Poetry

There is a country with no border guards, no passport stamp, no customs to declare, where every road leads inward, ever inward, and every breath becomes a kind of prayer.

You’ve been there — in the moment before sleep when all the day’s concerns begin to blur, in the stillness of a forest dark and deep, in music, when the mind grows blurred and pure.

The mystics called it many different names. The poets tried to map its shoreless sea. But every name falls short, and still it claims you, when you loose yourself from what must be.

Go there. Return. Bring something back with you. That country is the most real place you knew.

Beneath the rushing current of your thoughts, beneath the catalogue of worries and regrets, beneath the noise the restless mind has wrought, there lives a quiet you have not met yet.

It waits for you in spaces between words, in the held breath before the morning breaks, in forests where no human voice is heard, in the hush that follows all the sound that wakes.

It is not something you must learn to find — it finds you, when you stop your searching ways. The stillness is not absent from your mind. It is the ground on which your whole life plays.

Come home to it. It has been here always. Come home to the eternal, quiet days.

You are made of the same stuff as stars — forged in ancient fires, scattered far, carried across the dark between the worlds to find this body, this brief life unfurled.

When you feel small, remember what you are: not merely human, but a traveling star, here for a season, burning what you know into the darkness, making bright the road.

And when your light grows dim and hard to find, look for it in what you leave behind: the kindness given, words that held someone, the small illuminations, one by one.

You are luminous, even in your doubt. The light within you cannot be put out.

I used to pray with fists clenched tight, demanding heaven answer me, insisting that I knew what’s right, that love should come the way I see.

But grace came not through closed-off hands — it slipped between my fingers still. The more I pushed my own demands, the more I missed the holy will.

Now I open both my hands and wait, not grasping, not demanding more. What comes will come. What’s late is late. What’s lost will find its way to shore.

I pray with open hands tonight. Whatever comes, I trust the light.

May you find rest before you think you’ve earned it. May grace arrive before you’ve paid its price. May the burden that you carry lose its heaviness, if only for a moment — once, then twice.

May someone see you clearly, without conditions. May kindness find you when you least expect. May the love you cannot feel still hold you gently. May your brokenness become what you protect.

May you know that tired is not the same as failing. May you know that asking for help is brave. May the night that seems so endless turn to morning. May you give yourself the grace that you have given.

You have carried more than most would ever know. You are worthy of the rest that you are owed.