A wisdom poem on the origin of evil

Keeper of the Shards: a Cycle of Consent

Orientation

A heart holds what opposes.
Without collapse, without erasure.
The still point, where
friction births manifestation.

This is true.

Evil loose in the streets.
The window shatters
on the stone cathedral floor.
Pale winter light
reveals its stubborn beauty.

Clarity and numbness
occupy the same breath.
With a cosmic hum
beneath the chaos.

You are the keeper now
of shards on the floor.
Seeds under snow.

What grows, even in this winter,
will not save the window.
This is the unbearable tension
of seeing clearly.

Morning Alignment

I offer my attention to the still point.
May I hold what opposes,
neither canceling the other.

May I be keeper of fragments,
when I would rather be
a keeper of wholeness.

May I consent to the season:
winter, breakdown, ice and masks.
And the hum beneath.

Not the mask, the lie, the numbness.
If grief is what’s required,
may I become that.
I do not look away.

I do not ask to save the cathedral.
I ask to tend what fragments remain.

I consecrate this day to the Heart.
The center, holding
what tears itself apart,
into manifestation.

Amen.

Evening Release

May you rest knowing you stood
between seeing clearly
and changing nothing,
and you did not go numb.

May the fragments you kept—
the words you wrote, the attention you held,
the refusal to become the lie—
settle as seeds beneath tonight’s snow.

May your grief be received
as the conscious suffering it is:
nourishment for the manifestation
still forming in the dark.

You were not the mask.
You were not the numbness.
You were the keeper of fragments
in the season of breaking,
and that is enough for tonight.

The window will not be whole tomorrow.
But the shards you tended today
still remember their color,
still hold the light they were cut to hold.

Rest in that.

Amen.

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Logion 42
Yeshua said:
Be passersby.

Logion 48
Yeshua said:
If two make peace with each other
in a single house,
then they can say to the mountain: “Move!”
And it will move.

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Jean-Yves Leloup, The Gospel of Thomas, Inner Traditions, 2005

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