House on Fire

House on Fire

Your house

   is on fire.

Quick—

   what will you take

with you

into that new

life,

the one

you hadn’t planned?

The one without

the layers

of meaning

and belief,

carelessly constructed yet

protected

with such

blind

tenacity?

Choose now—

   will you keep

your relationships

as you’ve known them?

Your ways of being

   in the world?

Will you crawl out

  of the house

   at last,

gasping for clean air,

having risked it all

for one momento

of the person

you used to be?

Arrogant presumption,

this pretense of choosing.

As if the Soul, 

   having sought

  its ego-erasing crucible

would now empower

your illusions

of control.

Why keep running

back

into the wreckage?

Better to surrender

wholeheartedly.

Let the flames

take it all—even

your blueprint

for life after immolation.

Trust in the miracle

beyond your designing:

The post-surrender peace

that comes

from somehow knowing

amidst the ashes

you’ll find the treasure

that was always hiding

beneath your dross,

waiting for one more fire

to set it free. 

        ©2011, Kimberly V. Schneider

                     from her forthcoming audiobook,

                    

Terrible Beauty: Poems and Reflections

                     for Precarious Times

Kindness

Kindness

Before you know what kindness really is

you must lose things,

feel the future dissolve in a moment

like salt in a weakened broth.

What you hold in your hand,

what you counted and carefully saved,

all this must go so you know

how desolate the landscape can be

between regions of kindness.

How you ride and ride

thinking the bus will never stop,

the passengers eating maize and chicken

will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,

you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho

lies dead by the side of the road.

You must see how this could be you,

how he too was someone

who journeyed through the night with plans

and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,

you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.

You must wake up with sorrow.

You must speak to it till your voice

catches the thread of all sorrows

and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,

only kindness that ties your shoes

and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,

only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say

It is I you have been looking for,

and then goes with you everywhere

like a shadow or a friend.

-Naomi Shihab Nye

Life Will Break You - by Louise Erdich

Life will break you.
Nobody can protect you from that,
and living alone won’t
either
for solitude will also break you
with its yearning.

You have to love.
You have to feel.

It is the reason you are here on earth.

You are here to risk your heart.
You are here to be swallowed up.

And when it happens
that you are broken
or betrayed
or left
or hurt
or death brushes near

Let yourself sit
by an apple tree and
listen
to the apples
falling all around you in heaps

wasting their sweetness.

Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.

If You Want to Change the World

If you want to change the world… love a woman-really love her.
Find the one who calls to your soul, who doesn’t make sense.
Throw away your check list and put your ear to her heart and listen.
Hear the names, the prayers, the songs of every living thing-
every winged one, every furry and scaled one,
every underground and underwater one, every green and flowering one,
every not yet born and dying one…
Hear their melancholy praises back to the One who gave them life.
If you haven’t heard your own name yet, you haven’t listened long enough.
If your eyes aren’t filled with tears, if you aren’t bowing at her feet,
you haven’t ever grieved having almost lost her.

If you want to change the world… love a woman-one woman
beyond yourself, beyond desire and reason,
beyond your male preferences for youth, beauty and variety
and all your superficial concepts of freedom.
We have given ourselves so many choices
we have forgotten that true liberation
comes from standing in the middle of the soul’s fire
and burning through our resistance to Love.
There is only one Goddess.
Look into Her eyes and see-really see
if she is the one to bring the axe to your head.
If not, walk away. Right now.
Don’t waste time “trying.”
Know that your decision has nothing to do with her
because ultimately it’s not with who,
but when we choose to surrender.

If you want to change the world… love a woman.
Love her for life-beyond your fear of death,
beyond your fear of being manipulated
by the Mother inside your head.
Don’t tell her you’re willing to die for her.
Say you’re willing to LIVE with her,
plant trees with her and watch them grow.
Be her hero by telling her how beautiful she is in her vulnerable majesty,
by helping her to remember every day that she IS Goddess
through your adoration and devotion.

If you want to change the world… love a woman
in all her faces, through all her seasons
and she will heal you of your schizophrenia-
your double-mindedness and half-heartedness
which keeps your Spirit and body separate-
which keeps you alone and always looking outside your Self
for something to make your life worth living.
There will always be another woman.
Soon the new shiny one will become the old dull one
and you’ll grow restless again, trading in women like cars,
trading in the Goddess for the latest object of your desire.
Man doesn’t need any more choices.
What man needs is Woman, the Way of the Feminine,
of Patience and Compassion, non-seeking, non-doing,
of breathing in one place and sinking deep intertwining roots
strong enough to hold the Earth together
while she shakes off the cement and steel from her skin.

If you want to change the world… love a woman, just one woman .
Love and protect her as if she is the last holy vessel.
Love her through her fear of abandonment
which she has been holding for all of humanity.
No, the wound is not hers to heal alone.
No, she is not weak in her codependence.

If you want to change the world… love a woman
all the way through
until she believes you,
until her instincts, her visions, her voice, her art, her passion,
her wildness have returned to her-
until she is a force of love more powerful
than all the political media demons who seek to devalue and destroy her.

If you want to change the world,
lay down your causes, your guns and protest signs.
Lay down your inner war, your righteous anger
and love a woman…
beyond all of your striving for greatness,
beyond your tenacious quest for enlightenment.
The holy grail stands before you
if you would only take her in your arms
and let go of searching for something beyond this intimacy.

What if peace is a dream which can only be re-membered
through the heart of Woman?
What if a man’s love for Woman, the Way of the Feminine
is the key to opening Her heart?

If you want to change the world…love a woman
to the depths of your shadow,
to the highest reaches of your Being,
back to the Garden where you first met her,
to the gateway of the rainbow realm
where you walk through together as Light as One,
to the point of no return,
to the ends and the beginning of a new Earth.

--Lisa Citore

This, That & the Other

My little music maker now plays the harmonica, and well.
(I'll try to post a video soon)
He just astounds me.  Every musical instrument he finds, he picks up & learns to play in minutes.  He is a genius - I'm sure of it :)

I liked the guitar & I am very into his drum playing.
But the harmonica, I think, is my favorite yet.
My boy can play the blues!

At the same time, my heart is breaking.
Aching.
I am sure of almost nothing these days.

(Trent just woke up in the middle of my writing, so I went in & we snuggled & nursed & I smelled his wonderful baby head & listened to him breathing & all was peaceful.)

In a world that made sense, The Dad & I - we would still be living together.
We would not hurt so badly around each other.
We would not scramble through the same damn maze, over & over again, only to find ourselves in the same damn dead end, with no fucking cheese.

Love, we are learning, is not enough.

I am praying more & doing yoga.
Reading Mary Oliver:

Wild Geese 

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

And, so, I have begun my yoga teacher training.
It is intense & challenging & full & bright & exciting.
I like being a student again!

What a beautiful, broken, blessed world...

Words for Today

 

What the Body Says

I was born here, and

I belong here, and

I will never leave.

The blue heron's

gray smoke will flow over me

for years

and the wind will decide

all directions

until I am safely and entirely

something else.

I am thinking of this

this winter morning

as I sit by the fire

and the fire in it's red rack

keeps singing

its crackling song

of transformation.

Of course

I wonder about

the mystery

that is surely up there

in starry space

and how some part of me

will go there at last.

But I am talking now

of the way the body speaks,

and the wind, that keeps saying,

firmly, lovingly:

a little while and then this body will be stone; then

it will be water; then

it will be air.

-Mary Oliver