Our hearts have their own rhythm and rhyme. Our heart contracts and expands. Our Heart opens and closes as the eye that is I looks on from resting awareness.

My heart has been tender of late. Tender to my partner and tender to the pain of this world, tender to the sorrow in what we are doing to this world.  My open heart holds tenderness for myself….for my frozen left shoulder and the lessons that being disabled present.   And I find that this heart is tender also to the shame I feel as a privileged white man for all my complicity and participation in the degradation of this land…in the attitudes I once held of women, and for the privileged and entitled ways I’ve mistreated others.  The heart remembers.

This tender heart listens quietly and is slow to speak yet quick to laugh or shed a tear. Whatever is feminine within me resides at home in my heart, and what is male about me resides in my gut and my heart.  The courage I am finding within to speak of my experience as an xxy/intersex guy grows from the peace in my heart and the grit of my soul.

Our’s is a noble heart. Our nobility asks us to stretch beyond our zones of comfort. Our nobility calls forth from within, our true character and our soul’s light.

A friend lies dying and the world shrinks.  An old friend is returning to visit the dying and the joy of seeing them lights a flame in this heart.

When the friend leaves comes the realization I might never see them again and the world shrinks and then the sun rises.  When the night falls the flower closes.