What To Remember When Writing A Vision Statement

Visions that only taste of hopes and dreams
are sweet but unsustainable.
Visions that nourish are salty
with tears of loss,
spiced with a raw accounting
of our failures,
leavened with the honest embrace
of wounds and disabilities.
Refine your skills
not in blind confidence
but mindfulness of mutual frailty.
Honor mistakes:
they discover new paths.
The blossom whose perfection
takes your breath away
grows in stuff you wouldn't name.
What you refuse to put your arms around
returns to embrace you.
Kiss the dying.
Cradle the old and useless:
they give birth.
No hug is wasted.
Your mother's warmth is still here.
Never be afraid to say
with the reverence of a prayer,
'I don't know.'
Rooted in vulnerability,
you won't be felled by a sudden storm.
Have mercy on your genius:
restless, seasonal, bipolar,
it seldom dwells in equanimity.
Genius is native to cracks
and craggy places,
surging toward brilliance, then
falling back into the dark
like a wild blue aster in an alpine meadow.
The Spirit's mysterious hand
works not so well through angels' wings
as through these chance mutations in the mere
and daily unmiraculous task
of being human.