Spirituality

To: The Muse – The Poet (Audio)

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In the moments just before ink marks the page I know that words will fall short.  For who could capture Her with mere paper and ink?  But I am compelled to try hoping that my attempt, though clumsy and sophomoric, may in some small way reflect back  the beauty that I have recognized in Her.

She is new to me, yet I have known her forever.  Even so I have just begun to experience, to comprehend  Her.  She has captured my attention and stirred longings thought bruised beyond rising.  It is now Her face I seek, Her call that I await.  And in the between times I remember, I wonder, I muse.

I remember Her form, Her fragrance, the way She fits my body.  I wonder how it is that she has so easily assumed this place with me.  I muse about the meaning of this dance begun between she and I.

With Me she is familiar.  She is bold but not brazen.  Her confidence is that of assumed kinship and intimacy.  How is it that She feels like Home?  How is it that a raging passion and peaceful sweet rest can co-exist?

She is dainty yet powerful.  I have watched a dull room energized at Her approach.  Men straighten themselves in hopeful anticipation of Her glance or smile, grateful for any small attention.  Women appraise Her, hoping for an ally, dreading competition with Her light.

Her smile is a magic thing.  It is infectious and sensual.  Her mouth shaped in anger is pouty and full beneath a furrowed brow.

Her movement is fluid and natural as a young doe.  She is at ease and alert.  She is finely wrought and utterly feminine, Her spirit at home in Her flesh.

To be near Her awakens slumbering passion.  To be apart calls forth the Poet, the Bard.  She now has claimed Her place in His story.  She is now set apart.  Sleeping Beauty can now awaken, at least for the moments that the Poet can guard Her heart.

But harken to me!  It is a dangerous thing to call forth the Poet and awaken the Princess.  The story will unfold with many unseen twists and turns.  Exquisite will be the rapture.  Exquisite will be the torment.  Yet that is the nature of the play.  Both comedy and tragedy are required.  Such things are always risky.  But perhaps the Poet and his Muse can create between them a place where the songs can live.

Guilt – The Human Stain (Audio)

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I have been going back through some of the writing I have done over the last several years.  I guess I am attempting to make some sense of what it has been about.  Methinks it can be understood, at least in part, as an example of an awakening process of this particular soul.  Perhaps it is the fleshing out of the spiritual paradox of dying in order to live.  There is a great deal of talk about some awakening that is taking place in our world.  Perhaps it is.  All I know is that I am different than I was.  My values, beliefs, and attention have been shaken.  Attachment to my older ego identity is much loosened as well as my tendency to measure meaning and purpose against the values of culture and other people.  This older program is full of formulas whose equations required an outward focus in order to balance them.  I have come to understand that I had been programmed in a way which directed my energy away from the source of my disquiet.  As if I could find, go, fix, figure out, accomplish, and/or become, enough of something that finally I could rest.  But at the end of all things external was emptiness.  Ego’s domination was tyrannical and it only released control bit by excruciating bit. Perhaps a wiser person might accomplish this in an easier, less troublesome manner.  But it seems I required the harder way.  Solitude and death I think, preceded the birth of an awareness that I am much more than my ego and linear history here in time.  I am some distance now from much of the darker aspects of this process and can testify that all pain and grief is not evil.  And perhaps it is our avoidance of the darker aspects of ourselves that is evil and is the source of individual and societal lostness.

I have been talking to the wind

She is some comfort in that there is no judgement

I cannot bear that

Not that I do not deserve it but

Judgement has been rendered since the foundations

It permeates my being

Flows in my blood

I am guilty

But guilty does not clarify

One would think that the verdict would

Prod me in one direction or the other

But it only sits on me

Like wet burlap filled with shit

So I talk to the wind

She listens – No response

She touches me – Never wavers

She is always there

I feel her but there is no response

No positive – No negative

She is herself and moves where she wills

But I can

Say anything

Feel anything

Think anything

Want anything

It matters not to her, She is the wind

She is elemental, from the foundations

She was before me and will be after I am gone

She has seen my little story played out a thousand times

She is not troubled by my talk

She has heard it all before

I know that she knows

Yet I talk to Her and the moon and the stars and the sky

No response

I used to talk to God

It was similar

No response

But, I can feel the wind

A Father’s Province – Audio

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They have eyes of blue and hearts of gold.

Flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone.
They are of me, yet profoundly Other than me.

Their dependence decreases, moment by moment, choice by choice, as personality and character coalesces. Soul becomes known.  Small round bodies, unsure, become angular, strong and elegant.

Hints of the ancestors glimpsed, reflected in appearance,
posture, and mannerism.
Shadows of their mother and I emerge as different facets turn,
reflected in the light of their living.

See the man arise beneath the surface of the boy.
Hints of the woman foreshadowed in the girl.
Each unique and other worldly as a snowflake,
yet familiar as my own breath.

I am startled to recognize their autonomy –
their separateness from me.
And in that sacred space between the roles we play out in Time, flashes of their glory leave me awed.

They are my equal yet better than I.

Recognition of their immortality, the deity inherent in their volition saddens, yet brings strange comfort.  I grieve the blow to my ego.

I have much less dominion over them than I imagine,
yet I am greatly more important to them than I know.

They are neither damned by my weakness
nor necessarily elevated by my substance.

They are free and I am humbled.

I am Daddy to these three souls, at least for now.

And within the bandage of Time they are to me what they can be to no other and I am to them what no other can be.

While inhabiting the boundaries of this dressing we play out appointed roles.
Yet in Eternity we will have had and shall ever be One.

They have eyes of blue and hearts of gold.

Those have been and will ever be constant through the metamorphosis of flesh, circumstance, and experience.

Those same eyes which gazed up to me at the dawn of their journey will look down upon me at the ending of mine.

And yet our hope holds fast that when Time is finally swallowed by Eternity we will then know as we have been known.

We will recognize and finally comprehend the glory
of the everlasting souls with which we have journeyed.

Hearts pure, refined, and utterly alive.

Then together we can all play once more in the presence of the One who has watched over us all.

Your Daddy loves you very much.

But, I love you more.

The Offering – Audio

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child's hands

I re-submit this to go along with my recent thoughts on Christmas, Grace, and how one might be led down a blind ally seeking God or truth in doing.

With up-lifted hands I hold my best.
I offer it to you.
With trembling I await your acceptance of my gift
With trembling I dread your rejection.

I am in need. I am broken and out of my brokenness
I have fashioned my offering.
I have pieced it together with much pain and trembling
hoping to please you.

Now it is all that I have.
Every good thing in me has been
made manifest and resides in my gift.
I await your judgment.

As you approach I am borne aloft in anticipation
of your response.
My hopes walk the razors edge between your
delight and your disappointment.

I am reeling! You walked past my gift as if
it were not there.
I was prostrate offering my sacred gift, that which
I had made for you.

I am punctured, humiliated before you.
I shrink, collapsing, naked and ashamed.
Ashes are all.
Ashes, decay, and dry barren dust.

You move into the wasteland of my soul.
Slowly and with great care you search.
Blowing away the ashes while your dirty hands
seek something in the wreck that I am.

My humiliation evaporates as I see that
you heed my filth less than you did my gift.
You find and hold a tiny ember still glowing
somehow beneath the rubble.

I rest like a child in your hands and
again offer my gift to you.
You smile, kiss my foolish head, and with
a magnet attach my gift to your refrigerator.

The Search for You (Part 2)- Audio

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I searched for you again today.
I strained to find you amidst the chaos of a world seething with disappointment, battered dreams, and fragile hopes.
Millions of souls crying out for the answer to their hearts’ deepest longings.

I looked down the well-worn paths, the familiar places where I’ve sought you before.

Nature’s beauty was dulled.
The crisp cool air on my face did not quicken my senses as before.
It was only cold.
The golden red light of the sunset did not dazzle me with its splendor.
The orb hung in only two dimensions, flat against the dull sky.
It only moved me to squint the brazen light from my eyes.

The sounds and rhythms of life around me seemed out of tune and dissonant with my pattern.
I felt a stranger to the world.
Out of place.
Out of joint.

The faces, the touch, the voices of friends and loved ones did not reach me.
They seemed only to intrude upon my search.
Words of love, comfort, even humor, irritated and sparked anger hidden beneath my smile.

Exhausted, hope failing, desperate for you.
Weeping from the anguish of my bitter longing.
Prostrate, face to the earth, search ended – unfulfilled.

At the end of my search, at the end of one last bitter breath, after one final look outward,

I paused –

Stillness

My eyes sought a new path.
I slowly shifted my gaze.
As my eyes turned inward I was startled to discover your presence.
You were there where you have always been.
The wellspring of my heart was flooded with joy as I was filled with awareness of you.
You are a part of me, and I you.
I knew that which I have always known.
Nothing, no obstacle, no circumstance can separate me from you and you from me.
We exist together out of time.
We are eternal.
You and I will be always, even to the ends of the earth.

I found you today.