A Lesson in Trust

Perhaps passion is the opposite of action.  Starved into stillness, past the hard alertness of his eyes, what does the robin see? A single point of clarity is set like a spring to seize the next worm life puts in the way of his beak.

Maybe this type of patience is the birth of joy, and like little children who climb onto the kitchen counter to make dinner when their parents don’t come home, this is what we had always hoped to find – a quiet place where everything becomes clear, and life itself pebbles the path that leads us into the living of it.

Baptism

Perhaps water rushing without a moment's rest - twisted and chafed in a heavy surging mass - plunges over the brink of the precipice as if glad to escape into the open air. In all the hissing, clashing and boiling clouds of spray, the years break up and pass.

Maybe amid the mist and foam my mind dances off with its own weightless reveries that surface briefly before being swallowed in the heave, watching as winds sway the whole fall from the front of the cliff, then suddenly dash the water flat against it.

Childhood #2 (with Tess P)

Perhaps like the fleeting scent of lavender soap, one’s childhood can’t be found for long in any one spot. With each living moment so much more than a mess to be cleaned up, funny how the insubstantial repeatedly spills the milk, how traces of sighs, whispers and hurried kisses burrow their way deep into the fabric of a warm buttoned coat.

Maybe the invisible thread of childhood’s fabric has wound its way around a brother’s hands, across a sister’s lips, made bracelets of a mother’s tears, and pulled itself through the eye of a needle that crosshatched your heart as you gazed at the clouds and even now you find that tug, that pulling at your core, a curious unraveling that serves to tighten the knot.