I wanted to post a new poem here today and discovered the new wordpress block editor format. I used it and I loathed it. I was like a monkey bashing around on a computer.
This afternoon I discovered the ‘classic editor,’ and I hope they continue to offer the choice. If I am forced to use the new block editor for my poetry I am gone.
What about you, have you gotten used to it? Maybe you are stuck in the classic mode as well.
This is how I feel about it.
We cannot change the world by fighting it
Even in these tyrannous times
Only a radical shift in our consciousness
Will bring the peace and creative alliance we seek
Our task is to embrace our hero’s journey within
To see and resolve all inner demons
To slay the dragons of ignorance we have invested in
And transform our own world from divided to whole
And then spread that unity far and wide
Through our vibration, our speech and our action
Then the world we sought to change through our righteousness
Will begin to change through our love
It doesn’t have to take forever….
I don’t want to offer you
False hope
Or magical thinking
I am not a ‘lets send prayers’
Kind of guy
I want to invite you
Into the deepest experience
To see clearly
How far we have fallen
Into an existential mire
And how only
A revolution of consciousness
And an evolution of relationship
With ourselves, each other
And all life on earth
Will fundamentally change things
This is not a band aid time
This is us laid bare
We get to see our good
And our bad
Our attention and our avoidance
We have set up fantastic systems
That are in danger
Of consuming our very souls
We neglect the earth beneath our feet
And our own emotional wounds
Little realizing they are connected
I don’t believe in false hope
I have discovered the only way
To transform is to embrace
And to embrace
We must be on our knees
Not in prayer but in humility
Today I sit,
Head hung down,
Tears falling
Heart heavy
Feeling the weight
Of the human experience
No medicine to cure it
No trying to avoid it
Just the pain of this grief
That comes with acceptance
I’m sorry, please forgive me, I love you.
The cost of not loving
Is too high to bear
We pay with everything
Everything we hold dearNo, the cost of not loving
Is too high to bear
And I am not prepared
To pay that kind of price.
I cannot contain my life within my life
All sense of myself
As a separate person has gone
And I have become everyone
And all things of creation
I am you, him, her, child and dying person
I am the sun and moon, the stars and heavens
Fish, dog and ant
I see the beetle scurrying across my path
And I am that beetle scurrying to the other side
I am all feelings and no feelings
Nothing seems to be mine
And everything is borrowed
I am dreamer dreaming
And the dream
All life appears to emanate from me
Yet I have gone
Nothing separate to call myself
A love, yes
A kind of reverie of love
A tasting of time’s fleeting moments
Everything here and then vanished
Only presence remains
In silence everything manifests
In silence everything dissolves
What, then, is real.
Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash
Sometimes just take a moment
And try and view the harshness of life
As a doorway through which
You can see the divine
It might be almost impossible to do this
Through the rigid beliefs
And the broken heart
But even the trying itself,
When done with sincerity,
Is the grace you seek
It is not outside us
It IS us
Stop imagining you are separate
From everything.
Although I cannot always promise hope
Or dangle any carrots of enlightenment
In front of your nose
And maybe sometimes we go to the bottom
And court the darkness together
Still there is always a loving tenderness
Always there is this compassion
For the human experience
I see your beauty
Your buddha nature
I see the love that you cannot see
A bitter sweet majesty
In all this suffering
The awakened heart sees all this
And through the tears there is joy
In the wreckage there is still dancing
There is no attempt here
To cover up pain or sorrow
No
Everything is laid bare to be seen
And in that seeing everything is embraced
And in that embracing is the peace we seek
Nothing is found through denial
Denial is the path of the ego
Embracement is the path of love
This is the path of love.
I wasn’t ready for love
When it arrived
It shook me to the core
And in that shaking
Everything fell out
I fell so deep into love’s ocean
I drowned
But in drowning
Something new was born
The I that had struggled so hard
The one that fought the world
And battled for survival
Was no longer in control
Had become but a tiny whisper
Instead there was devotion to truth
An openness and a service to love itself
A warrior arose
Someone real
Who had no need for defenses
No need to attack
This new one wore no mask
Played no games
Yet was not weak
But strangely powerful
There is only one force
That can change this world
And that is love
But it requires a kind of death
Of the one who is defended.
We must look at the impact of our conditioning
If we are too untether ourselves from it
To find what is there prior to conditioning
And what is more real than conditioning
Is a deep and often painful inquiry
Because we start to realize who we are not
And we see clearly where we give ourselves away
And where we lost our innocence
We see all the beliefs and voices we have inherited
That are not ours
This inquiry may break our hearts wide open
But don’t worry, from this heartbreak
Will pour a river of love
That will nourish new growth in ways
Previously impossible to imagine
There is so much more to the human experience
Than is offered by conditioning
But first we must first loosen its steely grip.
The world we live in is so very human
Messy, uncontrollable, fragile, delicate
Impermanent, emotional
And equally joyous, loving, enduring,
Creative and inventive
The divine within us
Cannot solve the mess
Of the human condition
Neither must it be denied
But it can be held in palm of the hand
As you would hold a beautiful butterfly
Not with tight and clenched fist
But with palm open and soft
To forget our divine nature
Is to be plunged into a world
That is merciless in its push and pull
To have no awareness of our divinity
Is to be cut off from that
Which feeds us and holds us in its arms
Divinity gives this human life its context
It is the water we swim in, the air we breathe
Our divinity is not a belief
In some God
It is the truth of our nature
We are human AND divine
Always, all the time
And when we forget or slip into one or the other
We become detached and aloof
Or lost and crazy
Divinity AND humanity
Is who we are
Our forgetting is the problem
Our forgetting is the cause of war
And fighting
The cause of fear and hatred
And the cause of attachment and suffering
All this stems from our forgetting our divine nature
And remembering our divine nature
Reminds us that we are one consciousness
Manifesting as separate individuations
And everyone and everything is equal
And everyone and everything is worthy of the same love
And it is our human duty to look after and care for each other,
The world we find ourselves in, and all life that exists around us
Remembering our true nature restores us to wholeness
And when we are restored to wholeness
The world around us begins to return to wholeness.
