This is amazing, you know. When you begin to see how simple and what's at the back of all faith experience, that it is love, that it is this... And it's not a psychological condition because psychologically your condition may be i- in a dark place of depression or loneliness or woundedness or violence done to you, and yet if you can find the space within you which is loved The strength that comes out of that is extraordinary and here is the poem I mentioned.
Ascension
I choose. That’s the trick of it. I choose
the cinema, the chipper, the warm bath—
and choosing, I already live the thing,
the future leaking backwards into now
the way the smell of boiling fowl could lift
a bus-ride home to mother.
And she would say, I'll have a dinner ready.
Because she got the recipe from her mother,
Who got it from hers—the nutmeg and the spuds,
the organic free range feathered fowl,
And then the broth that filled the kitchen, the great pot
a kind of covenant, matrilineal, plain.
I was seventeen.
knew exactly what was coming.
That is the mercy of tradition: certainty
As embodiment of love, or love that works through habit.
And so with this Ascension. The story ends with leaving.
He sends a text: I'm already at the restaurant.
He has gone ahead—not vanished, but just changed location,
the way a friend is vanished, when they’re on the plane.
We call it kingdom, the sovereignty of tomorrow —
The confidence of saying I know where I’m going now
I choose to believe this. Too much is made
of chance—as if faith were a leap off stone
and not just stepping toward a table,
set by someone else for you,
She hears you coming down the long hall,
and has begun to pour.
The aperture opens.
The cosmos comes in.
Love is the trick of all happiness, I suppose —
and I am home before I reach the door.
","author_name":"Michael Harding"}