My dear, for the last ten years Arletta has been coming to see me every Thursday, and when he can't come, he stops in to tell me. We're old friends. I think he likes to talk with me. Do you know, when he found me, I couldn't even walk? Some of my toenaíls were at least three inches long. He came back with fríends. They heated water, cut my toenalls, and rubbed my feet. Look, over there is the basin, all polished and shiny. Do you know hím very well? I wonder what he sees in me. I had begun to believe that no one would ever love me again.
Through the cycles and seasons of our lives' as we continue to grow in awareness, we begin to feel more at home in the world. We begin to appreciate and accept who we are... We move from periods of joyful expansion into a dark night of the soul. We seem to reap the harvest of the sustained practice of attention and compassion and come to know ourselves in a new and more forgiving light, only to forget and return to what we thought were old, discarded ways. We suffer and we experience great delight. Yet deep within is a place of understanding, and to find this place is to come home.
~ "Coming Home to Simplicity" by Molly Vass-Lehman & Paula W. Jamison in SEEDS OF AWAKENING
Why do I forget You, abandon You? You who are wholeness, You who are home, always now, always present, giving what every cell in me yearns for-- to collapse into Your warm breath of Life; defenses drop, naked I be, cherished solely for my nakedness, my void, my forgetfulness.
Silence pregnant with all sounds, I come back, prodigal that I am-- bruised, tired, wired, To be undone again by Your embrace.
