Affirmation
When the sockeye come in, choking the riffles with their
crimson bodies, flashing their fins
with effort
and instinct,
we push through the alder and into the river
to sit among their fading stories
like patient, glacial erratics.
It has always been this way.
We fish the currents and eddys,
eating our fill.
When did you first deny
your hunger?
There is no shame in feeding, in
growing bigger.
Life longs to expand, to
wriggle free.
As a child, you knew this. Each summer cabin night
you would slide out of bed and
tiptoe across the moon shadowed floor
to the bear rug.
Its story didn’t matter, just the deep softness,
darker than the night outside.
You curled up there, head to head, deep
in a bed of your own choosing.
Love chooses love.
It has always been this way.
Think of the day his
ashes poured from the bridge
into this river.
The sunlight brightened the dust
as it fell,
refracting within the tiny prisms of him,
connecting you
to this water
with a column of color.
It was as if
he was becoming every silvery shade
of the river,
every flashing scale of the fish.
He loved this river.
Not the way we do, or you will,
but in the way salmon love with a fierce,
instinctual pursuit, heedless of obstacle or cost.
This drive to their own deaths
and return
is astonishing.
But their run is not about a hunger unmet,
or denial. It is not even
about death, though that is part of it.
They swim as the river, becoming it,
not its opposite,
not a journey of obliteration, self-destruction,
and pain,
but an affirmation
of the journey
Itself.
You have made
a different choice
than him,
season after season.
He took his own life, not yours.
Accept
this
feast.
In claiming your hunger,
you are believing what
he could not.
Come. The light is fading, and our bellies are full.
Dare to choose the bed that has chosen you.
Rest. Wait. Dream. Create.
It has always been this way.
The time for waking will come.
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