The Witness

Every soul is a witness. We see at first our own life, where we can be the elemental observer without thought or emotion. We witness through a cloud of feeling and cognition, but it obscures the simple river of experience, the flow of what can be seen and heard and touched. We collect—images, events, stories. We hold, individually and collectively, light touching the Tigris at a wide bend, the feeling of wet clay spinning on the first flywheel, the sound of wind susurrant through an ancient corn field.

Every soul is a witness. First for the self, and then for the other. The other needs to be seen; the love and pain mirrored, known. The soul is incomplete, untouched, its work caught in the limits of the “I”—without a witness.

The witness sees every fall, every getting up—deepening what’s real because there’s more than one of us who carries it.