A fierce wind is blowing inside me,
a solar wind that puts tails on comets
and also the tails of fish and their oceans,
a vast forest breathing, underground river,
something unfurling like a bell long buried
coming empty of clay and bones, almost ready
to let go its sonorous secret, music
rising in me, sung by gatherings of peasants,
a great song passed on through long generations,
a liturgy of hours and minutes and eyes and hands,
of births and deaths and daily bread and small acts of mercy,
the strange harmony of everything tangled together,
the noise of tongues of flame all murmuring together
so I can’t tell what any are saying, though they’re all
speaking great wisdom, I know, or at least
I would know, if I knew any of this, but all of it
happens in me without my even suspecting,
like my microbiome at work, spirits of another world,
as I pray the words, and long for the words,
and only occasionally let in the silence in which,
faintly but really, the smallest feathers of all this
echo and call and leave room for me, and a great Knowing
sighs, and holds me, and the sigh is a fierce wind,
and I breathe it in, without even knowing.
As I pray I know this, and give thanks
and do my best to be quiet and let it happen.
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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