Your Canvas

Who are you?
Who
Are you? Whose
Silence are you?   -Thomas Merton

What a short span you have, here
in your flesh and blood body.

Who will blame you, even at your age, especially
at your age, if you take your nerve and sinew
and set out to recover your soul?

Who’ll chide you for getting up, throwing on your coat, leaving
behind the screens of abstraction, the acid of acedia, the sucking ruts
of restlessness, to reach for the latch and step outside?

What’s stopping you from shaking off that persistent
darkness, that moon-shaped blankness, to turn,
again, and face the big canvas of your life?

There’s still time. Why not go to the meadow
and sit quietly with your paints?

Let the observer in you fade away,
let stillness soften the ridges of the judging mind,
let it melt your laminate shell, let
any slime of shame burn away
under a blazing sun,
let the growing tribe of losses run their wild course,
and give yourself to the tender arms of grace,
unfolding in the bear-hug of self-forgiveness.

Paint the motions of the meadow, enter the holy grass, the
keening willows, the kneeling trees, the fearless, dying, leaves,
the divine mystery, that abiding presence
you first saw in a puddle after a rain,
your child-eyes looking back at you,
with fierce curiosity.

You have no paintbrush?
Use your sprouting hands,
your raging gut and ragged spirit,
your greying, still pulsing, marrow,
your whole water and fire body.