From thoughtfully crafted words,
Within hand-thrown pottery,
A presence
reaches out
to you,
a gentle breeze
opening a space within.
Sometimes
a silent whisper,
“stop.”
You put down your brush,
Your needle,
Your stylus.
You do not know the source of this sotto voce
from the deep within,
your creating image before you,
your rough poem,
The first lines of your cross-cut stitching,
Presences open a space within you,
A new horizon
A faint deer path
Leading to a threshold.
The decision is yours.
You have lived an illusion;
You can control your attentiveness
Where you want to go.
But now
wide-eyed,
You did not create this open space
This new horizon
The almost visible deer path
Leading to a threshold
You could never have imagined in your world of dreams.
The decision is yours.
When I lay a chaos of prints before me,
an awareness goes its own way,
to certain prints and not others.
They speak to each other,
where they belong
to tell the story.
Your part in making the story is humbling,
As is the telling of your story,
Like this one.
When the potter sits down at a potter’s wheel
for the first time,
age twenty,
a space silently opens within.
A decision about this unexpected horizon
Is before him.
The young man,
Knows immediately this is what he wants to do
for the rest of his life,
Before he knows anything about
Skillfully throwing a pot.
When I stand with
my legs interwoven with the legs of the tripod,
my legs and feet root themselves in the earth,
my upper body weaves and tilts,
angles and dances freely in an open space
I have not opened.
Our energy follows where our attention leads the way.
When making a path in a gallery,
an exhibit,
a museum,
in solitude,
take note,
the sensations and impulses.
Our awareness goes its own way to reveal the faint path.
Be attentive to way opening,
this space you did not create
will change everything.
What will you do?
John Holliger©2018
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