so...

There's this book of poetry that sits on my coffee table...it's called Risking Everything; 110 Poems of Love and Revelation.

I've had it for years and it has kind of followed me from relationship to relationship. I'm not talking about the romantic kind, necessarily. I'll flip through to find some words that remind me of someone I know, or know of. Sometimes "risking everything", "love" and "revelation" extend to your friends, aquaintances and colleagues. Although...it took me a long time to understand that.

I think it's difficult to live with the fact that people will never be what we want them to be, act how we want them to act, respond as we'd hoped. It's hard to be okay with that. It's hard to see people for who they are when you expect them to act according to your own standards.

So here, here is my choice for the night and maybe the month, or year...until the thought naturally becomes my own:

I Unpetalled You
By Juan Ramon Jimenez

I unpetalled you, like a rose,
to see your soul,
and I didn't see it.

But everything around
-horizons of lands and of seas-
everything, out to the infinite,
was filled with a fragrance,
enourmous and alive.

-Translated by Stephen Mitchell