Flowers

This Side of Knowing

Even as my heart roams aimlessly
across the empty desert of disconnected souls blowing in the wind,
I feel a life-giving river run through me.

Even as I wander through the wooded lands that ooze with life,
I am all too aware of the void that must exist before anything can fill it.

Even as my mind sinks below primordial waters
submerged in the overwhelming influence of my origin,
I feel undeniable buoyancy that lifts my spirit to the surface
for a deep breath of what’s to come.

Even as my thoughts float with the clouds atop mountains of imagination,
I stand alone in my perspective;
so I reach down

into the Earth with my fingers and toes,
and touch the decomposition that is necessary for growth,
connecting to something greater than myself.

And even as I’ve witnessed the breaking of bonds that held a world together,
I’ve understood that the very same elements that were released
might join again in another form.

(With particular attention paid to the distinction between

the breaking of one thing to make another,

and the use of broken pieces to build something new.)

And as I slowly connect the disparate dots between myself and other,
connections that would undoubtedly produce a melding of parts

into a new whole,

I cannot escape the awareness that I simply long to be

at peace with myself.

Just as the heart, in spite of being torn from love over and over,
ever reaches out in search for that warmth,
like a vine that can do nothing other than climb toward the sun.

So do all these forces act upon me with momentum,
pulling me along, pushing me onward, making me become,
left only to wonder who I am and allege that you know me.

Even now as I contemplate the seemingly unbridgeable gap
between what I think I know and all the questions I don’t know to ask,
I am overcome with a certainty that somehow, eventually,

I will find myself, again, on the other side of knowing
and I will wonder what took me so long to come back around.

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