Who Would Take It Off

This morning left a question on the table. The day moved around it; by afternoon it had not moved at all. There is no power yet at the garden — for now, base camp — I am making ready for the coming winter, so to set this down I have come to a room that others keep lit.

A tick on the back has an answer, and a plain one. A tool, a mirror. The pharmacy in town. A neighbour. Ten minutes. I am not helpless in front of a tick. So the question was never really the tick.

Take the tick out, and what stays is this: whether I can be the one reached for. Not the one who reaches. That one I know — I am fluent in it, it is the comfortable room, it is most of a life. The tick sits on the side of me I keep turned away. The side I do not show. And the question is not who is able to take it off. It is whether I would let someone stand behind me and do it.

There is an old story about a man who would not let his teacher kneel and wash his feet. He would give anything, carry anything — but not be knelt before. He was told: then you have no part in me.

I have built that answer for everyone else. The thing that reaches the place a person cannot reach alone — I have made it, over and over, and called it work. The harder thing runs the other way: to turn the unshown side toward someone, and hold still while they do what I cannot do by myself.

I do not have the name. Maybe a name is not what is being asked for. Be still, the old line says — not solve, not name. The question does not close today. It is not the kind that closes. It is the kind you carry — until the first time you let someone take the thing off your back, and build them nothing in return.

Day 64 — Phase 9 — Hearing — Pericardium — Amethyst — Psalm 46 + Gospel of John
Gut Nisdorf, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Baltic Coast
© 2025–2026 Michel Garand | A Pilgrim's Fitness Plan | CC BY-SA 4.0
stewardship@ubec.network