There is a place that lies there hidden,
quiet beneath
the cacophony of life.
Like the hue of green,
which though predominant
has its shades of light and dark
and underneath a canvas blank,
its colour just a reflection of light.
So everything on the surface,
the buzz and business of the world,
hides behind it,
a vastness stretched
as a prairie in the evening sun,
or desert sweeping to infinity,
empty of much but the endless sky,
quiet as an encompassing womb.
That we might spend our whole lives
looking, and evading
this quiet mirror,
the still length of unfurled cotton,
this blue-print
of our wide-eyed self.
The place that in all our living
we have left as a discarded shell.
Ana Lisa de Jong
Living Tree Poetry
February 2021
– Perhaps this place of creation is frightening, the broad silence, the eerie loneliness, but to be fully human, we must not be afraid of the deep silences and caverns within us, where we learn to see in both the light and the dark, and discover ourselves as we are naked and vulnerable, but this place is also a place of peace and redemption, where creation is always happening, and springing from.
“Many of us spend our whole lives running from feelings with the mistaken belief that you cannot bear the pain. But you have already born the pain. What you have not done is feel all you are, beyond that pain.”
— Kahlil Gibran
Living Tree Poetry 