Tonight I feel a fragile string between all of us--fragile, but not breakable. It's just that it shimmers so much, makes it seem permeable. What it is you are working on, it too is what I am working on.
A cathedral takes more than one lifetime to construct, and I am thankful time is wearing down my rough edges. I am grateful for the hearts that make me see this so clearly in the morning talking over our words and our work. That I will complete this life without ever seeing the final product of these hands.
The lamp lit at the head of the classroom as we work through Hemingway's "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" and I say at the end: "Do you see?" And they sit in silence for a moment and then he says, "Yes. I see."
And we laugh loud and out of control in the afternoon when poems about kitchens and wars and hair bring us there, overfilled and brimming with this joy.
Those "inconvenient" tears (don't let them see me crying--I can not answer if I'm all right), they remind us of the space we make together in time, meeting, pressing at its edges until it takes on the full shape of life abundant. The vaulted ceiling held by the upward force of our breath and our willingness to give everything that has ever passed into us back into the open lung. And sometimes, nestled in the breath, we make a sound, a song, a sigh.
If that is home, then take me there minute after minute. Take me there brick by breath by brick.
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