Shadows in waves, tides shift in me
from deep darkness to light and ease
and back to dark.
It’s the tendency within hands to reach. What I see outside myself pretends to promise wholeness.
I slip into old skin and remember, even if for only one brief moment,
the constrictions of reaching.
I remember I was the saviour by the hospital bed loving ruthlessly,
conjuring light,
whispering prayers to all gods I could find.
The saviour of no Self, finding my-self through the other,
seeking to find the love I was pouring out.
When I visit corners of the old mind like dark locked rooms of grief
and rooms of yearning
I discover gifts tucked within thought.
I remove the inadequacy, the doubts whether I could ever be loved in fullness.
I centre myself around the heart
like a great tree whose roots grasp the heart of land.
There is pain in this cleansing of wound, skin hardening into resilience
With that
I power up to full strength.
Holding on to the constructs, to the weak scaffolding I built to anchor myself into life, is futile.
There is a collapse of the inner and outer worlds, a grand dissolving of all my edges and defining margins. The world is a great mirror, and I, too, reflect back to it my own convolutions. And I know that my world is also yours, and you are also dissolving and perhaps striving to cling to what’s left, and what’s familiar. Give in to this collapse, allow nothing of the old world to touch you anymore.
In the dark corners of the mind
I find
each part of me I scattered along the way. I gather the parts like crumbs that lead to my full belonging. Crumbs of an old loving, and old dreams and story,
crumbs of promise, loss, a knowing.
Give up the story and the words that create it. I become the space in-between, the vastness of surrender to a complete dismantling.
I cease the search, the reach and there are no remnants of grief in me. The world mirrors its shapes and I mirror back to it my shadows in waves, from deep darkness to light and dark again.
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