Number Ninety

Every soul is a witness.  We see at first our own life, where we can be the elemental observer without thought or emotion.  We witness through a cloud of feeling and cognition, but it obscures the simple river of experience, the flow of what can be seen and heard and touched.  We collect -- images, events, stories.  We hold, individually and collectively, light touching the Tigris at a wide bend, the feeling of wet clay spinning on the first flywheel, the sound of wind susurrant through an ancient corn field.

Every soul is a witness.  First for the self, and then for the other.  The other needs to be seen; the love and pain mirrored, known.  The soul is incomplete, untouched, its work caught in the limits of the "I" -- without a witness.

The witness sees every fall, every getting up -- deepening what's real because there's more than one of us who carries it.

Number Eighty Nine

Human emotion is central to our education on this planet.  To learn from fear and loss, to learn the work of love -- how to care while in pain.  How to see each other while bent with hurt or grief.

Emotions lie; we know that.  But they also hold truth.  Because there is an emotion of rightness: seeing the beautiful, the harmonious; seeing the opposites that belong together, the unseverable relationship between loss and hope, failure and discovery.

The emotion of rightness comes as a dancer moves in a certain way, as the sculptor chooses a certain shape.  It comes while reading the perfect lines of Steven's On Mere Being.  It comes as we finally say the truth that took so long to find.

The emotion of rightness is a sometimes dim, sometimes brilliant lantern -- lighting our way.