Christopher Woods, Wingspan
Faith
Maria Berardi
One morning in second grade, called to get out of bed
and full of the mammal reluctance to do so,
I found myself watching myself trying to move,
I found the watching prevented the moving:
I could think about raising my arm, and I could raise it,
but not, never, in the same millisecond.
From back in my mind, I noticed this,
this disturbing fact
that consciousness and action somehow prohibited each other,
that to act was to let go
of watching and allow my body
to be purely creatural.
And I have come, an unbeliever,
to live in the faith of this childhood epiphany,
that to take action
is to let go of awareness in the actual moment's movement,
to somehow trust
that I will again be there on its other side;
to jump into void
with every increment of actual living,
to go forward, to say I do,
to know, in my body,
that in the cold universe if I move
I will warm up.
Maria Berardi
One morning in second grade, called to get out of bed
and full of the mammal reluctance to do so,
I found myself watching myself trying to move,
I found the watching prevented the moving:
I could think about raising my arm, and I could raise it,
but not, never, in the same millisecond.
From back in my mind, I noticed this,
this disturbing fact
that consciousness and action somehow prohibited each other,
that to act was to let go
of watching and allow my body
to be purely creatural.
And I have come, an unbeliever,
to live in the faith of this childhood epiphany,
that to take action
is to let go of awareness in the actual moment's movement,
to somehow trust
that I will again be there on its other side;
to jump into void
with every increment of actual living,
to go forward, to say I do,
to know, in my body,
that in the cold universe if I move
I will warm up.