12/17/2023
Sin cere - on being with our holes
Friends, you may not know that in addition to offering classes and groups, I also write poetry to bring light to the healing journey. This week's poem arose from a prompt from Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer and Augusta Kranta's Soul Writer's Circle. The theme was courage, and it was a day when inspiration - and courage - felt absent.
I was recovering from another bout of illness - a frequent visitor in my guest house these days - and I felt vulnerable. When the time came to write, my eyes went to the broken clock on my desk. And from there, a poem came about the courage to delight in the full array of our human glory - our sorrows, shame and sincerity.
A dear teacher of mine, Stephen Jenkinson, once trained as a stone carver, and shares a story about the origin of the word sincere. It comes from the Latin sin "without" and cera "wax." We think of sincerity as genuineness or honesty, someone who doesn't hide who they are or disguise their motives.
But the 'long story' of the word, as Stephen calls it, comes from stone carving. There are many grades of marble - the most precious and valuable is statuario marble, because of its capacity to show the subtlest carving details in her stone. The poor man's marble is travertine, and has holes that prevent this subtle carving.
Enterprising carvers would take travertine, create a paste with beeswax and travertine dust, and fill the holes so that the marble looked 'whole and flawless.' Viola! Travertine marble that looked like statuario.
This story makes me smile. Oh, to look flawless to the untrained eye! How often have we attempted that? But if we're sin cera, we don't fill our holes with dust and mirage. We are without wax, and the holes, they show.
Sin cera
The clock on my desk needs new batteries
or has finally succumbed to every time it
was dropped. It's stuck in a soft tick, tick.
The second hand moves back and forth,
from four to five, like a gentle tide.
If clocks breaks so easily, what about tender
human flesh? What about the heart with its
four chambers, her soft red sheath of skin?
What about every wizened thing inside that
makes you recoil, and hide?
I'd like to write a line about being brave,
the time I faced my fears and came out shining,
holding a pearl of wisdom. But today courage
is seeing my broken clock. Would you call
it courage if I told you that I delight
in her creamy metal skin, the second hand
that stumbles at the four?
Would you call it courage if I told you
that despite everything in me that feels broken
I choose to delight in myself? What if
I told you that courage, like love,
doesn't have to be earned?
