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.
1 comment:
This post speaks to me because I feel it is so valuable to honor our brokenness and pain. There is often a split between our self-assessment and the face we present to the world (I was reading about this in a book called The Great Undoing by Stuart Schwartz). This duplicity erodes away at our sense of integrity. We all suffer from this to one extent or another, and I don't mean to suggest there is shame in this. The tendency toward self-protection by putting our best-face-forward is deeply entrenched and perhaps necessary to some extent for our survival as social creatures.
But I find your post deeply healing because to me it says that our vulnerability, our woundedness, even our over-sensitive egos, and all the shameful feelings we hide, have their place and are to be acknowledged and honored. We don't need to be split into "good guys" and "bad guys", as the outer world mirrors our inner dividedness. We don't need to be split into "I am together" or "I am neurotic", we are all all of it. Thank you for your healing words.
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