Meditations with Alden

A brief spoken word poem

There have always been prophets—a mystic in a cave, a voice crying in the wilderness. Always there have been prophets, until now. Do you know any? Do you visit them and pay them homage? Ours is a culture built on shadow, where violence and exploitation underpin our world, but this is not acknowledged in our bodies. To name this shadow, to feel it, is the role of the prophet. This work begins within. It begins by finding and naming the shadow that is braided into the marrow of our individual selves. The inner activism starts by recognizing that we are the shadow that we seek to confront. Having recognized it, we die to old notions of ourselves. We mulch. We decompose. We begin again and again. We cannot remake culture from the same mentality that molded it. This is why we need prophets. We need deep activism, that begins within.

There is a home you cannot see, a womb you cannot return to, but your bones and your being remember. It is the place you were thrust from, unwilling, into selfhood, into separation, and yet you carry its echo—a longing, an ache that feels like love. In moments of surrender—through love, through nature, through fleeting glimpses of union—you remember. You touch the great mystery where all separateness ceases, where you are of the world, not apart from it. These moments are not answers but invitations, reminders to approach gently, to love deeply, and to trust that we are always held, always guided, always on our way home.

We carry inherited neuroses, endlessly questioning what we should do, how we should be. But there is nothing to solve, no place to arrive—only the simplicity of being what we already are. Love, creation, laughter, grief, desire—these are as natural to us as breathing. Let go of understanding and also of not understanding. Let go of the questions, and with them, the need for answers. Move as the creature you are, belonging fully, effortlessly, to this world. Celebrate the simplicity of being alive—it is liberation itself.