Moving! It's so incredibly stressful! And sometimes I think how badly I handle stress, how small things like leaky washing machines, stoves that don't fit in the space designed, DMVs with long lines and unhelpful service agents, and well, the long list of decisions and things that must be done . . . Seriously, these are not life-threantedning events or decisions, but they drive me nuts. And well, sometimes they make me unto someone I don't want to be . . .
In the midst of all this, just last week I received a wonderful collection of poems by Thomas R. Smith, and I was stopped by this one poem:
YOUR INNER FACE
Like everyone, you have two faces: One of them others see, in restaurants and banks--it's only approximate, the probable cause when you feel misjudged by the world.
On the inside there's another face through which you reach toward that world: Pure gesture, it registers instantaneously each nuance of feeling, like a film star of Mother Teresa, an interior sky. When you weep, clouds darken with rain: when you laugh, all the pigeons fly up in to the light.
It's this face you'd prefer to be known by, so true to its desires, unbelievably beautiful. When two people glimpse it in each other, we call that love--and if someone should see all the secret faces at once, heaven.