Pause.

 

I have seen her bathing
in the lake, long hair drying
in the breeze. She sits
on a stone at the water’s edge
for hours and does nothing.
Her teeth have bits of dandelion
leaf stuck between them. She still
composes those poems you are
so fond of, but she sings them
into the air, finds words tracked
across sky in cloud and star. Each tree,
under her gaze, becomes its own
poem. She waits for you there,
knowing there is nothing but time.

She is the one you left behind when you
traded your bark for papers, your
stones for pens, and the sun’s
pilgrimage across the horizon
for your calendar with its tidy
color-coded boxes.

When you wake from a dream
one morning and smell
oak leaves dissolving into
the forest floor, you know this
is a love letter from her to you.

Christine Valters Paintner. “Where has the wild woman gone?”

Wisdom is a living stream, not an icon preserved in a museum. Only when
we find the spring of wisdom in our own life can it flow to future
generations.

Thich Nhat Hahn