A Ritual to Read Each Other

If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant’s tail,
but if one wanders the circus won’t find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider—
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give – yes or no, or maybe—
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

 “A Ritual to Read to Each Other” by William Stafford

Too pretty for words

❝ Of course I’ll hurt you. Of course you’ll hurt me. Of course we will hurt each other. But this is the very condition of existence. To become spring, means accepting the risk of winter. To become presence, means accepting the risk of absence. ❞

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

Breathing

This is the worst hunger

The hunger of loss

The deep set eyes

Burning through appetite

They will not be sated

These wolf eyes

The cry of hunger

Comes from a tearing

A tearing deep inside

Inside the wolf’s gut

His heart has been denied

And all he can think

Is to rip his teeth into flesh

To satisfy through the mouth

What his heart cannot have

This is the ghostly hunger

It will devour tear and rip

And still its heart will cry

A savage cry of cries

Echoing down the valleys

The valleys of his longing

His endless longing

The taste of blood in his mouth.

From Bodyhood by Leon De Kock (2010)

a word is one wing of the silence

You must know that I do not love and that I love you,

because everything alive has its two sides; 
a word is one wing of the silence, 
fire has its cold half. 
                                                –Pablo Neruda

The travelling friends: Freud and Jung

Freud's miniatures