The Sacred Work of Softness

Some people are carrying entire wars inside them—

resentments stacked like sandbags,

grief turned to rot,

rooms sealed off so long that nothing can breathe.

And it leaks.

Into how they speak.

Into how they touch.

Into how they leave—

or never arrive at all.

It's not always their fault.

And it's also not yours to fix.

You can love someone

without walking barefoot through their broken glass.

You can hold compassion

without becoming their casualty.

You don't have to metabolize someone else's poison

as if it were medicine.

You don't have to echo their pain

to prove you're listening.

You don't have to contort your nervous system

to accommodate their chaos.

You can witness without absorbing.

You can stay soft without becoming a sponge.

You can attune without being consumed.

You can remain awake

without being flayed open.

And sometimes—

we are that person.

The one leaking.

The one whose unhealed places

spill into rooms we meant to keep safe,

onto people we meant to love well.

Notice it. Be curious. Turn toward

what's been left untended.

Not with the harsh light of self-judgment,

not with the demand that you should have known better—

but the way you might sit with a child

who is lost and reaching in the only way they know,

who needs presence more than correction.

That part of you that leaks

is not your worst self.

It is your most unmet self.

And it has been waiting

for you.

The relief was never out there.

Not in the spillage. Not in the spinning.

Only here,

in the alchemizing crucible

of your own tender-heartedness.

Because beneath the wars,

beneath the leaking and the spinning,

beneath everything we contracted into

just to survive—

there is something that was never wounded.

A wellspring. Quiet, patient, inexhaustible.

The love we were before we learned

we needed to protect ourselves from life.

And we can choose, if we'd like,

to let it move through us again.

To wash our world in it.

To be, simply,

what we always already were.

This is the sacred work:

to feel the fire without stepping into it,

to tend our own wounds honestly,

to choose what we carry,

to choose what we pass on—

and to remember, with time,

that we have always had the power

to wash the world in love.