Word reaches 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 not taught.
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. Something you cannot teach as the saying, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.
When I say we go to an earned place when we die, I know it. It has taken a long time for me to be upfront with memories and many of them are painful and not happy.
If life were not everlasting, I would follow the daffodil or if hard pressed, even the mushroom because they come up year after year after year. It has taken many lifetimes to learn what I know. (I edit today (2/1/24) and say my peer Susan Howatch, when returning to England and studying at Oxford, came away with knowledge that the great philosophers thought that humans cannot accept what Reality Is. There must first be giant steps taken for evolution to prevail its course. But how to teach when people run from what sounds like work? When you can’t teach experience, you think entertainment will?)
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, what we know as well as what we have.
(Coming to mind is what an elderly did which I loved and highly praised. Teach me, please teach me how to do that! Haughtily she pulled back and said, but then you would know as much as I do! The 20 year old that I was felt as if slapped!)
I came dragging a foot from a world where learning was held sacred and have lived a functioning life here 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.
(But I since learned that when coming to physical life to make a difference we hope, we withhold forgiveness because we think that the past still can be rewritten. The potentials are still seen which keep us working the program and can’t give up. Lost causes are an oxymoron to us.)
THE POET’S MEMORIES
Torn from an event
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.
artwork by Claudia Hallissey