This Is What Love Does

The juju thoughts, the talismanic thinking

Each carefully tended plan, every last strategy

All previously-struck deals and bargains:

Love took them all out of my hands today

And I, willingly this time, gave them all up to love

This is what love does

So we can pass through the needle’s eye

And enter the kingdom of the heaven we thought was elsewhere

Come Back To The Well

Come back to the well and quench your thirst for aliveness

Rage with the torrent

Spin with the whirlpools

Pause in the millpond stillness

All of it water, however it flows

Jump right in

You’ll get wet, of course

You might even risk a drowning

But why make do with the sidelines of life?

Marvel at the miracle of imagining

Revel in your maddest thoughts, your most insane notions

Rejoice in your body’s contortions, the aches of the flesh

You see and are seen

You do and are done unto

You hear and are heard

You act and are acted upon

You know, are known

And are the knowing of it all

Why pretend you're not all that?

Dare You Be So Bold?

There’s an embarrassment of richness here

You are the luxuriance of being, unfestooned

The decadence of depth

It’s not that you’re not enough

For existence itself is beyond plentiful

When you see your own completeness

You’ll wonder if you dare be so bold

As to appear in public minus the garb of insufficiency

That you’ve been mistaking for who you are

This Is What No One Can Teach

No one ever taught me how to feel this pain

I learnt how to doubt and second guess myself

So all this time, I’ve been stopping well short

I no longer want your promises of salvation

(Such an inadvertent disservice, such a well-intentioned unkindness)

No one ever taught me how to lay myself open

What greater freedom is there than to feel this

Thus rendering everything else (having served its purpose)

Null and void?

My body, arcing and shaking, finally dances to its own tune.

Like Jesus’ time in the wilderness, numerous are the temptations to avoid this desert

Many are the whispers to stay away, to be unfaithful to ourselves.

This is what no-one can teach. 

This Silent Vow

With no thought to what I ought

I do just what’s required

The absence of rules, observances and resolutions

Brings a deeper resolve,

A wordless commitment:

To meet whatever calls

No longer abandoning abandonment, fearing fear,

Rejecting rejection or leaving loneliness on its own

To dwell in abandoning, fearing, rejecting and leaving

Until their time is done

This silent vow

Is to be here for it all

To consecrate all that’s been held mundane

To see the worldly in the divine

To move my allegiance from those false idols  

(What wasn’t and what may yet be)

To worship at the altar of what is

To stand, naked and vulnerable, as I am

No longer sheltering in the shade

Of beliefs, conditions, ideas or excuses

To emerge into the light of now, blinking

And a little timidly, at first.

Making Something Of It

The story, barely begun, meets silence today

A change from the customary making something of it

No momentum forward, no pull back

Bemused by the lack of movement

I sit, and do nothing

The aliveness of my senses wholly apparent

Then a question comes: what is here?

I sit and wait, the answer beyond comprehension

Yet known nonetheless

Next, words come: I’ll take up all the space I want

Really? And how much space is that?

A pause. Then an aah. 

Space does not take up space

It requires no special allocation

It now becomes clear that there’s something precious here

Which needs looking after

We can’t begin to know what it wants

Until we know that it’s not

What if I object to nothing, and things are as they are?

(Laughter.)

When The Times Comes

1.      Self or not self:

The heart knows no such boundary

To all things a season

Indivisible fragments of the undivided whole

No thing without its other

2.      It is time to step out now

You’re not quite ready

So I’ll take your hand

(We’re never quite ready when the time comes)

When you decide to stop dallying, you’ll see:

The gold you thought so elusive

Is not at the end of the rainbow you imagined