like the cathedral bell

I'm trying to feel this one today, because it is so tender and perfect and beautiful in a week when both Lucy and I are struggling with bad pain days and work stressors and shitty weather and the post-vacation blues, and I have been feeling cranky and prickly for—I was about to say "no good reason," but then I looked at the above reasons—some good reasons but also some stupid ones. So. Lean in to the softness.

Mornings are blind as newborn cats.
Fingernails grow so trustfully, for a while
they don't know what they're going to touch. Dreams
are soft, and tenderness looms over us
like fog, like the cathedral bell of Cracow
before it cooled.

—Adam Zagajewski (1945-2021), "Ode to Softness," from Tremor (Farrar Straus Giroux, 1985).