Meg Casey

1. Listen to the wisdom of 4 year olds.

2. Dance freely without worry about what you look like.

3. Curl up on the couch and let someone sing you to sleep.

4. Say yes when you want to and no when you don’t.

5. Go on secret missions with young friends (like my dear John) to leave message of hope around the city with sidewalk chalk.

6. Welcome someone who needs you into your home.

7. Then, let the kitten sleep on your bed (as if you have a choice).

8. Call your cousin (or whoever it is in your life who you know loves you to your toes).

9. Take pictures of everyone you love and the things that fill your heart with gratitude.

10. Drink chai tea.

11. Laugh completely and entirely–don’t hold back, even if you need to lay down on the floor and tears are pouring down your cheeks.

12. Take a long bath followed up with a warm shower.

13. Skinny dip every chance you get.

14. Read out loud. Snuggle long after the little one has fallen asleep.

15. Make guacamole and eat the entire bowl–or save some for lunch. Or eat the entire bowl and then make some more for lunch.

16. Get lost in a book.

17. Take the metro. Take walks.

18. Tell the people you love that you love them–even when, especially when, it might seem like it is coming out of the blue.

19. Get new glasses so that you can see clearly.

20. Clean out the closets. Clean the floors. Clean the bathtub.

21. Head out into the woods and stay there for a few days.

22. Cry when you need to.

23. Play your guitar–loudly (even if its badly). Play only for yourself if you want.

24. Wade in the water’s edge. Let your feet sink into the mud and get all sticky.

25. Move into action even as you sit in stillness.

26. Cook dinner with your dear ones and eat it outside.

27. Go out for icecream and let it drip down your face and get on your nose.

28. Drive to a farm and pick fresh berries, peaches, plums or whatever is in season.

29. Light candles and say prayers just sit silently and hold hard moments for what they are. Trust that “All will be well and all manner of things shall be well.” Whisper it until you believe it.

30. Throw your arms around the people who delight you.

Inspired by the gorgeous Jen Lemen and my dear cousin Leenie both who have reminded me that the only time I am ever unhappy is when I find myself wanting the joy I don’t have and ignoring the crazy joy exploding around me.

Today was the first day of school in our neck of the woods. While I mourn the passing of summer (with her promise of long lazy days, nights by the pool, adventure and breaks in the routine) I also relish the return to rhythm and routine that the school year brings. The smell of freshly sharpened pencils and brand new notebooks instills in me a sense of calm and order and new beginnings. Its an opportunity to start fresh, develop new habits and start all over again.

Last night Max and I emptied out his backpack–turned it completely upside down. We clean it out at the end of the school year, but it always seems that there are things we are not quite ready to let go of that somehow linger all summer. Sure enough, there on the floor, were the forgotten notes, cherished book, favorite pencils, stubby erasers and half eaten cookie that showed that second grade was a year well lived. We sorted out a few pencils for the pencil jar in the kitchen, put the book on the shelf and threw the rest away. We shook out whatever crumbs remained clinging and declared a fresh slate as we loaded the backpack with the new pencil box, highlighters and loose leaf paper that his teachers asked us to supply.

I think this time of year is all about just that–permission to let go of whatever is no longer needed in order to really begin again. To start anew, not at the same place but with all the years of wisdom behind us. To carry the accumulated wisdom forward without all the half eaten cookies and stubby broken erasers to weigh us down.

This weekend, I was furiously trying to organize our house to make way for our babysitting coop that uses our house as homebase during the school year. For some reason, I found myself deep into my bedroom closet. I think I had gone there in search of a hanger and decided to donate one thing to Goodwill. It’s no lie when they say that one thing leads to another because an hour and a half later I was still at it. You would be amazed at what I found was still in my closet. Not half-eaten cookies but clothes and boxes of letters and other items that should have been moved long ago. But as I put each item in the appropriate pile, I knew full well why it still lurked all dusty in my closet. I must not have been ready to let that thing go. Its OK. Its going now.

Clearing is an iterative process. I let go and create space. The spaciousness that’s created gives me courage and suddenly find I am able to let go of so much more. And so it goes, every fall, every spring, every time I need some room, every time I need a change. I let go of what no longer serves me to make room for what I need to learn.

I find that this physical tangible exercise of cleaning out my closets and emptying Max’s backpack has a momentum of its own. It’s no lie when they say one thing leads to another. Suddenly I am inspired to leave behind all sorts of things that no longer fit me: old stories, old habits, old fears, and even some old dreams I long ago outgrew.

And you my friend, what are you letting go of, so that you might begin anew? How do you prepare for the new learning that will come your way?

I have a long story I will tell some day about what led me to this camera and what I am doing with it. But for now lets just leave it at this. It is healing my heart in a profound way, helping me bridge a divide between resentment and gratitude. I have spent a lot of time wondering how to jump this river, how to get past a blindness, a stubborn wall. This camera is teaching me how to see.

It has long been a dream of mine to own a good camera and to learn to take pictures. But it was also not something I had been contemplating seriously until…well…I did.

Everyday since I got it I have taken pictures of that which I love. And I have been blown away by beauty–seeing people and the simple things in my life as though for the first time. It is a practice right now. This learning to see. On this rocky road fraught with obstacles I don’t know how to navigate, it is the only way I know to breathe into gratitude.

Something profound is shifting in me and I can only whisper a sweet alleluia and prayer of thanksgiving.

That sometimes the most beautiful innocence can be born from deep suffering, desperation and ugliness
That nothing is ever one thing and even the most exquisite joy and breathtaking beauty can be punctuated by sadness and loss and even the most heartbreaking grief can be tinged with a rosy kindness
That laughter and silliness and ridiculousness is sometimes the only answer to heaviness
That my heart will whisper to me exactly what I must do next
That angels most certainly must exist
That I have sisters who I will walk with and they will not leave me and I will not leave them because our paths are intertwined whether we like it or not (though we mostly like it)
That love (not sappy silly love by lionness roaring love) is alchemical — it is the magic ingredient and while it sounds so trite its true
That the youngest among us are extremely powerful and hold all the wisdom that we forgot
That miracles are like tsunamis and leave disasterous messiness in their wake and it is a saint’s job to clean up what comes behind, physically hold the wounded together to sutcher their souls.
Saints also bring lemon cake and stand on chairs tip toe to hang paper hearts from the ceiling

My heart is feeling both full and heavy today after standing with my arms spread wide open in a thunderstorm and letting the rain pour down. I would love to know what you know now–let our collective wisdom carry us.

Falling asleep, drifting fading in and out. It is then, only then I remember. Sweet voice I hear you and then you are gone, faded into the night like a whisper of a dream sequence, like mist that rode in and then dissolved, blown away by quiet heavy air that came in when we weren’t looking.
Disappeared.
I can smell the spring chill now, feel the perfume on my skin, it lingers to tell me that once upon a time I knew you, once upon a time long ago. The memory of you is left like a footprint. But no embodiment or ripeness to wrap my fingers around, no door on which to rap, no.
Waking to a memory of a memory of a memory–a reflection in a glassy pond in summer’s fading light at 9 o’clock in the evening as the frog’s croak out their love songs, by a gas station with an ancient stationwagon under sharp florescent lights which reflect the fumes and turn pretty girls into stone, by a hotel room on a country road an hour before curfew, in a driveway, bold girl wandering out in the night to say good bye and not let you leave not let you leave not let you leave. Curl my fingers around yours, drop my keys, not let you leave.

The day we landed in Mexico for the first time, we sat in the formal living room in the Mexico City house, cooled by one solitary fan and drank cold coca colas on sticky vinyl covered couches. My legs, made bare by my pretty little sundress stuck to the plastic and I looked longingly at the plush velvet beneath the clear barrier. “Protection”, Juan leaned over and whispered to me, reading my mind. “When something is this precious, we can’t afford to leave it unprotected.”

From my perch on my plastic velvet throne something magical caught my eye. In a living room that was rather sparse, a simple table, a lamp nothing more, the corner exploded in decoration. A waist high table was filled with fresh flowers, plastic flowers, candles burning despite the sun which bleached out the room, red beaded lamps, pictures of saints in gilded frames, ancient toys, figurines carved out of wood and stone. I got up and wandered over, mesmorized. Juan followed me and touched me on the shoulder. “It’s my tia’s altar”, he said. I had never seen anything so gaudy and so beautiful.

Before we left to travel to Oaxaca, Juan’s tia called us over to the altar for our blessing. She pulled out a fresh candle and lit it with ceremony, laid her tiny hands on our heads towering above her. She said prayers for a safe journey and with the saint’s protection firmly in place, she finally let us go out of her watchful sight. When something is this precious, we can’t afford to leave it unprotected.

I was swept up in the mystery of this magical country, I would soon call my second home. I loved, and became a student of the altars I saw built everywhere–in businesses, by roadside stands, in formal rooms and in the corner of shacks. A place for the Virgin to watch over and bless all who labored, loved and lingered there. Yet, the altars struck me as charmlng, antiquated, habits of old ladies with time on their hands, connections to a superstitious fate-based culture, a culture where angels and demons made choices instead of people and gods were arbitrary and mean in how they doled out joy and pain.

When I saw little altars constructed by friends of mine back home, I thought of them as glorious art pieces. A showcase of spirituality. I thought they were things constructed like window dressing to declare one’s love of God. I didn’t judge them, I was enthralled, in love, caught up in them. But I saw them as “extras” as “statements” as artful expression.

That was until the bottom fell out, after that night when Juan whispered to me that he was leaving me. That was until I was plunged head first into the realization that all my expecations and illusions about how my life would play out were dashed.

Night after sleepless night, I found myself whispering prayers in the dark to my tia’s Virgencita, the only woman who I thought might be able to hold my pain. Anxious hands, flitted about while my words poured forth, as though the very emotions, heart breaking needed to make themselves real and physical. One night I woke up and I stumbled into the living room. I suddenly remembered my sister in law, constructing her “Day of the Dead” altar for her young daughter, creating a space to grieve and honor her short life, to give thanks to her children who lived. Old toys and pieces of birthday cake and candy–a celebration of her life, an acknowledgment of her death, a pleading for the safety of her remaining three children.

And suddenly I understood what drove her to create her altar each year–what mad forces drove her forward through tears and turmoil as she laid the table cloth and arranged each item. I found the handthrown clay Virgen de Assumption I had purchased from a local potter in Oaxaca, moved her off her spot in the background of a shelf on a waist high table. I scrambled for a tea light. With a flashlight I went outside and cut wilting flowers from my garden, shoving them into a jelly glass. I found a picture of Juan and I happy and smiling and full of love and hope and bursting with joy at each other’s presence. With tears streaming down my face, I wrote a letter to sweet gods and goddess whoever would listen, imploring them to save my marriage, or at very least to protect my child, my heart, my sense that I would be OK. I thought about all of us flayed and bleeding. My heart whispered to me: When something is this precious, we can’t afford to leave it unprotected. And then I fell into a deep sleep. When I woke, I arose with a new peace. I had found a place to park my grief, to concentrate my dream, to make sacred my worst fears and deepest desires. And suddenly, I had found the strength to go on and to bear life as it unfolded, however it unfolded.

In the last six years, I have constructed countless altars. I take them down and refresh them frequently. When I am going through transition or transformation, their creation guides me. They are not art or window dressing or decoration. They are not a statement about my belief in god. They are a survival skill. An anchor. A thing I do so that I can keep going, despite the chaos and uncertainty and pain and messiness that I experience day after day living life on the edge. I currently have four in my house. Each one is place to hold my fears, my dreams, to learn to trust. I have one dedicated to my community, another to my tenuous and turmoil filled relationship with God and the Universe, my doubts about Her/His intentions, my questions and struggles. I have one dedicated to following my path–where I can park those fears that come up when I listen to my heart. And I have one, tucked away in my bedroom which hardly anyone ever sees, my most private space where my heart dwells. Each one is a place where I can acknowledge, grieve and celebrate. Where I can concentrate my prayers and honor the fears that try to protect me. Each night I light the candles. And then, I can say to my fears, the ones who try and protect me from life’s sorrow. “Stay here and rest, my loves. I must go out and bear life without you in the way.”

On Monday, a young teenage friend of mine set off for the journey of a lifetime. Headed to Rwanda to follow his path, I know his tender heart will see and experience both extraordinary beauty and pain. His mother, so strong, swallows her worry and speaks out loud over and over why this trip is good for him. I too, find myself thinking of him constantly, my prayers of protection, my pleas that he will find mentors to help him process what his tender heart experiences rising up and clouding my thoughts. Sunday night as I wandered through the grocery store, I passed the Latino section and saw the guardian angel candles–the very same ones with their paper wrappers and baroque images of an fair haired angel guiding a child that my tia places on hers whenever we set off from Mexico. The very same ones she lights when we leave her. I bought two, and placed the first on my community altar.

Monday morning, bright and early, I walked to my friend’s house. His parents just back from the airport were upbeat but strains of anxiety showed around their eyes. “This may be corny,” I said “but I brought a candle. To protect your boy. Its a space to hold the fear I know you have. I have one burning in my house for him too.” Furiously we searched for matches and lit it, said a little prayer and then went on with our day. Parking our grief and our worry so we could move on, but knowing full well that our hearts’ love had been concentrated and sent out like a magical golden net to protect him while he walked his new tightwire. When something is this precious we can’t afford to leave it unprotected.

For my dear friends E and K who reminded me this week why I build my altars.

Update: As I finished this sentence my friend just appeared with her phone in hand so I could read the email her son had sent, describing a land that had already captured his heart. I am in tears with joy. If you keep an altar would you light a little candle on yours for a boy, so brave, so wise and so connected to his heart that he left his comfortable life here at 16 to answer the call to love? May he be held up and protected and carried through the countryside by hundreds of prayerful hearts.

I have taken the week off of work with week. Our babysitter is away visiting her family. This is not when we normally take our vacation–we hold out for cousins week each August. So instead, of using the week to escape my life, I am using it to delve more deeply into it. To do all the things I wished I could do if I wasn’t so occupied by my paid work. I have been anticipating it juicily. I feel I put off so much of my life while i am living it.

So often this last month, while battling against the assault of the end of the school year (with its performances, and picnics and celebrations and ceremonies) I would dreamily say, “I will get to THAT when it is all over and I take my week off”. I had a long list of chores, projects, playdates, and fun.

I had a bit of a panic as the week approached–as Friday signaled that “the week” had finally arrived. As I did the math, I had no idea how I would get it all done. Like a general, I pulled out spreadsheet and organized my time into neat little blocks.

But still it didn’t calm me. I was so afraid that the time would slip by and I would have missed it, missed my chance, missed my moment. Missed my juicy life. Missed my opportunities to delve deeply into all that I had put off until “just the right time”. Does this sound familiar?

So I made my schedule (because as we all know routine is soothing and good for children and adults alike), and then reminded myself that as long as I lived deeply in every moment I would have lost or missed nothing.

I am having to do a lot of reminding of myself. This week I am learning that no matter how wise I pretend to be, I can’t shake that habit of imagining a time in the (hopefully) not to distant future, when I will finally get it right, when a bell will ring, when the curtains will part and I will arrive at my perfect life. (I had somehow convinced myself that that time MIGHT just be at the conclusion of my week off).

Once upon a time I could have rattled off to you exactly what it would look like when I finally made it–about the job and the kids and the state of the house. Truth is, over the last 5 years that vision has gotten pretty muddied, but still, I can’t quite shake the feeling that some magical moment is right around the corner and when I turn it, my happily ever after will start.

I am (she says withe relief) no longer attached to one vision of how it might look, but still, there is still that striving, that sense that I am on my way somewhere and it will be my reward for the pain and the struggle and the heartache and all the soul work.

I have a mentor and soul sister named Kaiya. Whenever I mutter that “I am getting there” as I talk about my life she sits up very tall and looks at me very sternly. “There is no THERE baby girl.” she tells me. “There is no magical moment. The reward for doing your soul work is more soul work. The reward for eating healthily is craving more good food. The reward for learning to unconditionally love, messy and complicated people is another glorious day relating and learning from the same messy and complicated people. There is no “aha” moment when it will all make sense. So stop waiting for that moment and jump in. Thats it. Be here in this moment. In a comfortable room with a pleasant view. Sitting with someone you love. Talking about stuff that matters. Talking about stuff that is silly. This is it. This is your life. Its a good life. Enjoy it.”

OK. Thats great. I can sit and enjoy my life in slow motion. I have mastered the art of “letting it all hang out”. I have eased into being–just in a space and time, which is great. Except for when things need to be done. Except for when there are steps to take that may be hard or complicated and demand a lot of energy.

Its so hard for me to be action oriented but in the present. Isn’t that nutty? I am good at simply sitting in the moment, but I am so unpracticed at the idea of moving forward and taking action without any story about that action carrying me somewhere–without the belief that that action will help me somehow arrive. I find that I am either all blissed out in the now on my cushion or sitting in the sunshine or sitting with a good friend and tea or tequila or wrapped up in my down comforters with a great book. But doing things I need to do, that are scary and hard work–stuff like doing art, or writing something longer than a blog post, or taking steps to get to school–doing them for the sake of them, without a sense that they are worthy because they signal some implicit arrival. Doing them simply because they need to be done. That is so difficult.

This week, I painted my kitchen. Once upon a time I never would have gotten started with a painting project like this because it would have been wrapped up in a vision of a perfect house. I would have done the calculus and seen that week or even a few hours is not enough time to arrive at what I wanted and so I would have given up before even starting, paralyzed by what it would take to arrive. I decided I would just practice painting for the sake of it–with no attachment to a beautiful kitchen, or even a neat kitchen. I found it soothing and soulful and restful. I find that I am making progress step by baby step. I am painting my kitchen because it wants to be green. Not because I have any story about a clean kitchen or a beautiful kitchen or even about a kitchen that will be orderly or calm or in which I will live a more beautiful cleaned up version of my current life.

Its a balance that is complicated to find. Just like all the unpracticed people before me, I am failing more than I am succeeding but I am using this week, with its scheduled blocks of time and its chores and its wide open spaces to practice the art of realizing that I have indeed already arrived. With every breath I arrive over and over again.

Day of brightest light, of biggest wishes, of round mango suns. Day of promises coming true.

This day, this sticky heat, this sweet sweet sunshine pouring in. Welcome. I lift my arms to the sky, try to wrap them around you, you golden orb rising.

I will make my altars anew this day, so full of life. I will whisper shout my prayers to the heavens. I will light fires and eat tomatoes from the garden, let their juice spill down my chin. I will face south and sing alleluia. So much light, so much love, so much joy.

The Sun
By Mary Oliver

or have you too
gone crazy
for power,
for things?

About a year ago, I spontaneously decided to go through my blog and find posts inspired by people in my real life and send them to them as a package. It was a strange exercise for me. People in my community of friends know me to play many roles. I am a mother, a neighbor, an activist, a researcher, a mentor, a boss, a student. I am that nice person up the street who hugs and kisses a lot. But very few people think of me as a writer.

And that is a little bit on purpose.

I don’t drive many of my friends and co-workers here because I am a bit shy about the truths that get told here.
Writing here is such a tender process and sharing that writing with the people I love exposes me and often leaves me feeling vulnerable. Its scary enough to share my creativity. But this blog has become a place where I often lay my beating heart out on the table and speak truths that sometimes surprise even me.

So sending those packaged up bundles to those i love was terrifying. I was asking to be seen, warts and all and I had no idea what the response would be. I decided to send them anyway, with no attachment to the response. I decided to risk being loved as I am. Or at very least to be seen.
******
I know for a fact that I have loved ones who don’t get my writing. Perhaps they are embarrassed or shocked by my willingness to open my heart so shamelessly to strangers. Perhaps they think it is “attention getting” behavior and not art to tell stories like mine. I once had a debate with a woman I respect very much (and who didn’t know I write) about the memoir genre. She hates them. She thinks that memoirs are fiction wrapped up and pretending to be truth and they they are inevitably preachy and self-absorbed and to quote her “artless”. She said the minute we claim to tell the truth we are lying and that if an author really wanted to say something they could be creative enough to tell a story to illustrate the point. I sighed, holding her truth in the light and wondered what I could learn from it. Its true, sometimes fiction can tell truth so much more powerfully but I also wondered about the possibility that maybe to her memoir can be scary. When I speak my truth, not as fiction that could be true but as truth it can be really scary. Especially when it isn’t your truth. It calls us all out as liars.
******
When I write these truths I immediately run a risk that a rift will open up, a chasm, a valley. I run the risk of being called out as a liar, of my truth being sacrificed on your altar, or smashed to bits when held up to the light of what you might know about me. I run the risk of breaking carefully crafted expectations you may have developed about me or worse yet, run the risk of the snickering comments, “Well, that’s not really how she is”. The reality is that when we write about our lives there is no way to do it without exposure and without blowing up that myth we call truth.
*****
I am a both a holy wise woman and a broken down mess. I am extraordinary and unique and exactly the same as everyone else. I have moments of kindness and moments of pettiness, moments when I am magnanimous and moments where my patience is raw and limited. There are moments when I am profound and moments where I am cliche and obvious and so full of shit. I know that whenever I tell you a story I am only telling you a part of it. That every attempt to convey a truth immediately makes a liar out of me. One face. One truth. There is no way to know the whole truth. Ever. And yet…at that moment, in that space, in the perfectness of a now, no one ever really lies but only whispers what they know to be true in that millisecond, even if that truth shifts the moment it is uttered.
*****
Over this last year, some of the people I love most have disappointed me and it has set my world upside down. Perhaps they were unkind or thoughtless. They may have hurt me greatly, acted in a way I found disrespectful or simply annoyed me. They may have behaved jealously or they may have judged me or someone I love. Maybe I thought they took advantage or took all all the air. Maybe I thought they took without giving. Maybe they gave for the wrong reasons. Maybe I thought they were a hypocrite or made a liar out of me.

At the end of the day though, my disappointment was about me.

I was annoyed because they failed to meet whatever unfair expectations I had created when I declared why I loved them and then quietly in my heart of hearts demanded (unfairly) that they always be that way. I was angry because their truth at that moment did not match up with the truth I had told myself about them. I was convinced that they were perfect in the ways I wanted them to be. I was caught up in a lie. Caught up in the calling them a liar, caught up in not seeing the whole, caught up in not being willing to meet them as they are exactly as they are.

The moment I realized this, something hard inside me began to dissolve. That work is still happening but I feel so much softer around the edges. I am able to hold the reality that the people I love are divine and terrible. We all are. As we stumble through our lives they will be lovely and screw up exponentially and I am simply called to love. And the aim of this practice is to know unconditional love. To see and be seen.

I am making it my practice, to open up and love the fucked up parts of the people I love along with the delicious parts.

Immediately as I wrote this last sentence, I tried to qualify it, for fear that someone in my real life could claim it isn’t the truth. They could point to the thousands of times I have failed at this. They could think I am being smug. They could think a lot of things. It takes too much time and energy for me to worry about that anymore so the qualifications are going out the window. I am flawed and todays truths may be tomorrows fictions but for now this is my truth. The Truth according to Me. The truth that the minute is spoken dissolves.

A few days ago, when I sat down to write, I had an entirely different post in mind. But this is what came up and so I honored it. Truth is, it has been bubbling up and wanting to be written for months now but finally came to the surface, probably inspired by these truth tellers whose posts made me think so much this past week.

These links are not the kind that come back telling you there was a typo in your link but rather links to material that has sustained and nourished me as a I have been contemplated the brokenness of me, the brokenness of humanity and the glory and gift of being broken wide open like one of those geode rocks that looks all plain and regular rock on the outside but inside are brilliant sparkling gorgeous gem-like unique miracles. The breaking is what makes it possible for us to see the insides.

Awhile ago, the lovely Jena Strong (who herself, often writes about being broken open) made a book recommendation. I immediately picked this book up and gobbled it in a matter of a week. Broken: A Love Story is a story of a Native American shaman who found his talents to train horses and to heal people after an accident leaves him paralyzed. More than that however, it is the story of what happens to the author, Lisa Jones, when she allows this man and his community to touch her life. It is a story about the beauty that comes from mess and the peace in living life exactly as it shows up, the joy of surrender.

And then there is Maggie, of Okay.Fine.Dammit. Maggie writes about a lot of things, but she writes with raw exquisite breathtaking beauty about being broken open. Or rather, Maggie–so deeply immersed in this life she lives, breaks open her heart, confronts pain and ugliness and shows us spectacular beauty in the procss. One of the things I love about Maggie’s posts is that she doesn’t feel the need to tie it all up in a neat little bow. She is content with the messiness to be, well, messy. If you don’t read Maggie, you should. She will knock you to your knees. Try this one about the impending loss of a cherished friend or this one about her battle to be true to herself and commitments she made or this one which made her one of my heros for ever.

Or how about this video of Elizabeth Gilbert of Eat Pray Love and Committed fame. A marvelous look at how we never really arrive anywhere, just muddle through the best we can and do brilliantly. If you have 20 minutes or are feeling like you can’t quite get it together and IT.IS.ALL.FALLING.APART watch this. You will be so glad you did.

And lastly, via Jen Lemen, this song which speaks for itself: