[Healing] Even though I had lost everything, the next morning still came, and there were eggs. Salted eggs and coffee. And later that day there were beautiful people in the chairs next to me. [Quiet]
You will find your place when you sit still enough to see, when you sit so still the moon can’t find you, when you notice the sweetness of the sidewalk and the stupid cat, when you see the people around you so closely you hear their hearts breaking and the words that they are saying, when you pause to hold their hands, to wash their feet, and pass one minute at a time.
You will find your place when you let go just long enough to let the place you’re in hold you. Let it cultivate your heart. Even if it’s just one small plant.
Not that it was beautiful,
but that, in the end, there was
a certain sense of order there;
something worth learning
in that narrow diary of my mind,
in the commonplaces of the asylum
where the cracked mirror
or my own selfish death
outstared me.
And if I tried
to give you something else,
something outside of myself,
you would not know
that the worst of anyone
can be, finally,
an accident of hope.
I tapped my own head;
it was a glass, an inverted bowl.
It is a small thing
to rage in your own bowl.
At first it was private.
Then it was more than myself;
it was you, or your house
or your kitchen.
And if you turn away
because there is no lesson here
I will hold my awkward bowl,
with all its cracked stars shining
like a complicated lie,
and fasten a new skin around it
as if I were dressing an orange
or a strange sun.
Not that it was beautiful,
but that I found some order there.
There ought to be something special
for someone
in this kind of hope.
This is something I would never find
in a lovelier place, my dear,
although your fear is anyone's fear,
like an invisible veil between us all…
and sometimes in private,
my kitchen, your kitchen,
my face, your face.
"These are not the ways you would have chosen to become more than you were, but they worked."
-- B. Taylor
