Dear Miracle

Setting free the beautiful truth inside.

Category Archives: Mercy


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The Kindness of Strangers

Small and large mercies everywhere when you look.
Light in the shape of a butterfly on a dark and stormy night.

Don’t shutter the windows ,

don’t turn the deadbolt just yet while hope survives—

just not inside of you.

One minute past giving up, calling it quits

while you believe as you do because of those that hurt you—

you, the stranger, who has extended so much mercy in your life.

Kindness is not dead even if you believe it true.

You are due, owed your time, ripe for the plucking.

And your story may be much different than you picture it now

as you stand upon the narrow ledge of your own aching heart

thinking no one sees

or worse, cares.

Mercy and kindness travel in pairs on the bus of surprise—that

is how they operate.

You never see them coming until they arrive.

And what if you have locked all the doors to your heart,

how shall they enter?

All the while they’ve been looking for you while you slump pale and cold,

buttressed behind the deadbolt and shuttered window.

This troupe, this Calvary of strangers who arrive most unexpectedly

to see you through the next minute or the rest of your life

here to restore your faith in you, how okay you really are.

You never quite know where and when they will appear,

who or what will waltz or breeze through your door with arms

full of what you need

or run into your burning house

with buckets of water to save you.

So go on, turn out the lights and go to bed.

but this I beg of you,

just be sure to leave the door open a crack

for possibility, please.

Photo and poem by S. (Sawyer) Wolfington


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The Courage is the Work

Photo by S. Wolfington

When we expose our soft underbellies, we risk ourselves. There is a freedom in risk when your heart is aching to tell the truth. Yet in doing so, we grant the courage to others freedom to do the same. This is my underbelly of truth, how it is. Living with severe sleep apnea, which in the past was a point of shame. I practice kindness now even in my difficult places. My wish for you is to do the same. ♥

When one is alone long enough, it is out of necessity you grow accustomed to days upon days spent alone. You accommodate yourself. Too many days float by, like leaves on a stream, where dressing or brushing your hair becomes a bother—because, really, who is going to see you?

In fact, you prefer your aloneness over the feeling of having to entertain others because there is little energy for it. You’re practiced at keeping busy even when you’re doing nothing at all.

You’re okay with phone calls to ask how you are to which you usually make light of with a joke; or calls from those who just need a listening ear and they know you’re there. Because you’ve always been good at listening or speaking a timely word and it makes you feel useful.

Yet to pick up the phone and ask for something is akin to lifting a 50 lb. weight. It’s difficult. Friends complain you never call. You know you should. Everyone has their life to live and you’re no different.

You mostly seem to find a way around things on your own because you’re a seasoned soldier and survivor. You know how to go it alone—for the most part.

The scary part is being so darn good at it.


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The Alchemy of Years

fall-on-the-columbiaThe beautiful wild calls to me more and more. Days and years pass, and I am moving closer to death now that I am in the last third of my life. Being here now, I feel done with so much focusing on the logical minutia of my days. It’s easier than when I was thirty or forty in a way. This minutia feels stale as I move towards lightening the agendas others have for me, the ones I have of myself, the tyranny of the urgent cracking its whip over me to move faster, work harder, accomplish more. I am ready to become a human being now rather than a human doing. My commodity  is not valued in how much I can accomplish but in realizing my mystery, to be tenderly compassionate towards all that I have deemed as less than perfect within and around me.

This is what makes perfect sense to me now, the alchemical weaving and blending of logos and mythos together into a substance that becomes far more valuable than either alone.  Gold, if you will. I have spent the better part of a lifetime mostly doing one or the other, furiously scurrying around to accomplish whatever long to-do list I had in order to be able to live in the mystery. As if I had to earn the right to lie on my back in the grass and gaze at shape shifting clouds or put my pen to the page when the first lines of a poem slipped in to my awareness or try my hand at putting some color on the canvass—or merely to take a much needed nap.

What makes sense now is living on purpose, living with awareness of all that I am doing in each moment, of acceptance wherever I might find myself.  Washing dishes turns into an act of grace as I feel the warm water running over my hands, handle each fork and cup, happy there are dishes to wash, food to prepare, food at the end of my arm anytime I want it, blessing the earth and each hand that went into its growth and preparation; or paying bills, feeling the abundance of the universe, that I have been graced with a roof over my head, a place to lay my tired body at night.

I am grateful I have what I need when I need it even if it is not always exactly what I think I want.

Today I was counting the last of my former life, the years I have spent in caretaking. I believed it mine to shoulder the atlas as I cared for seriously ill friends and family, along with a serious illness of my own.  Counting too many years in the business of living and dying, emergencies, and crisis and drama in the physical, mental and emotional arenas—I am just done.

Now I feel ready to count the stars  in the midnight sky, to watch the sailing ships of clouds passing by. I am ready to take long walks, write books, and rise up and up into my one beautiful life before dissolving back down into the primordial soup from which I came.

Yet even in the sad and the bad, the worry, the hurry that has consumed my days, I am utterly grateful. These are gifts of pain I have been graced with. Deep within me lies a dark underworld from which arises a priceless seam of gold, a transmutation of the pain and fear into a precious metal.  I couldn’t have fully understood this until more recently. I am multi-dimensional, of the stars and of the earth. In this suit of flesh and bone, lives a being descended from the stars, from the source of life itself. I am meant while I am here to dwell in both myth and logic, to learn equally about both, to learn to weave them into a beautiful tapestry. Everything is purposed in my life to propel me towards the realization of this wisdom…to be heavenly minded while tending to life, to mend that which is broken with my compassion, to seek forgiveness, to forgive, to be a place holder for love, to be in a possession of a heart that has been broken wide open, to become fertile ground where life can grow.

I have not entirely mastered these things yet. It’s okay. It is not mine to completely master. Better to accept my own humanity, my fragility, my missing the mark so many times. This is true wisdom to know there is perfection in failure and fragility. It is part of the dying process, the cycle of life. Everything has to eventually die so that something else can live. At every moment, ten thousand things are dissolving at the same time ten thousand things are arising, taking their turn at form, at life, deciding what they will be, just for the joy and the experience of being in any particular state.  For are we not each and every one and everything nuances of the one life that runs through us all, here to learn about life, ourselves, each other?

Grace is continually born out of pain, life arising out of death. Our pain becomes another’s grace as we reach out to touch and comfort. We can do this because we’ve been there, walked through the same fire of suffering. Lives and hearts are made whole from shards of anguish and heartache. Love grows. We’re not alone.

To me, this is what makes perfect sense.

 

Shoshana Wolfington


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If You Can Wait

dug a hole

 

It’s enough, a place to begin

to wait for a single drop or bead of rain

to fall on the hole you’ve climbed in.

A single drop that waters the single word

that strikes the chord that plays just right,

that grows into a bud, a tiny shoot, a spark of hope.

If you can wait long enough.

 

A day will do, then becomes two and three,

a week, a month, a year of unexpected alteration,

offerings falling from ominous clouds

straight into your heart.

And what went down, now goes up—

it’s the natural law of things.

 

The blackness of pain, as you will learn,

drop by drop from day to day,

will serve to increase your capacity for joy,

stretch your boundaries,

which can often hurt as you know,

then break the cords that hold too tight

your beautiful and sacred life,

if you can wait

just a day or more.

 

If you give yourself permission to fall,

say it’s okay to be held while you go down,

go easy on yourself,

there will be stronger arms than yours right now

to catch you while you fall.

 

And then

there will be that day,

though I can’t say exactly  when,

you will rise and rise from your black loamy bed

born in sorrow and blood

and know you were glad you stayed

and waited for rain.

 

© 2016 Shoshana Wolfington


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MERCY

Mercy

Photo by S. Wolfington

 It takes courage to tell you this

at the risk you’ll think less, nevertheless, I will.

I’ll tell you what depression is—like this—

a barren land leaning into forever,

a dark annhilation; it’s a

void of hope or imagination

when hell comes to pay a call.

And here’s the secret: I was just there.

But most of you would never know.

(You might even be there now, too.)

Truth as I saw it then, this life had been enough,

I was done.

But you think like that when you’re in hell.

And so began to envision, with each glass of water

that passed my lips, what I could do

with that and a few or more pills.

I didn’t exactly plan that I would, only imagined it so,

how it could be.

There was no more room for anything–

not in the cruelness of men or the ghosts denied, or

the self-deprivations while acting strong for everyone

visiting all at once in my life.

Orphans each of emotions

looking for the smallest drink of love.

Not that I wasn’t loved.

Not that I didn’t love in return, not that I didn’t care.

No, it wasn’t that at all.

It was the driest white bone of exhaustion,

all the lifetimes lived in the space of one.

It was like a gift

as I see it now.

I’ll tell you what strength is—like this—

strength is taking one small move in mercy’s direction,

even a flinch or a step,

towards whom and wherever it might be found.

When all you can say to anyone with kindness in their eyes,

to whatever’s holy or sacred paying attention,

help me, please.

And I did, because my life was leaving me,

just like the sea rushing back from the shore.

A gift, indeed.

A profound breaking, a leaving, then

a sad resurrection towards the miraculous while those that could,

in compassion, seen and unseen, walk me back to myself,

back to a kind of confounding beauty,

an uncertainty of what was to come.

And it was enough.

(We’re never really alone.)

Were I to be honest, the pull towards leaving

still haunts me once in awhile

when I imagine drinking that cup while tired, I forget

that mercy waits just past the next corner, the next fork in the road.

And I remember nothing is for certain for any of us,

and life and death have a way of reminding us

there’s nothing to control.

It’s a coming home again to myself,

wherein between staying or leaving,

I need only extend myself a whit to say help

to ask for mercy, please,

when hope is lost.

© 2015 Shoshana Wolfington