Took Time To Recognize

I had walked the long inward road.
Climbed each rung of my becoming.
Met purpose, shaped meaning,
and stood whole in the light of myself.
Self-actualized, or so I thought.
My strides were strong,
each challenge another stone beneath my ascent.
I loved, I gave—
but only where my choosing led me.
My compass pointed inward,
not yet outward toward the unseen.

Then I passed her.

A woman folded into herself
as though the world had forgotten her name.
In her eyes—despair, yes,
but deeper still, the echo of who she once was:
a person with dreams,
before the nightmare arrived unbidden.
Illness clung to her.
Life had placed her at the margins,
not unworthy, simply unseen.
A society that cares in theory
but often fails in vision.

I sat beside her.

Not to solve, not to pry,
but to speak the small human words
that make two strangers into companions.
Day after day,
I brought no wrapped offerings—
only presence, kindness,
the humble gift of being witnessed.
And something shifted.
In the quiet mirror of our conversations,
her dignity rose again.
Her confidence stirred,
a forgotten ember warming back to flame.
Not cured, not rescued—
remembered.
She realized she still could.
And in that realization, she began to lift herself.

But something else happened too.

In her rising, I rose.
In her reclaiming of self-respect,
I discovered the boundary of my own growth—
and stepped beyond it.
She awakened to possibility;
I awakened to transcendence.
Two lives, once separate,
now bound in the gentle truth
that giving and receiving
are the same motion of the soul.

That day,
two spirits turned outward.
Two spirits grew larger than their own stories.
Two spirits transcended.