I Don't Need You to be Pretty or Good

What I need is what you need.

Hello Beautifuls,

I am humbled and thrilled by the community gathering here. Thank you for your kindness, your vulnerability and your presence.

🌈Please ❤️ this post (and or comment and or restack it). Those hearts make me feel good.

Me and Lake Tahoe, May, 2025.

This is a different kind of a thing today. It is a letter from me to you full of Source/Spirit/God.

It also feels like an ongoing conversation, that while complete for now, is resting, waiting to become the next thing.

Do you know that feeling?

I feel that way right now in my whole body, about my whole life, about the whole world.

Dear Loves,

I don't have it in me today to be pretty or good or smart or funny or wise or insightful.

Does this happen to you too?

But baby, I want you to know something. I don't need you to be pretty or good or smart or funny or wise or insightful.

What I need, and what I know you need too sometimes, maybe right now, is to be carried gently. To be scooped up and allowed to lay all your bones against mine, to let the weight of your head rest in the curve of my neck. To breathe in the comfort and the sorrow and the life that rests on my skin.

What I need, and what I know you need too, is to hold the truth that everything is not okay, and yet, there is softness, there is light. There is the satisfying reverberation in your hands of a dry twig broken in half. There is the growl and shake of thunder and the soft slip of rain against your skin. There is the sound, across miles of grassy flatland, rounded hills, barren mountains, dirty rivers, waterless deserts, of your voice, a sound that carries me through the next moment and the next, until I take a breath that feels like coming home instead of a thousand swallowed thistles.

What I need, and what I know you need too, is to witness the devastation, the desecration, the destruction, and continue to love, as a sacred and imperative act. To rest our foreheads together, to let our hair tangle, to share the grief and then look up and see the hawk gliding, the clouds drifting, the moon curving herself through her interminable arc across our lives.

With Love,

J

A note on the writing today:

As I said in my preface, this poemish, essayish letter feels like it’s the beginning of something. It feels both complete for today and like it has much more coming. This is also the state of being human, isn’t it? The strangeness, the discomfort we all must hold or ignore, of being both alive and dying, starting and finishing, always, always, all at the same time.

Loves, do you feel this completing and becoming too?

Your song for today. This song breaks my heart wide open. Robbie Robertson was such a gift to us all. May you all feel loved beyond measure today and always.

j

xoxox

And this one by Scott Matthews that is both devastating and redemptive.

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