On being foolish and full of human passions (and a moist poem)

I attend a group regularly - I can't tell you what kind, because that bit needs to be anonymous. But it is a group of regular people (I'm going all American - 'regular'!) and we meet to share our experiences and listen to each other and learn and love each other.

When it was my turn to speak, my theme was how truly messed up we all are. There's a saying - 'we are all very sick people - it's just lucky that we're sick on different days'. It felt somehow glorious that we were all bumbling along, NO idea most of the time what we are doing. There's a Buddhist term - bombu nature - we are all bombu, we are all foolish beings. We are ordinary and full of passions. Well, I am anyway.

Last night it was a joy to be in the same boat with all the other bombu members of my group. Last night there was so much love in the room that I thought I might go pop.

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Here's a very appropriate (and moist) poem. Love you all too, readers - you're in the boat too.

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My Love For All Things Warm and Breathing

I have seldom loved more than one thing at a time,
yet this morning I feel myself expanding, each
part of me soft and glandular, and under my skin
is room enough now for the loving of many things,
and all of them at once, these students especially,
not only the girl in the yellow sweater, whose
name, Laura Buxton, is somehow the girl herself,
Laura for the coy green mellowing eyes, Buxton
for all the rest, but also the simple girl in blue
on the back row, her mouth sad beyond all reasonable
inducements, and the boy with the weight problem,
his teeth at work even now on his lower lip, and
the grand profusion of hair and nails and hands and
legs and tongues and thighs and fingertips and
wrists and throats, yes, of throats especially,
throats through which passes the breath that joins
the air that enters through these ancient windows,
that exits, that takes with it my own breath, inside
this room just now my love for all things warm and
breathing, that lifts it high to scatter it fine and
enormous into the trees and the grass, into the heat
beneath the earth beneath the stone, into the
boundless lust of all things bound but gathering.


by William Kloefkorn (from Cottonwood County: Poems by William Kloefkorn and Ted Kooser)
Thanks to The Writer's Almanac - do support them, they're fab.