When you are old enough, go where love is.

a poem

Photo by freestocks on Unsplash

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When you are old enough, go where love is.
 
Not merely in the quiet corners of familiar rooms
or in the soft smiles that greet you at day’s end.  
But into the wider world, where love pulses under the skin of the sky
waiting in the rough hands of the oak,  
the brisk wind sweeping across the lake,  
the hawk circling above the open field.

When you are old enough, go where love is. 
Not just the sweet familiar,  
but also to the gray and the tough,
at the ragged edges of neglected fields.

Walk quietly and look closely,  
how the spider spins its web not out of duty
but as an act of faith, delicate threads  
that catch the morning dew,
jewels hanging in the crisp air.

Go where love is in the endless patience of mountains,
the steady gaze of the moon on your solitary walks,
in the push and pull of the ocean,  
teaching you to roll with its tides,  
to embrace the salt and the spray,
the impermanent sand beneath your feet.

And when the night arrives, vast and clear,
let the stars spill their light silently over your skin.
Understand that this is love: vast, unspoken, undemanding like water
filling whatever shape it meets.

Go where love is in the kindness of strangers,  
in the symphony of the city, the unspoken peace of parks,
the rhythm of feet walking down crowded paths,  
faces lit by the shared sun, by shared struggles,  
the poetry of everyday lives unfolding beside each other.

Stay long enough to feel the heartbeat of the earth,  
to know that being lost is just another way
of finding places in yourself that maps have not named.  
This is where love breathes, in the untamed margins  
of the pages of your life story, love waiting for you to pick up the pen.

When you are old enough, go where love is. 
Not just to take shelter,  
but to nourish it in your bones,  
to cultivate it in the pause between your heartbeats,
to carry it back like a lantern illuminating the path home, so even in your silence, even in your solitude,
you will never be alone.

-Jessie Raye

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