“Golden mountain”: not an image I would have thought to connect with silence which I might usually picture as cool and blue-toned like still water, more like that “perfect lake of nothing” the chatter sinks into. “Golden mountain” calls to mind a mountain suffused with sunlight, warm and radiant, a beautiful image of peace and wholeness. The sense of sight contains in it some distance, so it is interesting that we don’t see the mountain, but “apprehend” it. Hearing is something we take inside of us: I like the twist of senses at the end of the poem: the golden mountain is “waiting for us to be still enough to hear it”.

I find this poem raising questions about what does it mean to share an experience. The aroma, form and shape of the beach roses is so intense and meaningful to the speaker (“hardy, scrappy and perfectly soft,,I wanted to ..be them”). The speaker realizes that intense desire to share this experience comes from the “as if”: “as if sharing them would make somehow/ exponentially increase the delight”. There has been a few months distance from this experience, and the speaker now realizes the experience “was mine alone/and exquisite all the same”.

There is something unbridgeable about experience—scratch and sniff is nearly always unsatisfactory. Even if we are together with someone, their experience is different from our own. Is what we share with someone not our actual experience but relational: our mutual delight, our delight in their delight, our joy in seeing them touched and deeply moved, our pleasure in being together in a moment of happiness?

This week spring is coming rapidly in the wake of warm days, buds on plants, the rapid appearance of daffodils, magnolias on the side of the street that gets more sun. I think of the photo a friend shared of bloodroot, a plant I’m sure I’ve never seen before, that she saw in a local park: “the single leaf embraces and protects the flower” she wrote and had me see the rounded leaves like cupped hands. I was grateful for that sharing.

It started with the optometrist telling her: did she notice her vision getting better herself before he told her? She sounds skeptical: “What’s next?” But with him telling her this surprising finding, she opens her “improved” eyes, a change of inner vision that allows her to notice, to celebrate the details. I love the image of the “cathedral of the ribs” calls up for me the holy mystery of the beating heart, life itself. The other victory, the mind starts to be able to see thoughts as they are, “jugglers, fire swallowers, acrobats”, energetic entertainers passing in a parade, just watch them enter and leave without getting caught up in them. The light step and the dark hair are not coming back but there can be a growing wisdom of heart and mind.