Tell Your Stories: It’s a Mad Love Affair.
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Commit to telling your stories.
Commit to them like they are the best lover on earth for you. Like they are the ones you have been searching for since the moment you took your first breath. Like they are your first breath, your first word, your first song — sung out under the sun in the backyard with the birds.
Like they are your first smashed-into-a-million-little-pieces heartbreak, the first taste of celebration dripping off your tongue, the first tongue that brushes against your skin, the first grip your skin feels pulling you closer into another’s bones. The first life that slides from your blood and skin and lands into the palm of your hands. The first cry of your child.
Commit to telling your stories in faithful matrimony of the most polyamorous kind because — let us face it — we have many stories, with many layers, and each one is The One — so let us just keep it hush-hush and get on with it. Stories know that without each and every one of them there would be no book of You, no shooting up of daily pleasure and sticky pain and everything in between. So they will agree that monogamy does not work best.
Give your stories promise rings, a stare into the eye, circling the edge but always peering deep into the darkest part of the center. Let them know you are there. Fully there. Paying attention, paying them love. Let even the ones of struggle, of death, of wincing pain, know that you are there, witnessing their unraveling. Let your stories know that they are equally welcome in sickness and in health, in darkness and in light.
Your stories are never playing games with you or playing hard to get. They are always there, ready to serve. Your stories are quite easy, really. They do not need much convincing to take it all off, let it all down, and open it all up for your pleasure. They are freely floating particles of wild stars and wild women and wild animals. Always present. Always willing. Always giving.
Your stories are not you. They are beyond you.
They are not just what the world has given you, but what you have given the world. In meter and rhyme, in color and hue, in heavy bass and stinging high note.
Straight up. Hardcore. Feather, leather and lace. A side of grassy field, and probably a back alley here and there. They are dancing when you are young and drunk and somewhere you should not be. They are you sweating against someone’s body, a body you were told you are not allowed to be sweating against. They are your Hail Mary. Your full of grace. Your fall from grace. Your holy body water.
They are where you meet yourself and decide what it might mean…
… to be alive.
Your stories will be your most passionate lovers. Undress each word with the mystery of its exposed skin. Seduce each sentence with the slow wane of the moon and the fast crack of lightening on stormy summer nights.
Nobody says commitment is easy. But get on your knees and kiss the feet that have carried you on this wild ride of a journey — blistered, callused, with imprints of your soul ground deep into your arch. Your story will feel your undying worship and will be the most electrifying lover you have ever had.
The greatest love affair starts with a story and ends with a story. Your story.
The one that is to be told again and again. The one that the kids will re-remember how to re-tell, re-make, re-write. To be their own.
Mountain fresh air, leafy greens from the earth, limbs that entangle us together, the children that come from our womb, the children that have died, the murderous things we have survived, the dishes that never get washed, the sex that left you hanging by a strap and a hook, the sugary sweetness that life brings. These are our stories. The most important thing, the most needed thing in the world.
Who are you not to tell your story — all of them?
It is time to make love with your life right now. It is time to romance the breath-making power of words.
What have you got? Write it out. Now.
*****
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