Day of Venus ll: Poem Embers

We are as beaming as the moments we spend tending to the dark.

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“How willing are you to consider that you are the source of your own suffering?” -Questions Before We Begin

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The moments come–the ones where you are right where you need to be to see 3 prisms in the sky, find agate on the playground, meet the author of your poem face-to-face. We have to be ready for them.

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I’d like to stay in my world all through the day, is what it is. I feel like I am longing to dive but the teacher insists I keep my lifejacket on. I find movement when I am here, then when I sing from the gourd of my stomach. “Movement is good” and the tide changes because it always does–something to rely on. It takes our slippers off of the porch and leaves dead fish under our clothes lines. `

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I am learning more and more every day of how attracted I am to the stillness of things. I am already hooked to what is about to be said when someone is very slow to respond, closes their eyes even. I do this too and it feels like home to me. I like to knead the question around in my gut to gather the right images and seep them in herbs before I answer.

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Anything that promotes or insinuates superiority is a lie.

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Patience is a different kind of strength–overlooked and underrated. The pauses, the simple offering of your presence. Letting a 4-year old stare at the rocks on the ground before getting into the car, lingering in the pulses of silence after a poem is read, before swooning with applause.

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I cry and kick the air, run in place, turn it into words to get the heavy off. I lift and push and dance it into the wind up off of me, just so I can fly.

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Be careful of the temptation to turn anything that challenges the desires of our egos–desires to be right, to be better, to be more–into villains, less than’s or insignificant. Seeped in humility and watchfulness we grow taller, more rooted, more fruitful.