Author's note: The following is a letter I wrote to my father in a recent moment of grief and reflection. It is a heartfelt conversation, and to put a fine point on it, this letter is not a fiction. Grief informs my novel Our Lord of the Flowers (and its attached images), and it's worth noting that my father was still alive when I started writing this book in early 2024. However, now that I am preparing to release the web novel in this new web site amidst a world that often feels like it is in chaos, I felt it was relevant to connect how my inner thoughts suggest paths that may connect to the novel. This suggested link is nothing more than a subjective notion, but since we are talking about the mysteries of art and writing, I felt it was pertinent to share this with you.

Dear Father,

It's difficult to express the heavy feeling that permeates through me today. It's as difficult as trying to chop firewood without an axe or to weave without a loom. My community suffers greatly, and there is much more sorrow and death on the way.

Father, what advice would you give your child, this strange child who was once precocious, and now simply tries to listen to the music of the inner chambers of their heart?

What do you think I should do next? Can I weep? Wil I fight? Should I shout? 

You left us before things got much, much worse. And often, I am glad you didn't have to stick around to witness how dire our situation became. 

But I still am here, willing to do everything I can to steward, to stand up. And sometimes, I need to hear your voice.

I still know how to continue to put the car into drive. Glad to say that motivation has not waned.

But I am plagued by dreams filled with navy blue clouds, and inside the dreams, I hear throbbing beats that seem to come from the very heart of this city. I also hear other noises, like levitathans rising, further off into the distance. And I am never sure if those giants are going to come to our aid, or if we must fight them too.

Father, there are hardly any threads you and I did not weave together. That's another way of saying you and I don't have unfinished business. But I know you still have unfinished business with other people who are still here, still alive. And as a parallel quest, I still have to keep discovering who I really was to you, and what you were to me. The sculpture of our shared truth is already fully carved. All I am doing at this point is working the marble to bring out smaller, finer details of this thing we called the father-child bond.

Father, protect me, because in this time, there is a lot to be afraid of.

Help me find in myself something that is not mired by the trappings of human convention, colonialism, artifice and construct.

Allow me to find the truth of what it means to be part of the cosmos.

Allow me.

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