What I Know About Waiting

Do not mistake stillness for ending.

Seeds spend whole seasons

hidden beneath the earth.

The tide retreats

without explaining itself.

The moon disappears

without asking permission.

Not every unanswered question

is a closed door.

Not every pause

is a loss.

Still—

there are mornings

when the silence feels heavier

than certainty.

Mornings when the map ends

and nothing arrives to replace it.

When the body asks for rest,

is it wisdom?

Or fear?

When the future remains hidden,

is it protecting something,

or withholding it?

Some journeys move

in visible miles.

Others move

in roots.

But how do you recognize growth

when nothing appears to change?

How long do you trust

what is happening beneath the surface?

And what, exactly,

are you waiting for?

And if the door remains closed,

for a month,

a year,

longer—

what part of you

continues planting seeds

anyway?

—Malwina Buldys

A Few Rules, More or Less

when wet, get dry

when cold, get warm

when tired, rest

when the wind blows, bend

when hyper, calm down

when happy, be happy

when sad, be sad

when loving, just love

when hating, see above

when being, just be

always, just be

—Paul Causey

Love is Deathless

I think the trees are exchanging information again.

Not through roots 

but through hesitation.

Every branch holding still

a fraction too long

before surrendering to wind.

This morning the world appeared slightly misaligned:

steam rising sideways from my tea,

a gull circling the parking garage

like it had forgotten the existence of oceans,

my own reflection arriving late

in the dark glass of a storefront.

Maybe love survives this way.

Not dramatically.

Not as monument.

But as a repetition so precise

the universe keeps mistaking it

for one of its physical laws.

The moon pulls water.

Heat bends metal.

Somewhere inside the chest,

something continues

despite every ending placed before it.

Even after the hand releases the hand.

Like the way birds continue singing

during the five seconds after thunder,

as if they hear a door reopening

the rest of us mistake for noise.

Even now,

the flowers on my balcony

close themselves carefully at dusk,

as though darkness

were only another form of listening.

—Malwina Buldys

North of I

Three eagle feathers

crossed oceans before they reached my hands.

One large

two smaller beside it,

like a constellation still remembering

the shape of its own becoming.

Found in Alaska,

carried first toward Hawai‘i,

toward volcanic earth and salt air,

toward the island that once taught me

how to walk barefoot into uncertainty

without losing myself.

But that year

my body became another geography.

Another climate to survive.

And so the feathers waited for me

between worlds—

crossing the Pacific,

crossing absence,

crossing the long interior distance

between who I had been

and who I was becoming.

From Hawai‘i to New York City

they traveled sealed in darkness,

yet arrived carrying sky.

North of I—

there is a place where direction

stops being a map

and becomes listening.

Where the medicine wheel turns inward.

Where east and west dissolve

inside the chambers of the heart.

Where the gravitational hymn

that holds the earth beside the sun

is the same unseen force

that breathes us through grief,

through waiting,

through return.

I think of the eagle

riding invisible currents

it does not question.

I think of how light

sometimes survives by hiding itself

inside the dark.

And I wonder

if these feathers were never meant

to symbolize flight at all,

but trust.

Three quiet witnesses

laid across my palms

one for the body,

one for the spirit,

one for the part of me

still learning

how to navigate

without leaving itself behind.

North of I

there is no arrival.

Only the great inward turning

the moment the soul remembers

it has always been held

by the same forces

that spin galaxies,

lift wings,

and keep even the broken-hearted

in perfect orbit.

—Malwina Buldys