Love is in the air, and fear lurks

1.   Love is a word. Love is an action. Love is an ineffable exchange.
    Are you alone and fragile in your skin?

2.   The wind tossed the last leaves off. The old-wood buds will swell, will open in the spring. Do I love the magnolia? OR does the magnolia love me?
    The sky is falling, again. Again. Plastics. AI. Climate catastrophe. More; again.

3.   Four US-ians at a neighborhood bar, all reportedly diaspora. Conversation, company. Different paths, different ages, different histories, different/same sensations behind our skins. Africa, Europe, Europe, South Asia, South Asia, Europe.
    Um, Americans. Who are Americans?

4.   Familiar panhandler in the subway car. Work-tired woman gives him a note, an undemanding kindness. Relief flutters.
    The problem is too big. Look away.

5.   The bell rings and a neighbor hands me a big bag: staples, fibre, protein, taste. I’m going away. A large family agrees to take the bag, another gift.
    Pesticides. Herbicides. Environmental protections vanishing.

6.   Beloved books contain sounds: music and words. Palpable rhythms; resonances; impalpable, mutable meanings.
    The dullness of AI.

7.   The artist helps a family caught in a vice, again and again.
    Do more people care? Do fewer people care?

8.   Standing in a food pantry preparation line; bagging family quantities of healthy produce; turning from the person before me to the person after me; exchanging an occasional word or smile. Nothing profound, nothing life-changing. Very simply, good.
    Hunger. AI. Hunger. Data centers. Hunger.

9.   Lumpish in my child’s home, loving and loved. “Homecoming — warmth/community. Belonging — strength, confidence”*
    “Homecoming — changes
     Displacement — pain”*

10.   Holding abundance. Offering abundance.
    Losses. Endings. Terrifying sorrows.

11.    Love isn’t everything. For me, a living being in human form, it is. Can you eat love? Answer: eating is loving, and being loved. 
    Sometimes eating is a gross grasping, even withholding, of love.

12.   Thanksgiving in the traditional homelands of the Anishinaabe and other indigenous communities. Love and reverence, my mother says.
    Beyond reconciliation.

                Steadfastness. 

* Quoted material written by others in an improv exercise