this came out just after i wrote this…
Dear Clinty,
I’ve been dreaming about you lately.
You’ve been in my dreams and close to my skin, and when I awake I find you’re not just around me but inside me now.
I think, “you are my biggest brother” – not only my oldest, but the biggest – the man who is bigger than the stars and clusters of planets and a field lying yellow in the summer. You are bigger than exquisite possibilities and truth and body, and you teach us that.
A few weeks ago, a boy I knew when I was a teenager died. And he made me think of you. He would have been nearly the same age as you when you died. I turn your eternal age of 25 in a few short weeks. I used to think you were old enough to die – that 25 years is a good go at life. And yet, here I am on the birthing precipice of that age, and there is still so much to do. So much to live and feel and experience and know and do.
I dreamed that you died again, and I began to wail that I was losing you all over again. And the stars came out, and I stopped wailing, and I realised I knew how to grieve now.
My grieving made me yearn to dance, my bare feet thrashing the gravel, my sweat becoming stars, my heart pumping long, loving bursts of blood through me. I wanted to dance you into heaven, I wanted to celebrate you in the ways I now know how to.
I didn’t want everyone to go home, to sit in our silent rooms on our own and cry, to not know what to say, to feel that the experience was too uncomfortable to sit with. So I gathered our family and friends together in a big circle near the shed. And we drummed, we sang, we danced, we prayed, we spoke, guiding you home to Great Spirit.
I danced you into me, in that dream.
I danced until my arms were a-swirl and every precious possibility, every piece of love, every dream, every promise, every lifetime was awake.
Today, I wake up and you are with me.
Today, I wake up and something I want falls through, but I feel you beside me, smiling down a thousand lifetimes on me, telling me that everything is sacred, everything is real, everything is new, and everything will happen.
I want to photograph you today. I will photograph the stars and the grass and the great looming trees instead. You are in them.
All My Love,
Bony
And then the sun came out and glowed through the rain
and the whole world looked like a miracle…
