Vacated Space Poem by Joan Woodbridge

The deciduous year attenuates
draws thin
my insubstantial resolve.

What beyond a certain grief can I make of this?

Is not failure in the striving itself?

What marks the way
between efforting and too easy acceptance?
beyond the failed dialogue between recrimination and defense?

The year contracts

Ah! Vacated Space again
at once
a stark statement of emptiness
and the quantum paradox of concurrent fullness

What remains?
non-striving stillness
awaiting
'not so much information, but transformation'*
and silence

the silence born of
profound listening.

* Rabbi David Ingber
November 28,2010
Thanksgiving
Stockbridge, MA