Navel Gaze

It is the quintessence of unbelonging
To be surrounded without means of connection
Mute in the words of communication

To have forgotten
How to look
How even to love
To catch only
A glimpse
A passing touch

All this belonging to people business
Makes for lonely days
And restless

All this owning, too

Maybe earth owns me
Not the other way around
Maybe belonging to place
Requires surrender
And the grasping at control
Takes too high a cost

Trust cannot breathe there

Trust not of earth to me
But me to earth
To dirt and seed
To water
Both earth-bound and sky-fed

Yes, loved ones
Tender ones
It hurts in my heart also
That pricking vine that holds us apart
Holds us all
Grips us because we are all together numb
And must remain numb
To subsist as we do

Oh the unbearable
The anguish it will take
To bind us together 
Harmoniously
Requires more of us
Than we know yet how to give

So do not tell me
Do not tell you
Not to feel so much
But let us weep
Until we cry out a new way to Life
Older than the mountains themselves
And in those tears, too
The courage to birth it
To bear it

Child, how long
How long will you dig there?
How long, in search of water
Scratching at dirt and stone?
It lives not where your hands alone
Can reach

It needs one hundred others beside you
One thousand others to sing for you
And ten thousand to breathe with you
And the four winds across your back
The voices of birds
The seeds of grass
Even the yielding of the roots
And the rocks
To bring forth that wellspring

If it is lonely work
It is because it was not meant
To be taken
Alone