The Remembering Place

' If you are irritated by every rub, how will your mirror be polished? '
   - Rumi

‘My Love, you are memory, you are all I try to forget, but can’t...
We have been apart too long to stay in chains, I must absorb you,
    breathe you in like air, swallow you like water..
 The viscosity of you is that of my blood flowing to keep me alive...
 You are the mist I feel on my skin but cannot see...
 You are always all around me and nowhere as well and at once...
 We, together are everywhere, unable to be destroyed...
  This is how we shall endure, wrapped in the mystery from  
    which we originated..’
 
 
Here I sit, remembered.
The leaves of trees above rustle
with my voice repeating all I have told them
in their gentle language and reminding me
of our past meetings and how I have grown
like they have.
 
More leaves emerge to shade
to require rain, yet I have been shaded  
in their midst as I have grown and yet
my leafing out continues.
My summer drags on and doesn’t  
fear its end.
 
Every summer I return to see  
my summer friends again and
somehow the wild things are still here.
They go on living so I believe I can too.
The summer beauty motivates me to
make it to the next one.
 
And when it fades it has a beauty  
all its own and it promises to return,
to not fully depart, in this way  
Summer lives on through my memory of it.
I see myself in every leaf, and how finite
they all are yet I cannot be defined by this,
I have too much growing to do.
 
The reflection changes but will not be
rubbed away from my memory even as
the leaves meet Autumn to fall and change.
I shall return next year undaunted by remembrance  
and what it has done to my landscape
how it has changed me.
 
Underneath the trees I am the same as before
as they are, fully remembered and alive
here underneath them and sheltered by them
in this shade of insight where I am renewed
in this remembering place.
 
     ‘ What hurts you blesses you,
       darkness is your candle’
 
                          .....

       #Rumi