Psalm 103:4

Psalm 103:4 · תהילים ק״ג:ד׳ blesses the One who redeems your life from the pit and crowns you with lovingkindness and compassion. I have joined its letters into shared forms and let them fall unevenly down the page, so that the verse has to be worked loose from its own tangle, as if redemption is not something you can recognize from a safe distance.

The word המעטרכי, who crowns you, meets the tagin, the crowns already resting on sacred letters. But this is not a crown of status, and it is not a way out of being vulnerable. It is made of חסד ורחמים, lovingkindness and compassion, and I let those two words settle near the bottom like ground beneath everything that has been falling. What the psalm gives me is not rescue from the pit but the discovery of what was holding me the whole time I was inside it.