A Language That Carries Us
Poetry is the language that carries us into the hidden worlds—worlds where every word, every phrase, pulses with life. Where the first language—one that can make reality itself tremble—speaks to us with such power that it bends the very fabric of what we know, heals the sick, brings us home to ourselves. In those spaces, where the world rests on the edge of a dream, we are reminded of how deeply we are connected. "What is remembered lives," says Starhawk, and in the telling of these stories, we give breath to the past, the future, and all that is unknown.
There is a sublime devotion in these words. They arrive, like the scent of wet earth after rain, like the hum of a forest alive with the noise of life. They knock softly at our doors, offering us glimpses into realms untouched, unseen. Just as Whitman’s verse rings with the insistence of truth that transcends time, the soul in its quiet devotion to the moment finds peace in knowing that the present is where all things converge. "There is no time more alive," Whitman writes, and in the eternal now, we find our place. The past and the future pulse through the present, and it is in this moment that we come to understand the depth of our love for life itself, our existence wrapped up in the beauty of each new leaf, the promise of every new day.
Aging too, like the weathered window in a quiet room, holds beauty. And perhaps this beauty is most deeply understood by those who have loved fully, those who have seen loss and still continue to love. In the silent company of memories, where grief and love intertwine, we are offered an image of ourselves that is beyond the constraints of time. As our bodies grow weary, our spirits find quiet joy in the smallest things, in the sticky leaves of spring, in the scent of rain-soaked earth, in the blue of the endless sky. These things, as Dostoevsky reminds us, cannot be loved through reason. They are loved with the whole of our being, with our innards, our bellies, with the truth that is woven into our hearts.
We do not understand what is happening here, in this moment, but it stirs us. It stirs us deeply. It is more stirring than we could ever have imagined, more vast than the words we use to describe it. And in this space, as the world moves in waves of light and shadow, we are reminded that there is another world—and it is this one. And in this world, we find our home.
Poetry, then, does not just speak to us with words. It leaves us filled with visions—visions that carry us into the great dance of the universe, into the joy and sorrow of the world, into the realm of the unseen. "God was in this place, and I did not know it," says the Genesis passage, and perhaps we all live in that sacred mystery, seeing it with our innards, loving it beyond logic, beyond reason, beyond what we thought we knew.
As we walk through this world, we remember that love, the love that ties us to all things, is real. And in that love, we find meaning, we find belonging, and we find home. And so, poetry becomes the bridge, the language that leads us back to this home, back to the truth of the world that is always already here.
And in the quiet, in the stillness, the words, like a prayer, rise in us: Be whole.
