“If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.” ~Juan Ramon Jimenez

From the epigraph of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

Not in the spirit of the disenchanted misanthropic society dissident, the one who won’t make eye contact on the T, or who seems to disagree with your own harmonious melody, but because you know who you are. And you know that all that you are, those many amazing, deep, and prophetic parts, the one’s that are easy to love, and the one’s that sometimes feel easier to hate, you resist them for them to only then cry out louder to get your attention. And they are offering you the opportunity to welcome them in. To love them. To wrap them up in your own two arms, because they deserve to know what your own accepting embrace feels like.

And remember, none of those parts of you, the virtuous and even the seemingly vile, none of them have to fit within quarter inch sky blue lines on white paper.

They can all just be.

So, in the words of Anis Mojgani “Shake the dust.”

And,

“Make sure that when the fisherman returns, you are gone.”

You may have been led to believe that coloring outside the lines was incorrect, that your cursive had to be perfect, and your spelling words lined up in neat narrow rows,

but your wiser, older self now knows

coloring outside those lines has a unique beauty all its own. One that our adult selves would be wise to welcome in and make known.

“Do not let one moment go by that doesn’t remind you that your heart beats 900 times in one day, or that there are enough gallons of blood to make every one of you oceans.”

“Do not settle for letting these waves settle.”

This message is for you. And for all the sweetness that is you in this life.

“For the sweat that drips off Mick Jaggar’s singing lips, and for the shaking skirt on Tina Turner’s shaking hips.”

For the yoga teachers, the writers, the whiskey drinkers, the jerks, the erotic poets, the isolations, the debutants, and the orange apron’d grocery check-out clerks, the multi-million dollar executives, the starving actress who struggles with her lines, for the popular and the petrified to rhyme, for the jocks, the housewives, those riding the welfare flow, the public transportation workers, the physically incarcerated, and the seemingly so, the lonely, the meek, the man with the fabulous fro, the little girls who dance in black leotards and pink tutus, and the young boys they want to know.  Those boys who want to grow up to be firemen, to be thought a hero, and to know the power of what it feels like to prevent sorrow and woe.

“Do not settle for the dust to collect in your veins.”

To think and to dream and to be is beautiful. And the relationship between you and your own sacred soul is the most important one to nourish, let flourish, and watch grow.

“So walk into it. Breathe it in.”

Remember how it feels when we you slip into what peacefulness within your own viscera feels like, the simple way that sunlight on golden weeping willows feels beautiful to your being. The way afternoon December sunlight casts a soft silhouette on your cheek that feels just right,

and dances across the bridge of your nose, the way dimples feel when you smile, as you capture a still moment in time for a couple walking by you in the park while golden willows hang down behind them over a quiet rippling pond, and tree roots bend and fold and bend again into earthen ground that is moving towards its own annual habitual hibernation. To rest during the evolution of its own resurrection and then spring forth into its heightned rebirth.

That couple, the one you took the picture for? They’ll look back at that photo someday and say “Remember the time…..”

So, in the inspirational words of Anis Mojgani “Grab this world by its clothespins. This is yours. Walk into it. Breathe it in. Let it crash through the halls of your arms like the millions of years of millions of poets coursing like blood, pumping and pushing, making you live.”

Shake the dust.