to newly envisage one's self

Mike’s Gifts

a gift of Mike’s

is complete absorption in the world of another,

in those intense minutes together

the universe centers

and all else circles distantly

away from those grounded connected souls,

another gift of Mike’s

is a vision of how that multitude of centers

can connect and circle together

toward a rightness that needs to be,

each of us circling that of God

with love, like gravity,

holding us together with each other,

I feel the price inherent in such connection,

Gandhi’s favorite Hindu passage warned

that real lovers of God “feel others’ sorrows as their own,”

and Mike’s years of leaning into the pain

former students felt from great mistakes in the past

must have wounded him,

his empathy and action healing them

while the hurt lingers in him,

how wonderful that one can still go West, 

into the frontier

and newly envisage one’s self,

San Francisco, no longer the physical frontier,

lives the cultural frontier

where the grandness of a welcoming America

can return us to our best.

with love, from Henry H. Walker

April 24, ‘16