Seeds

At the playground today with my toddler it was one of those perfect golden-hour situations where everything's backlit and soft and pulsing and your kid is laughing and you're just there, wearing the moment like a full-body wetsuit, squished and squeezed into the, like, actual present, and hundreds of those little helicopter-seed-things started falling from every tree in every direction like the world was just quietly snowing itself into the future and I stood there doing the push-release, push-release on the baby swing and I completely lost my mind a little bit in the best possible way because lemme tell ya, ya nerds. Here is what a tree most-def does NOT do. It does not go hmm, maybe I should space these out more strategically, maybe I'll batch-schedule my seeds for Tuesday and Thursday for optimal reach, maybe I should wait until I have a better bio or testimonials first — just NO. NO NO NO NO. The tree just goes absolutely Oprah with abundance. Every single seed — and they're samara seeds, I looked it up — is released out into the wide open playground all at once. Into whatever breeze will have them. With the kind of confidence that doesn't even know it's confidence because it's just — nature. The full and total expression of being a tree in the springtime in the presence of children and their tired grownups and the dog on a leash who so desperately wants to lick the kids' peanut butter faces and fingers but can't due to "rules" and I'm standing there in the late-mornin' rays with these seeds in mah hair just pontificatin' about everyone I know who is so genuinely interestingly mindbogglingly complex, who has had so many thoughts and experiences and opinions and disasters and full-on, like, Robert Downey Jr.-level resurrections — like y'all have lived some lives — and yet every time you sit down to write a Linkey post it comes out sounding like a buttoned-up bow-tied press release that went to therapy once but didn't really commit to the process and something in me wanted to gather up every single one of those seeds and hand them back to you and go: here. These are yours. Don't you dare hold back a single samara, okay!? And if you ever need help gettin' those seeds onto the breeze and into the ground, pls lemme know because I do some writin' for other peeps too and it's as simple as listening to you light up about the thing you care about most and then writing it fer yeh in exactly your voice and no one else's but guess what mah lads and lasses?! I will not edit. you. out. So please for the love of Cookie Butter, let them seeds fall.