Living Tree Poetry

What if we were wrong
and the aim is not to grow,
or at least
not to perfect ourselves,
as pots hardened in a kiln.

What if we were to expand
instead,
and then crack slowly open.
What if we made to break,
and start again.

What if to shatter,
just now and again,
felt like some kind of enormous relief.
What if we were to melt
down as snow.

What if perfection
were established as the myth it is,
and the crushed became the
oil to
anoint the earth.

What if we could hold
the broken pieces of us with
reverence,
regarding the intrinsic worth
of each.

And then offer them up
surrendered,
cast back into clay,
and reworked to
another shape.

What if suffering were the
path to salvation –
this road not always chosen,
but which in reflection
might become a better way.

What if opportunity
and new beginnings are things
wrung out of the old,
like precious jewels retrieved and
melted down as gold.

Yes, what if we were wrong
and the aim is not to be
right,
so right that no-one questions
our holiness.

What if sometimes to
be wrong is right,
and to be weak is strong,
and true growth sometimes
is to fall with the leaves

and turn like the seasons
into mulch,
and earth,
and the soil
to sustain new life.

Ana Lisa de Jong
Living Tree Poetry
September 2019

‘“What else can I do?” God had asked.  There was something else.  What could not be won through power, he would win through suffering.’
– Phillip Yancey, Disappointment with God

‘The place of the wound is the place of the healing. The place of the break is the place of the greatest strength. That’s why Jesus himself, even in his resurrected body, reappears with the wounds still in his hands, in his side, in his feet.’
—Richard Rohr, Breathing Under Water: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps