Word reaches often that there are issues with some of my posts that are unreal; that perhaps I don’t know how the real world works. I write what I know, not hope or pretend. As Lawrence O’Donnell commented on President Biden’s Inaugural, experience is something you cannot teach.
We always knew it, I think, just never applied it to ourselves. Seldom are we lauded for our experience, mostly they say that we learned things and are old for sure.
When I say we go to an earned place when we die, I know it. It has taken a long time to be upfront with memories and some of them are painful. I wrestle the painful anyway to squeeze the good out of them.
If life were not everlasting, I would follow the daffodil or if hard pressed, even the mushroom because they come up year after year forever. It has taken many lifetimes to learn what I know.
One of the catalogues of this past holiday had a printed shirt that took my interest. I paraphrased the words to say ‘I read, I research everyday and I learn. Therefore I know some things.’ (not a lot, but some things)
I understand that heaven’s remedial classes are now instituted to get a head start on Dr. Jonas Salk’s Conscious Evolution. This is evolution not to survive because we have spent lifetimes learning how, but to evolve to a higher form of human potential, with the spiritual aspects of more compassion, empathy and the heart elements like love and the more stingy, sharing.
I came dragging a foot from a world where learning was held sacred and have lived a functioning life for almost a hundred years. Not easy . . but doable. But thinking I should wear a hazmat suit for protection from cynicism which may yet do me in.
THE POET’S MEMORIES. . .
Torn from an event
with memories still alive
and placed in an incubator to breathe,
are poets expected to live.
Leaving a world incomplete,
they wander in vegetation
totally unfamiliar
and yet expected to survive.
And give rise to credence
in a world with no root,
where trees are shades
of others more vivid,
whose flowers whisper their names
in a forgotten language,
whose people are ghosts of livelier images,
all crowding the nimbus.
Where horizons are vast
and what eyes behold are stark lines
dividing two dimensional realities
pretending a depth that fools not a one.
Where snow sheds its stars
on a crystal night and the night becomes
a holy night eliciting unexpected
extravagances, bestowing grace.
All grasped in a moment’s vision
to linger through worlds creating ulcers
by gnawing the viscera
with dreams not completed.
The poet’s pen
translates worlds of mean existence,
from memories held
long in the heart’s pocket.
Translates the colors of those other places
where winds caressed and sun bathed
a skin unlike his own.
In another place and time he walks
and because he does
his memories give rise to an Other’s dream.
Poem Jan 11, 1988
art work by Claudia Hallissey