REVERSING THE FALL

Wishing everyone a fulfilling, joyous, and extended season of thanksgiving and gratitude for one another and the deep happiness of just being alive. —VBP

For Chris who took us there and

I swear the earth shall surely be complete to him or her who shall
be complete.
The earth remains jagged and broken only to him or her who
remains jagged and broken.
— Walt Whitman, “A Song for the Rolling Earth –No. 3”

At Canyon de Chelly,
at its infinite edge,
looking down, ten thousand feet down, overcome,
opened before its untouchable grace,
forbidden,
its visible fields, far meadows, and groves,
its terranean stream,
safe, far away,
so far away, exultantly far, that its grace
becomes our desire;
and the stories we tell to ourselves,
the lives we would live there,
our longing for dawns on the floor of the deep,
in the mind of the place, canyon walls guiding
light through the brain.
At the infinite edge, the urge is to fly,
to embrace what is seen … but the fall,
the mortal distinction,
the death between flesh and world.
We walked
down into the canyon that day, actually down, descending
into desire, and
into the real canyon we’d seen,
reaching the stream, our real feet in the mud,
swifts in the air above us, sky above them,
actually there, there with our bodies,
our real nerves touching the rock, the water;
we were
what we’d desired, our brains filled with the place
and what we had made of the place, together
reversing the Fall.
At the farthest part of ourselves
we’d disappeared into de Chelly;
the distance had opened
out into that place in the self
no longer the self, but complete,
as one might glance at the morning star and know
no distance exists between eyes and light,
between light and brain,
between stars and the self’s earthly night.

(Image derived from tsaiproject)