shards- Something was broken here—a bowl, a habit, a marriage.
Late afternoons, the tide reveals how far the scatter’s flown—
ceramic, a cigarette, a fragment of a shopping list.
The waves pummel or baptize the rocks, depending on your mood,
the seaweed a halo or a slippery slope.
You are supposed to live your life as if it were a miracle,
and you have touched that place,
after loss has wound its way toward an innocence
softened by despair. You have emerged, shiny and wide-eyed.
Not new, of course—
altered. But it is impossible to sustain.
You return to your own ordinariness, pacing
the world metronomically. So maybe
that’s why you keep going back, searching among
the ruins. Not because you believe a jewel will wash up—
perfect, intact—but because
the shards remind you nothing will ever disappear.
No one will ever really leave you.
~Maya Stein
this perfect moment went by unnoticed….
inquiry for today~ how will you practice with heart today?
The mind I love
must have wild places,
a tangled orchard where
dark damsons drop in the heavy grass-
an overgrown little wood-
a pool that nobody’s
fathomed the depth of
and paths threaded with flowers
planted by the mind.
~Katherine Mansfield
