Spirit cuts like water though it all Carving out this emptiness So inner eye can see The soaring height of canyon walls within Walls whose very color, texture, form Redeem in beauty all my life has been The darkness and the light, the false, the true While deep below through my parts To resurrect my gravebound heart Making, always making, all things new.
Because in trying to articulate what, perhaps, joy is, it has occurred to me that among other things—the trees and the mushrooms have shown me this—joy is the mostly invisible, the underground union between us, you and me, which is, among other things, the great fact of our life and the lives of everyone and thing we love going away. If we sink a spoon into that fact, into the duff between us, we will find it teeming. It will look like all the books ever written. It will look like all the nerves in a body. We might call it sorrow, but we might call it a union, one that, once we notice it, once we bring it into the light, might become flower and food. Might be joy.
