These days.
I knock on the door of every small thing.
Asking if it will have me.
I beg the buff-tailed bumblebee.
Too heavy to land on the poppy.
I ask the plump red current,
Whose crimson skin hides small seeds waiting for an inky mouth,
Then a sunless belly,
Then a stretching distance,
Before finding this bright world again.
I plead before the violet-faced cornflower,
And even beside the cold garden bonfire.
Now woven with bramble.
Housing a small kindling of ranth.
Will you have me?
And then without waiting for an answer,
I turn away,
Away from what I am,
Becoming yet another intimate thing.
Not even in the wake of my forgetfulness.
Can I fall beyond the beloved soil that keeps finding me?
The person this beautiful world longs to welcome in.
Is not the one standing,
Knocking on the door.
The one who thinks she is apart from everything can never be let in.
Because she is separation itself.
To ask,
Can beauty or love or goodness let me in,
Is to overlook the quiet truth already making its way to us as effortless sound.
As hands slipping across the damp grass.
As moonlight falling through a wicker basket.
As the slow sweep of a bird's wing in the evening sky.
These are not invitations into connection.
They are connection itself.
The senses do not require.
A solid and separate self.
In order to belong to the world.
They are the world.
As intimacy itself.
To remember our belonging.
Is simply to be here.
To feel the cool rush of air against your skin.
To breathe in the resin of pine needles.
To let the crowded room fill you.
Or a baby's cry to move through your body.
To find a hand in yours.
It is even to let grief reach all the way through you.
There is no separate self.
That must learn how to connect.
With the living world.
Because you are its deepest expression,
Interwoven with every river,
Root,
Cry,
Ache.
To knock on the door is to forget.
That you are already on the inside.
Take a moment right now.
To slow down.
Close your eyes if you can.
And just become aware of your body.
And listen.
Staying with the simplicity of sound moving through you.
Where do you end?
And sound begin.
The exact border where you two meet.
Or if it feels like you are the one doing the listening.
Can you then keep a certain sound out?
Can you choose which sounds you want and which you don't?
Or is there just listening?
Unmanaged.
Without distance.
You can never be an inch outside of a deep and profound belonging to the world.
Which makes this path more a turning with tenderness towards the one who thinks this cannot be so,
Gently untangling what has never been true from the intimacy of your being.
Is it not the idea that you need beauty,
Love,
Peace and freedom to let you in?
That's really keeping it.
At a distance in the first place.
