The house that dirt built
Just as there are stones born to meet —
and when they do, they make no sound,
they simply join
with a precision that needs no explanation —
so too, the ancients say,
does each thing in the universe fit with the others.
Not by chance,
but by secret necessity.
By measured fate.
One might think that houses rise through force —
but they don’t.
They rise through accord,
through silent pacts between matter and time,
between weight and void.
And when one stone rests upon another
without shifting it,
there is proportion.
And where there is proportion,
there is permanence.
What one sees in the small —
in the perfect joint, in the exact edge —
is but a reflection of what happens in the vast:
for the universe too was built like a house,
with stones of light,
with unseen depths,
with balances that require no witnesses.
It is not beauty that makes things what they are.
It is communion —
the way one thing supports another
without breaking it.
How fire does not invade the air,
how water does not betray the earth,
how silence leaves room for sound to be born.
That is why they say
all creation answers to a number.
Not the number of calculation,
but the other kind —
the one that pulses from the centre of the real,
the one the Creator used as the first measure,
when the world did not yet exist,
but rhythm already did.
And every thing, to remain itself,
depends on all the rest —
as a wall depends on its foundation,
as a shadow depends on the body,
as the soul — if it exists —
depends on time to be revealed.
In that weaving lie the days.
And memory too.
And the trembling
of the one who has seen enough
to know that nothing endures alone.
That the true does not shout.
And that all which endures
is what, in secret,
knew how to become a part.