Gifts come in all shapes and sizes. They come in every noise and every skin. They come with wine and they come with water. They come in black and white and technicolor sunshine when you’re blind with sleep. They wear the morning; words like dew on bitter tongue. You can’t know what packages they will come in or what spice they will wear when they cross state borders and choppy oceans to reach you, battered and disfigured with the mystery of abuse. They come saturated with the minutiae of love for you to open and be amazed.
Connectivity is a contradiction between a delicate reaching of mind and sweaty hands, grabbing dirty hands. It is an endless chain of creation a million hands are grabbing and holding fast to through hurricane and mudslide. A rope that chafes while it protects. Connection ignites the the pile of tinder built in the center of our chests. Connection is matter turning into other matter. It’s a gift. What connects is more than voice or note or convenience or weather or place or race or money or language. What connects us also eludes us constantly.
The best you can ask of yourself is to offer pine-cones when they’re the most beautiful and available objects within reach. The best you can ask of yourself is to see every object, every light, every voice, every rock, every thorn as a potential gift. Sometimes for yourself when you’re crimped between the brambles and the quack-grass with the desperate tears of loss. Sometimes for friends who’ve blossomed in the light of your happiness and broken under the weight of their own sorrow. There is sugar in tiny mosses and twigs, fairies dreaming something to replace the tears. And the gifts for strangers may seem the most impossible but it will come to you without thought or heavy head how to give the milky waxy gardenia in your hair to the rent boy passing you, seemingly impervious.
No one is truly impervious who has skin.
Perhaps fortune is thin on the ground these days. Jobs are scarce. Money is mean. no one can afford to lose an inch but we’re all losing miles every minute anyway. Still, there is something to wait for, something to wake for, something to drink for every single day. There are always gifts, naked to expectation. There are always gifts, climbing the graffiti up through the chain-link to open air. There are always gifts, no matter how they’re wrapped or torn or broken or bruised or flecked or stamped or canceled.
Will you recognize them from your dampened morning pillow? Will you see them from your window, looking up at you from the alley full of prostitutes and syringes? Will you accept them with your grace, in any condition, and be thankful to have them at all?