The Idea of Deserving

Maybe it requires a leap of faith
To believe that anything “has value.”
The dreaded V-word, my therapist jokes.

It’s self-evident that everything exists;
But it is not self-evident (to me) that anything has value,
that anything has inherent worth,

that all beings deserve love.
I’m allergic to something in the idea of deserving.
What do we even mean by that?

I look around. Things exist. It is an observation.
That they have “value” is an assertion.
How can I accept it as fact? I ask.

---

Like the earth, our conversation is spinning
on an axis. We are pulled
around a center, around a wheel.

As on the Earth, you can discover things in the subterranean parts of conversation
that drastically alter your sense of what is self-evident.

---

I notice that when I sit in a quiet place
and start to wish all beings well in the world
an internal force stirs in response.

As if the phrases of care, when pronounced internally,
are a spell
with the power to summon forgotten gods

or a bird call that, when voiced,
could bring forth a flock of geese
from the bright air.

And this force, when attended to,
settles like flesh
on the skeleton of each wish,

pours through the words
as if they were an opening channel
at the bottom of an ocean.

This practice sharpens my awareness
of a thing that was already there,
pulling the value of “that” out of “this”

the way that “blue” is a charm
the sky casts on my attention,
pulling me back into the bright air.