House on Fire
Your house
is on fire.
Quick—
what will you take
with you
into that new
life,
the one
you hadn’t planned?
The one without
the layers
of meaning
and belief,
carelessly constructed yet
protected
with such
blind
tenacity?
Choose now—
will you keep
your relationships
as you’ve known them?
Your ways of being
in the world?
Will you crawl out
of the house
at last,
gasping for clean air,
having risked it all
for one momento
of the person
you used to be?
Arrogant presumption,
this pretense of choosing.
As if the Soul,
having sought
its ego-erasing crucible
would now empower
your illusions
of control.
Why keep running
back
into the wreckage?
Better to surrender
wholeheartedly.
Let the flames
take it all—even
your blueprint
for life after immolation.
Trust in the miracle
beyond your designing:
The post-surrender peace
that comes
from somehow knowing
amidst the ashes
you’ll find the treasure
that was always hiding
beneath your dross,
waiting for one more fire
to set it free.
©2011, Kimberly V. Schneider
from her forthcoming audiobook,
Terrible Beauty: Poems and Reflections
for Precarious Times
