Shh...

Little sweetheart, I had a bad day yesterday. I don't know how it happens but sometimes a day just unravels. I lose my way. I can't find the path back until I've closed my eyes and slept and woken and tried again. I think it's because I'm so lonely, my little sweetheart. I can easily be distracted without the True North of your presence to guide me. I say this often but it bears repeating because I need to be reminded and to heed the simple advice to just listen for you. Quiet myself and listen to you. To practice mindfulness, so that when I feel myself beginning to careen out of control, I recognize it and slow down and just unpack what's happening to me. To remember your love and your guidance and listen for you right that very moment. You always try to help me. I just need to be mindful. Be with me today, won't you, my love? I need you. More than ever.

Listening

Little sweetheart, I've been telling myself that if I just quiet my mind and listen for you, I will hear. And it's not even limited to auditory senses. Listening for you can also be finding you by seeing signs of your reaching out for me or even the scent of something suddenly, unexpectedly in the air. Some things that seem to bring your near me are birdsong, sweet unexpected aromas, numbers appearing on devices or clocks.

This morning I was sending an email - it was another one for the Skylanding project, this time to the Imagine Peace Tower in England. I clicked on the link and it opened up Apple Mail on my laptop. I've mostly been using mail from my browser not from the app because it takes a good while to load otherwise. I let it do its thing and went about other tasks.

When I came back to it, instead of opening on the most recent batch of emails in my inbox, it landed on an email from you from from August 28, 2009. There was no text, but wonderfully 11 photos as attachments and your subject line which reads "picks from my most recent visit". There's an entire series of the two of us  - including the one below - and several of you on your own.

What a miraculous thing to begin the day with. Thank you for finding me, my angel. I will do my best to honor and conjure and listen for you today and every day until you come collect me and take me with you to be together again and for all eternity in The Forever. With all my love...

PS: Also, little sweetheart, I like this photo. Even though it looks like I'm sad, I'm not! I'm just holding on to you so gratefully because you are so precious to me. The first few moments in The Forever with you will be like this for sure - I won't want to let go. I don't know how time works there. It might be a couple of centuries of my squeezing you tight to me before I can loosen my grip and fly everywhere you want to take me...

Skylanding

Little sweetheart, Yoko Ono has an installation in the UK and another in Chicago asking for people to write and send their one special wish. It can be for the themselves, for the planet or for someone precious to them. Mine is for you and I to be together again and for all eternity in The Forever. Here's a photo of my prayerful wish going live. With love.

On My Best Days...

Every morning I wake up longing for you. Aching for you. I say our prayer and I caress your things on the pillow next to me- your pillow, your side of the bed undisturbedly made up just the way you like because maybe somehow all magic you will return. Every morning it’s terribly hard to face another day. Sometimes attempts to rise are more successful than others. Some days I can’t move from bed at all, I have to cry myself back to sleep and try again in a few hours. Other days I make myself go on. But all days are hard. And what I wanted to say is that on the best of them - and I need to remember this - I strive to honor and conjure and listen for you. On my best days I get things done. I tell your story which is also my own. It is ours. I find some well of strength and I try to find you. For that is all I want. That is all I ask prayerfully of God - just to let me be with you again and forever.

All Roads Lead

Little sweetheart, it's late. I'm watching West Wing and trying not to eat an entire box of gingersnaps. Every thing is about you, little sweetheart. All roads lead there... 

I remember that before I came to SF to do the play and meeting you, I also liked cookies. I didn't have a sweet tooth in all the years I was drinking but I was sober now and I liked Chips Ahoy. They were my go-to. But for some reason when I was living in that little basement back apartment in Bernal Heights where they put me up during the play, I started eating gingersnaps. My grandpa liked them, I remember. I would come home to that place after rehearsal and just be alone. There was a Blockbuster Video a little ways away and I bought a few DVDs marked down as 4 for $20. I'd watch them on my laptop and snack on gingersnaps and sometimes text people I knew asking them to come see the play. They were all out of town. Either in LA or back in NYC. I was lonely. No one would come over. But you did. 

And you changed my life. You were there. You made your way in. I didn't have to ask. 

And I'm still feeling every wave of what you set in motion. Your pictures and things surround me. You are in my first thoughts as I wake and my last as I lay down to sleep. You're not here but in a way - ways I can't entirely describe - you very much are. I need you. You're everything.

Love you forever. 

Tonight I'm thinking...

Little sweetheart, it was six years ago we went on our great trip to Ireland. I'm thinking of that tonight. It was so good to be there with you. When we first met, you were so interested to know that I had been there so many times. And you were so excited and wanted me to take you too. I'm so very very glad we did that. I almost didn't take my iPhone with me - I had a cheap little UK phone I always activated as soon as I got to London and that's what I used to text and make calls while there, but I brought the iPhone anyway and I'm glad I did because I used it to take pictures. And we must've taken at least 300 of them. I have so many wonderful pictures of you in Ireland, little sweetheart, and a good many too of us together. In not a few of them, you're wearing that big black sunhat of yours. I have it here. Your mom gave it to me. A couple of birthdays ago, she sent me a big box with a couple of those lovely monogrammed Serafin bath towels and a few other things and that pretty hat of yours. She attached a beautiful pin to it. The pin is a seahorse- one of your favorites- and she said in the thoughtful letter she included, that pinning that seahorse to the hat was something she thought you might do yourself. As you would say as "one of your tricks". That lovely hat sleeps next to me, little sweetheart. It rests along with a purple shirt of yours on the pillows -your pillows - beside me. I fall asleep every night and wake up every morning with it beside me. And I'm thinking of that right now before I go to sleep now. I'm thinking that and saying to you as I often do - because I talk to you all the time, I'm sure you can hear me - I love being with you. I love being with you, Summer. I love you with all my heart and soul. Come collect me soon, maybe even in my sleep tonight, won't you? I love being with you. Let it be forever.

Dream Travels

Little sweetheart, you were in my dreams last night! I don't remember all of it but we were together and performing with the band. It was a new work and you were singing. It had a kind of Christmas feeling to it and was not unlike this idea - incorporating spoken word and visual arts - of an installation piece like we have for Of Love and Loss and Dream Together.

I remember parts of the dream only sketchily. You and I walking around together in a house or a something like a venue and outside around it, too. And you (and me also) feeling a bit nervous and concentrated. Very much in it together. What a wonderful electric feeling! Entirely connected and shared.

I remember a little bit about performing. You in front to the side of me on mic, singing and speaking. Me alongside on guitar and also singing and leading the band. The flash of lights and film projection. The air thick and trembling with amplified sound, sonics. The intimate setting. A seated audience on folding chairs. I wish I could remember the piece itself! But being with you there is an enormous blessing just on its own. I'm so grateful.

The part I remember most and best - as so often happens - is what we were doing in the dream just before I woke...

We'd finished playing but were still standing in front of everyone, sort of answering and asking questions in a kind of dialogue with those gathered. There was a back and forth between me and someone seated there about some element of the piece. About how we experienced it performing. And - this is the part that is so vivid - you suddenly piped up, still on mic, your voice filling the room to say "it felt the same way tonight as when we were in St. Louis".

I loved that and am still thinking about it this morning. Wherever we were, seemingly we were on tour, because we'd been to St. Louis to do it too. We were traveling. Together. I love that.

And I love you, my little sweetheart. With all my heart and soul I do. Forever.

Follow

Every morning as I wake, every night before I go to sleep and every moment in between, you are in my thoughts, my little sweetheart. Remember what I said the other day? About playing one of the new songs and I sank to the floor weeping and just said that every day I still imagine somehow you will come back? I'm still waiting for you to. I feel your presence and our lost life together like a phantom limb and I ache for you deep inside my being. I heard this song last night and wept- not only because of its tenderness or its longing or its lyrics which so match my soul's wish to flee my body and fly to you wherever you are - but because I know that had you heard it first, you would have bought it and sent it to me in an email. Your love, my little sweetheart, was and is always like that - boundless, unabashed, courageous, without caution, never playing it cool, brighter than the sun, and it saved me. I know you must be near. Some unknown sense within me can almost touch you and take your hand. Please let it be so. I will follow. With all my love forever...

With You

Little sweetheart, someone I know wrote me a very sweet email last night, quite moved by what I've told her about you. I wrote back to thank her this morning and here's a little of what I said....

"Summer is in my every thought - in my prayers every morning as I wake and every night as I fall asleep. In my waking hours I do my best to honor and conjure her. My writing is of and for her and every album is too. I love talking about Summer, telling others of the miracle girl who filled my life with light and love. What remains of my life I hope to devote to her and I live in faith that I will be at her side again and forever in the blink of an eye. Summer is so much more than I can begin to say. She is (as she liked to say) my partner. My soul mate, my best friend. The love of my life. Summer wanted to raise a child with me. She couldn't carry a baby to term because she'd had a double organ transplant and was on amino suppressants (to keep her body from rejecting them) but she wanted to find a surrogate to carry one into the world for the two of us to parent. No one ever brought that up with me but Summer did. When I see children now, I so often see Summer in them and my eyes fill with tears, my heart fills with love and I know she is near me."

It's true, my love, that I will not know the joy of raising a child with you in this life, but who knows what is on The Other Side? Who knows? You do. You know and wait for me there. You know and will show me. I can hardly wait for that day, little sweetheart. But until then please be near me and help me do my best, won't you? Love you forever.