Love, sooner or later, forces us out of time. It does not accept limit. Of all that we feel and do, all the virtues and all the sins, love alone crowds us at last over the edge of the world. For love is not explainable or even justifiable. Love itself is the justifier. We do not make it. If it did not happen to us, we could not imagine it. Love includes the world and time as a pregnant woman includes her child whose wrongs she will suffer and forgive. Love is in the world but is not altogether of it. It is of eternity. It takes us there when it most holds us here.
It could take a tribe
to find the way back
to what you love.
A day's wandering
could become a season,
then another. At times
it may all signal chaos.
But take heart.
Sometimes
there is intelligence
even in the crumbling
of things.
The creek is wearing its usual disguise,
braiding and unbraiding itself
through narrows and pools as it pleases,
proving its force by taking the path
of least resistance, taking apart the stone
one grain at a time.
If you were water, what part of your will
would you be willing to dissolve?
Which of your ways would you have to learn
not to want to have?
And how, if you always ran downstream,
would your desire know how to live?
~ Steve Godwin from "If You Were Water" in FINDING HEART
A fragment of fence long trampled
by those who needed most to pass.
Pilgrim, immigrant, refugee,
all journeys severe, all made in longing.
Most cross over what's already breached,
but the step is long and touches down
In a world that takes heart
in the breaking of what divides.
~ Steve Godwin from "What Divides" in FINDING HEART
