesterday I was done with the sitting and done with the journaling so I thought I was done, for good.  Ready to start the day.  Thursday's have been thesis writing days so my head was a tumble of forward motion towards that.  Words on a screen.  Losing time down the rabbit hole of books into thought into books into new next thought.  Like little lights in a row each of which transmits power to turn the next one onnnn.  I love it.  I have never before been so plugged in to my real life on every end.

I got down out of the loft and went for my phone.  I keep it plugged in downstairs where I can't reach it.   Or that's when I don't have clients in the morning or need for the alarm.  That way my precious first glance at me in the morning isn't consumed by that dastardly little electric machine!  Those high-wires they so easily infiltrate my brain.

When I got down the stairs and peeked the time it was only 8:30, I don't write til 10.  Sighhhh, morning time.  I made a fresh cup of coffee and climbed back up to the loft.

Hoagy Carmichael on Pandora brings up muscle-ey memories that catch in my chest and stir my whole body to rise.  Coloring in bed for the next hour is what I did.  It let my body transmit memories.  I was alive, at Church Street, which is the house in South Baltimore, Brooklyn Park, where my grandparents raised 7 kids.  This little two bedroom and an attic space, the living room ahhh god the kitchen, a space so living in my earliest reverie.  I spent a lot of time there.  It's a body memory of orange-brown linoleum and yellow walls and my grandmother's round squooshy bosom where her hug got you lost. And my pop, his records.  Porgy and Bess.



It was amazing to me.  I had this new experience of re-living the love-light of back then, and feeling so happy my eyes brimmed with wet tears at least for half the colored pencil ink pen time.  All I could think the whole time was wow, it's never really gone.  What a secret to comprehend!  That we can revisit love-past at any time.

It wasn't bitter-sweet.  The tears were gratitude, every one.  Meeting the Self is endless in its inward reigns.  It's playful, a living sacrament we each get to make unto our own spirit and soul whenever we choose, each and every day.  There's so much joy.  There's so much play and life.  There's so much and it's so endless and precious and easy to access when we just--do.

In the early morning pain in 1997 when Grammy died I dealt with it in customary McMullen forward motion.  Shuffled the girls with their clumsy arms and awkward puberty hair and squeaky voices and braces mouths in to my car.  There were five of them, my five girl cousin that all came in a year or so of the others.  They were in middle school by then, except for Sarah, the babe.  I was 20.

We drove 97 through the county towards where Jackie lived.  At some point the car radio played Total Eclipse and that is our song, to this day.  Endless.  Reverie.  Church Street.  The bemoans of the aching human heart.  An eighties song so legit during the interlude you actually hear blowing wind.  Uhhhh yea.

This morning, bc this is the way of the heart when we let her open and sing--cousin Erin's text was waiting when I climbed down the ladder from the loft.  A group text to all the girls.  It said, Total eclipse on the radio!  Love you all-- with a million exclamation points to try to express the inexpressible.  We live in Seattle, Buffalo, Vermont, Pennsylvania, Baltimore, California now.  It was to me a nod from life that the heart is still home, endless in its ways which lead us both in and outside.

The oldest just had her first girl, last week.  Of the six of us, half are parents now.  Life goes on.  The heart keeps us golden, connected.  It eclipses, too, hell yea.  And also, overflows of blessings always there, always living and beating, pressing us to look a minute and recognize.  To just, see.