It Is Not for Me to Stretch Your Arms

Dear Kate,

Another heat wave is coming to Vancouver, they say, and I don't mind that.  This is selfishly speaking, if only I know how to speak any differently with true sincerity.

You've been living here for years before.  You know what I mean when I say this place plainly rains too damn much, even for a man who's frequently given to melancholy for the sake of poetry--or is it the other way around?  I love autumn; it gives me a good reason to die, a complete, proper, cosmic closure.

So I say let it burn.  The peripheral of my vision is the furthest I can see and, naturally, where I stop to care.  Heaven above and the Earth below, here I stretch my arms to the sides and there you go, a full five feet of finite materiality offered to this World, caricaturing our Lord on the cross.

UN's latest climate crisis report warns there's "nowhere to run, nowhere to hide," but I have other more urgent threats I need to run away from (such as my child's wrath for having no access to a vehicle when one can be clearly seen on the driveway ready for exploit) and the place to hide, first and last, is my own silence.  Never say anything that doesn't improve on silence.

I surrender all, as a hymn goes, to this World.  If God wants to get mad at me, he must know his madness is in part a burnt offering of my wrath, smoldering just as deep and long.  Let's compare mythologies.

I first read about the sustainable winter home temperature being 14.5°C when I was fourteen and a half, and have been struggling since to observe and live in this truth.  At the end it was a pleasure to keep the thermostat down and put on layers of clothing to feel, before anything else, the embrace of God.  Only that that wasn't the end.  The end came when I became a father of teenagers.  Then I surrendered and lived in reality, at last.

I must have mentioned to you the cold room temperature made me twice as strong and literally cured my life-long allergy?  Well, one man's cure is another man's disease.  The cure can sometimes grow to look like a cancer cell to dis-ease everything around it.

If you think I am self-pitying I trust you know your cynicism is as misguided as mine.  I can only trust.  It is not for me to stretch your arms.

Yours, Alex