The pieces in this section are personal accounts of the rough and tender wonders of relationship, and the difficult yet inevitable process of being turned inside out, and the unexpected feelings of wholeness I’ve been touched by along the way. Most of these pieces were written in my forties and early fifties. In “Troubled Waters,” I bear witness to my thirty-year relationship with my oldest friend, Robert, and how being split open by life has only brought us closer. In “Who Will Live Your Life?” I affirm the irrefutable truth that wisdom and wonder are only palpable through direct experience. And in “Chores,” I discover how the very atom of resilience waits in the smallest task. If we can tend to whatever is before us with all our heart, each task holds the secret of life. The poems in this section explore where the seed of what matters really lives and how love, exhaustion, faithfulness to each other, and surrender can open that seed.

Troubled Waters

TROUBLED WATERS

It is unfolding like the bonsai I have been watching for months, waiting for the one blossom to finally open . . .

Yes, Robert is a man of pure yet troubled spirit, and we have journeyed far these thirty years, waiting and watching for each other to open into new beginnings we barely thought possible. It is more than friendship. For we’ve been forced to hold—onto each other, onto what matters, onto life—like spirits clutching in a fire so ancient and hot that our centers have molded to one grip.

The bonsai is an Australian Brush Cherry, about seven years old. It is only eight inches high and issues only one bud a year. This small flower begins to surface in April as the tiniest green swelling, a fresh nub amid slender leaves. The clay sages that live beneath the tree watch for it, too . . .

We were in grad school when we met, and Robert tells the story, how he saw God in my eyes, no mask or refracted speech, just raw, unharnessed energy. I knew him also as an immediate spirit, someone I wouldn’t have to explain things to, someone who understood the wonder that was my open secret. Here was a compadre I would not have to convince of the world of Original Perception.

We came upon each other, a pair of transcenders, in Maslow’s terms, who:

seem somehow to recognize each other, and (who)

come to almost instant intimacy and mutual

understanding even upon first meeting.

I put the bonsai in the sun daily, for direct light hastens blooming, the way real dialogue opens the human shell . . .