Have you noticed how you and I can be around our young ones?

How we look at saplings, at puppies, at babies?

No, that’s not quite right, we don’t look, we behold

I wonder, would you please behold me that way – just for a while?

Better still for a lifetime

I don’t mean the cooing or the smiling

or the way you might tickle me and tell me I’m delicious - delightful as that can be

I’m talking about the infinite ways you can bring yourself, all of yourself, to all of me

The way you know that I’m whole - safe and sound - just as I am

The way you know that I’m still growing, a forever unfinished body of hope

The way you can be with my sadness, my rages, my strokes of genius

The way you respond to my small-minded, hidden acts of malice

and my colossal acts of kindness with ferocious, truthful lightness

The way you land us both safe on the side of trusting that this both is - and isn’t - my whole story

I think you do all of this out of faith – am I right?

Faith in me

Faith that, like a holy hologram, the whole is here in every part

Faith in the ragged becoming that I am

But you must also do it out of faith in yourself – am I right?

Faith that you can greet whatever is here and welcome all that is yet to come

Faith in the ragged becoming that you are too

Have you noticed how you and I can be around our young ones?

How we look at saplings, at puppies, at babies?

No, that’s not quite right, we don’t look, we behold

And have you noticed how they behold us too?

A small, potent, goodness-seeking missile to the heart

I’m not sure which comes first?

Perhaps there isn’t a first, only an in-between

You’re safe and I’m sound

You’re sound and I’m safe

Something like that