heartaches, shakes and victories,
delights, rumbling mysteries…
sad betrayals and aborted hugs…
reasons screaming meaning, making nonsense of karma, shredding ideals whose humming “virtue” obliterate the stuff of love, saying “what goes around, comes around” while studiously ignoring the so much that goes around for so many and never comes around…ever and. And turning love into this gross assessment of cause and effect when some cause just don’t care about effect, let’s all shaft the masses and watch them writhe and when we die in beds of soullessness… rich and fat, what is that? What exactly IS IT that goes around and comes around? Will someone please tell me? No, nevermind my rhetorical quiz. I know. What goes around? Our fathers’ programs and mothers’ lessons leaving all this rot in our words and stories, telling clever belittling jokes and smacks at siblings in “playful” jabbing sarcasm posing “wit” with cuteness, our self-absorbed fixation on whether or not we’re “right” or “growthful” or making the difference that wasn’t made for us or or or…
What else goes around?
Sing it out, will you?!
The love, regardless.
It goes around. It comes around. That’s all. Karma be damned. All these wild dreams of karmic justice, karmic absolution, karmic restitution, karmic shmarmic nonsense posing LIMITS on love. See, now. Watch, they’ll get what’s coming to them. (beauty or malformation, all!) They’ll get every chance to heal the bullshit posing as clever wit constructed in daddy’s ugly mockery. They’ll get every chance to walk away from the fight with dignity, seen as wrong but knowing otherwise. Knowing there’s something other than rightness, something deeper brewing compassion, brewing awareness of real, yes solid, yes exactly justice. But it won’t look like karma. It’ll just be this…
quiet humming grace
oozing love through every pore
dripping awareness and presence
and standing witness 24/7
because there’s no holding of the breath for karmic salvation, no measuring exact portions of recompense for lives and life details whose value is boundless unfathomable preciousness. And, in spite of that fact, could die on the side of the road never realizing just how sweet. All these layers, all at once, no karmic salvation to make sense of it all. No sense to be made. Only love, people. Only love. And that not in fear, not in desperation, not in frenzied hopes to keep us all from dying on the side of the road but
in quiet confidence of just how sweet is the now chance to be,
breathe, expect love
and love’s best.
J. Ruth Kelly 
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