Awakening:  Nothing Can Separate

Lectio

"Nothing can separate us from the Love that is God"
words so gently spoken
a dagger in my heart
finding grief
where I thought there was none.
I do not understand.
I do not want to.

Pray with Your Eyes Open

Pray with your eyes open.
Speak the gentle bend of a willow branch
    as it reaches to caress your cheek
Give words to the flight of the flicker
    the magpie
    the sparrows
Utter the soft brown flutterings of the quail
    in their scurried quickness
Praise the bejeweled leaves touched by last night's rain
Whisper the greenness, the orangeness, the redness
    of the world around you.
Pray with your eyes open
And when they close,
Listen.

Difference

You can keep your pills and your platitudes
    stop trying to make my brain work
    the way you think it should.
We are different, that's all
and if I don't fit
    with your way of viewing the world
Pretend you don't see me
It's easier for everyone that way.

Landscape

The rain
has painted a landscape on my patio -
such depth, such tone,
such beautiful use of light.
Even the way the brick has been laid is perfect:
carefully placed glass
so I can still see through to the beauty beneath.

Seed Capsule

Look deep
within this dried capsule
See the darkness?
that black seed?
Look again - look further
it blossoms in a flash of yellow
    and orange

The lily
lifting its face to the sun

If you can't see it yet,
be patient.
Tend the seed gently
Love it
Water it
Warm it
Trust ... that it will appear

Becoming Soup

If you hold your spoon
    just so
You can turn yourself upside-down
    and become soup.
an interesting duality,
    but not one I favour.

Beyond the Veil

It was in the passage of your birth that it began,
    this slipping of veils and intermingling of tides.
It was as you moved,
    gentled
    from death into birth
that I saw the curtains lift
    and saw beyond
    to where existence
    was all there was to being
    and life and death had no part of it.
For a moment I thought I had gone with you
    was there, beyond the world, looking back
    through a haze of unreality,
then I realized that it was you
    who was looking back at me
and with your second death
    I began to weep.

Due Process

Some poems can just be written
    appearing like deer - fully formed and ready to run
others can be laughed out, or cried
    giggling tearfully onto the page

But some poems
    must be
        Ripped
    from the womb
    with great heaving sobs
Leaving jagged tears,
    and becoming their own births.

In the Hands of God

How I wept when they said your name:
    Dominick
When they labeled you
    still-born son
Still you were, and still was the only way they knew you

But I
    I knew your life
        your joy
    all your tiny movements
I knew you 
    before you were named
    before we called you In the Hands of God

There was nothing I could have done
nothing I did
    i know
But still i wonder why you chose to go

Perhaps you would have stayed
    if i had loved you more?

Teachings

Does it really matter how we get a teaching?
    whether someone gives it to us
    or we find it tucked into some leaves
        perhaps
    or hidden in a jaybird's wing.

If our hearts are open
    full of spirit
    the teaching will be good
    no matter where it finds us.

Meditatio

"There is nothing that can separate us 
    from the Love that is God"
        so it is said
and yet
    nothing
is the only thing that does separate us from God
    even if
    God never separates from us.

It is only in nothingness,
    in absence of becoming
that we grow so big in our own eyes
and turn God
all around us
    into 
        nothing

And the great Light becomes darkness

Lost Words

"Your last child died."
The blunt force of your words shocked me
from that nowhere world between labour
    and birth
What gives you the right
    to tell me something I already know so deeply
How   dare   you
    suggest so cruelly that I should follow your advice

The force of your words shocked me

But the words themselves have since been lost
    deep in a newborn's cry.

Contemplatio

They are dark, those days
    those days when we separate ourselves from God
And I can see
    how earth
    would become hell
If God ever chose to separate himself
    from us
Many of these words were born or conceived on silent retreat at a place called Naramata Centre.  If any of this has touched you or called you to a sacred moment, please consider giving a small gift so that Naramata Centre can maintain this ancient sacred space, and the programs offered there.
copyright 2012 ailsa flynne