Stumbling Into Joy

What has happened to me that I long now to be warm? To sleep on sheets beneath blankets rather than in a ratty sleeping bag dropped wherever my eyes fall shut? I stay in bed sometimes until the sun rises, its fractured rays filtering through half-drawn curtains and childish prisms. Have you seen what light is made of? What dream of ruin and deprivation did I reenact before stumbling into joy like a bear? My brain is like a birch tree or maybe a chunk of quartz cleaned by a brook or even a chickadee resting at dusk in the pines. When I dream of broken-down cars, nobody needs to get anywhere. When I dream of burning maps, everyone is already home. Was it a thousand mornings of darkness and cold - walking with my head down hill after steepening hill - that taught me gratitude? Was my suffering real, a precedent unto grace? And where am I now that a cup of tea should be as broad and textual as the world? My body knows how to die, and so what remains but to be amazed? I remember in Vermont discovering a fox would lead me out of the world home. Now I can let them be, being no longer starved for symbols, and ready - almost - for the wordless this.