Robert J. W.

Not the greeting card version.

Not bubble bath spirituality

with watercolor affirmations taped above the toilet.

I mean love yourself

the way forests do.

The way a pine tree grows around barbed wire

and still reaches skyward

dragging the wound upward into light.

You have survived things

that would have turned softer creatures to salt.

Look at your nervous system.

That electrical cathedral.

Those synaptic highways still firing through storms of memory.

That heart pumping faithfully beneath every betrayal,

every unpaid bill,

every funeral suit,

every night you nearly mistook exhaustion for failure.

Your body has carried you

through entire eras of collapse.

And still

it wakes.

Still your lungs unzip morning air.

Still your hands reach automatically toward warmth.

Still some animal part of you believes in tomorrow enough

to brush your teeth

to feed the birds

to water plants

to laugh unexpectedly at videos of raccoons stealing cat food.

Do not overlook the holiness of this.

The universe spent billions of years

forging calcium in dead stars

just to build your teeth.

Ancient oceans rehearsed inside your blood

before your name ever existed.

You are not separate from creation.

You are creation

wearing a nervous system.

So love yourself.

Love the gray hairs arriving like winter frost on fence wire.

Love the scar tissue.

Love the stomach softened by living.

Love the strange coping mechanisms slowly becoming wisdom.

Love the younger selves still hiding in your chest

holding broken crayons and unanswered questions.

Sit beside them.

Tell them:

You survived.

You survived.

You survived.

And when your mind begins sharpening knives against itself again,

when shame enters wearing familiar perfume,

when the old voices start rebuilding cages from memory,

interrupt them.

Become enormous.

Stand in the center of your own ruin

and speak with the authority of galaxies:

I am worthy of my own tenderness.

Not because I am perfect.

Not because I am enlightened.

Not because I have conquered pain.

Because I am alive.

And being alive

Is when you realize

how much of your life

you have wasted

waiting for words

that should never

flowing around the thin air

where I thought hope lived, underestimated fog

suddenly knocked them all down.

.

Sometimes I am a great expansion, and in my heart the dead and dying light, as so the newly created;

all.

I can embrace it.

Other times I am the rain, leaving little highlights on little things; mystifying the mundane.

Corrugated roofs, then, are my favourite. Then, I am so abundant! Yet far more often I am but a single

drop.

That is enough.

I cannot quite explain what I am when I am this emptiness, with a hollow touch.

Sometimes, I am afraid that is when I am

human.

Each forged morning Life kept dying; Emptiness perverts the beauty of chance 

Real only to body and language, I was only ever gentle  With one of them