Windows - 8 (Avenues)
"… and if you lead one, or another, through those pathways to your heart – turning this way and that as they do, confusing as they are, ending sometimes in blind alleys and brief frustrations – will he (or she) find generous rooms, warm with art and soft with cushions, and a table laden for a feast?
“You are the one to guide them: you hold the light. You must meet them on the public avenue with your invitation, you step forward maybe shy maybe hesitant to meet them, ‘Welcome friend! Welcome in…’, and perhaps in your extended hand there is a place to rest and be comforted, or passage to a country they have never seen, or generosity unbidden, to make that strange walk worth taking.
— I can’t see where I am going. Will you take me carefully? That with the unexpected lift or fall you catch their faltering.
Room, by Yoshua Reece @ deviantart.com
“You are the guide; you hold the light; you welcome that friend in; you say
… here is the book with frayed cover my mother read for me, this is how she spoke the names, this is her warmth the rapt voice her story … here is the river where stones in the swirl of current cut circles in the bedrock, as though digging bells; there my heart opened to the clove and pitch and the springy step of the red pine wood … here the school where first years led to next years, where I outgrew my clothes and outgrew those friends who were here to grace one season … there, the galleries of Paris; the unimaginable spice of the Archipelago; the South American caress; the Other World beneath the Hawaiian surf; the easy stillness of the northern forests … the flint in a glance … this touch - this embrace - this surrender - this fever - this release … here, again, tomorrow
“… or leave them to walk in their private evening. If you learn the art, and clear these paths from heart to heart… all stumbling, knee-bruising, scuffed skin and the stain of slipping, the uncertain landscape, the unstable terrain… all becomes a fertile plain as you trace that map of each other, for each other.”