What do people need? Food, water, shelter? What do people need? You mean like human beings? That’s a big question. Too general. But somewhere near the beginning of all the questions I need to ask.
A warm glance, a welcoming handshake, an invitation into the home of another. The moments that strangers become friends. To feel ourselves sharing the struggle of existence, the wonderful and terrifying momentousness of life, the universality hauntings of death. To breathe, to feel, to be, to learn, to know, to appreciate the moment remembering the ones who’ve lost themselves to unconsciousness, vegetation, coma- and worse.
So while I’m here, I count my blessings. The glory to have the opportunity to feel lonely, the chance to waste time. The ability to hope, this reminder to dream beyond. The power to act, the leisure to laze. To grieve my own losses, to imagine others’ pain, others’ anger, frustration, and calm, too, while I’m at it. To imagine the coolness, poise, mastery coming from the acres of skill and the miles of experience I have never grazed. And to know that their are sheer cliff-drops of shock and thousand pound weights of suffering that I just can’t understand.
But in looking into another and trying to really see them- know them- I adjust a lens that sharpens my sight, crossing distances of unfamiliarity, opening portals with each attempt. How far I am willing to go, how much am I willing to show up and how much am I open to accepting, how expert am I in this moment in being a lover of humanity? And the next time, and the time after that?
I’ve heard the advice to love yourself, but to love others makes a lot more sense to me. To deepen that groove so each return is easier, to transform an unfeeling stone into a carving smiling with life, to polish a rough exterior into a gentle, yet powerful, everlasting glow. To not allow bodily encasement have the last word in trapping the force of spirit’s expanse.
Probabilities are imprisoned by numbers, but I feel an infinity in the outpouring of possibilities of the heart. The shortness of time becomes an irrelevant thought as I realize my self, who I am, and how inseparable I am from You. The way of compassion, it’s good to meet again. Where have I been all this time?
