The Trackless Path

Don’t speak everything that comes into your mind.

Keep your silence. Let it work its mystery.

Act and let your action speak for itself.

If you do, you’ll be a mystery

And do far less harm

If the secret that you keep

Is in keeping with the will of the Great Unseen.

Turning the other cheek,

Or in other words,

Letting the enemy win the war,

Take the spoil,

And leave you poor, 

Puts you in the proper place

To receive the spirit of humility.

Whereas winning the war breeds pride, 

And those puffed up with pride grow fat and weak,

And sooner or later they start losing,

Not just with outward ememies,

But with the inward battle 

For unseen things.

But not so with those

Who turn the other cheek.

They already know their weakness.

It is their constant companion.

And in it, they grow strong in faith,

For faith is the only way they can survive.

And armed with faith and humility,

They win an inward battle

That lends itself 

To perfect strength 

And stamina in suffering.

And you can write this down:

That those who suffer the longest always win.

In the absence of the ones you love,

Imagine that the strangers you meet are them.

Love deep into the foreign one

And it will seep into the very ones

You miss and cannot see.

Corporations and kingdoms,

Democracies and fascist regimes,

For all their pomp and pretension,

In the end, are temporary.

They have a beginning,

And they have an end.

But family is eternal.

It is the bedrock of existence.

And the family of God is the only order

Without beginning and without end.

Just think about it, 

What are you 

When all else is stripped away,

But a child of God,

So that your deepest definition 

Is in relation to a Heavenly Parent.

It is the ultimate identity,

And it is the only authority

That transcends

The grave.

I am surprised that the Spirit of Christ

Is not a part of any cause that I can find

Except the family. It doesn’t seem

To take part in debates

Of doctrine.

It doesn’t argue.

It doesn’t try to prove itself at all.

In fact, it is most often found 

In the unsolicited praise

Of those that it inhabits.

And when those who have it

Try to describe relationships in its context,

They inevitably are cast back upon descriptions of the family,

Father, son, mother, daughter, sister, brother,

These are our closest approximations

To the love that we’ve found in Him

And in those in whom he dwells.

And isn’t that a surprise,

That in Him we find a family,

And in the family, at its best, 

We find something of Him.

There is a kingdom of peace.

Its banners waft in the wind.

But there is no earthly power

That has found the peace within.

Their heart is bent on anger.

Their will is set to win.

And until they forsake winning,

They’ll war and war again

Until it works a cleansing

A change from deep within,

And then, Oh then,

When men are free 

From the need to war, to win,

Will the unseen peaceful kingdom

Come to Earth again.

I bang the pots.

I stir the bushes.

Fly away. Fly away.

Take to the sky, you little birds.

Take to the heavens, you big birds.

Don’t stay long! I say,

Just long enough to leave your curse upon them,

Or in other words, your blessing, 

The blessing of the ruin that you took early,

The one that they’ll find late which they’ll find out

Is the key to their deliverance.

But whatever you do, move on.

Don’t stay long, lest you take sides in the coming battle,

The last and most senseless battle of them all

When the earthbound folk will kill 

For the sake of killing.

You don’t yet know

How anger can clip your wings 

And wet your feathers.

And drown you 

In a cause

That you’ll regret long, long, after they are gone.

And it’s coming soon. It’s coming soon.

But not for those 

Who can still fly away and keep on flying,

Not for those who keep on moving out

Of the life that was expected

And into the voice 

That points the way 

To the Unseen Holy Place.

I love to work with people.

And I live my life mostly by my gut

And prefer to deal with people who do the same.

But it becomes impossible to do that when organizations get too large.

And so I have finally stopped shadowing their thresholds.

Because if I must fill out papers before we look eye to eye,

I am not interested.

If you need to ask me a set of questions that you’ve written down,

I’m not interested. If you don’t know at a glance,

And if I don’t know at a glance

That it’s right,

I’m not interested.

The Corporation has had its day, has had its day.

There comes a great de-centralization through chaos.

And in its wake will flourish

The private enterprise,

And laughter,

Sweet, childlike merry-making,

As the little ones chant and sing upon its grave.

And we will do business with each other once again

When the great Leviathan crashes to the earth

And the children of the kingdom

Feast upon its ashes.

I live and keep on living.

I move and keep on moving.

And it suits me fine. It suits me fine.

I knew an old man who lived by the ocean.

And he said that once, years ago,

It made its way into his house.

And so the old man and his neighbors 

Pushed it back. They pushed it back.

With rock and sand and a crew of engineers,

They pushed the ocean back.

Can you imagine that?!

And the man lived in a little shack. 

For that, they pushed the ocean back!

Because they could not keep on moving with the tide.

They could not keep on living with the seasons.

And I realized as he told me the story,

That we were very different.

I would have moved on, I thought.

I would have moved on without a thought.

And trusted that an unseen hand had better plans.

Yes, an unseen hand has better plans.

If we can only see them 

For what they are.