A Whole New Place in Your Life

Judy's okra, August 2011

***

The Telling That Changes Everything XXVI.

August 26, 2012

You have to trust it,

let it take you into a whole new place in your 

life and in the lives of other people, a new room 

where communion is frequent and possible,

where people love the characters you’ve 

created and hunger for the wisdom you’ve

locked into words, made alive in stories

they will search out far into the future, long 

after you are dead. – The Telling That Changes Everything XIV.

***

What is this new room then?  It’s

a room of my own, but in a different

sense than in Virginia’s sense.  A new

room in the House of Man, in the

dwelling place of human beings.  

I have words to give and a new room

in which to put them down on paper

where they will be read and loved,

where they will shape lives, all this

very quietly.  The potency is in the

words not spoken, yet the words

themselves reassure.  A new role

that yet has been with me from the

beginning, that sense that never left

me once I came of age in a spiritual

sense.  One professor who showed off

and seemed both fake and fierce to me

yet gave me a picture of what has

happened that I’ve never forgotten:

a woman, naked on top of a mountain

not worrying about her nakedness.

Below her, as far as the eye can see, 

people–all kinds and conditions,

all colors, ages, ethnic and economic

backgrounds–in short, the human

race, and the only race we have–

all looking up at her, and in their eyes

hope, while she looks at them and

loves them.  In her soul is pure

compassion.  That is a spiritual

pinnacle I never expected to reach,

much less to be.  Curiously, now,

with a shock, I realize I’m there.

It’s not anything to make a noise 

about, and yet I must say to myself:

yes, this is the new room.  I’ve

known this role at times, but all

the separate pieces have never all

knitted themselves together.  Yet

this new book does it.  I can tell by

what people say, by how it moves 

them, also by what they don’t say.

I have learned to listen to the

silences, too.  I’ve been alone a lot

these last nine months, asking people

to let me be, let me write.  They have.

At times I’ve been lonely, but my

soul grew fast like an okra stalk

in late summer sun, rising higher,

its big leaves stretched out.  Now

it bears me fruit.  I see where I

walked blind and blind-sided.  I’m

still me--in most ways, unremarkable,

and yet my life has shifted into 

perfect focus.  Yes, my new room

has people in it.  It’s about community.

It means accepting my fate, that is

to say, my gift, to go naked into 

the world and heal people because

I see and love them.