“There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in”.

 ~ Leonard Cohen

Waffling between beguiling and betrayed,
your hesitant glance triggers alarm…
gut instincts recoil,
avoidance invoked,
distance calls,
validation denied,
full circle of angst

conceded.  

Projections

from an unhinged soul,

a heavy heart
in quicksand,
speak a language all their own;
vocabulary of fear,
sadness and regrets
personified.  

This involuntary

glimpse,

unguarded moment,
defense in neutral,
vulnerability exposed;
defaults to
shuttered windows,
locked doors.  

Nothing less than
compassionate

but complete

disintegration in its entirety,
of your distorted
world of illusion
is the exit door
to your groundhog day.  

Only

here and now

will free you from
there and then;
buoyed up from

bottomless well,

insatiable appetite,
for more.  

Vanquish

your apparitions

in the presence
of the present.
Past and future
have no external reality,
outside the oppressive confines
of your imploding mind. 

And where exactly
in this soul constellation
do our

convoluted paths

intersect?

And what is it
 that you mirror
in secret chambers of my heart.

 

Copyright © Henri Ferguson 2013 All Rights Reserved
 
Author Notes
We all experience wounding in life and the act of recognizing our own pain in others is a way of allowing light into each other’s darkness. As Leonard Cohen so aptly states; “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in”. Hanging on to, and prolonging the anguish of painful situations from the past is a destructive illusion that separates us from a vibrant joyful life in the present.
The expression goes “It takes one to know one”, meaning that when we recognize a certain quality in another individual it implies that this same exists within us, or at least we have an intuitive understanding of what we observe. This knowing can facilitate deeper connections with others or when we’re not feeling secure and stable, result in alienation and distance. When we live our lives from a place of empathy we can acknowledge others’ life pain without needing to analyse or fix it and just be present in a validating way.
This write was prompted by someone who I don’t know well but run into occasionally and often walked away with a feeling that I have just interacted with a wounded soul?  I am reminded that by being another’s witness, hearing silence, seeing stillness and holding a  compassionate mirror, I can invite light into the secret chambers of my heart.