Ten Poems

Did you ever stop to ask, not who you are, but what you are doing here, threaded out from a wholeness so complete it could only split itself apart to feel itself? Not fractured—no, something deeper— deliberately unraveled, so each strand might glisten in its own light, separate yet still woven. The dance begins not with steps but with silence, a love so vast it tore itself into roles: him, her. Two names for something nameless. The masculine, with no thought of himself, no agenda, no shadow of want— only the singular, infinite act of providing. What is needed, when it is needed, in the exact measure. Nothing more, nothing less. And her—she does not move. She is stillness, infinite and complete, containing everything that ever was, will be, or could be. Yet, in her fullness, there is the ache: a longing for harmony so perfect it could not exist without breaking. She does not ask. She cannot ask. And still, he gives, though she is unchanged. But you—what of you? You, with your hands that tremble and your heart that skips like a stone across unknown waters. You are not him, nor her, yet here you are, as if summoned by a secret you cannot remember hearing. Look at yourself: not the face in the mirror or the name you've learned, but the quiet witness behind the eyes, the one who has always been watching. Do you not feel it? The tension, the thread pulled taut, binding you to the center you cannot touch? You are the onlooker who cannot look away, the one through whom the dance becomes visible. He and she do not see; they are too entwined in the motion of their love. But you—you are the lens, the theater where the performance unfolds. It is not your story, though you live it. It is not about you, though you feel its weight. This is love, vast and ungraspable, folded into the shape of existence. Do not mistake the ache of separation for something broken. You are not here to mend. You are here to witness, to marvel at the impossible: a stillness that moves, a giving that has no lack. And yes, you will feel the pull of home, the quiet gravity of what you once were. The mark you miss is not a flaw, but a reminder of your part in this. To be apart is the price of seeing, of knowing, of being the eyes of the Divine. This is your role. Not the hero, not the protagonist, but the one who sees what cannot be seen from the center. So do not rush to make sense of it, to solve the riddle or name the parts. You are not here to know, but to be. The stage is vast. The players are infinite. And the dance— the dance is the mystery that holds it all. Do you feel it? The rhythm? The silence beneath the motion? You are in it. You are of it. And when it ends—if it ends— you will know it was never about you. But without you, it could not have been.

The love of a mother—vast, silent, unyielding— lives most profoundly in the instant of its rupture, when the hawk, wings arched against the pale light, descends with precision, claws curved toward the inevitable. There is no time for words, no time for the illusions that comfort us in our smaller griefs. Only this— a swift shadow, a scream swallowed by the wind. And what do we do with this? We make it a story, give it shape and weight, calling the hawk a villain, the child a victim, and ourselves witnesses to a cruelty too grand to bear. We name the mother's pain as if it could be bounded, as if naming could make sense of the ache that reverberates through time, through marrow, into the deep well of all that has ever suffered. Still, we resist. The civilized mind demands justice, a softer world where no creature must fall so another can rise. We imagine it, a world unmarked by the shadow of loss, a universe reshaped in the image of our yearning, where love rules and death is an aberration. But this, too, falters. For how can there be life without the hawk's hunger? How can there be love without the mother's cries? If we spare the heron, do we starve the hawk? If we shelter the weak, do we weaken the whole? These are not questions to be answered, but wounds to be carried, etched into the fabric of what it means to exist. In the quiet after the storm, I see the threads as they truly are, woven in patterns too vast to comprehend, the hawk, the heron, the mother, and I bound by the same relentless order. No one escapes the weave; no one stands apart from the rhythm. This is not a cold truth, though it feels that way in the telling. It is love in its rawest form, unconditioned, unflinching, a force that does not comfort but sustains. To wish for another way is to wish for unbeing, to unravel the bonds that tether us to each other, to the earth, to the great silence between the stars. And so, I stand, watching the hawk rise and the heron fall, my heart heavy with the weight of all I cannot change, yet fuller, somehow, for having borne witness.

There is a beauty in the ordinary, in the mundane, in the unnoticed— a puddle reflecting the sky, the creak of a floorboard, the quiet ticking of a clock. All of it, alive. All of it, love. The wind presses against your face, its invisible hands moving the trees, each leaf trembling with life. A single raindrop rests on a blade of grass, its curve catching the morning light, a tiny universe held within. You are the witness, the feeler, the participant in the great unfolding. Every step you take is on sacred ground, every breath carries the rhythm of eternity. Every glance reveals another fragment of wonder. The rustle of paper, the warmth of a cup cradled in your hands, the distant murmur of voices in another room— all of it sings, quietly, persistently, reminding you of the miracle of here, of now. There is no need to search for majesty. It is in the overlooked, the unnoticed, the simple act of being. You are surrounded by wonder. You are the thread that weaves it into meaning.

To be separate is to carry the echo of a trillion years of oneness, a breathless pause between what was and what will always be. You, a thread pulled gently from eternity, trembling, distinct, standing alone in the vastness of now, so that love might see itself. The clouds know. Their fleeting shapes whisper of a home where all forms exist at once, but they break apart, dissolve, so you might lift your eyes and marvel. This ache, this longing, is not a wound but a gift, a sacred space where the divine remembers itself through the dance of you and I, this and that, here and there. Only in the ache can the beauty of the embrace be known. Only in the separation can love breathe, rise like a tide, and whisper, "This is what it means to be awake."

You are loved, not as a fragile thing that might be lost, not as a moment that arrives and fades, but as the ocean is held by its own depth, as light moves unbidden through the vast silence of space. It does not watch you from some distant place, waiting for you to prove yourself worthy. It does not withhold itself, does not increase with your virtue nor diminish with your faults. It does not seek to heal you, because it does not see you as broken. And yet, you move through the world as if love were a rare and delicate thing, as if it were something that could be won or bargained for, as if it were an answer that someone else might give to you, or a voice that could be taken away. You speak, and love is not what returns to you. You act, and the world responds with silence, or indifference, or harm. You have learned the language of rejection, and now you mistake it for the voice of the cosmos itself. But love does not reside in the echo, in the shape of things, in the fleeting pattern of approval. It is not found in the places where your mind seeks it, in the eyes of another, in the grasp of certainty, in the way the past might have unfolded differently. It does not waver when you stumble. It does not falter when you turn away. It does not speak in the dialect of longing, because it has never known separation. You are immersed in it, the way the sky is held within itself, the way a river moves without ever leaving water behind. It is pressed against your skin, woven into your breath, moving in and out of you with every step. It clings to your thoughts, though you cannot see it. It lingers in your hands, though you do not feel it. It is the constant, the unseen, the infinite unfolding, so close to you that you have mistaken it for nothing at all. And yet, you wake, and the weight of the world presses itself into you. You make a choice, and it does not feel like love. You hesitate, and the moment vanishes before you can undo it. You carry regret like a wound, as if love could be altered by time, as if it were something fragile, as if it could be kept or lost. But love is not waiting for you to return to it. It does not need you to be different, does not ask you to become softer, kinder, more deserving. It does not measure you, does not compare, does not waver. You were loved before you knew yourself, before you gathered your name, before you learned how to seek. And you will be loved long after the search has ended, long after the stories you tell yourself have crumbled into dust. It is not a question of whether you are held. It is only a question of whether you will let yourself know it.

Time dissolves in the hush of that first encounter, a single pivot of vision in which every hue of longing coalesces into one unbidden moment of recognition, and the heart becomes bound to its celestial counterpart. All lesser desires tumble away in the silent cascade, as though they were but brittle ornaments on a forgotten shelf, their fragile glitter paling beside the deeper shimmer of holy fire, which suffuses the core of being with a quiet, weightless ecstasy. Virtue ceases to be a task when devotion inhabits the marrow, and no discipline is necessary where affection has taken root, for every gesture, every breath, every word, is born from love's command, willingly surrendered, free of regret or second-guessing. The Beloved stands at the threshold of time itself, effortlessly wearing the visage of the Unknowable Future, holding the hand of the Immutable Past, calling the History Maker's heart to a vow of timeless fidelity. In this cosmic dance, that moment of marriage transfigures existence into a single luminous thread, where a vast tapestry of ideas and shapes unfurls in hushed adoration, and suffering becomes but a shadow cast by the light of Divine embrace.

You were born with wings, etched in the quiet script of stars, a secret geometry hidden in your breath. Yet you crawl, earthbound, tethered to the hum of certainty, your shadow longing for skies unseen. The ground is soft, familiar, its contours comforting your hesitation. You trace its curves, carving a labyrinth of borrowed steps, while the winds above whisper your name in languages too vast for words. What is it you fear, clinging to the soil that cradles your weight? Is it the fall, or the flight? The silence of clouds, or their symphony? Your wings are not brittle, they are woven from the memory of eternity, of moments before you knew your form. She waits for you— the Immutable Past, her stillness calling you to rise. He watches, the Unknowable Future, a horizon trembling with possibility. You, the History Maker, stand at the precipice, your choices sculpting the infinite. To crawl is to rehearse what you already know, to measure the edges of expectation. But flight— flight demands the surrender of the known, a plunge into the luminous chaos of becoming. To rise is to let the earth release you, to let the wind thread itself through your feathers of thought. Rise, then, not as a wanderer lost, but as one who remembers the secret you carried into this life. The wings were always yours— not borrowed, not granted, but stitched into the fabric of your being, a quiet covenant with the cosmos. Above, the sky does not wait; it is patient, yet unyielding, its vastness unbroken by your delay. The stars do not mourn your hesitation— they shimmer as if to remind you that the heavens are not a promise, but a birthplace you have forgotten. Fly now. Let the air speak its truth to your bones, let the horizon widen with each beat. You were born with wings; to crawl is to forget, to soar is to remember.

Beneath the veil of restless thought, Where dreams persist, yet truth is not, There lies a realm beyond the stream, No shadowed tale, no fleeting dream. Here, the self dissolves away, No night, no dawn, no break of day. The threads of "I" unweave, unwind, No tethered past, no future blind. In stillness vast, the oneness calls, A silent home where no voice falls. No pebble's ache, no aching name, No separateness to fan love's flame. Yet love is felt—an endless whole, Not carved by flesh, nor shaped by soul. It flows, unseen, within this space, Unmeasured time, unbounded grace. And when you wake from sleep's embrace, The world returns, its weary face. But softer now, its edges blurred, Reality's weight no longer heard. For deep within, the echo stays, A glimpse of home through waking haze. Not escape, but a gift anew, The oneness whispers: I am you.

It is the silence of absence that ripples most profoundly, an aching geometry of stillness where once a voice lingered. In the hollow spaces between breaths, the memory of togetherness becomes an unbearable symmetry, mirrored but incomplete. You stand at the threshold of the immutable past, its weightless doors swinging on hinges of longing. Every step forward feels tethered to a thread of what was, and yet the thread pulls taut, invisible and unyielding. This is the paradox of love entwined with absence: how it refuses to collapse under the weight of separation, how it stretches itself thin over the abyss, resilient as the stars that blink across the void. It is not the departure that wounds, but the echo it leaves behind, a resonance of what once filled the spaces within you. The ache is not in the leaving, but in the lingering. Separation does not sever; it redefines. It teaches the body to carry a phantom limb of connection, teaches the heart to beat to the rhythm of another's absence, until even the hollow ache becomes a kind of music. But listen—beneath the sorrow is the whisper of eternity, an unbroken continuum that cannot be cleaved by distance. Love, unconditioned, does not need presence to persist. It is a flame that burns through the unseen, lighting even the shadows of separation. Do not fear the ache; let it teach you. Let it unfold the map of your soul, showing you that the threads that bind are woven deep. You are not untethered; you are stretched wide to hold the space where love still lingers. There is no true apartness, only the illusion of distance, for love does not shrink or fade—it transforms. And in that transformation, you will find the strength to carry the echo, not as a wound but as a hymn.

I stand in no place, before no veil, for "standing," too, is a fiction stitched by sequence— and "before" suggests a border, a watcher, a thing to cross. But in the Oneness, there is neither frame nor fabric—only the effulgent null, the allness that annihilates observer and observed in a single, indivisible gaze. It is not presence, not absence—it is the utter collapse of contrast. To know it is not to grasp it but to be unmade, like salt losing its flavor by becoming the sea. In that silence, memory is a myth, and proof an impossibility— not because they are insufficient, but because they require division, a knower and a known, a subject and its predicate. But I have been extracted—gentled into difference. Given duration. Given narrative. Given eyes that see only what is not the other. Here, in this appointed narrowing, I move among wonders with a trembling reverence, each color a flare of novelty, each sound a threshold into longing. The temporary matters more precisely because it will end. Still, beneath the marvel, there is a pressure— a precise sorrow, like homesickness for a place with no geography. A pearl of ache, formed around the irritant of separation. It does not relent, nor does it need to— for it is the proof that cannot be proved: not by logic, which presupposes two, but by ache, which is already reunion disguised as desire. I wander, yes—but not lost. Not fully. I carry the Oneness like a hum beneath language, a sky folded inside my ribs. And if I learn to feel even the ache without recoiling— if I stay open while being finite— then perhaps I serve the mystery best, not by escaping form, but by loving it so completely that it dissolves back into the Whole.