So I awake to fail again –
to think of futile goals I’ve made,
of time I did not mean to spend,
of moments I did not see fade,
of wounds to which I did not tend,
of paths where I should not have strayed,
of strangers who were would-be friends,
of empathy by self delayed,
of words unwritten, yet to send,
of love not given, plans mislaid
There is no life so tattered or spirit so broken that God cannot use it for His good. You are still trying to hold onto your life and as you grip the edges with white slipping fingers, you find it still eludes your control. You blame yourself, you shame yourself, you look to the future and past, and ever before you as you close your eyes is the unfathomable void, the as-of-yet unarticulated disaster towards which you see your life heading. In this moment, you have a choice. You can continue to live hunched over, crippled under the weight of what you were never meant to bear. Or you can let go, acknowledge your own fallibility, and cling to another surer sense of security.
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Only for this moment –
Can I love the face in front of me?
Only for a single breath –
can this be all I see:
these hopeful eyes,
this broken glance,
this thin disguise,
this fleeting chance
to be inside the given time,
to love a life that is not mine
and find
a beauty in
the preciousness of this –
existence, person, moment, gift,
the sacredness of what-now-is
Dear Beloved,
You are much stronger than you know. You know things that you have forgotten that you know. You have gone places where you have forgotten you can go. You are not as alone as you think you are. There are so many things about the real that your mind has gotten twisted, so many ways that your fears have taken hold of you and unseated your intuitions.
You can trust yourself a little more. You can blame yourself less. Those places you were in the past – there was a reason for your being there and there was a reason for your being there then. But you are not there now. You are here. And there are gifts in this moment of which you are worthy. There is strength for this moment, which you can claim. You deserve to be happy.
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Something in me stirs
when I see sidewalk cracks –
those crooked lines
dividing surfaces so smooth
in twos or threes or fours
like faded stained glass underfoot –
the clefts all sprouting up with grass
and bending weeds
and crinkling leaves
and things that will not last
Fear is a feeling you wish
you did not have to feel
your suffering
is a hard fact
(you suffered –
you cannot change that)
You wish you could change
the “what was” and erase
the hopelessness, worthlessness
of that dark place;
wish that your story could somehow be shaped
with an alternate slant
In seeking always for a concrete sign,
you watch the sky expectantly – with stars,
prophetic moons and meteors in mind.
You wait for words descending from afar
to tell you where to go and at what hour
you should begin. But night does not reveal
divine intent. The clouds obscure its power
and when the stars appear they all are sealed.
They ought to tell you: Look towards the earth,
where little stones and shrivelled petals lie,
where life in its perpetual small birth
lives simply and is not afraid to die.
Be not in search of grandeur or in haste
to know the whole. But be content with grace
(The giver never has a thought of waste)
Dear Beloved,
It is hard for you to look at yourself and see something that is beautiful. This is because you see only the separate component parts and never the whole. You isolate a particular physical feature and analyze it as though it can be stacked up against others of this kind. But as soon as you remove this feature from the living, breathing whole, it becomes lifeless and flat. On its own, this one “part” of you is nothing, and yet when seen in the fullness of its context, the whole self radiates through, and the brilliance and uniqueness of this self overshadow so-called objective “imperfections.”
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On days, on days like these I gaze
Upon the face where only beauty dwells
I cannot tell
Of darkness, there is only light
Inside these eyes and in my own
My heart will break, my heart will break
And would that you would never be alone
Now and at the hour when you will wake
And see the world the way I see
For love of you
Your eyes and all the truth they speak to mine
The rippled blue reflection of
a thought divine
My heart will break, my heart will break
And love like this so pure it can erase
The sorrow so long carried in this soul
And give a glimpse of nameless, boundless joy
For now we see in part but then
For love of you
We will see face to face
As I now gaze
Upon the eyes that shine up back to mine
I want to see the world in broken parts:
These pieces only seem a wholeness when
a mind (which fears the mystical) is bent
on neat abstractions. Oh, to have a heart
that loves the littleness instead! A hand
to hold the pieces – pure as incomplete;
to see in brokenness an unknown plan,
in fragmentation joy and not defeat;
a peace to love small things in idleness
without the lusting drive to seize, convert
and mould mysterious things to my own shape;
to be content with glimpses, and to rest
in half-veiled truths – though unexplained, not less