Taming the glowworms

Today, I’d like to think of them as glowworms in the night, twinkling in isolation, briefly glittering. But before their fire dies out, I’d like to take them in hand and throw all of them towards someone who is ill.

I don’t know what the patient’s bed looks like, I don’t know whether there is a window in the room, I don’t know whether the room is settled in soft light coming in though a curtained window or if it is hushed and dark. I don’t even know whether I have a right to access this room or not because it is a pretty real room and there is a pretty real patient in it in pain. Yet, I’d like to manifest my temerity just this once.

So: While my hands are full of words — a thousand billion of them, snaking over my fingers, cracking jokes from behind my nails, peeping from between the folds of my palm lines, having an Armageddon or a tea party (I wouldn’t really know) — I’d like to borrow some love. For while such a lot of words make a lot of noise, love has silent hands. Invisible ones too, that I can use now to tame these glowworms. To give them the wings of my imagination and let them fly, burning through the air, fast, in irrevocable speed, towards the window in the room.

Maybe it’s open, maybe this window that lies between my imagination and the world’s reality can, just briefly, unclasp its latch.

Then, the glowworms go in right to your bed, travel beneath the sleeve of your dress, dance before your eyelids and burst. So, that you too, my patient, have a dream. That you are well and whole, that amid the hills, where the turbulent river of brooding flows, where there is but one tree to climb, one branch to hop on to, one song to sing, that there you find one who claps so silently that you can’t hear him. One who has invisible hands full of words but knows the silent withholding of all talking. One who would be silent, companionably and in joy throughout, but demands to be talked to if he is human, and if he is divine, waits without murmur.

For the divine is in silent love with you and me all the time. No number of words can get Him down from his tree. But one can climb up. And perhaps it will be like this: That you never really climbed; you merely wanted to and He came down and picked you up. And, before you knew it, asked for it, made a nest for you near his eyes.

So that even if you look away from him you are never far from his gaze. But, if you chance to look into his eyes, or better still want to, you can find all the glowworms you like and not a sign of the night. All your songs are there, all your hills — without this daily pantomime.

Then, you’ll sing full-throated, carefree, sweet words. And when the time comes, flutter your wings, leap, take off from one of his invisible palms to another.