Journey of the Heart

(EDITOR'S NOTE: I am sharing this beautiful message by poet Kai Coggin again today, after Kate Spade's  tragic death, to give hope to all those thinking about ending their lives right now. If you ned help, please call the National Suicide Hotline: 800- 273- 8255. Your life is a gift to the world. We need you here. Please never forget that.) To keep going is sometimes both the hardest and easiest step to take out of darkness... It may not look like a promise to smile, or to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and conquer the world today …  it is just a gentle nudge of Spirit, it is holding your head just above water for one more moment, one more hour, one more day, until there is no longer the struggle to keep going, you just unshakably ARE.  Suicide was a lying shadow of escape that lingered in my life for years. Today, I am thankful to be able to say that I no longer have those thoughts of permanent escape. I no longer lend myself to the darkness in...

Today is Valentine's Day, a day to celebrate love… I was tucked away one morning, writing a love poem for the woman that named my bones holy, the woman that made my smile come out of hiding, the woman that I love with all the lifetimes I can muster. The words poured out from the inspiration I received after reading one of my favorite lines of poetry from Pablo Neruda, “I want to do with you what spring does to the cherry trees.”  My poem "Becoming Vapor & Rain" flowed out of me for her, my beloved. That night, as we played checkers and laughed, words of my poem came out of her mouth even though she had never read or seen the poem with her eyes! She had already absorbed the poem with her heart, with the thoughts I was projecting as I wrote. This is how close we are in this love, DNA entwined, almost one person. There is one person out there who will love you in all of your light and shadows, in a way that echoes through all of your lifetimes, in a way tha...