Month: February 2023
Manifesto: Talking with the Holy Spirit
I like winter fires, don’t make them as much as I used to. But still. Sometimes I drag a plastic lawn chair over; mostly I stand by the flames alone. It is what it is.
Taking my cue from Peter Maurin, I want to help create a world in which it is easier to do good and to be good, by supporting others in their (natural serious) happiness, e.g., they are safe from violence, they are fed, they have clean water, their work has meaning, there is time to play, they can see a doctor if/when they need to, they can go to a church of their choosing or no church, and so on.I want to know the world as a village and everyone I meet as a sister or brother doing their utmost to remember – with me, for me, through me – our shared Creation in Love, by which Love we are all of us sustained.In order to live in that way, my mind has to heal. Here, I take my cue from A Course in Miracles. I need to see reality as God creates it, not as I in my separated state would prefer it. This means discerning between what is true and what is false; it means becoming responsible for projection and denial; and it means valuing according to love and not fear.I want us each to be the other’s savior.
What you are describing takes work, hard work. Work that requires discipline and willingness. That requires faith, goes on in the face of not-knowing, goes on in the space of un-knowing even. You have to be strong and humble; you have to give everything away; you have to give away your identity, you have to give away even your right to an identity. It’s hard to understand let alone apply. There are lots of ways to fail, lots of ways to go astray, lots of ways to quit. Almost everybody does.
Stillness and peace are effects of remembering oneness with our Creator, by knowing ourselves as an extension of that Creator. This means – among other things – accepting that only loving thoughts are true and that there are only loving thoughts – that everything else is an illusion.
Love holds everything. You either know this or you don’t. Either way, you can’t fake it.
All fires are altars, all flames a grail. I hold my hands up to the starry sky; smoke trails through my fingers. “Love holds everything.”
When we accept that Love holds everything, then we know Love’s effects in our life; in that way, Love becomes the foundation and the light; it becomes the word. It becomes us. On that day, Love is all that we bring forth because there is nothing but Love to bring forth.
I want to remember that there are no favorites anywhere, that God knows one creation, not many. Therefore, there are neither enemies nor competitors. A holy relationship is any relationship which recognizes the other’s fundamental equality because it shares that equality, because it is that equality.What do I want?I want you to transform my confused mind, turn it into a prism unto the light of Love, so that all it brings forth is whatever is most good for all Creation, so that all it wants is to bring that goodness forth.
Teach me to remember what I am; let me be the light by which I remember that the only peace is the peace I bring forth in, with and through you.
Everything went Under: January Poems
The Butterfly Conservatory
Fitted Perfectly
The Moon of the Sleeping Bear floats hidden in clouds, I study it carefully after morning chores, perceiving in my heart – which as Emily Dickinson makes clear is the world calling itself home – a sense of driftiness on cosmic seas. Call it prayer if you must but when you are ready there is something prior to language and outside the universe. What is rose-colored, amethyst, what is the interior of a shell months after its meat has been transfigured in an oystercatcher’s gut. One doesn’t look at the sky, one is in the sky, one is made of what the sky is made of. There are no secrets, there are no mysteries, only truth coming forth as through a prism. Act and attend accordingly. A thousand-petaled lotus, a crucifix made of light, a ceramic Buddha wreathed in ivy. Snow melting under apple trees where in summer we made love beneath the watchful eyes of a blind Appaloosa. What chooses, what accepts. What helps, what does not, and by not helping, helps make clear what does. Resting in Love with Her always now, getting better at not denying it, allowing even its utility to be undone in me. I remember gathering stones on the beaches of Cape Cod with you before the wedding, they are in the hay loft in glass containers now, symbols of spiritual ballast, witnesses unto the one shared journey we are learning how to share. Equals making clear what is the same and what is not? Look at me writing yet another poem in this briefly outpouring light, look at Chrisoula studying the melting garden, mentally planning rows of kale and spinach. January is four syllables fitted perfectly to the tongue, God abides no less. Look at Christ dancing happily in the shallows, splashing my face with tears of joy.
A Little Dance
Old Currency
A Study of Agony
For a few minutes there is no body, only rain falling in the pasture. Barn owls sailing in low arcs across Route Nine west. Now we are nowhere, now we are nothing. Deep in January, stillness owns the flavor of salt, and you remember how a righteous king makes decisions. Unable to sleep, I devote myself to a study of agony, and find in it a lonely, not unsterile joy. You walk a long way alone long enough the question what do you want evaporates, even want evaporates, but something does not evaporate, and that’s what I want. Winter is in so many ways not the end it pretends to be. A single hill in the interior made of lifetimes choosing not to climb a single hill in the interior. All night rain falling, notes arriving from a country I was not allowed to visit. The world a cell nurturing prayer, surrendered without a hitch. How happy one can be in the fluvial darkness, no clock or calendar, no aspirin or bible, God so big and unpredictable.