The Listening Is Not Finished

Wake-up feel: 6.

Yesterday I picked up mein Stern and her mother at the station, back from the Baltic, their second home. We drove to Müllrose, then went our separate ways, and I came back — to the base camp, or the garden. I don't know yet which it is.

Rain on the tent in the night. The power bank dead, no electricity, the phone gone dark. Cut from the digital world.

The festival again, the same as the night before — techno from somewhere through the forests and across the fields, the boom of it coming up through the ground and into the pillow. I lay and felt it in the body before I heard it. Then I heard my own heartbeat, and fell asleep on that.

Woke to mist rising off the field as the sun came up. Cars in the distance. Mothers and fathers on the way to work. No engine from the fisherman's boat on the Bodden. Enough charge in the netbook to read the time. Then the 5:30 bus to Frankfurt (Oder).

Leaf day. The moon in Scorpio, in water. The body listens on a day like this, the way the ear works before the mouth.

Thirty-one years in Germany. Fifteen of them in Müllrose.

On the bus I carried three things. The thirty-one years. The fifteen. And the needs of those who have been close to me — held, not spoken.

A judge does not rule on the first testimony. He hears one, then the next, then the one who has not yet spoken. He weighs each one before he says a word. The case is not closed because the hearing is long.

The old councils knew this. War or peace, the hunt, whom to send and whom to send away — none of it fell to one voice. The circle heard each one. The heavier the matter, the longer the fire burned before anyone spoke.

At the end someone decides. The compass is the child. The family, the Gemeinschaft, the peace they are built on — that is what the needle points to.

The goodbye to the past — to the thirty-one years, to the fifteen that lie deepest in my heart, to the people who have been close to me — is already said, inside. Two weeks of tears, on the Bodden, and a smile. I let go. The past is gone. I am listening to the present now. Where I land for the next fifteen, or thirty-one, is the part still being heard.

I am not here to decide who is right. I am here to serve, and to build — with each other, with those who wish to build, out of the ruins, wherever they may lie, whenever they are ready.

Who that is, I do not yet know. The ready ones name themselves.

To cross is to keep stepping and keep listening, before the far bank shows itself.

The listening is not finished. I am here to serve, with. The council has not been held.

Seven places were on the table. Now three. What I am naming is what I need from wherever I land. Not only mine. The needs of the people who have been close to me all these years belong in this too.

Day 67 — Phase 10 — Word — Triple Warmer — Beryl — Paulo Coelho
Gut Nisdorf, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Baltic Coast
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