Broken-open community

As I reflected on the heft of my heart, sitting in a room with so many others, each of us on our own journey, our paths mingling and diverging, I felt the strength of brokenness.  I felt the possibility in the place we now find ourselves individually and as a community.   I felt the words inside me wanting to spill out like the candies we shared at our tables, like the little battery operated candles we lit to remind us of the One.   I felt the fear and the fatigue, the excitement, the sense of reunion and the sense of isolation all present in that room.   I longed for each of us to know the great gifts within us, waiting to be noticed, perhaps most of all by our very own self, the one to whom they are first given perhaps lying years unnoticed til the moment our receptivity blossoms.   I felt risk and a kind of tired wonder.

I feel a flare, a work of fire
soundless,
shot from my heart
into darkness.

Tiny soft spangles
from my brokenness
fall
floating,
not into nothingness,
but into your own
broken-open heart.

We are pilgrims together
sitting on the slope of night,
giving and receiving
perhaps unknown
our gifts to one another.

Do you doubt?

Let us feel
the sharp rift in our numbness.
Let us admit,
flowing over those newly remembered edges
the holy, fluid, sweetness
of the One.

(Catherine Smith)

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