This world doesn’t improve by demanding perfection. It improves when we reach through our armor and touch another with tenderness. It improves when we bust through the walls of our conditioning, and try a new way of being on for size. It improves when we work through our unresolved shadow and share what little light we can find. It is the small, positive steps that we take when we are at war with ourselves that change the world.
🌀
– Jeff Brown
awe…
examination…
it keeps appearing
again…
I delete…
again…
I delete…
haven’t I already written my poem?
haven’t I already done that one?
What is left that I haven’t taken out…
haven’t examined properly?
There are always layers
As Shrek reminded me,
I am an onion…
layers…
illusions
shadows
truth left to excavate
healing to be hard won
motivations to uncover
mystery to be discovered
always more
God keeps getting bigger
as I examine,
reduce,
open.
help me to stay in this mode of self realization…
growth…
humble me…
my best self emerges within this process
send it again…
remind me again…
🌀
AL
Approaching Wholeness
The time that my journey takes is long and the way of it is long. It is the most distant course that comes nearest to thyself, and that training is the most intricate which leads to utter simplicity. The traveler has to knock at every alien door to come to his own, and one has to wander through all the outer worlds to reach the innermost shrine at the end.
We can never engineer or guide our own transformation or conversion. If we try, our so-called conversion will be self-centered and well-controlled, with most of our preferences and addictions still fully in place but now well disguised. Any attempts at self-conversion would be like an active alcoholic trying to determine his own rules for sobriety. God has to radically change the central reference point of our lives. We do not even know where to look for another reference point because up to now it has all been about me! Too much “me” can never find “you”–or anything beyond itself.
So Step 7 says that we must “humbly ask God to remove our shortcomings.” Don’t ever bother to go after your faults yourself because you will usually go after the wrong thing (the real thing remains denied in the unconscious). Or you might actually obstruct your “golden shadow” which is your gift. “If you try to pull out the weeds, you might pull out the wheat along with it,” as Jesus puts it (Matthew 13:29).
Instead you have to let God reveal your real faults to you, usually by falling many times, and by other people’s opinions of you. You must allow God to remove those faults in God’s way and in God’s time. If you go after them with an angry stick, you will soon be left with only an angry stick–and the same faults at a deeper level of disguise and denial. Thus most people at early stages in alcoholic recovery just replace one addiction with another. Now it’s nicotine, caffeine, shopping, “stinkin’ thinkin’,” or the angry stick itself, which is supposedly okay because it is a Christian angry stick.
Jesus said, “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you” (Matthew 7:7). He was telling us to stay in the position of a beggar, a petitioner, a radical dependent. This is always our spiritual posture, if we are honest. To know that you don’t know, to know that you are always in need, keeps you situated in right relationship with Life itself. Life is a gift, totally given to you without cost. A daily and chosen “attitude of gratitude” will keep your hands open to allow and receive life at ever-deeper levels of satisfaction. But don’t ever think you deserve or have earned it. Humility is foundational. Those who live with such open and humble hands receive life’s gifts in abundance and throughout their years, “full measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over into their lap” (Luke 6:38).
✋🏻
– Richard Rohr
Your Life begins to change when you change. Someday what seemed so difficult will not be anymore. Every step taken to find a new you brings destiny closer to your doorstep. Everything you do consistently is either bringing you closer or taking you further away from the Life you were put here to have. Castaway the demons blocking unrealized greatness stored within the chambers of your soul and never ever stop trying to reach the best version of yourself. The world that now exists will not exist tomorrow because you had the courage to change………………
A sense of place results gradually and unconsciously from inhabiting a landscape over time, becoming familiar with its physical properties, accruing history within its confines.- Kent Rydon
Photos by Fisherman Dan @ Branford, CT
🌀
I have abandoned the dream kitchens for a low fire
and a prescriptive literature of the spirit;
a storm snores on the desolate sea.
The nearest shop is four miles away—
when I walk there through the shambles
of the morning for tea and firelighters
the mountain paces me in a snow-lit silence.
My days are spent in conversation
with deer and blackbirds;
at night fox and badger gather at my door.
I have stood for hours
watching a salmon doze in the tea-gold dark,
for months listening to the sob story
of a stone in the road, the best,
most monotonous sob story I have ever heard.
I am an expert on frost crystals
and the silence of crickets, a confidant
of the stinking shore, the stars in the mud—
there is an immanence in these things
which drives me, despite my scepticism,
almost to the point of speech,
like sunlight cleaving the lake mist at morning
or when tepid water
runs cold at last from the tap.
I have been working for years
on a four-line poem
about the life of a leaf;
I think it might come out right this winter.
🌀
The Mayo Tao by Derek Mahon
Curator’s note: “Mayo” refers to the County Mayo, in western Ireland.
I want to make a poem
that slips into the heart stream
quietly, tenderly,
with no great splash
just a graceful entry,
with minimal ripples
which plunges deeply upon entering
and allows the mud to settle gracefully around it.
I want to make a poem
which allows the heart to trust,
to open,
to flower in it’s own time
knowing, for sure,
it is dependable,
steady,
written to last
through the fiercest storms
though the world burn
and the mountains crumble
words of love
so beautiful
so eternal
they come to life
each time they are read,
or spoken
and anyone who dares to read the poem I make
cannot help but
find within themselves
clouds of peace
wrapped up in thick blankets of joy
and will forever know for sure
they are
beloved
❤️
AL
Everything real comes through the heart. When it is truly opened, everything secondary falls away- egoic glory, fame and fortune, substitute gratifications. The heart doesn’t care about such things. It doesn’t hold it against you if you don’t own your own home, achieve your goals, have a perfect body. The heart doesn’t care what you have earned or accumulated. No matter our seeming differences, we are all the same when the heart gate opens. Deep feeling levels the playing field.
life: acoustic & amplified 