life

From Dancing Moons, 1995, by Nancy Wood

 

I invite you to life

and you send regrets.

Sorry can’t come, too late or

too soon, too busy, too scared,

Too much involved in the business of living.

 

The reasons you give

are a song all their own.

off-key and shallow, with the sound

of avoidance, the rhythm

Familiar, the words echoing the same old excuses.

 

I’ll issue no more invitations

to you. The party’s been

cancelled, the guests won’t arrive

in time to find me having

 

A dance all my own. You see,

 

I invited myself to my life

and finally accepted.

From Dancing Moons, 1995, by Nancy Wood

 

The space between events is where

most of life is lived. Those half-remembered moments

of joy or sadness, fear or disappointment, are merely

beads of life strung together

to make one expanding necklace of experience.

 

The space between events is where

we grow old. From sunrise to sunset one day lives

as another day emerges from the fluid womb of dawn,

the first bead strung upon

the everlasting thread of life.

 

The space between events is where

knowledge marries beauty. In quiet reflection

we remember only the colored outline of events,

the black and white of war, the rosiness

that surrounded our first love.

 

The space between events is why

we go on living. The laughter of a child or

the sigh of wind in a canyon becomes the music

we hear expanding in our hearts each time

we gather one more bead of life.