Making Room

This morning I reflect on the ways that I have missed your attempts to be seen. I feel how I am, at times, drawn into expressive exchanges with others, which perhaps more loud and visible, can take away from the smaller, no less felt, quieter words of the more accommodating presences within a room.

Like yours.

All of our modes of conversing come together, and they attract and deter connection in their own way. The strong, outgoing, and determined; meets with the tender, withheld, and observing. We pass over, duck beneath, hide and misplace; just as we align, collaborate, infuse and make contact. We miss each other perhaps more often than we find our way.

I must acknowledge, that I contribute to passing over you, in my own humanity and limitation. And in the moments when tearfulness in you has wanted to emerge with others who could hold you, but have perhaps chosen not to --

I know that I am called, when I am able, to offer the holding you are asking for.

Why are we so apt to avoid the quieter moments with one another?  Where does this need to fill the silence, quickly and with our own maneuvered interruptions, come from?

Together, we have too many needs to fill any one moment. 

Let us quiet them within ourselves, when to patiently delay our own urgent needs will provide no further damage to our loneliness. May we court our own longing to be met by others -- with the matured places within ourselves. When we can see that the quiet vulnerability of another, easily overlooked, is more important than our own momentary desire for attention and witnessing.

*original version posted on "From Dirt", February 23, 2020