Wednesday, March 13, 2013
When What Happened (poem by Dorothy)
When What Happened
When what happened to me happened,
I did not know what to make of it.
Not really.
Though I had read vague descriptions
here and there—
something about snakes
and lotus flowers.
A reference to something named
“chakras,” a word I
was not sure how to pronounce
and did not really understand.
Someone told me I had entered
“rapture,”
a word that seemed to be right
though I had never experienced
anything like this before
(I was a professor, and
rapture was not part
of the curriculum.)
Each morning
I re-experienced this strange
and delightful state,
this thrill through the blood,
but still I had no one to
talk with or who might explain
either the vocabulary or the process.
But I delighted in my happy condition
of not knowing,
recalling the familiar adage,
“ignorance is bliss.”
It was like being
the only flower
in a garden,
a rose, say,
who woke up each morning
to greet the day by blooming
all over again.
That was years ago.
Then one day the flower woke up
in a garden over crowded
with flowers and plants
of every color and variety,
voices chattering all around,
people bending their bodies
this way and that
as if in an athletic contest,
secret words bandied about
as if they were recipes for a cake
or directions for a road trip.
It was, of course, nice
to have company along the way,
to know that others
had found the path,
but something inside
kept on yearning
for those early days
of silence and solitude,
solitary blooming,
whispered inner wisdom
that only I could hear.
Dorothy Walters
March 9, 2013
