Welcome to day 27 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. I won’t attempt to tie them together.

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all these scraps, like some eternal revenue
of memory and feeling blown together.

— Henri Cole, from “Dune”

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“Desire turns us into ghosts. — Octavio Paz, from “A Draft of Shadows”

Not that I’m counting, but 6 people and 4 dogs in these photos are dead now. Ghosts in my life.

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