The Hollow
I carried it for years. A small light, curled in the hollow just beneath my chest. I thought it was mine. I protected it. Wrapped it in reason, in rules, in the story of who I was. Seasons passed. The shell thickened. The light dimmed. One morning, I found a sparrow had made a nest in the hollow of an old redwood stump, split by lightning, opened by time. Inside: feathers. A broken egg. Something soft, that once waited to become. What was guarded was never owned. That knowing changed everything. I sat beside the stump. I did not speak. I did not move. I just listened, until the warmth returned, and then I wept.
Some Backstory…
When I wrote this, I had been reading several of Pema Chödrön’s books. I was reflecting on the concept of bodhichitta: the soft spot in the heart that never closes, no matter how much we try to shield it. She writes about how we armor ourselves. Not out of malice, but out of love, confusion, and the need to survive.
I began writing a poem around that idea: the slow building of a carapace over the heart, shaped “not by fear, but love misread.” Another line emerged: “the jewel mistaken as one’s own, starving on its shrine.” The poem took form. When I “finished,” it felt philosophically true, but something was missing. The emotion wasn’t there. I had written about the ache. I hadn’t written from it.
So I let it sit.
Eventually, I reread it and began again. And somewhere in that rereading, an old memory returned. I was young, on a camping trip with my parents, when I found a bird’s nest tucked into the hollow of a redwood stump. Inside were the broken blue shards of what had once been eggs. I thought something terrible had happened. That the babies had been taken. I remember feeling sad.
My father told me the birds had simply grown up. That they had flown away. That they no longer needed the nest.
Maybe he was right. But part of me was still sad.
This poem came from that place.
The one that knows we cannot hold on forever.
The one that still sits beside the stump,
waiting for the warmth to return.
Background music in audio by Ramón de Smit
I’ve reread The Hollow several times over the last couple of days.. trying to pinpoint what it is about your words, besides the rippling soft cascade of them, that keep me doing so, Glen.
The image of the hollow place open with remnants of what had been a viable living thing that had dwelled in that space before it left…that is what keeps speaking to me.
I find your words vesper soft and perfectly spare eliciting the memory of the life that the hollow sheltered ..speaking to a presence still felt/aspects of it still seen despite absence …personally meaningful.
This is a beautiful poem.
As you can see my words are completely clumsy disjointed musings…made clumsier still because I might be totally missing the intent of your poem…but I am going to leave them…as they lay…
because I had promised you earlier to come back and I didn’t want you to think that I had forgotten.
Interesting how re-reading stirs up old memories “wrapped in reason”. And how subsequent writing can help peel off the layers.