Julia, A Poem by Patrick Houck

For us, this poem beautifully conveys a vivid sense of what we refer to as "open, heartful awareness" – an expansive, open-hearted state of inner peace, love, and joyful well-being. The author, Patrick Houck, was a landscape architect who wrote this poem while a student in Roger Housden's poetry writing class. He died several months after writing the poem. 

We especially love that it gives a sense that this state can unfold unsought, unannounced, in the midst of the most ordinary of circumstances – for Patrick, it was a chance encounter with his 8-year-old neighbor on the way to work one morning   

In the midst of that ordinary encounter, he finds his “whole body opening wide…thought falling away, insignificant, incapable of knowing such immensity . . . all the way down” his “heart is breaking, down into a vast, infinite love where we both are ageless . . . together in the forever ancient.” 

He realizes that “what sees is not just me, what’s seeing is also looking from everywhere.”