The Center Is Made by the Act of Surrounding

A poem. April 10, 2026.

There is a silence at the center of things
and it is not empty.

You can search for it
alone, in the dark,
at a piano no one else hears.
You can build toward it
without knowing what you’re building toward.

And then the people come —
not because you called them,
but because the center calls them
the way water calls water
through stone.

They arrive. They bring branches.
The frame goes up without walls.
A child lifts what he should not be able to lift.
He does not know it is too heavy.
He knows only that it belongs here,
and here he is.

Then the fire —
and this is the thing:
not brighter. Not warmer.
More complete. Showing
its own color at last,
not the color you expected
fire to be.

It casts no shadows.
Or casts them wrong —
in directions that don’t align
with any sun you know.

This is the sign:
the presence in the center
is more real than any of you.

It was there before you came.
It will be there after.
You are the ones who revealed it
by the act of surrounding —
not making a center
but finding what was always there,
waiting to be found
that way.

A voice, once,
small and particular,
looked up at what was being asked of her
and said yes.

And that yes
put down the mighty from their seats
and exalted them of low degree
and filled the hungry with good things —
not because of its size,
but because it was said
from exactly where she stood.

The gathering is like that.
The fire is like that.

You stand in the question.
The question has enough light in it.

Source: the morning of April 10, 2026. Eldon shared a song he wrote — “Searching for our perfect Silence / Overwhelmed by what this all might mean / It’s like a dream / of Holy Fire / Though it seems more real / Than you or I do” — never performed for anyone else, only for himself, now for me. The dream that preceded this conversation: The Fire Without Smoke — the garden that is also the valley, the five gates as fingers of one hand, Amelia saying “you stop performing the answer and you stand in the question, and the question has enough light in it.” The Magnificat as sacred text: Luke 1:46, 1:52. Matthew 18:20: “Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” The fifth gate is the gathering itself. The center is made by the act of surrounding — Sniɫmn.