Snow... lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

The Dead, Dubliners, James Joyce

 

Yes, paralysis of the heart
Involves a continuing lack of empathy
For anybody outside
Of our small circle of lived experience. 

Epiphanies - sudden, striking realizations
Where we see into the heart of things -
As in the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles
Commemorated on the feast of the epiphany. 
Epiphanies can free us from paralysis:

All we need to do is to forget all that we expect of life,
Undo any falseness in ourselves,
Any hypocisy or cowardice;
And look upon the world with smiling eyes.

Time wrecks everything
Except for the importance of the moment:
Marriages crumble
Families disperse
All epics and rhapsodies
Flee from our lives

Leaving us amidst the mute greyness of despair
If we lack faith in what is not there.
The hour of our birth
The hour of our death
Should not be barriers but portals
From which we see into the life of things:

Icicles, stalagmites and stalactites,
Preserve us from the contagion of greed
The stupidity of selfishness.
Let us be the bog poets
Exploring the depths, excavating, 
The wilderness of our hearts.

Reaching out to those
Who came before or come after

And learn to avoid the detritus
Of Homo Sapiens - 
The killer species.