Tools to make sense of the pieces.
Words to name the beliefs and emotions.
Understanding.
Equipped to sit in the discomfort.
Gained ability to separate self from stories and shame.
Compassion.
Release and removal of blockages preventing flow and future.
Inspired.
Relief and clarity of what no longer serves.
Hopeful.
Excited.
Energized.
Curious.
Category: poetry
The Summer Day
Poem 133 – The Summer Day
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
—Mary Oliver
The Invitation – Oriah Mountain Dreamer
It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living.
I want to know what you ache for and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing.
It doesn’t interest me how old you are.
I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love for your dream for the adventure of being alive.
It doesn’t interest me what “planets are squaring your moon.”
I want to know if you have touched the centre of your own sorrow if you have been opened by life’s betrayals or have become shrivelled and closed
from fear of further pain.
I want to know if you can sit with pain mine or your own without moving to “hide it” or “fade it” or “fix it.”
I want to know if you can be with joy mine or your own if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful to “be realistic” to “remember the limitations of being human.”
It doesn’t interest me if the story you are telling me is true.
I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself.
If you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul.
I want to know if you can be faithful and therefore be trustworthy.
I want to know if you can see beauty even when it is not pretty every day.
And if you can source your own life from God’s presence.
I want to know if you can live with failure yours and mine and still stand at the edge of the lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, “Yes!”
It doesn’t interest me to know where you live or how much money you have.
I want to know if you can get up after the night of grief and despair weary and bruised to the bone and do what needs to be done to feed the children.
It doesn’t interest me who you know or how you came to be here.
I want to know if you will stand in the centre of the fire with me and not shrink back.
It doesn’t interest me where or what or with whom you have studied.
I want to know what sustains you from the inside when all else falls away.
I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.
How I Became a Madman (Prologue) by Kahlil Gibran
You ask me how I became a madman. It happened thus: One day, long before many gods were born, I woke from a deep sleep and found all my masks were stolen,—the seven masks I have fashioned and worn in seven lives,—I ran maskless through the crowded streets shouting, “Thieves, thieves, the cursed thieves.”
Men and women laughed at me and some ran to their houses in fear of me.
And when I reached the marketplace, a youth standing on a house-top cried, “He is a madman.” I looked up to behold him; the sun kissed my own naked face for the first time. For the first time the sun kissed my own naked face and my soul was inflamed with love for the sun, and I wanted my masks no more. And as if in a trance I cried, “Blessed, blessed are the thieves who stole my masks.”
Thus I became a madman.
And I have found both freedom and safety in my madness; the freedom of loneliness and the safety from being understood, for those who understand us enslave something in us.
But let me not be too proud of my safety. Even a Thief in a jail is safe from another thief.
The Madman: His Parables and Poems. by Kahlil Gibran
Play the Role
If you want to be loved,
Darling, just play the role.
Remember, I decide your value.
You are only here for how I need you, nothing else.
Your comfort… not my concern, I’m sure you’ll figure it out.
How naïve are you?
Oh perfect… you don’t listen to your boundaries.
Use and abuse?
Of course you won’t pushback.
You keep telling me you want to be loved,
But then you push back and tell me I’m doing it wrong.
Don’t you get how this works.
You don’t get a say in how you want to be loved.
Your pleasure isn’t my concerned.
Now you want to hold power and be in control.
I’ll make you pay.
I’ll use those feelings, that care, compassion, and empathy to destroy you.
Did you forget?
My feelings are your responsibility.
Your job is to take care of me first.
How dare you push back and think yourself worth is even close to mine
How dare you make me uncomfortable.
You do not get to be the comfortable one.
Show me how much you actually love me.
How dare you enjoy anything that diminishes me.
You will be punished if this makes me look bad.
How dare you enjoy something at my expense.
How dare you challenge me. You are not equal.
Take it, take all the abuse, more, you deserve it.
I’m so sorry.
You should have just listened.
You don’t know better.
You’ll do better next time.
If you want to be loved,
Darling, just play the role.
I Love you but…
I miss you and don’t want to not have you in my life.
You want me how you want me.
Not how I want me.
How do I keep me when I try to exist with you?
Can I have you in my life and still live my best life?
Are you taking up space or empowering me to grown?
You want to be what I need, but in action (practice), cannot be who I need.
I love you but…
I love you, but the time is wrong.
I love you, but I’m struggling to let go.
I love you, but I love me more.
Maybe this time it will be different
The harder he pushes, the worse he fucks.
That aggression, so relentless,
Yet that thrust, so limited, so underwhelming.
The talk, the insistence, the pressure,
I give in, my brain convinces me it’s just easier this way.
All for….
Disappointment, emptiness, sadness.
One minute of ecstasy?
Was that what that was supposed to be?
Unclear, as I left my body the moment my brain gave in.
I lay there now, tossed aside.
Needs unmet,
Needs not communicated, not heard.
Resentful.
Angry at myself.
I let it happen again.
I did not respect my boundaries.
This weakness, to fall back into behaviours that don’t serve me.
For what?
To believe that this is my only value.
I know better,
I deserve better,
Yet I struggle to believe that this is not my only worth.
Storytelling
What if the world is here solely for me.
What if that was the approach I took… ‘The world is mine!’
Where the world is as amazing as I want it to be.
It is created for me.
To challenge, execute, inspire and to share.
What is it that finally makes us feel that we’re valuable enough and worth it
That we deserve to share our story?
If I cannot find value within, then it is unreasonable to expect others to find any value either.
Then once I figure out my value, how do I let go of ego, and forgive my younger self?
“Never be a prisoner of your past. It was just a lesson, not a life sentence.”
I love and embrace that what I know today may be completely wrong tomorrow
… and guess what?
That it is ok and I should not be ashamed that I may have come from a less informed place.
You can’t give people what they want, but you can give them something else.
Amanda Palmer
You can give them understanding.
What Did it Take?
What did it take for you to finally stop and smell the flowers?
To take the time to really taste a meal prepared with love,
To gaze with wonder at the stars.
To put your phone phone away and be present?
To let go of insecurities and assumptions.
To remove ego.
To be vulnerable.
To let go.
To feel
To really feel how you actually feel.
To listen to your body.
To hear what the universe was trying to tell you.
What did it take?
When did it hurt enough?
But Did You Live? 