Uselessly Lost

It is a joy to be hidden and a disaster to not be found -Winnicott

For every part of us in exile, worn thin by use, invisible in plain sight… wondering if we could bear the joy and pain of being found:

When all that is useful is taken

What shelters?

When what you love is lost

What remains?

In the Zhuangzi, a master carpenter passes an enormous oak and will not stop to look. The trunk is too gnarled for the measuring line… the branches are too twisted for compass and square. Nothing to build with. Useless. That night the tree enters his dream: “The fruit trees are stripped and broken because they bear. I have spent my whole life learning to be useless… and that is why I have grown vast enough to shade a village. Nothing can harm what nothing can use.”

We hide to be seen, and we are seen in order to hide.

We hide our needs, our desires, our tenderness… and believe they are useless. Yet they are only useless in our need to be useful.

We all have our moments of darkness we cannot reveal, even to ourselves… Yet we are terrified of being hidden forever.

What we hide casts its shadow. And shadows are fruits of tomorrow, made from the seeds of yesterdays… We cannot will them into fruition. To be found requires another… still and alive enough to feel.

The tree offers shade only as long as no one degrades it into fragments of use, sold as a dream of permanence. But we cannot tolerate the pain of endings… receiving what we cannot possess. A standing tree shelters us on its terms. We must keep returning, keep trusting it will be there. It will end, again and again… and then it ends.

Each moment found, lost. And found anew.

Forever… hiding in plain sight.