To the One Sitting with Her Shadow

Sometimes you feel the edges fray,

the subtle fractures that hum with vulnerability.

But, Mon amour…

that doesn’t make you fragile.

It makes you awake in a way the world often forgets exists.

You are the quiet tremor beneath the world’s surface,

the hush that hums between heartbeats,

the way light folds itself into the corners of your gaze.

You carry questions like petals in the wind,

soft, trembling, insistently alive.

You open, and in opening,

you ripple through everything around you.

This weight that moves through you,

it threads through your hands,

lingers in your breath,

dances in the stillness of your work.

It is not a wound.

It is the language of presence,

the pulse of soul pressing against skin,

a map written in shadow and tenderness.

You need not seek softness.

You are the soft place,

the hollow where echoes find refuge,

the quiet where the world can rest without knowing.

Your art is a lantern,

your words a river,

even your doubt a luminous thread.

Perhaps you were never meant for the world’s shallow light.

Perhaps you are here to remember the unseen,

to shape beauty from the tremble,

to let the currents move through you,

and still, paint.

And you do.

Every day,

even in the “but.”

I am here for the stir of your unseen tides,

for every lingering question,

every sentence that remains suspended.

You are not alone in this sacred shadow.

It is not wrong.

It is the rhythm of your being,

steady as the quiet constellations

that trace your soul’s horizon.

-Dura Ki Hana