Hari Om

Some days you just aren’t that interested. There are a million opportunities to pathologize this experience, and I am sure many of us could list our diagnoses like a roster for a really weird baseball team. But the truth is, sometimes a thought comes up that questions what it is we are doing; what is it that I am doing?

I came across this poem by Tim Seibles this morning, in the usual fashion. Ten minutes to gather my belongings, finish my hygeine, make a cup of coffee, feed the cat, feed the dog, find my left shoe, and make sure I have the keys; but first…let’s sit down and write and read poems until that ten minutes just doesn’t exist any longer. So that is what I did. Opening Septemeber 2023 issue of Poetry, I found this gem that sat under me like a pepple in my chair. Right there, the feeling of why stretched out onto the page, two of them really, lounging back like the man on the couch that has been here for weeks and has no plans of leaving or paying rent. But you think maybe he has some wisdom today, so it’s fine that he ate your cereal last night, and polished off the milk.

There it is. The feeling of dysmorphia, but not with a part of your body, rather with your body in the whole of the earth. A mouse in a maze. Click on the title of the poem to hear the author read the work.

Something Like We Did IV

Working through this experience with the intention of understanding and the goal of curiosity, we can get to the deeper places that is being asked of us. It is not the thought that is deep, but the listening.

Listen deeply. But don’t believe your ears. Look closely, but nevermind your eyes. Feel everything, and kiss it goodbye. This is the way through our forays into isolationism. To not shun or exorcise the feelings, but to embrace as an old friend and bid farewell to as an old lover. Try it. It starts with a few breaths.

All In Love,

Michael

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Hari Om

Hosanna! Save Us! The shouts came from the people as this disheveled revolutionary walked into town, on his road to his own death. That was the foundation of the poem by Drew Jackson in his phenomenal tome Touch the Earth called Hosanna. It follows after the pastors reading and responding to Luke 19:36-38, where-in Jesus makes his way down from the Mount of Olives into Jerusalem, and is met with the people coming out to call unto him, Hosanna! They are are not simply heralding him, they are begging for deliverance. For liberation.

This single poem took me into a thread of memory that was like sutres in the wound of my heart. I was given access to a place in my life where I saw my mother crying out for liberation. She knew she was trapped, unlike so many of us who assume our failures are our failures and not the limits of the prison walls of thought. She seemed to know, to understand, that she needed liberated from some kind of binding on her soul. And I heard the congregation sing “Hosanna in the highest, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord” and I was a child again, tempting to say only a child, but it is a child who shall lead them, they taught me. So now my child is leading me into my wounding and showing me the gory details, and there are ghosts. And these ghosts are not so scary any longer. They are only needing me to see them to be freed. And I do.

This poem brought much relief from a burden I was unaware that I was carrying. Thank you is all I can say for that.

Your practice, whether it is poems, or body movement, or breathing meditation, no matter it’s method, is an ivitation to reassociate with your history. There is a burden there, I would nearly guarantee it, and it must be relieved. Simply befriending our ghosts is loving our enemings, and that is another teaching I remember well, especially because it seems it was always an enemy teaching it to me. But isn’t that the way, too?

All In Love,

Michael

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Hari Om

Some days, you can catch that glimpse of you and see how pretty the worlds sees you, and some days you just can’t figure out why your shirt feels like crying. Hmm. But then you breathe in and breathe out and pay the attention of devotion to your body, just for a moment of pause, and there it is: your love is here, and within, and never left, and you can stand up to move through this morning, Not so bad, eh?

Seven White Butterflies

Well, Mary Oliver, I for one did not think it could be so easy. Now I do. Thank you for the reminder that we can always, at any moment, pause and see ourselves alight and rest down in our pretty.

All In Love,

Michael

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Hari Om

This morning I saw that the cherry blossoms have gone. This invited a moment of pause, and of connection in my heart. I know what it is to see newness gone. And, I know that it is an invitation to my growth as well. When I saw that I had missed the last days of the blossoms, unaware in my busyness, distracted by the importance of my own thought, I was ashamed. There are worse offenses, for sure, and of many I am guilty. But this one, this moment of reckoning the way the glow is not going to explode off the branch at first light, this one gave me a chance to forgive. It is much easier to forgive myself missing the final breaths of the cherry blossom than it is to forgive when my unawareness gave way to insistance with my beloved ones; but it is the same thing. One of them just has barbs in it’s story.

Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen reminds us in Today to dance with ‘the sweetness and the bitterness of being both perfect and brief”.

Today

Remember that we are not the expressions of beauty in the season, we are more steadfast in our temporary lives, to be able to stand through the seasons of loss and the seasons of birth, and the times of great and surprising gifts that come as flashes and sparks and flaming out at our feet like so many stars.

All In Love,

Michael

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Hari Om

How do we focus on Joy, and still honor the spaces of sorrow? It is through a practice of equanimity, to see with equal vision, that we can see all of the expressions of our being as expressions of creation, of love, and of spirit. It is when we use our mind and body to grasp tightly to any of these sensations that we become stuck in a loop of suffering and escape from suffering, which is still suffering.

By returning to our Joy, our experience of suprise and familiarity, love and connection; we can hold that sacred sorrow on the altar of our body and celebrate with Joy even this.

David Whyte offers us a poem of the journey from despair to joy here:

'The Journey'

In this individualism-centric culture, we can assume that we must contain and have ability to access anything we need on our own. By our self. This is a wrong thought. It is because we can see beauty in our world, that we can be reminded of where we are from. We are from where we are formed, and we are always formed into love. Even the deep gouges made in our clay become wonderful reminders that we are penetrable, and as such, we are connectable.

The desire to hide away our difficult feelings makes sense in the context of a culture that teaches us in so many ways that we are not supposed to feel pain. That somehow pain is an abberation of our “natural state”, which as children is to be happy little images of their parents ultimate success. So, of course, unhappy equals failed parent equals defensive parent equals dismissive parent. This dunamic extends to almost all power hierarchies in our lives, espevially the ones within us. This may seem to be a harsh criticism, but truly it is not shared out of resentment, but in recognizing these tendencies in myself to feel a bit impotent against the sadness of my loved ones, and to feel a bit helpless with it. Also, the ways in which this messaging comes through is vastly different for each person. My mother would soothe me with sweets and treats to assuage my pain, where-as my brother might ‘give you something to cry about’. These are the same lesson from two different teachers. By force or by fawning, we are taught that our pain is not healthy, and we never learn how to be miserable. So, the practice of seeking Joy is conflated with the practice of running like hell from pain.

These are not the same thing.

We can begin the practice of forgiving our training, understanding our humanness, and embracing our amazing capacity for feeling all with the equanimity of a breath. Breathing in, this is okay; breathing out, I am okay. Whether we are swimming in a sea of happiness, or treading water in the tide of sorrow, we are in the same ocean of love.

All In Love,

Michael

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Hari Om

What about the way you think you are has been able to change as you change? What has been kept from changing? How are you opening into love in each moment?

The work of changing is the breath of becoming, and in each moment we can become if only we are able to release what we think we should be, or are supposed to be. We have heard the weaponized ‘you’ve changed’ thrown like a grenade into the foxhole of our insecurities. Becoming with each moment is a terrifying sort of death and birth and requires it’s own grieving. Greif work is the work of loving what change is.

Joy Harjo invites this change loaded with this grief and pregnant with possibility in It’s Raining in Honolulu.

It’s Raining in Honolulu

We are welcomed into the growth and rebirth here, and made aware that this cyucle falls evenly upon all of us; that everyone by virtue of being is worthy of cleansing, and able to be forgivable.

This is one of the most crucial elements to the process of becoming, being forgiven and forgiving. This is what has us grasp tightly onto what was, even when…no, especially when what we are holding onto is hurt.

What must open this doorway wide is the grieving. Not the grief itself, but the process of engaging livingly and openly with the grief. That is the grieving. The breathing in and out with the mouth of los, fill one another’s lungs with our own breath.

Drew Jackson takes us there:

The Tragedy of

Grief. Rage. Despair. Loss. and the questioning when it will change. This is the poetry of shift. The verses of becoming.

All In Love,

Michael

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Hari Om

So Damn Thirsty

What better way to start the journey than to awaken to your journey than to stop? Right there. Middle of the road. Middle of the breath. Just pause, and speak the truth that aligns with your suffering. This is not how I want to be any longer. I am suffering because this ride is taking me from here to there, and I want to get from there, to here. Right here. And we breathe. And we receive. And we release. And we forgive.

Simple.

Then Hafiz goes next into a bit more brash bar-dad advice:

Find a Better Job

That’s it. Just to find your dharma, your path, your way, and to do the work that that is asking of you. That is how we flip the switch of awareness. By first stumbling in a darkened room, fumbling for the light. When we find it, it really is as simple as flipping it. The practice is both hands feeling their way along the walls.

All In Love,

Michael

Hari Om

This morning I had the best teminder to say Thank You; my own suffering. Met with a barrage of small challenges to the way I think things should be going, I was coming further and further away from my breath. It’s too cold, resistance. It’s too early, resistance. This shouldn’t be here, resistance. I don’t have time, resistance. And amidst all of this resistance in my mind, my body was storing the capacity to deal with the inevitable central nervous system response: fight, flight, freeze, or faun.

I was fighting myself. I was fearing myself. I was struggling with myself. And I forgot that I can stop. Just stop. As I sat to put on my shoes without ceremony, just another obstacle in my morning to overcome, I started to feel my way in. I looked out and saw the cherry tree, still in it’s spring outfit, fluttering sweetly as if to tell me to shut up, and cut it out because people are trying to work here and I am cluttering up this place with all of my insistence on struggling. I looked to my desk and saw Ross Gay reminding me to say Thank You. It took some time for my body to settle into the breath, and it eventually did. And eventually, I was able to hear it when I spoke it. And eventually, I was able to believe it.

Thank You to Myrna at Expedition Press, a letterpress making some of my favorite print pieces these days, for making this beautiful piece of art of this beautiful piece of art from Ross Gay.

Step into Thank You with us this morning.

All In Love,

Michael

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Hari Om

When we open ourselves to the quieter voices of our grief, our regret, we find shadow puppet sorrows that cast large monsters from tiny hands; we can begin to see just how differently they may be from our myths around them. Opening to this place in our body can be daunting, scary, and seemingly impossible, though. It is as if there a tidal wave of emotional monsters just waiting to attack us.

This, however, is not true. The beliefs we carry of our terrifying self, of the low worth, or the chronic fail artist, they were not put into our being by large, looming monsters of our former selves. Many of them, if not most of them were placed there when we were only children.

That’s right. That big scary, mean voice that tells you to fear judgment, or predicts abandonment, or is never satisfied with your body, or your hair, or your mind…that is the voice of child you. It is the seven years old who learned not to talk about pain or they would make mommy sad, or the 11 year old who learned that fat kids aren’t supposed to ask for girlfriends, or that 9 year old who was taught secrets keep the family stronger. Those are childrens voices you hear when you speak to yourself from fear, from pain, from anger, or from rage. There is nothing to afraid of from these voices. There is an asking for healing. A quest for comforting. A begging for belonging.

The poet and pastor Drew Jackson reminds us to look upon the tyranical empires of the past to see that the myths only hold power if we don’t see them in perspective. When we see the fears of the monsters we have hidden away in our untouchable grief, we can see the giants thhey seem to be in myth’s lense, and also the smallness they are with the lense of loving acceptance.

As you go deeper into the practice of awareness of your bodies; your emotional body, your thought body, your touch body, your body of memory, you will find yourself ready to open to these voices. This is a gift of the practice.

I see the lines Drew Jackson is threading clearly, and then there are also the ways in which I see what I need to see to meet the need that I cannot express so clearly, and this poem does both for me. Thanks, Mr. Jackson.

I would love to hear your thoughts, experiences, questions, and comments on this sit today!

All In Love,

Michael

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Hari Om

Good morning, Loves! Today we ask the question: What does Love ask of me, today?

How can I show up, in the way that moves love through my body and through your body and through the collective body, freely? Liberated? Whole?

It begins in stopping. Stopping what you are thinking, what you are doing, what you are feeling, and just being. Just for a moment. A buffer between the ego and the eros.

Ross Gay goives a moment of what that may look like, on any given day.

Thank you, Ross Gay . Please head over and subscribe to his work, as he is often found showing up for what love asks of him, and sharing that with the world.

All In Love,

Michael

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