I Cannot Wait for You to Know You Are Good

I cannot wait for you to know you are good
to relieve the judge, send the jury home
and pronounce yourself worthy of love without condition
no more thinking your wounds are who you are
no more heroic sacrifices to atone for your shortcomings
no more hiding your distinct beauty in the deeps of the cave
no more fingers crossed that there might be some better time or place than this

Let us imagine together
the day is drawing close
where you stop combing through clues
weaving biased little bits of evidence into half-hearted arguments
to convince someone somewhere that your life might be more
than a missed opportunity
that your value might be more than the money you can get for it
that your stray daydreams and wild ideas might be no less precious
than whatever it is you do to keep your belly fed and your body warm
that the unfathomably unlikely happenstance of your existence
deserves nothing less than a raucous celebration
and a measure of your self-expression
hard-poured to the brim and beyond
spilling out all over

What if today is the day you finally understand
no effort is wasted
the only way to do it wrong is to give up growing
because you keep thinking you are doing it wrong

What if your values are vectors
Your strengths all angles
Your passion (times) your intention (times) the breadth of your vision
(equals) a extraordinary volume in non-ordinary space
What if the point of your existence is to scribe and craft a unique shape?
a bold promising prism never before seen
yet obvious in its elegance
labyrinthine in its complexity
unfathomable in its design to any mind other than yours
and only available for an eyeblink in the entire arc of the universe
a dream manifested and given to the world
because that is who you are

And what about the rest of us?
so many many bizarre shapes?
Consider that all these odd geometries aren’t just a random menagerie
but perhaps puzzlish pieces meant to snap together
slide in and snug up tight to form something so grand
so vast we cannot see it at all from here
cannot remotely comprehend our communal architecture
cannot imagine it in the same way a neuron cannot imagine
a brain organizing an electric cascade of thoughts and images
into the word wash of a poem about overcoming insecurity
and leaning into collective transcendence

Could it be that the places where your strangeness intersects mine
form the tiniest little dewdrop nodes in the higher-dimensional nervous system web
of a creature beyond anything we can conceive? 

What if the best way for cells like us to contribute to our cooperative creature
is to shed the weight of wishes that we be anything we are not
and learn to love ourselves so well, so much
that the only choices that make any sense to us are those that summon and nurture
our best selves?

What if your dharma and my dharma, described in so many byzantine ways
are really as simple as that?

stop trying to be anything you are not
buy into the game of your own goodness

love yourself without reason
let rest follow naturally
inevitably

you are so good
I cannot wait for you to know you are good