Roots.wings

You may do this, I tell you, it is permitted.
Begin again the story of your life.”
~Jane Hirshfield~

In sorrow, pretend to be fearless. In happiness, tremble.

Zen pretty much comes down to three things — everything changes; everything is connected; pay attention.

“There are names for what binds us:
strong forces, weak forces.
Look around, you can see them:
the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,
nails rusting into the places they join,
joints dovetailed on their own weight.
The way things stay so solidly
wherever they’ve been set down—
and gravity, scientists say, is weak.

And see how the flesh grows back
across a wound, with great vehemence, more strong
than the simple, untested surface
before.
There’s a name for it on horses,
when it comes back darker and
raised: proud flesh,

as all flesh,
is proud of its wounds, wears them
as honors given out after battle,
small triumphs pinned to the chest—

And when two people love each other
see how it is like a
scar between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud;
how the black chord makes of them a single fabric:
that nothing can tear or mend.

It is stunning, it is a moment like no other,
when one’s lover comes in and says I do not love you anymore.

There is no beyond except

In the mind, which is
It turns out the body after all

Where we live, whole-

Hearted. Where surface will not hold
We must shatter.

… sometimes blocked in, sometimes reaching out,
one moment your life is a stone in you, the next a star.

What is it in us that lives in the past and longs for the future, or lives in the future and longs for the past? And what does it matter when light enters the room where a child sleeps and the waking mother, opening her eyes, wishes more than anything to be unwakened by what she cannot name?