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Posts Tagged ‘walls’

Letter to the Parts of Me I Have Tried to Exile

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on November 27, 2024| 20 Comments »


 
 
I’m sorry. I thought banishing you
was the way to become better,
more perfect, more good, more free.
The irony: I thought if I cut you off
and cast you out, if I built the walls
high enough, then the parts left would be
more whole. As if the sweet orange
doesn’t need the toughened rind,
the bitter seed. As if the forest
doesn’t need the blue fury of fire.
It didn’t work, did it, the exile?
You were always here, jangling
the hinges, banging at the door,
whispering through the cracks.
Left to myself, I wouldn’t have known
to take down the walls,
nor would I have had the strength to do so.
That act was grace disguised as disaster.
But now that the walls are rubble,
it is also grace that teaches me to want
to embrace you, grace that guides me
to be gentle, even with the part of me
that would still try to exile any other part.
It is grace that invites me
to name all parts beloved.
How honest it all is. How human.
I promise to keep learning how
to know you as my own, to practice
opening to what at first feels unwanted,
meet it with understanding,
trust all belongs, welcome you home.

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A Big Bouquet, in Fact

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on September 23, 2020| 1 Comment »

They said

it’s a wall

so I believed

it’s a wall

until I reached

through the wall

and found my hand

full of flowers.

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Expansion

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on May 4, 2018| 3 Comments »

 

 

 

When I started to fume,

God grabbed me in his arms

impossibly strong and tender

and said, dear one,

don’t build our house too small

and I dropped my hammer

and nails and noticed

how fine the breeze

without walls.

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Off the Wall

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on May 24, 2011| 1 Comment »

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