Welcome to 31 Days of Kissing the Wounds, a month of posts about the beauty, longing, and soul inherent in our damaged selves; in the world’s brokenness; in the imperfection, incompleteness, and transience of all that we love; in our recognition of each other as the walking wounded; and in the jagged, messy, splintery, deformed, sullied, unhealed parts of me, you, the natural world, our communities, the culture. Throughout October, I will be adding a new post each day, with a link to it from this page. Each post will look at these ideas from its own vantage point, which may not obviously connect with the others. I won’t attempt to tie them together.

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“We are all the walking wounded in a world that is a war zone. Everything we love will be taken from us, everything, last of all life itself. Yet everywhere I look, I find great beauty in this battlefield, and grace and the promise of joy.”  ― Dean Koontz, Odd Apocalypse

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Day 1: The Mutilated World
Day 2: Bound
Day 3: Uprooted
Day 4: Miles & Miles of Shadow
Day 5: Butterfield Pond Field Trip
Day 6: The Leaves Turning
Day 7: We Need Lies To Make It Through the Day
Day 8: Ruined
Day 9: perhaps a huge silence might interrupt this sadness
Day 10: Hostage
Day 11: Death Fragments
Day 12: The Lightness of Being Wrong
Day 13: R̶o̶s̶e̶s̶ Lichens Grow
Day 14: Path of Life
Day 15: The Beautiful Squalid Lifelike Slug
Day 16: Healing Cairn
Day 17: I Am A Landscape Of Loss
Day 18: The Darkness, the Sweetness
Day 19: Something Vacant
Day 20: Wabi-Sabi: How Time Came Along
Day 21: They Had Gardens, They Had Mornings in Those Days
Day 22: The Ghost That Follows You
Day 23: Dark Forms, Yearning
Day 24: How Much Wholeness is Present?
Day 25: Bedrock Gardens Field Trip
Day 26: Fickle
Day 27: All These Scraps
Day 28: What’s left of kisses?
Day 29: The Night is Dark, and I Am Far from Home
Day 30:
Day 31: Feast of Being

Thanks for checking in. And be sure to see what the other 31 Dayers wrote about.