Tuesday, January 8, 2019

Gifted

1/8/18

Love and a dog and woman gone
For the time being, awakened, right before the alarms
When the body is ready and the mind revived
Without worry, with love for the woman and dog
With separation comes thought and realization
Of need to be held, to be coddled, to be accepted
To be angry when people don’t listen and behave my way
To see a couple stumbling down Lesseps Street
Five in the morning and praise grace for the days I have made
To forget the second person and how another person
Can push you to anger, for he threatens the very bedrock
The foundation upon which your life has been built
Feigning sobriety and tarnishing the name of what represents you.
How to separate anger and ego and acceptance and love:
The short answer is to pray, and to talk to the elders
To ask, to see what it is that they want,
And maybe to move on, to make a change:
This is where source takes you this morning, to a place
Where others do not determine who you are or how you act
To love with detachment, to let go
And love more when coming back together,
To think of her, sleep in her eyes, a porcupine
Or a turtle or a dinosaur egg at four in the morning
Asking you not to sweat, her sweet voice
Under the down, hiding her breath, smiling already
Together you wake and you kneel and pray and join her after the second
And then you say that where there is doubt
And she struggles to find the answer always
And sometimes she plays, and sometimes she answers right away:
Faith. You have been given this great blessing
This woman that does not let you complain
That says you cannot talk shit about another man
For one week. So you try, you separate the talking shit
And the addressing of how to better serve, and there are phone calls to be made,
Talks to have, an address to be looked at and examined and always growing
Let not the threat of ego drive you into temptation
Meaning that the need to change or stop him becomes rage filled.
For this is easy to hold onto,
Like the covers, like the hitting of the snooze, like a life
Without discipline. The first steps in combating and beating down the ego
The two parts of the mind: serpent and dove
The intellect and love together must overcome, must believe
Must run the course and lift up all of those of us that are
Those of us that believe, and under the skin and within neighborhoods
This is everyone, even the couple stumbling at five in the morning
Even the one needing attention and pretending to be sober
Even those that get under your skin, for these petty tyrants
Are lessons. These people that also know not are your best teachers
So find a space on your front porch and let not
The roosters crowing in the cypress tree across the street disturb you
Remember yesterday, walking beneath the trees in your yard,
A woodpecker and the desire for him to take down the entire
China Ball Tree. A flitting little finch, a male cardinal, and the bird with
The long tail feather. Beyond all of this: Chickens on Lesseps
Eating pretzels shaped like goldfish, from yesterday, cafeteria worker
Throwing a box of apples in a dumpster. Fret not for when
One does not know the value of what is returned to earth
There is opportunity. In her being away, your heart pulls, your heart wishes
You want to give her joy, hope, and most important: faith
That you love being around her, not because of codependence
Not because of a need for warm shelter
Take this thought into the cold morning shower of the way she yawns
The way she sits without needing you, the excitement of her journey
Of what she encounters and cannot wait to share
Of her realizations, of her making you a better man
Take not offense to a woman that does not constantly want you around
This is a sign of health, not an error of touch, not an error of need
In the trees you will find your answer
In the dance of the morning wind. In the discipline of words
And silence on the front porch, the smell of Tibetan cedar
Burning and wrapped and hands that did this tens of thousands of
Miles away, everything is perfect
Here, everything is perfect
Inside your body, the tingling is more than coffee
The false nerves, the self-induced fear
This is only the ego seeking charge
Let go and ask questions while knowing certainty is never caught
Knowing that the beauty of life is questions never answered
The beauty of life is loving without knowing why
The beauty of life exists inside each one of us
As soon as we can separate from the hamster wheel spinning of worry and guilt.

After meditation:

The written word delivers awareness
Without which thought revolves and spins
Thought gets mixed in with all counters, words, people,
And experiences do little to change what is within.
Emptying is the name of the game:
Emptying the body of toxins
Emptying the mind of thought
Emptying the heart of everything but love
So that what comes in the silence: the swimming
The desire to sit for twenty minutes in a sauna each morning
This is what god sends in the chill of the front porch
This is what god sends in the incessant crowing of roosters
In the sounds you differentiate: traffic on a bridge compared to
Traffic on Claiborne, compared to a rooster across the street
And a rooster blocks away; in this you are taught the value of silence
In these opposites you see the need to quiet the mind
To find that all is a backdrop to the perfect knowing and unfolding
To the sleeping shortly after the sun sets and waking before it has risen
To take time to find the discipline, to realize that all is connected
And your purpose is to find this deeper connection, to love
To question, to get more involved, to write at night, to share, to reach out
To listen, to take one thing: reading comprehension for youth
To concentrate on this, to know that this is where you have struggled yourself
To pay attention to the words, to understand, to not have to go back and read again,
But you do, and maybe this is the reason for the hundreds of books
Maybe this is the reason for new bookshelves
Maybe this cold on your skin, this chill of arm hairs and freckles
This changing of the sky as time turns almost into six-thirty
This way that we have constructed days, made with the
Advent of agriculture. What if we all walked through these blocks
Past these birds, past these butterflies
And what if we all knew the names and the reasons
Behind why the loquat is called a misbelieve
Still a reason has not been given
Like the devil beating his wife, how everybody just says this
Like how a hotel has not a thirteenth floor
Yet nobody mentions that the fourteenth floor is still the thirteenth.
These myths that we all believe in order to coexist.
Which of them must be questioned, and which give the best eclipse
Of distance between us. A force field, a structure, a bird waking from above
The first hint of sunlight, the ripples of white within
Gray clouds moving, a gift for what wants to grow
A relatively warm January morning, a poem made by ee cummings
All of what you get to do if you choose, to not run yourself ragged
To not feel responsible for other’s lives, to realize the value of realizing
Your codependence may be masked sometimes as a desire to help
As a desire to love, as a desire to control the ones around you
For what if their affection leaves and you are left all alone
In the words you are delivered this: Presence, God, Connection, Source
All words for what can be felt but not explained
All words that take into account that all is flowing
That you are only a stick in a river
But the stick of an oak
A former intention of an acorn
As an intention of your own soul
As an intention of a zygote
Or a y chromosome
Or the way words you have not used in years can be recalled
When you force yourself to sit, you align spirit with body and mind
Moreso, you realize that they have always been aligned
You ask ego to move. You
Be the energy that spreads and touches and lifts other energy,
That washes away the negative, that lets voice not drift
Into talk that attacks; let talk contain multitudes
Let talk contain solutions and ways to lift everybody that walks
Even Tamera passing a second time, talking to herself before sunrise
As you talk to yourself, as we all talk to each other
In conversations never spoken
Inside daily minds, millions of conversations each day
In a city as small as New Orleans and as wide as Burundi.
In a village of sorts are there less internal conversations?
Is it better when the monkey yells to let other monkeys know:
There is a lion! or There is danger in the tree!
Is better even something that can be measured?
Is what you can find to eat what can be grown outside the school?
The gift of arugula that keeps on giving, the gift of gynura procumbens
The gift of mirlitons and the need for a fence
The gift of letting others take charge
The gift of a car horn at six thirty in the morning
The gift of seeing that all you encounter

Is a gift.

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