Tenderness.

Tenderness is a word that has changed for me over time.

It used to grate. Maybe I had tenderness about tenderness.

I didn’t like it. It felt too vulnerable, overly sweet, almost overbearing in its rawness. I didn’t want to be tender. I wanted to toughen up, to feel the firmness of clearly delineated lines, the steadiness of clean edges, of knowing where they are.

Time has passed, and now I am different. My relationship to tenderness is different.

If once I experienced it as uncomfortably awkward, now it is another flavor of love with its sudden welling up of joy, and yes, it is vulnerable. It can still be uncomfortable, just in a new way.

It’s uncomfortable not because I can’t handle it but because it is honest: here I am with my real heart, my real love, my real everything. I am ready for tenderness.

I love words.

You’ve probably figured that out if you hang out here.

I mean, I’ve written 1,409 blog posts. Well, about thirty of those are still hanging out in the “one day I might press the publish button if I’m feeling brave” hallway, speaking of things that are tender.

I love words, and I love them even more since having become silent.

Once I used to taste them in my mouth, now I taste them with my whole being. I feel them. Sometimes I think silence has amplified the magic and pleasure of words. Speech now seems like a very small way to access language, if that makes sense.

Once.

Once I had a lover who loved words as much as I did.

We never met. We were lovers in words. We created entire worlds constructed in words.

We spent well over a year whispering words to each other across the distance.

All the words.

We would fall into words, as word-lovers do.

If we were in touch (a word that begins with T), I would ask him about how he experiences tenderness. The word and the quality.

Twisting.

I share words this way with other people too. I have word playmates. TJ. Agent Elizabeth. Anyone who can play. Delight in words is my inheritance.

Word playmates can’t stop at Tenderness.

The other T words would have to come and play too:

Twisting. Tangled. Tentative. Toss. Torque. Tension. Tulips.

Take. Torrent. Torrid. Tend.

Truss. Tussle. Tousled. Tassled. Together.

Twilight. Tilt. Tipped. Trouble. Treble. Trellis. Trill. Thrill.

Touch. Taste. Treats. Timelessness. Trust.

Trust.

Trust is the most beautiful thing in the world.

I am learning about it in entirely new ways with the boy I like.

This is my love-more trust-more.

In [relationship with jealous ex], he never trusted me. And I would think, “Well, that’s his stuff, and he’ll find his way through it, and see what is true.”

I didn’t understand that to be with someone who cannot trust me is not sovereign. You can’t have love between equals when one person doesn’t believe the other person’s words.

Trust is everything. Mine got broken. But here I am, trusting harder, because that’s what is needed.

Time.

I have never liked the phrase “time heals all wounds”.

It is one of those things that is both true and not.

Time makes space. It allows for perspective, and there is a slow, steady magic to moving through life and then discovering that you have a new relationship with the hurting places.

Everything ends, changes, reconfigures.

Suddenly you’re on the other side of the thing that seemed like it would never be okay.

This week I made a list of every time someone in my life has disappeared. Death, breakups, misunderstandings, drifting apart, mysterious disappearances, or not-at-all mysterious ones that made total sense but still hurt.

I put an asterisk next to the ones that still sting, and two by the really painful ones.

Much to my astonishment, it turned out that items that used to be squarely in the two stars category suddenly don’t require any.

So. Time has a wise magic. Time, space, releasing, forgiving myself.

Twice.

Some things just need to be repeated.

You really hear it the second time.

There is something about twice. Twice becomes ritual. Three times is even better.

This is also related to truth and to telling and to tradition.

Tranquility.

I recently came back from 43 days on the road with the boy I like, in the desert and by the sea and in the mountains.

43 days, 5150 miles, 114 hours holding hands while driving in the truck,

We called it Operation Tranquility Recovery Magic. Is that not a marvelous name?

There is a deep peacefulness that comes from horizon and spaciousness, a restfulness that I can soften into and trust.

Tranquility might be my favorite drug.

Transition.

Things are in transit, right now, for me. And also in general, because everything changes. That is the way of things.

Nothing wrong with transition. It’s metamorphosis. Things moving because life requires movement. This is the end of stagnation, and sometimes it looks like breaking when it is really shedding.

Tell me. Tell me tiny truths.

This is what I say to the beautiful boy when my head is resting on his chest.

Well, I type it.

I like hearing his voice. I like being reminded of things that are true.

Sometimes I want to be told about sweetness, sometimes about warmth, sometimes about trust.

There is a tenderness (yes) to asking: Tell me. To listening and receiving.

This is how I get better at remembering to treasure myself.

Treasure.

Where is the treasure?

Right here, in this moment.

The thing I want more than anything else is to be someone who treasures herself, who takes exquisite care of herself. To meet myself with a kind heart.

To be someone who finds treasure in treasuring. To glow boldly, because the treasure is in my heart.

TRUST TRUTH TOWARDS TREASURE.

May it be so! And come play with me.

This has been a meditation on words that begin with T.

If you want to whisper words or sound effects that start with T, go for it. Or we could drink tea. Or listen to the tale of Tetrazzini, something I do every winter.

Other T-words (tea words!) that I like:

Towards Trickle Tricksy Twinkle Tenacious Tea Texture Tomorrow Tipsy Transparent Teleport Talisman Twirl Turning Tough Turquoise Truth.

Oh, and toast — it’s also a verb!

And tango. And turning over. And thoughtful. T is also for Terpsichore, the goddess of dance, the muse of movement. A toast to her, and to all the Terpsichorean treasures.

You are invited to add more T words, or peek over here for more tasty T-treasures. Like tachyphrasia, tangoreceptor, temporicide, and tirailleur.

And of course, if you want to share in any of the qualities and magical words I named here, help yourself.

They work like the salves in the Friday Chicken: there is enough and there is always more.

Whispering loving spells that begin with T, for myself, and for anyone who wants…

It looked like a cigar.

Or did it.

It didn’t really look like a cigar, but my mind tried to make it into a cigar, because what else would someone be throwing behind a bush?

The woman holding it was maybe a couple feet away. I just saw the shape of it, and the lit end, glowing red.

My mind flashed: Embers. And: That’s a careless way to dispose of a cigar, good thing it’s raining.

Then the explosion, loud and immediate, and I took off running.

Saturday.

This was Saturday, late morning.

Except in my mind I was back in a different Saturday, a Saturday night more than ten years ago.

Different city, different setting, different circumstances, but the thing that made me run this weekend was the same thing that made me drop to the floor behind the bar then.

Exploding. Noise. That instantaneous thought-feeling of this is the end.

Blocks.

About four blocks away I realized it must have been a firecracker. A big one, by the intensity of the explosion.

My monsters had already stepped into the power vacuum. Look at you, panicked over nothing. Snap out of it. Pull yourself together.

Twelve blocks later, my ears were still ringing like crazy. I couldn’t hear in my right ear. Everything was muffled.

Muffled.

This of course wasn’t anything like the terrorist attack, but I was having a little trouble figuring out the difference between now and then.

What do I remember from then?

Mostly the waiting.

Long minutes after the explosion.

Waiting, grimly, because we didn’t know if there was a second suicide bomber, and if so, was he going to try to take out my bar.

The explosion then was bigger, louder. Though not as close. Across the street. We weren’t even sure which bar or cafe had been demolished, there was too much smoke, and we had locked ourselves inside.

Waiting. Watching the news on television to see if they knew, or if they knew something we didn’t. My boyfriend had just left word that he was looking for parking a block away, this was moments before the explosion. I didn’t know if he was alive, or just stuck behind police barricades.

I tried not to think about it. My job was to keep everyone at the bar and inside the restaurant calm. And drinking.

Perspective.

Terror warps perspective.

I didn’t realize it at the time, the effect it was going to have on me.

The truth is, I don’t remember experiencing it as terror at the time at all.

Maybe that was shock. Or maybe it was lack of shock: too jaded from a decade in Tel Aviv to even show fear. I mean, I’d been a bartender for years. You kind of half-expected it on every shift, and especially in those last months when things had gotten bad.

I’d sit at my local pub, and when the manager left, he’d nod to everyone and say, “Okay guys, just try not to get blown up between now and Thursday when I’m back”.

That was our humor in those days.

So when a suicide bomber took out the place across the street from where I worked, my plan was to get through the night, have a drink, shake it off, go back to the routine. And at some point eventually move to Berlin where people were presumably less likely to try and blow up my place of work.

And that worked.

I don’t remember much more from the night itself.

I was able to contact my closest friend, the one who killed himself later, and he called my family to say I was okay.

I remember Ofer, the cook, nicknamed “The Butcher” — a half-joke about the mismatch between his terrifying appearance and his sweet teddy bear of a personality, he was the one who unlocked the door and went outside to hand out water bottles to people in the street. The rest is vague.

It turned out my boyfriend was indeed behind police barricades, unhurt.

He helped me close up the bar, and then we drove to the other bar. The owner bought us whiskey, and we sat there until very, very late. Morning, really.

The next day I went back to work. I worked there for another six months maybe.

Now.

While me-then was almost alarmingly blasé about this experience (she says, “come on, what other choice did I have?”), current-me is still going through all the fear that didn’t get felt then.

This weekend, when the woman threw the not-a-cigar, it took the better part of ten minutes to even fully comprehend that this wasn’t another suicide bombing.

I mean, clearly this woman was not a suicide bomber.

Conscious-me knew that.

Intent.

This woman may have been bored, or mentally unwell, or any number of things. As my mother used to say in situations like this, “She must have problems.”

She was being wildly irresponsible. And not particularly concerned about safety or hearing damage — a double M-80 is not something to screw around with. She wasn’t being malicious though.

Or, to put it another way, she wasn’t trying to kill civilians in an attempt to make a reasonable political point in a completely unreasonable way. She wasn’t trying to hurt me or the people I love.

And she probably didn’t know that I’d spend the next three days in bed, unable to get anything done. I mean, I suspect she might not care either way. Just that this was not her intent.

Current-me sometimes has trouble differentiating. It’s because of the wormholes.

Coming slowly back to now.

While current-me has a harder time dealing with scary things than me-then seemed to, at least on the surface, current-me is also a lot better at taking care of herself.

She knows about the healing powers of baths and naps, of intentional not-doing, of process and play.

She knows about peacefulness.

So I gave myself permission to be fully derailed.

I hid in bed for a few days. I let that be okay.

I reminded myself of all the ways that Now Is Not Then.

I took eight breaths and used the ringing in my ears as a reminder to be a bell, to reverberate.

First bell.

First bell: the bell of clearing. Everything gets clearer.

Second bell: the bell of joy. I can find the joy sparks here, even the very small ones.

Third bell: the bell of presence. I am here.

Fourth bell: the bell of curiosity. Noticing what is actually happening.

Fifth bell: the bell of steadiness. Anchoring.

Sixth bell: the bell of sweetness. I am safe and loved.

Seventh bell: the bell of anticipation. Finding my way back to wonder.

Eighth bell: the bell of resonance. I am a clear bell.

Come play. Or come hide. Or both.

One thing I have learned from being alive is that we all have our stuff. Everyone has pain, hurt, sadness, longing. This is a safe space to be a human who has stuff.

We don’t need to think in terms of hierarchies of pain, that’s a distortion. The fountain can take everyone’s pain, and the fountain doesn’t care whether or not you think it’s not as big a deal as someone else’s pain. We are all equal at the fountain.

In the meantime, we’re all learning how to get better at taking care of ourselves, to tread gently, to play at the edges, to create safety for ourselves. Not just for our current selves, also for who we were then, and for incoming-selves.

Things I’d like today! Hearts, pebbles, breaths, warmth, appreciation, sweetness. Or ring some bells with me.

We keep this safe space by refraining from advice-giving and care-taking. That being said, you are also welcome to share things that are sparked for you, or to play in your own way.

Thank you, and much love, as always, to everyone who reads.