Reception

Friends, I toss myself aside for you.  I become available for you.  I eat, drink, mumble, run hands through hair for you, scramble down the gulch for you, carry wood, fold socks, scrub pots, ever-fearless, requiring nothing.

These are not the days of time’s inhalation pulling way up under the world’s collarbones, stitching together the fibers of dream and memory.  These are days of emptying the mind, distilling the essence.

Friends, what does it matter if the world hears your voice?  We all belong to each other. Your voice is here, mine is here: as wild, small, and equal in worth as any other.

The voice is in your heart and so the world’s heart knows it, as surely as you know the heart of the world and hear its voice also, as surely as there is perfect stillness in the eye of the storm.

We listen for the voice with all the power of our deepest listening,  as if our line is cast before the coming of a great fish, a sudden tug is felt through our hands, and our withered husks give rise to some new possibility, somewhere between dusk and our return journey.