Turn to face
your fractured frame
old friend.
Do not run
from the wound
from the tenderness
from the raw humanity
of it all.
Dive into the abyss
of your secret agony
and let yourself be remade
in the alchemy
of your fall
through darkness.
~ Matthew Liam Gardner
There is a beauty
waiting to bloom
seeded deep within
your being.
Its been there
since before you took
your first breath.
You've seen its face
in your deep dreams
many times before.
Some say
it smells like a mountain,
looks like a breeze
and feels like tomorrow.
Its always there
just under the surface
and it wants,
like all seed-dreams,
to find its way up
into the realm
of the alive.
This beauty
doesn't fit
into this world,
doesn't make sense
in these times,
and you won't find
a soul on earth
able to comprehend it
in its entirety,
in its fullness,
not even the most journeyed
of all beings you know.
No Elder.
No Teacher.
No Seer.
No Leader.
No Coach.
There's not a being on Earth
who already knows
the fullness of the beauty
that is yours
to bless upon us
until you've blessed them
with your BEINGness.
Even your own mind
can barely touch
the distant edge
of all that this thing,
sleeping
and stirring
inside you,
is.
The closest we can get
is the knowing
that this forming beauty
is the initiation
that you uniquely hold
for all beings.
The Remembering
that only you
can breathe
into our lungs.
This seed inside you
is yours
and yours alone
to water
and tend.
So you have to learn
to be its sole guardian,
custodian,
protector,
and you have to somehow
find within you
the courage,
the will
and the belief
to stand for it
and speak for it
and give your life to it,
even though it might not make sense,
even though it will eventually
remake the world
that kept you safe
and ultimately reshape,
over and over again,
everything
you thought you were.
But, at the end of the day,
if you ask me,
that's the whole point anyway.
~ Matthew Liam Gardner
Hello winter my old friend.
I promise I won't run from you this year.
I promise to meet your silence like never before,
to finally sing your song with you after all this time,
to let all those stories that are ready to come to their end
finally fall from my form.
I promise, old friend, to shake and shiver and delight
in cold bones and candlelight and the blessing warmth
of skin on skin in a bedroom grave.
Forgive me for dishonouring you,
for not knowing how to meet you,
for turning from you because I did not know what you are,
for holding on so tightly to everything that made me comfortable
in this skin that you ask me to shed,
for protecting myself against you until we were whole oceans apart,
for thinking the life that was mine was everywhere
but right here in the discomfort of your embrace,
in your humbling ways.
Sing to me winter,
I'm grown enough to sing along now.
~ Matthew.
