What the Heart Knows

We do know...to reach for each other

(The image says: the barriers are real, built, inherited, reinforced—but they are not the deepest truth. The deepest truth is that the luminous selves inside are already reaching for one another.)

What the Heart Knows

They built the cages first.

Before we knew one another’s names.
Before we touched.
Before we discovered that your grief
could recognize mine
without translation.

They built them from fear,
then called the fear wisdom.

They used borders,
doctrine,
color,
class,
history edited by the victors,
and wounds handed down
like family silver.

They taught us to look through wire
and see an enemy.

To look through distance
and call it difference.

To mistake the architecture surrounding us
for the shape of the human being inside.

And still...

something in us leans forward.

Something ungoverned.

The heart does not always obey
the walls erected around it.

It recognizes warmth.
It recognizes hunger.
It recognizes the hand, uncertain,
reaching from the other side.

Perhaps that is why so much effort
is spent keeping us apart.

Because when we come close enough
to see one another clearly,
the story begins to fail.

The stranger has a mother.

The enemy laughs.

The unwanted child, dreams.

The person we were instructed to fear
carries tenderness,
shame,
memory,
and hope
All in a body as breakable as our own.

This does not mean the cages are imaginary.

They are metal.
They are law.
They are money.
They are violence.
They are the repeated lie
until the lie becomes a road
we forget was ever constructed.

To love is not to look away from that.

Love without awareness
can become another comfortable blindness.

So we must see clearly.

See the cage.
See who built it.
See who profits when we remain afraid.
See how easily pain can be recruited
to guard the very structure
that confines us.

And then...

create from what we know.

Not from innocence.
Not from denial.
Not from some soft fantasy
Or some harsh and imagined victory

Create from awakened tenderness.

From the knowledge
that we have been separated deliberately,
and that reaching toward one another
is therefore not weakness.

It is refusal.

It is reconstruction.

It is the quiet, stubborn declaration:

You will not teach my heart
to abandon what it knows.

There is a living being inside you.

There is a living being inside me.

And though the cages may touch
before our hands can,

we can begin there—

at the place where the light in me
leans toward
the light in you.

gracias, queridas xox