Stretch your mind

Your capacity to hear

The wind rushing through your wings 

Your ability to heal

In a nonlinear style 

Stretch your breath

As it intertwines with the earth

Its wild embrace of

your body

Its soulful song in your bones

Stretch your thoughts to interrupt 

The narrative you follow blindly 

The repetitive cycles that keep you 

From seeing 

Your own vastness, and your limitations 

The value of someone else’s perspective 

The importance of continuing to 

Learn what isn’t binary

To be not righteous 

But brave in your tenderness 

Brave in your heart ache

Brave in your refusal to get caught in

The web of the over simplified 

Instead 

Weave the complexity of truth

And stretch the thread of your intelligence 

To include the chapter that doesn’t fit perfectly 

Into the story that you’re telling

Stretch to breathe in layers

Stretch and breathe out one dimensional views

Stretch into the roots of things

And even deeper

Into the nets that connect those roots

Into a wider system 

Stretch your heart open

So that when hatred steams in you

You can still stir a brew of soulfulness 

To nourish the world with 

Stretch to see humanity in its beauty 

It’s easy to see its flaws 

Stretch your legs 

So that you can take big leaps 

Stretch your arms and hug more fully 

Stretch the understanding of your limitations 

It will soften you

Open you

And let the love that you stretch

beyond the confinements of the moment

Become your guide

Through tunnels of narrow mindedness 

Stretch

Into the wide entangled reality

Of a world 

That stretches into you