you and I.
Let's accept the fact that you are
misunderstood to be a
grimy, murky artwork,
a tarnished bit of steel cast aside by your
Creator.
This is why people keep spitting on you.
With good intentions, I assume,
they keep spewing out degradations and belittlings to
inspire change in your stature.
With their old way of thinking, they assume that
hanging you over the line and
striking you many times with consistent strokes will
result in a spiritual airing of your great bitterness.
You, however, cannot be spit shined.
You are not a piece of old rug somebody's grandmother
dug up from the back room in the country and
drug out the front door for a good beating in The
Sun.
You are a hidden gold. Gold. You are so long
hidden in the Earth of this great PIT of viciousness that you must now be
mined out delicately.
You cannot even identify your own self,
covered as you are in years and years of
build up and wash over and run off and
environmental toxins.
Your water table is tainted with the dumping of others
trash and commercial waste.
You are a used and abused place.
However,
your fundamental nature cannot be tainted.
All elements are themselves because in their
very composition you find only one kind of
stuff.
We must now find again the
goldenness that you are
made of.
It will take a team of us,
a team of us to cover ourselves in adamance and
come out into your pollution.
We will wade into the muck because we
know that you are out there buried beneath the
ugliness of others' raw, denatured materials.
We will lift up and drag out the barrels and
barrels and barrels of lies about your potential worth.
We will scrape off the top soil and underlayers of your
toxic anger.
We will lay down the peat and granules of our
personal disappointments and frustrations to draw out your
deep vitriol.
We will dig and dig and dig to get to your location.
All we ask is that you STAY THERE!
Though you cannot yet see the light of day,
do not believe you are the tainted ground around you.
Trust us when we say we are the professionals.
Trust us when we say the earth can be saved.
Trust us while we draw out mounds and mounds of
groundwork you believed you needed to be something worthy.
Underneath this mess is your goldenness.
It exists despite the misuse of your holy place.
You are not a landfill.
After we have removed the garbage and
cleaned up the fallout and
shoveled out the dirt and
gotten down into the bedrock of your purpose,
you will realize again the
true state of your existence.
We realize that some us will not live to see you come up entirely
out of the pit, but that is alright.
We have already gotten dressed,
and we have already gotten started,
and we have already been soaked in the radioactivity of
your situation.
If you will be patient and believe us when we say there is
gold in these hills,
you will realize,
someday,
that we are talking about you.
And you will know then,
that everything that everyone else said about your landscape
was a lie.
-T. D. James-Moss
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