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I am soft today. Soft as shortbread dough fresh off the mixer, liquored by an extract of vanilla and spun with siftfuls of powdered sugar. And salt. Because when I say soft, I don’t really mean sweet. I mean the feeling around a streetlight on a quiet road, that miasmic halo that reveals the season’s lingering winged things aiming for the bulb’s muted warmth. Or when the market vendor, handing me a sheaf of kale, said it was so much better because of the frost. I’m not saying I am the frost, or the leaves, purple-green and pliant, spread across the palms of our half-gloved hands, but whatever middle it was that we met. Palm-soft. Air-soft. Truth-soft. Soft as whatever the sky is doing right this minute, shedding the day behind it. And in-betweenness where what’s next isn’t here yet. Or it is, and if I keep my breath soft enough, I’ll see it. - Maya Stein
Are you looking for a quiet place? But friend, you are already here. The repose of your blood between pulsations. A secret chamber in your chest where you have no enemies, no one is to blame, and the endless journey has never begun. Here even prayers for peace need no speaking. You can disperse into the finer element you are before you breathe. You can be the sparkling sky in the lungs of a hummingbird, smoke of sage in desert air, aureole in emptiness where the flame just blew out. Here you can burn away because you remember your body is made of vanished stars. You can stumble and fall into your own rhythm, which feels like you are not moving at all because your mind is at rest in flesh that needs no discipline of stillness. You are a nest inside the egg, a mother's womb that carries her own savior, the seed of what you have always been seeking. Now flower on a Winter night. - Alfred K. LaMotte
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