Valentines Day

Tonight I came home this evening to this on my porch: a small note, a candy bar, and a budding flower. I sat next to this note and played guitar to love in a setting sun after a long week. I watched as the golden light of the sun faded across the heart-shaped note.
Every day, I sit on my porch and watch homelessness, watch bits of despair; today the couple in a broken down blue Ford Explorer, who have been working night and day to repair, have moved their car about 20-feet, and just around the corner. I play music on my porch and sometimes I’ll notice a person moving to my rhythm. I will see them sitting up against the warehouse, their feet tapping along to my guitar, or a head bobbing to my time. Some have clapped, many have just looked at me oddly.
Every night, as I walk Chico around the block, I can hear the soft mumbles of people in the shadows trying to sleep in such biting cold. I don’t really have any solution, and I often beat myself up about my own selfishness and all that I do have to give, more that I could do. Leonard always says hi to me and Chico...usually he says hi to Chico first. He often tells me he loves me, and I do back to him. This is every single day at my house.
At work, I am now the interim director of a program, it is a program I feel deeply for, one that I know is making a difference for a lot of people. It is only week three of my first semester running this program, it wasn’t an easy week. But each day I work with these students, these lives that will just pass through my life, and I see how amazing they are.
And then there are you, all of you out there I write to, my friends and family. You who take the phone calls when I am uncertain. You who text me about your garden and the trees about to bloom. You who play music with me. You who argue with me and open my eyes. You who help me find a car and find a bike. You who encourage me to be better each and every day. You who leave me notes of love. I have written about love for most of my life. Poetry, and songs, and stories, tried to make metaphors that matter.
Sometimes life feels lonely. In a morning of mass murder, I hate my own numbness, but you, all of you, help me feel so deeply. I want you to know, as I do, that you are loved too.