Winding Down That Old Road

Hari Om

We have been here all along. This old road. I think we forget that. I think we forget that we are not “new” or “old” but “always”. When we enter into the conflicts within and without, we can feel so isolated, or so aligned, depending on how we can open our hearts in that moment.

When I am in my wounding, everything hurts. When I am in my healing, everything is medicine.

It is from this place that we can see, in any moment, how our heart is opening or closing. All along, though, we are on that road we have always been on, and eventually it will bring us right back around. This means we are working along a lineage of all of the love and the pain that we ever have had. We cannot bury the past, because it is our history. The difference is the past happened then, and our history is always coming through us.

bell hooks brings us into what that looks like in the place from which she comes.

Appalachian Elegy 15.
bell hooks

pink and white oleander
not native to Appalachian ground
still here lies
years and years of poison
rebel flags
heritage and hate
in the war to fight hunger and
ongoing loss
there are no sides
there is only
the angry mind of hurt
bringing death too soon
destroying all our dreams
of union

Thanks, again, bell hooks for that wonderful breath of grief and love and memory.

We also heard from Padraig O Tuama:

Men in a war
Padraig O Tuama

Men in a war
prefer the talk of 
politics
than of
pain.

In many ways, we are all in this war we have agreed to inside of our heart and minds, I think. And when we are embroiled in that war, it is the weapons of pretext and emotional dysregulation that we use the most.

And finally, we have a great love poem from Ellen Bass, a prayer.

Prayer
Ellen Bass

Once I wore a dress liquid as vodka.
My lover watched me ascend
from the subway
like I was an underground spring
breaking through.
I want to stop wanting to be wanted like that.
I’m tired of the song the rain sings in June,
the earth, her ornate crown of trees
spiking up from her loamy head.
There are things I wanted, like everyone.
But to this angel of wishes I’ve worshiped
so long, I ask now to admit
the world as it is.

Ah, yes! The best of prayer. To learn to really truly love the world as it is.

All In Love,

Michael