October 07, 2026

Everything Opens Again

Open, closed, open. Before we are born everything is open in the universe without us. While we live everything is closed within us. And when we die, everything is open again. Open closed open. That's all we are.

Yehuda Amichai wrote this as the closing lines of the title poem in his 1998 collection, published late in his life after decades of war, immigration, and loss shaped his view of human endurance. He had fled Germany as a child, fought in several of Israel's wars, and by his seventies was facing the illness that would kill him in 2000. The poem treats the closing off of the self, the guardedness we build to survive hard seasons, not as weakness but as part of a natural cycle that always moves back toward openness. It speaks to resilience today because it reframes self-protection as temporary, not permanent, and reminds us that closing is never the end of the story.