Outside
The flags fly
Down the highway, hanging on to the back of large trucks or the chest of a man.
Outside
There is grabbing and taking
A staking and restaking
Of territory claimed
The roads cut, the oil burned, blockades erected, and walls built
Outside
The borders between us are made visible in noise, colors, ballots.
Signs and signals.

Inside resides
The breath of common ancestors
The child who plays with no thought of malice
The heart tuned toward suffering
The taste of figs ripening in the lingering autumn heat
The sliver of an orange moon low in the evening November sky.

Inside, begins something you might call a prayer
Let us kneel down.
Not to God or nation or ideology
But to what is inside. A feeling, a connection
A welling like the waters at the very beginning of time
Unpolluted and gently flowing.
Sweet and dark and healing.
Let us kneel down to the persistent possibility that the life and love within prevail.
Let us release what is inside outward in beauty, spilling towards each other, until all merges.
Unstoppable well of knowing that we will only ever be saved by one another.