I feel this so deeply with the death of my father. Though we were so different in the world, we were at heart the same. And now, when I touch something he carved out of wood, when I hold the chisel he used for half a century, I feel the creative fire he left growing in me. And the legacy of a friend I loved who died of cancer is that I feel her fierce honesty awakening in me. Such is the power of true relationship. As the eighteenth-century philosopher Saint-Martin remarks, “My friends are the beings through whom God loves me.”

Can it be that when we join by daring to open the way between all living things, we piece the broken world back together?

Since I first had that dream twenty years ago of the young man jumping off a bridge in search of the fellow, I have been fascinated with bridges. For they always uphold the endless story of how we help each other from one point of aliveness to the next. And there’s one bridge in particular that speaks to the journey from suffering to wholeness. It is The Suspension Bridge Between Hida and Etchu, a woodblock print by the Japanese Master Hokusai (1760–1849). He carved and printed this in the early 1830s. In the scene, two travelers, carrying their belongings, carefully balance their way across a thin, ropelike bridge. The bridge crosses a small ravine, so high that it sways among the clouds. It’s unclear where these travelers are going or coming from. The entire focus of the woodblock is where each traveler steps. The whole world seems to bend to the point of their steps.

The Suspension Bridge Between Hida and Etchu by Hokusai

I share this because it captures the power and poignancy of our time on Earth. We have to go from here to there, but the life—the aliveness we treasure, the company that matters—is always in the tenderness of each step. It is in each step that we find ourselves and each other. It is in each step that we hold each other up.

It remains a powerful mystery that when I look deeply enough into you, I find me, and when you dare to hear my fear in the recess of your heart, you recognize it as your secret which you thought no one else knew. And that unexpected Wholeness that is more than each of us, but common to all—that moment of unity is the atom of God.

Adrift

ADRIFT

Everything is beautiful and I am so sad.

This is how the heart makes a duet of

wonder and grief. The light spraying

through the lace of the fern is as delicate

as the fibers of memory forming their web

around the knot in my throat. The breeze

makes the birds move from branch to branch

as this ache makes me look for those I’ve lost