Love what you love

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body 

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

- Wild Geese, Mary Oliver

I think about this poem a lot. And Kreed. And the love he had for this world. The way in which he lived in this world. And I think of other kids with autism, other disabilities and the way they clash with what this world wants them to be. All we ever wanted for Kreed was to be happy. To enjoy his life. His existence. To live in this world in a way that worked for him. And for the world. I never saw the two as mutually exclusive. If he wanted to hop through a store, he hopped through a store because who was I to dictate how he wanted to walk through a store. Or in his case hop. And express his joy. 

Now, running away and knocking over everything in his path, that wasn’t happy, joyful or conducive to this life. So we showed him another way. Where he could both be himself and be in this world. And I would never have changed that for one single second. 

And I think about being “good” and what does that even mean? Kreed was good. In so many ways most people are not. He was kind in ways people could not imagine. He lived in ways most people could never even dream of. And he raged in ways most people will never even comprehend. It was a clash of a boy knowing his body wasn’t working right and desperately just wanting to be happy and to feel the good in this world again. 

He just wanted to live in this world and experience everything good this world had to offer. To experience the opening of a flower, the feel of leaves as they rush by your hand. And a taste too. To sit and feel the wind as it gently whips around your body. To feel the sunlight kiss the skin. If this world would stop for a second and see these things, I think we would all be in a better place. To just be. Even for a moment. Without the rush of the world, deadlines and people wanting things from you. To just be. Amongst the stars. The moon. The deer. The rabbit. The dandelions. The sun flowers. The pine. The aspen. With the whispers of the river. The roar of the waterfall. To just be. To just love. To exist. To live. 

This was our boy. And the way in which he existed. And the lessons he always taught me. And the way I want to continue to honor our boy through everything I do. And to write about his life and what it meant. And our grief and how we experience it. And love and how we feel it.