Third Day Thoughts: That Thing I Do

I need to get this stuff written down.

Yarn fibers and hanks of thread.

Twisting maybe strands of belts or straps and
I cannot figure out what it is and
I know it is important
because it was given
to me
this past weekend.

I keep teasing the strands apart
running my fingers through it
like hair I'm trying to braid
behind my head.

Embroidery thread. First,
pull apart the strands.
Lay the threads against each other
so that their spun nature aligns

It is impossible to attend (be attentive, be in attendance) for a weekend of Testimony, Night, Woman at Point Zero, The Little School, Hiroshima Mon Amour, Death and the Maiden ... the palpable answering pain of my fellow students ... without being permanently changed. I was right. I'm back from The Village, and everything here is the same, but I am not the same. So everything's different now for me.

It's becoming a theme for the year.
2010: The Suffering of Others.
2010: The year my soldier came back from Afghanistan.
2010: The Year of Nazareth House. (Give if you can. Please. Click on the link and give if you love the people who love without condition of litmus tests. Color, creed, politics or past - none of it matters to these people. All they do is love.)
2010: The year I heard the pain of men whose women are destructive - several such men, concurrently and all in this year
2010: The Literature of Resistance




Pull apart the strands and feel
the places where it grabs
every tiny scratch or hangnail or rough
place on your fingers.

I hear you. I can feel you here
in the palm of my hand
and along the inner edges of my own touch
You are no longer

Softly faded into the neat and woven
threads of destiny and the history channel
is not pausing for a commercial
and I hear you now.



I find myself wondering if there is anything in the natural world that has its layers peeled back over and over, and yet neither dies nor hardens. Are cork trees like that, I wonder? Cinnamon, perhaps? I know why I was not peeled to this depth before now. I would have died in some way. I think the sounds of this sort of pain would have caused me to turn away in self-protective need ... and maybe that is what happened. Maybe we can stop our ears and block the sounds if we are not yet strong enough to hear them.

But now I've heard them. I cannot un-know, and I cannot un-hear. I got back off the island, left The Village again, I'm back at my flat in London, and I have no idea what to do about what I know and heard. How do I give this into the safe keeping of another?

I think this is becoming a "thing I do." A few weeks ago, my adult daughter called me from the army base, and asked, "What 're ya doin?" I was not yet fully back into the room in which I'd answered the phone -- I mean to say, I was still in the last clutches of my thoughts. And so, to give myself a few more seconds to become conscious again, I said, "Ruminating." She laughed and answered, "Yeah - because that is a thing - that you do." I suspect now that finding ways to help people hear is becoming a thing - that I do.

And they heard the sound of the Lord God
walking in the garden
in the cool of the day
and Adam and his wife hid themselves
from the Presence.

The knowledge of good and evil
the innocence of not hearing
and now it's gone
and there is nothing left to do but listen.

I heard Your voice
in the garden and I was afraid
because I was naked.
And I hid myself.

Lord, teach us to pray.