The other night at dinner Eileen tells us that her great aunt would play piano for silent movies. Something in this won’t let me go. Perhaps it’s the image of someone playing music in the dark while we watch others like us meet life in silence. It makes me think of a caveman drumming a stone with a stick while his brother draws his bow but fails to shoot be- cause he loses himself in the bison grazing. Perhaps the... Read more
via InnerSelf.com There is an art to imparting strength and confidence, to inspiring and heartening what is already within us. In many ways, to encourage is to help the heart unfold. And each time we do so, another aspect of our true self unfolds. Very often, the art of encouragement is needed to counter some sort of fear, which blocks us from what we already know. Fear makes courage forget itself. Encouragement reminds us of what we’re capable of. In... Read more
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Archie loves Betty, but Betty loves Petra and Danny wants whatever the person next to him has. And the poor want to be rich and the rich want to live forever. And Henry fears Miguel and Miguel who has done nothing fears the white police. And Jorge tries to explain to his son what a border is, why this handful of dirt is different than the dirt across the river. Yet in the dark soil we finger when no one... Read more
We haven’t spoken in years. My father says her memory is shrinking. After five minutes she’s unsure what conversation she’s parachuted into. She can’t remember what she went down the mayonnaise aisle for. It softens me and I wonder: what crumbles first, the hard times or the soft? Has she lost her version of why I left? Of when she slapped me in the eye? Of her darkly whis- pering, “I wish I could hurt you more.” Tonight I visit... Read more
Still enough and we break surface like small fish wanting to eat light. In that moment, we’re up in the air, eyes wide, our mouths open, our bodies shining from the deep. Sometimes we even touch before going back down. When in the deep, we long for the breach, when in the air, we dread the fall. But this is life: the leap for light, startled to find each other, the plunge back down, the leap for light, startled to... Read more
The sparking flame holds against the necessary rain. —Robert Mason The human and the being must reach an agreement with each other or there will be no peace for the life that carries them. The human in us must accept that it will never transcend this life into what its heart knows is eternal. It can feel and taste what is limitless but never stay there because being human by definition is to live here with limits. And the being... Read more
We each have one, made over a lifetime of the empty moments in between, when everything is still and complete, each a clear bead strung on the invisible chain of our experience. I’m thinking of the long silence after we talked for months about what it’s like to be alive. Or the time in winter when the snowy pines were creaking and swaying a hundred feet up like the eye of the earth opening slightly. Or the time in early... Read more
Monday I was told I was good. I felt relieved. Tuesday I was ignored. I felt invisible. Wednesday I was snapped at. I began to doubt myself. On Thursday I was rejected. Now I was afraid. On Saturday I was thanked for being me. My soul relaxed. On Sunday I was left alone till the part of me that can’t be influenced grew tired of submitting and resisting. Monday I was told I was good. By Tuesday I got off... Read more
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