building the broken things...

"All emotions are pure which gather you and lift you up; that emotion is impure which seizes only one side of your being and so distorts you."

I run you through my mind all the time, it's my favorite thing to do. My subconscious trying to fit you into a comparison with past experiences, for which there are none. A fact for which I am extremely grateful. And then my mind lingers, tracing the old edges of those experiences, taking small notes of why and how they can't hold you, why you don't fit into them.

I've been reading poetry lately, so much poetry. It's what I do when I get so emotionally full that I can't write my own. Or rather, can't write my own that doesn't come out sounding like a cheesy country song. I'm so used to writing from my wounded places, of distilling the hurt and heartache into the tiniest of lines so I can tell it without it hurting whoever reads it. Writing from places that are whole, well, that will be something new; will take some getting used to.

Anyway, while I was reading this week - Rilke, because he's my favorite when I'm not in a Sylvia mood - I found a few quotes of his that fit my feelings and observations. The one up above, for example. Oh, I cannot beging to express how I feel gathered and lifted up in all of this. I don't feel like someone's pulling me by one arm into the sky while I have to cling to the heavy, hurting things.

"Believe that with your feelings and your work you are taking part in the greatest; the more strongly you cultivate this belief, the more will reality and the world go forth from it."

With you, I am not uprooted. My branches aren't breaking and snapping because my stubborn roots insist in winding hard into the rocky, grubby, lifeless, rotten soil they've held onto for so long. No, you have wrapped firm hands around the base of my trunk, dug careful around my roots. You have transplanted me with more care and concern than I ever knew possible in another human being, into soft brown soil, the likes of which rival Eden's. That Gertrude Jekyll would have coveted, despite all of her perfect gardens.

The sure strength of warm hands moves effortless, delicate through my bare and broken branches. Salving and binding the splintered remains of too-rough twisting. These loose and languid ends, so long blown in the wind, beating against my trunk, my half-whole boughs... are slow and surely pieced back together again. You test the spring in my still-green reaching, and instead of walling me in crutches, foreign things to prop myself up on, you measure the surety of me and prop my broken pieces up with myself. The delicate detailing of your attentions show me the image of my wholeness, of the goal and blossom at the other side of this work.

That is how it's different, why you don't fit into any before: you aren't a half, looking for me to prop you up, or to prop me up. You don't struggle on one leg, ambling for the cane or crutch of me, giving me purpose only in making you stronger in your weakness, in your incompleteness. I haven't come to you for the meagre meal of redemption in being something you need. I am here because you are whole and because you want me. And because your wanting me makes me long to be whole, makes me begin to be whole.

I didn't want to bring you this broken thing. I didn't want to move on from the messes of my past into another facade of insisting that all of me was okay. You know this, you were there when I resisted, when I almost ran away. You know the hard parts, the dark corners, we have covered that ground. You don't just know that I am broken, you know the things that made me brittle enough to break in the first place. I have moved hands with yours, to peel away the masks and the voices that for so long I have trembled and cried behind. I have welcomed you entirely. You see the unfinished, the long-locked, the broken and burnt rooms. You also see the parts of me worth keeping, the places that can be bright and shining. You see the work and the worth of me, and insist that you want it, you want it all. And I have put the key into your strong hands, folded your fingers over it, watched you hold it tight, like a great treasure, and I have been moved. Through the glimpses of your eyes that you have shared with me, I have seen a worth and a dream in myself that I had long lost... or never had. Until now.

You open my eyes. You cradle my face.

I love you.

"For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation."