The Wound Is the Place Where the Light Enters You (Rumi)

A wound is the most obvious abrupt opening into our inside.  While tangible and visible, a wound can also transcend to the hope of seeing beyond our insides, even beyond our world. Indeed, when I was a kid I often thought that the full moon was a clean-edged wound into the dark sky from which I could see the bright universe on the “other side”. 

Then I went to school and was told that the Moon was just a planet, a satellite to our Earth. Just like Charon is to Pluto. Interestingly, now that we know that Pluto is not a planet, I am hoping that soon we will discover that the Moon is in fact a hole in the dark skies above us…

This morning I came face–to-face to a wound. It was in a parking lot. Upon exiting my car I saw a large tree that had its massive branches too precariously attached to its trunk. So, a creative team from the city landscaping, had decided to somehow open wounds at the base of the branches, insert steel pipes into these wounds, and bet that the tree would heal around the pipes and make these its support.

And the idea was a good one. Looking at the wood and bark that have grown over the steel pipes I assumed that this intervention was done many decades ago.

… A few hours later when I returned to my car I recalled (even recited) a few lines from Rumi.

                                      My friend, in friendship I am bound to you:

                                 Wherever you set foot, I shall be the ground.

We all heal, at least from the outside. When we heal, often from inside out, we close openings others can see. We become scarred in order not to scare others. Sometimes those scars are cherished and most welcomed by others as if pearls made by mollusks to coat the intruder (often an irritant parasite) in nacre.

Other times, we heal from inside out to liberate our very inside. To make it free of itself.  As I took the ramp to the freeway, I found comfort in another line from Rumi:

I knocked and the door opened but I found that I have been knocking from the inside

January 28, 2016

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2016

Genius is childhood redefined

To take the cold away from coldness

And boil down all fear to their absolute pleasure

To let the mind touch all corners and make them round

As time does to passion so we can call it love

To sit by the fire and feel your feet so far

Away from the roads that once led to pleasant names

To be pleased with what you have and dream simple dreams

With others, or alone when in a world full of brown eyes

To quietly know that you have become who you once were

A child

And be ready to discover again

January 22, 2016

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2016

Red Cap with White Pompom

It may be just a leap

When one wakes up on a snowy night

And hears his arteries drum

Because he had dreamt

Of the dead

While feeling alive

Like a dog hacking a hairball

It might have been just a leap

But when one lands in the same place

Was it a leap?

Too early for coffee, too late for new dreams

But a walk in the snow is like a forbidden book

One knows not to read yet each page turns one’s fingers

To point

To the same point

Where the leap was taken

At the drum beat of neck arteries

So loud

January 7, 2016

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2016

I took this photo in Jerome, AZ a day before Christmas 2015