August 2015 Words + Art Reading + Poem

“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me”…

But they did, they surely did. Every unkindness expressed, an impossibly sharply whittled bamboo sliver, slid between ribs, into hearts, under fingernails.

Torture inflicted upon me, Me inflicting torture upon all the thees in reflexive response.

A special destiny – for a time that seemed infinite – to live in constructed and self-constructed houses of bamboo shards, poking the eye of truth, puncturing the flight of confidence, at every turn. Walking carefully to avoid further pain. Slipping into the shadows of invisibility to go …undetected.

But the nature and voice were too strong, too innately joyful, to stay invisible.

And then the bamboo houses unfurled and became something new.

Bamboo shaped different meaning. No longer instrument of torture, but symbol of strength, of adaptability, of rapid growth and weathering of winds where mighty wood falls.

Currencies reevaluated. Worth measured in other forms. Comforts remembered, in bamboo, in miso, in rock gardens, in gyoza, in seiza – which in transcending the outward, I could sit forever.

I enter the bamboo house now, airy and light and full of promise, and dissolve in the turning outward.