Welcome to Day 18 of 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. Each post will look at these ideas from its own vantage point, which may not obviously connect with the others.

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“I began to understand nature / as something seamed and deep into which one plunged, going dark.”

-- Anne Carson, from The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos (2001)

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Oh, I need

The darkness

The sweetness

The sadness

The weakness

Oh, I need this

— Natalie Merchant, “My Skin”