We spend our lives looking for portals to the possible. It is not often that the gates are opened by some great hand. Often, it is where we least expect them – in a chance encounter, in a small unconscious choice, at the wrong time, in a quiet corner of the quotidian. Often still, they're cracks where we've broken – we've broken the story, we've broken the ego, we've broken the pattern. If we are attentive enough and quiet enough, the shy light of curiosity is enough to begin to widen these gaps enough to glimpse the other side, to believe there. is something the other side. Courage is a form of curiosity, courage is a form of belief. A hand through a hole. A foot across the threshold. And suddenly, where there was nothing, there is something – that opens the way to start everything.
That, at least, is what I think as I read this beautiful poem by Hannah Fries:
WHEN YOU THINK THERE IS NOTHING
by Hannah FriesIn the old tree of the heart.
In a rough eggshell a bright blue.
Between the bars,
between bombs,
between blows.In the flower room where the squash bee sleeps.
In a calcium-shelled spiral.
Among the sirens,
between the slaughter,
between the last letters of hunger.In the great exhalation of the choirs before Händel's amen.
In the time machine swirl of stone.
Apart from our blindness, the cloth
catching the sun again
sun and sun.A black hole for the reader.
The smell of the garden of a newly dug grave.
Open palm.Not in the flesh, but the wound.
