The Divine Door

When the cataclysmic chaos of today

Breaks your heart into a myriad of pieces

You cannot bend over to retrieve 

Because the walls loom larger 

Moving in fast, there's no reprieve.

Lost in the weeds, 

Anxiety breeds

Something that can be sure: 

Open your own divine door.

Squeezed in between

What is obvious and unseen-

Newfound nonsense, daily doing and

Absurdity realized 

Surreal stickiness inside of purpose paralyzed

Inaction can be an 

Act of Resistance

(When applied with Intention)

Habit is a creative invention

With permission to unplug, undo, slow down....

STOP.

Long enough to feel, to look, to see, to know

What is most wholesome, what is truly Wise

Hatefulness and Haste, alignment's demise

I get it, I know, this is a lot, like WHOA,

Spinning wheels in a muck of nowhere to go

We must remember our Divine Doorway

Waiting to be found

Hand on heart, space in the mind

It is here that we enter, 

It is here that we ground

Breathing in, we find our strength

Breathing out, we release fear

Breathing in, we conjure access

Breathing out, we're already here

This doorway offers us a place to rest

To ponder hope, before the next test

On the other side of the breath

The opening, a clear walk-through

Stepping into your own vastness

You can reclaim your real "you"

Liquified walls, we swim through pain

Suffering is only part of existence

In our True Nature, we learn to contain

Waves of what does not serve you

Waves of what does not serve them

Pause now, right now-

BREATHE

1.....2.....3.......

Turn off the tsunami of thoughts,

Then pick up your own pen.

Telling your own truth,

All a brush-stroked story.

When again, you lose your way

Find your doorway back to glory

Signage marked: "It will be okay"

Just keep going

Just keep growing

Just keeping knowing 

The mighty breath whispering the password

To the Divine Door, 

This is where we go to 

To remember there is always more 

Pardon me

Pardon me, while I invite you to stare at all the mouths for a while...weird teeth and double chins and lips that curl when they smile, like they're advertising orthodontics or toothpaste and the birds are reminders too. Watch them when you walk-maybe you'll see a bird drop out of nowhere, off a branch suddenly materialized and cast off into a beak first nosedive. You'll gasp, imagining a near definite disaster, gravity's grip is just so fierce, until suddenly the wings support the landing and when you see it,  you smile. Because, now, you get it-we aren't birds, but goddamnit we have WINGS, we can find our glide, sure as the sunset finds it skyline, and then walking on, more discovery takes hold. Houses tucked aways, eyes unearthing them like they were never there before, except they certainly were. Just not seen. Your eyes awakened new, you may laugh with the lady passing by on the bike in your moment of close contact, and then inhale deeply the wake of her perfume that somehow reminds you of the color purple. You will come upon a delightful older man tending watchfully to his beautiful arrangement of spring blooms- hands on hips a sense of satisfaction in his stance that can only be enhanced by the admiration of a passerby. So you'll play this role and tell him "how beautiful!" and he will absolutely light up and say "how kind of you to say" and when you return to your own humble abode, sweaty and tired, you'll pause a bit more to the evening events of your neighborhood's nature channel, a plumpy cardinal will visit and as you process full body chills, you will know that all of this is just ethereal confirmation of the sublime. You will know that the line between right and wrong, masks and vaccines, all of it, will remind you that the line between good and evil is not as blurry as you feel. It's all to be found in the here and now, in the sun you squint back, in the daring to feel. That is what I invite you to see, as real. 

<Notes scrawled in a journal on June 4, 2021>

The Forgetting and Remembering

The forgetting and remembering 

Are braided so tightly

It leaves deep angsty grooves

In the mind and in the body

Tension that True Nature wishes to relax,

Over-efforting fails to smooth out

Mental creases 

Until the sitting occurs

And it is not immediate or pretty

Inner chatter broadcasts in the brain

Physical form attuned, shifted

Opening the eyes, then sighs

Making notations belies what is wise

Attachment, Aversion, Delusion-

Three poisons dripping all over everything

How to deny consumption?

With each breath, return to the path

The exhalation allows release

Dismissing imperfections like this 

The inhalation welcomes awareness

Including what is not amiss

Right here

Right now

Is only

This moment

Come back to practice

Over and over; and over again still-

Remember what has been forgotten

The braid hangs loose, at will

Family Heirlooms

Shame slips in, hooded in the cover of darkness

Insidious, it begins its work, undetected until

A landslide leaves you, stunned suffocation-

Shock is a sneaky way to rewrite a story

And while you begin the work of removing

Heavy narratives and half truths, breathlessly swimming

Inside a thickness of what you've been told is yours

The poet has opined as much (in prior drivel)

Then stopping to sit, a rare shaft of light

Brightens what has yet to be considered

And sudden expansion replicates-

You write lines that move and hold true

How Shameful

How shameful to be pulled 

So far 

        (Society’s collar and leash)

From the fraught moments of childbirth 

A baby then breastfed

Warmed by more than milk-

        (A nourishment inherent in this pause)

Sacred 

Bathing in retrospective sweetness

The miraculousness of a milestone 

Met and forgotten

        (Frivolously filed away, a new day)

New strangers dressed up as years 

        (Wedged and hardened, sticky)

Bloated rings, an overgrown Elm 

Brittle bark flakes, reveals and conceals-

          (An easily contained ecosystem)

Lurking beneath the surface 

Insidious and darling, all of it 

A Soft Place to Land

I call upon words to wrap 

like a blanket or a balm 

Pinning pain before it evolves into

suffering

In doing so, 

I will it to have meaning

Or beauty

Or integrity

Something. 

The staccato currents internally dodge

Conventional language and dancing fingers 

Spread longing, letters lacking character 

Pecking at a keyboard with intentions

A collection of the mind's inventions

What is missing?

A rendering to capture this experience:

The core truth of it ambles onward, 

Strikes blast in such a way to remind 

Standard discourse, unwilling to convey 

Grasping occurs anyway until I hear

"I am going to be okay"

Because essence matters enough

Today.

Grappling with paradox:

Practice prides itself on purposefulness

The terrain of possibilities 

unfurling like a dragon's breath

Mystical, with a reach that extends

into vast space and time

Corners crumble and curl away

surrendering to infinite rolling

Billowy smoke stacks fill the chest,

Demanding emancipation

Holding on is futile

The sense of uncertainty sitting 

Tall is all 

That can be called Certain.

Stones settle:

Sacred.

Worthy of respect I come to see

that I can honor with reverence 

the silt that slips, unsure 

Of what is and will be more. 

An opportunity to practice

true release and faith feeling into, 

The uplifting in the beyond

Divine Order 

Grace 

Mercy

A tall team felt so strongly

In colors pulsing behind my eyes 

Fluffing my wings, ever so lightly

Clearing a safe pathway 

Reminding me to "look up"

Inviting me to request 

A free fall backwards

into what lies ahead 

Assuring me a landing, soft-

A bed of poems and metaphors

That will catch me 

Carrying me all the way home

To My Self. 

Goodbyes to Ghosts

Shadows tip-toeing behind us, faded

Our eternal light, luminously created

Dark parts held firm, nice and steady

Integration awaits my heart, open and ready

I see our iterations, so dear and so clear

Our silhouettes wearing suits made of doubt, fear

What was once you I see now as a ghost

What was once me I see now as a host

A reckoning rattles- releases- a grip

Our story an old tale, a beautiful blip

Ghosts that gaze, connecting as one

I am released- sigh- that story is done 

The me that I see discovers you waiting, at ease

Your heart now thawing out, a long deep freeze

Sunlit fingers laced together, we pray

The contours that back us now point the way

Goodbye

My shadow will always belong to me

Your ghost will always be kindred, free