Striving For No Striving
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I have been craving time in the garden, and this weekend has given me that. Hard work, sore hands, tired body, empty mind.
I may be on to something.
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Emily. Emily. Emily. I am excavating a palace for you in my heart. Not the one I built you as a little girl. Not the one I built for who I thought you were going to be. But a new one. Right now it looks like a gaping hole, a smoking ruin, but that is only because I had to destroy what was there. It was trying to blind me to who you really are. It was a beautiful dream, but you cannot live in a dream and when you choose between what is real and what is just a dream, you take what's real.
You take that, and you make a place for it.
My plan is now just to make this space and hold it. If you want to build a new palace there, that's fine. If you don't, that's fine, too. If you don't move in at all, then it will still be the place in my heart where you are. You will be the emptiness. You will be the 'not going in' ness of the room wherein you do not dwell.
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The thing you are teaching me, Emily, is that I have a great and wild country inside me, where there is a cold, deep river coursing, and thick grasses and trees lining the banks and all manner of beasts residing. In my heart you show me that there is a stone like a mountain that will not be moved.
I think sometimes I am done learning what you have to teach me, but that is an illusion.
*
The steady love of the world is revealed by attending to small things.
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posted by tearful dishwasher at 2:10 PM
4 Comments:
"Make a little birdhouse in your soul
(and while you're at it
Keep the nightlight on inside the
Birdhouse in your soul)"
(They Might Be Giants)
I like to think my father had built a little birdhouse in his heart for me.
And that he left the nightlight on.
just tell me one thing mister...
... why does your girl look errilly like MY girl,,,,,, did?
..without out the freckles.
... hmmmmmmm
Dodge-
You know you could hold a carnival in the birdhouse your father built in his heart for you. I bet you go there all the time when you're sleeping.
Fathers and daughters. I guess it's not any stranger or more difficult than anything else is.
yrs-
Scott
Anonymous-
Well, it's hard to say. In order to render an opinion, I'd have to know more. You have me at a disadvantage...
yrs-
Scott
"Fathers and daughters. I guess it's not any stranger or more difficult than anything else is."
Nor between mothers and sons. I see myself doing this with my sons, this seeing of who they are, not who I think they might be.
My eldest is now a deep-voiced young man, several inches taller than his mom. I keep shaking my head and clearing my eyes when I look at him. Who *is* this person?
I need to let him reveal himself.
It is so difficult to do.
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