I have looked everywhere for someone to teach me what you already know.

The pounding of your too-large-for-you paws on the stairs tells me joy is a serious business,

The bone, lovingly chewed and then dropped, without preamble, on my still-sleeping head says play won't wait one more second. 

Why bow to the tedium when running so hard you fall down laughing is an option.

And food? Each little morse...

"An orange, I think. 

I would like to eat the world as though it were a gigantic orange,

Not nicely, in sections, either,

 Truthfully, with juice dripping."

Silence.

Leaning my head against the bark, the oak who has lived three of my lifetimes. "Can you hear me?"

Perhaps a century of too many confidences has made it deaf.

 "I said I want my joy to be a scandal. 

I want days light with laughter and...

The myrtle blossomed,  

There, I sent you a petal.

A piece of summer.

From far away, can you hear?

This is how I say your name. 

Who called me just now?

Is it the rain, soft on leaves?

A dove with no nest?

With the summer, she calls me.

Out of silence, love has bloomed....

They asked, "How could you possibly know what red is?" 

I tell them "I don't. But I know a robin doesn't know how to be anything else."

A little scrap of fire against a nothing sky,

The dance on a mound of nothing soil, 

For no other reason but being alive one second longer.

How can that bright spark of a song, 

Somewhere between laughter and a whistle,

Given to the morning with that audacious cha...

"Ravishing!" The creature with the springy white hair and paint-splattered apron set down his brush, his eyes taking on the glinting green cast of the inspired and the mad. I did not want to look at what he had made. I certainly did not want to look at him, so I let my eyes rove over the chaos of his studio. "Studio" is a term that implies a scholarly order, rather than the cacophony of colors and...

If the clouds would shift for an instant, 

I would know there was still a moon.

I would look behind me and laugh because, how silly, it was only the wind, 

And the pounding of my own heart, deceitful above all things. 

The whisper of the leaves would change from "Run" to "Breathe", to "Stay", to "Slow." 

But they have gathered tighter, the clouds,

 The leaves, perfectly still because of course, th...

Between us there is a river of every discernible character.

Sometimes, it is a sheet of undisturbed glass, 

Where I can see you properly,

The words come back and forth with the gentle sway from only a breeze,

 And I pretend it could be like this always.

More often, it is narrow and close, laughter bubbling over the roots, smoothing the boulders over which, until now, I have always stumbled.

At nig...

They called it a bit of a slump. I assume it's because Hellscape of Existential Desolation sounded the teeniest self-indulgent, even for an East Side therapist.  A slump is what they call it when you prefer to walk at night and you don't like company. I've have a glass of wine, only one, let's not be dramatic, and walk until the barest hint of sun told me to give it up. The paths of the lonely in ...

They were very clear that I would not have to give up the colors moving forward. They always said it like that: Moving Forward, as though the strange sidestep, back-hop dance I'd been doing to stay alive didn't really count and I may as well have been standing still. From the time my eyes could see, all they wanted was the colors. The scarlet flash of a robin's breast sent me into gales of laughte...

She knew where everything was. That was her story. The new apprentice had quirked a skeptical eyebrow the first time he'd come in here. He'd hastily made his excuses and run back to the dormitories, reappearing ten minutes later with a mop and bucket and a pile of boxes.  She'd been forbidden from using her gifts for classroom management (the last apprentice still had rather protruding eyes and a ...