The heart is deceptive above all things.
I thought to write you a lover’s lullaby. I drafted it– was unhappy with it. But it had a good message: To help ground you and give you something (someone) to think about when life becomes overly muddled with self-ambition, discontentment– I– a place to rest your weary self when you are tired.
I used to make wishes on falling stars. I don’t anymore. I think I am just grateful to have witnessed it because, after all, what are the chances my eyes happen to be in the right place at the right time for such a wonder! (Or maybe just the sight of it is all I have allowed myself… because I never thought I could experience something else.)
Oh my wishes have become even more powerful than that as I’ve grown up. I make wishes that stream through conscious and unconscious thoughts that weave tight together– woven by needle and thread kind-of-tight– where it is hard to tell how one came up with a pattern to make what looks like another to the eye, unless closely examined.
The kind that is hard to unravel stitch-by-stitch with the impossible hope there would be anything worth keeping or salvaging once the undoing is done.
Unless one destroyed it with one cut of scissors! But rarely do we go about destruction like that. Not with our own creations.
We are careful to unweave what was woven. At least at first. We try to savor old yarns, hoping to weave something new with the old we’ve known, we’ve become attached to, that’s become a part of us because we have spent so much time with it, intimately laboring over it as it caught each of our breaths and we touched each length gently as we wound it around fingertips and were careful to use delicate, simple tools that couldn’t split or fray ends.
I’ve woven so carefully as I have unwoven so carefully, just like you have.
I understand that masterpieces take time and so I think in the “making,” all that labor was worth it. But the unmaking takes longer it seems and with less satisfaction is it unmade into its scrambled disarray of a mastermess. Why have I cared for it like this even in that state?
The most tender people at heart are some of the most kind and gentle people. I guess I just hope that someone will do the same with me.
Dear Creator: Be deliberate in your approach. Be direct about your intentions. Never stray from the loyal pattern and with this practice clings honesty to its picture as shown on the cover. (Be who you are. Do as you say. Mean what you do. You know… all those kinds of things.)
Photography art by Elspeth Diederix