Letting the outside in

The garden is coming inside.

Before the ivy it was that climbing vine. The world seems determined to breach the boundaries.

Others have blackbirds hopping into steal the cat food; tits flying in to nest; badgers arriving for sandwiches and foxes for peanut butter. It's the vines that cross my threshold.

Young and in love, I told my partner that I was like the honeysuckle, wrapping its tendrils around him. Now I know how that causes the young trees to mutate and spiral in response.

I think of scarred wood, the callouses of trees, as an eternal pain that is lived for ever rather than felt for a time.

I think of Simone Weil saying that the afflicted person is no longer a person, for the ultimate affliction is not to be seen. The eyes averted, the attention turned away. The act of love is to seen the unseen among us. To see the suffering cow behind the burger as much as the homeless woman on the street. You don't just look, you attend, and the many dimensions of the other's reality are there before you, in their suffering, their fear, their heart-sick longing. And what you see is not just the other but the act that you then are drawn to do. To give love and to give help. To see the person is the first step toward easing the affliction - and as soon as you see, as you fully acknowledge that person, that being, then it is not possible to do nothing.

Well, you can do nothing. But you will forever know that you sinned.

The radical act of letting the outside in.