for Josh

You died four years ago..

Mostly I maintain happiness and fullness that you were here with us for as long as you were.

But then from the sacred place burrowed eternally inside this body that held your precious body until you joined us.  From some well spring of life the deep cries arise again..the bone drenched emptiness of your absence, there is nothing but your absence and I collapse grabbing the tiny urn with your ashes before I fall …clutching my homeopathic dose of you, the 6’ 3” powerful body of you, a life time of building houses, furniture, fixing stuff, snowboarding like a maniac in epic conditions making the world more beautiful, more vibrant with everything you touched.

I get up off the floor eventually and join the land of the living.

You were not murdered at a music festival nor held hostage by your government’s enemies ..I did not pull your body from the rubble. I return to this moment and watch Al Jazeera’s bureau chief in Gaza hold the shrouded body of his grandchild and touch his dead wife’s face with the sorrow of the ages with his dead son and daughter somewhere nearby..

I get up to return and to remember to practice the wholesome joy that keeps me going…happiness will return as I engage wholeheartedly in this life again, as you always did..

Get back up, keep going, as you would do….