Stretched Canvas

I was slowly walking short distances on the Atlantic’s shore during the period I wrote the poem “Stretched Canvas.”

I was nearly dead inside, and hadn’t yet faced that my 28-year relationship with my life partner needed to come to a close—should have come to a close some years earlier. The shifting shells on the shore created pale, dripping-like patterns that reflected my melancholic heart. My toes wanted to touch the nourishing water as I remembered the Bhakti analogy that the soul’s nature is similar to the demarcation between the ocean and the sand.

The line between water and sand—spirit and matter respectively—is sometimes wet; sometimes dry. The self chooses where she wants to invest herself and thereby is nourished from that nature.

Desperately wanting to be held by the divine, I saw my steps leading me, slowly, painfully, indistinctly—like the colors of the shifting sands—yet somehow surely, too, like each step I was taking. I had a faint sense of trust in the intelligence of how life; I just couldn’t sense how it would look like as it unfolded.

You can read the poem on Journey of the Heart: Women’s Spiritual Poetry blog.