I will not die an unlived life.
I will not live in fear
of falling or catching fire.
I choose to inhabit my days,
to allow my living to open me,
to make me less afraid,
more accessible;
to loosen my heart
until it becomes a wing,
a torch, a promise.
I choose to risk my significance,
to live so that which came to me as seed
goes to the next as blossom,
and that which came to me as blossom,
goes on as fruit.
I can't speak for any one else, but I know that in my own life I have often lived out of my fear rather than out of my potential. I've lived out of self preservation rather than self-giving love. And yet, my heart's desire, my prayer, is to grow in God's love, to open my heart to Christ's love, to risk, to live, for love, in love. Perhaps that's why this poem speaks so much to my heart. It seems to me to be about living the one precious life that God has given us. And that, my friends, is really what it's all about - don't you think?
1 comment:
Oh yes, someone said to me once that we should do something you fear once a day... I meditated on that for a while and I realized that the activities I thought about were 'big' things - sky diving, rescue, protection - but I think that what it really means is the small gnawing things that eat at us. It's the mundanity of opening the bills you know you haven't got the money for. It's speaking when it's easier not to, or taking that moment to recognize someone's humanity or standing up and saying 'Enough'.
Etty Hillesum (And Interrupted Life) has a great passage about how humiliation, fear and control takes two participants. The Humiliator and the Humiliated. When one participant doesn't play their role, it doesn't work. It's all a matter of perception. At least for me, when one contemplates the Immensity of Eternity, life does not seem so big and scary.
Thank you for sharing the poem!
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