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We wear the weekday hats
and costumes,
in the stores, the factories,
the offices,
and weekend gatherings,
baseball
and football,
warrior games,
flags and anthems;
and at night
in the bars,
the face paint, tattoos, dances;
and on weekends
in churches and synagogue,
the skull cap and fringed shawl,
psalms and tribal chants,
and every refrain means
we belong, we belong, we belong.
Beneath the melodies,
between the words,
a silence,
a nakedness
covered by the caps
and uniforms,
stillness
like the moment
we were born,
helpless and beheld -
on the edge between
death and life,
being and longing to be -
when we witnessed
that before anything
there was only
love.
2 comments:
“Before anything there was only love”. Or perhaps “aloneness”? Which is perhaps what you mean by the “silence/nakedness covered by the caps and uniforms”? Existential aloneness. Ergo our need to belong. Belonging is so much a part of our DNA, it’s hard to argue against it, unless the only way we express our belonging is through superficial means (like tattoos and uniforms).
I’m not sure that aloneness precedes everything. We are born, which means someone gives us life. In most cases, but admittedly not all, giving birth elicits the purest form of love of one person to another. The love that would have a parent sacrifice their own lives for the life of their child. I believe that’s the same love that permeates all of life, if we allow it to. Living tends to get in the way - the personas and uniforms of society, the belonging that is the performative kind. I’m trying to say that if we strip the layers away we may realize that what is actually fundamental is that we belong to each other and all of the universe, because the universe has given birth to each and everyone of us.
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