A friend dropped dead today: massive heart attack. One minute, he was here; the next, he wasn’t.

Randy Shields.

He and I met because we both have the writing disease. A few years back he published a fine little volume: Wear Your Love Like Heaven. You can find it in the tubes.

Today, a mutual friend, another writer, she, of Randy, wrote this: “He was always reaching for the stars and romancing a future utopia that was such a dynamic and enlightened place, with a superb view of the entire cosmos. It was a recurring visual mood in his writing, regardless of the topic. If you clicked on one of his essays, there was a chance you might be pulled into his utopia where you would scroll and scroll while love would fall like rain and peace would break out across the sky—because that's how nature rolled in that place. I never doubted that he had somehow caught a glimpse of this exuberant utopia, across time. And I don't doubt that's where he is now, wearing his love like heaven.”

A lot of the time Randy wrote about the politics. Because he had seen what can, what will, be. And it hurt him. That we are all, instead, and still, in . . . this.

The Americans, they anguished him. And so, when he reached the geezer years, he relocated to Costa Rica, believing, and correctly, that he might better be able to live on the geezer pittance he received from the US government, down there, rather than up here.

But it didn’t take. After a while, he came back. He wrote very candidly, of all this. As he wrote very candidly of most of the whole of his life. Warts—even bleeding string warts—and all. I imagine Randy’s son, he will gather together these, and other, of Randy’s later words, for another volume.

It’s hard, when you’re an American, to get out, and stay out. Which is why everyone should be cheering Jfur. Because she, is making it happen.

I learned of Randy’s death from another woman making it happen, another writer, though this woman doesn’t write much any more, because she is planted in Kathmandu, so “I can devote myself to the study and practice of Tibetan Buddhism.” In passing on Randy’s death, she wrote: “Every day I am taught that the most profound reality to internalize and live by is that of impermanence; truly understanding impermanence in all of its profundity naturally allows for unbiased compassion and clear-seeing wisdom.”

Yeah. Impermanence. When you stay in a town burning down, and then you stay after, you get that one. Like you get it when you’re downstairs, and upstairs your partner calls for you, and you go up there, and the cat Sailor—she named him that, because he, a rough old tom, had come to us from out of the wild, like a sailor come home from the sea, and then, he had become so sweet, and then, because of the “Sailin’ Shoes” song, he had become, more familiarly, Shoe—she had watched, as, there on the bed, he had suddenly risen into the air, as the unknown heartworm slid into his heart, and stopped it, and then he fell back onto the bed—just, in that quick: dead—with just a little blood, seeping from his, never-again, never again will he sail, in his sweet little shoe, mouth. Because he was gone. Forever. Because: life. It goes. Just. That. Fast.

My friend Jeffrey Miller, poet, dead now more than 40 years, in one of his poems, he foresaw his own death: when, he there in the back seat, at the wheel a drunk, plowed him round the corner, and into a tree; he was impaled. The poem, it was called “DEATH.” With the all caps. And it reads as follows:

here today

gone tomorrow

right around that corner

oh yikes

oh yikes

You get the second that you’re in. But nobody, nothing, promises you the next. Someday, you will be in one second. But you won’t get to the next. That’s just the way it goes. For everybody.

And so, my Kathmandu karasser, she wrote: “With the news of Randy’s death, I realize I haven’t really taken this profound teaching to heart. Let us live every moment with love and care, passion and compassion for this life—let us continue to make our shared world a better place for all beings.”

Seen below is a picture of Randy at the ocean. We come from the ocean, all of us; the ocean, of all of it. And we are here, on this planet, in this realm, for such a very short time. And then, to that ocean, we return.

So: I love you, Randy. And, in case I die in the night—could happen; and it will, some day—I love all of you too. Because that’s all, ever, that matters. Love. And so, as Jeff always says: be kind. And then let us build. From there. Until. All of us. We wear our love. Like heaven.