‘How did you know to do it?’ he asked.
I loved and raised babies and painted roses
on their cheeks and planted evergreens in their hearts.

Now you should put the sabers
at the foot of the evergreens.
The dove sings high, gargles her song at times,
but you know my friend, you know.

                                                                                                                                                               The PoemMaker

In every time and place there is a one who will dip pen
in the heart and write.

                                                                                                                  The Philosopher-King

The rose will bloom in December, I promise.
And I do not make promises lightly.

                                                                         My Mentor, the Nazarene

(I knew that eventually I would have to define my god or what it is I have held as my truth.  Having been brought up in a traditional orthodox religious home,  from the beginning I was watched. And heard the apologies to the priest about what I was saying.  Somehow it is important I put into words that are understood what is my knowledge or what I came into the world remembering.    I overheard a new reader say he gave up on me  because he had to resort to the dictionary for every second word.  My favorite English Lit teacher says my language is often archaic.  But considering the ancient world I volunteered from,  to me it’s understandable.

I am not credentialed so my education has been for well over a half century a daily independent study program.  When my world slept,  I went to the books. (when my brother Ted died  I  learned from his daughter that after dinner he went to his books, his friends he said, like I do) Thought given and integrated and practiced.  I cannot quote theories and postulates,  I write what I know and after much struggle,  am lightly editing my last journal entry of July 23, 2017 that tells how it is with me.  I had scribed the following from that entry.

We are given to speaking in a lofty language too so bear with us. What you are searching for is not without peril for you delve into territories best left to those whose ambitions list with the arch angels.  You form a doctrine also best left to the farmers of the soul whose intent is to feed the people.  You love your humans and do not leave them adrift.  But we educate.  Your dreams also are  lofty at times but we lift when we can and surprised are we at times.

What we can do is give you a premise.  A premise with teeth but not without bite.  You wish to give what people will find comforting and yet something to grow on.  And think.  Work is something people avoid when they can but we give it a go.

Ineffable.  That which is too lofty, too sacred and must not be spoken of.  Must not be spoken of.  Yet if we are to see growth and a planet not in peril,  we have to work.  Ineffable.  The rolling thunder of which you speak, the implicate and explicate is what the scientists call it.  We call it the core and outer limits of the dream as you say.  You wish to enhance or enclose with an embrace the awesome splendor of the love you find permeating. You live in your god since he is All That is.  The outside of you is the inside of his outside and this you knew from the beginning.  The awesome splendor of the embrace is what your god is for you.  Awesome.  It is a word that people use and can relate to.  Yet it does not answer the question why the killing of 6 million humans was not sufficient reason to stop one human.

You will not find a reason within human intelligence to explain that symptom of depravity exhibited by a human toward other members of his species.  How could your ten year old heart at that time be ravaged by its knowledge and not the god to whom you were given for safekeeping?  Though your parents held to the Grandfather God concept,  you did not even then. What you ask the human mind cannot grasp.  But maybe we begin to explain how goodness can operate without emotion and still be considered above evil.

It seems the word ineffable stems from being not spoken in terms of outside the sphere of sacred.  Sacred is common with you.  Beyond sacred is ineffable.  Not spoken of.  You find this difficult; hard to live with a concept beyond the realm of speaking.  You think and therefore have the right to speak providing you intend no harm to the house of another nor to break the rice bowl from which he eats.  So we adhere to these concepts.  But there is a realm of existence so far beyond where we are and you are that it cannot be spoken of because there are no concepts beyond the immediate conceptual. Simply Is.  All else Is.  Or are,  steps toward getting nearer to that place where awesomeness will begin to conceive a form holding yet further realms of thought not possible.  Realms of thought not possible for the human brain.

It seems nonsense and yet,  yet,  ineffable is the word to use.  Too lofty, too sacred and not spoken of because there are no words in the human lexicon,  dictionary, able to describe.  When people speak of the god they believe in who has a hand on their shoulder it is a leaf that they feel and lean on.  A leaf.  The tree itself is a mighty redwood of understanding with roots going down levels of life that consume Every Living Thing and whose height is above sight.  When man says there is no god he does not feel the weight of the leaf yet.  He still has many lives to go to get to that point.  Ineffable.

You see the word in conjunction with the mighty redwood.  Man is a lightweight against the leaf but when he feels it,  it is progress.  For there now is the presence of Conscience.  You see the sacredness of life and the child hurting.  Many have not reached there yet,  thinking still that all is a match of chemicals,  hormones mostly that propel humans.  Humans you say are divine and place them in Genesis where the beginning was.  They cannot assimilate that information and cannot relate.  Knowledge rises from within and is a Given.

Ineffable.  Beyond the scope of humanity because there is no form, no concept of the word becoming.  God is a thunderous roll of Becoming Yet To Be and that is why minds say that life is everlasting and everlasting.  The residual of that thunderous roll to becoming is left within Mankind and is the god within.  The leaf maybe they feel.  That they humanize that weight and say their grandfather god will open his arms to them may be all they can handle at the moment.  That there is a stronger someone than they is what they need.  Someone to justify them.  And what they do.  And even if what they do is not good it may be what their human father commanded,  wished,  or taught so they are obedient to their human father god.  You see the evolution and why it stagnates.   Education is required for growth of the human spirit.  We begin again.

The Vault of God

And the inside is the outside
of the inside of God and I am he, or it or she.

Just as my children were part of me, the
outside of me, while inside, yet separate.

I am they, that part of me that flows
through them, yet are they separate and

they are part of me, an expression of
who I am, yet separate.

With my memory bank, just as I am the
holder of my mother’s memories,  I am

the vault of her who had me as her
expression.  I am the vault of God who

expressed himself through me and I am
the holder of memories.

(I told a long time friend that for me God is a verb and Jesus is my Mentor. A verb cannot cuddle nor is a comfortable pillow.  But I was not then at the place of rolling thunder yet nor where all time is simultaneous that quantum physics espouses.  So there was a lot of growing to do and much living yet to thread through.  My mentor became my friend as I was held accountable and as I sought his divinity,  I found mankind’s and my own.    In the Dead Sea Scrolls (The Nag Hammadi Library)  Jesus said ‘I shall give you what no eye has seen,  no ear has heard and no hand has touched and what has never occurred to the human mind.’   Even with no credentials and whatever our persuasion,  we all have a highest and best we hold onto.  It is a good beginning.)

                        THE MOMENT THE STAR FELL          

                     I must call you by name
that will pull you close to me.
I’ve searched for something,
some one word that will torch you
and bring the inner light to bear.

                      I cannot know my love,
what name you wore
when first we saw the bright dawn
and held hands
as darkness lulled us deep.

                       But here, this night, my thoughts
                       rove time and space,
     piercing the black sky
for a memory still shedding sparks.

What w
already familiar.  So try that star and this
and the one shining brightest.
Love holds court in its light,
however cold as man thinks,
however warm as man thinks.

                          I do not know.  I do not know.

      Your memory pulls from night
its secrets.

You  will find it shines because I lit it.
You will find it warm because I am there.
I see you search the southern sky
                            closest to your bed and against your will,

 

We Are Earth’s Prayer And Benediction

Over the years I have asked us all to fall in love with our Earth.   Obviously it must have been easy for me because I am still in love with her even though I am ending my earth cycle.  I described it as a oneness,  a union nothing dissolves nor cracks.   It is the steadiness,  the compliance of all things in Nature that yield to a bidding when it is done with love.

I first wrote I loved working in the yard and having life take on its noble form.   I loved the coming alive,  the rebirthing and the response of the Earth beneath my hands.   It was my love and my pleasure.   The rich, black, early nostalgic smell takes me back to a someplace where I fell in love with it and the first love is always a first love.

It is a place where the heart knows its completeness in and with the laws of Nature.  We are one and the same.   We become its answer and its prayer,  its meditation and its question,  its benediction.  I become what the seeker chooses to establish when all else fails to come to fruition.   When there is nothing that satisfies the hunger within,  there is always hope and response in the garden.

It is a communion with its holiness and puts all else to shame because it never measures up.   Relationships may wither and disillusion, but Nature does not.   It gives from an unending source, reaching into its carpetbag and bringing forth bits of revelation and reconciliations to give one another reason for trying.   She lets us know we are stewards and as stewards we have a responsibility,

The Earth will cherish the soul who cherishes the Earth and Nature will revere the one who reveres Nature.   When knowledge is ours,  when we know who it is we are as we walk this planet,  doubt will no longer allow ignorance to rule.   It is time for us to protect and attend to this most beautiful of all places.   Conscience will deem a return to rectify errors.   And there may very well be ash on our boots the next time and memory may well crucify
us.

I was a young girl of 12 and it was our first summer on The Farm and it was a hard one.   But it also was filled with good food straight from the warm earth.  My mother had a talent for growing things in the city despite its polluted air even 70 years ago; people knew it then to be unhealthy.   But in the clear air of the country, in the soil of her loam filled garden, her talents blossomed as did her crops.

We were getting produce ready for the stand near the road.   As we were preparing the fruits and vegetables, selling them as fast as we put them out, friends from the city were arriving.  They were diverse characters.  Some were people in her circumstances with many children and little money.  A few were wealthy but the outstanding characteristic of all these relationships was mutual respect.

Toward the late afternoon, I was tired and whiny.   The source of my irritation was the fact that my mother was giving to her friends, without charge, the best and finest of what we were putting out.   A bushel of potatoes here, quarts of strawberries there, a basket of fresh vegetables here.

But the strawberries were my argument.  I loved them and the ones she grew were the reddest, juiciest and largest I had ever seen.   They were sweet clear through and the dream stuff of that first June on The Farm.  With the heavy cream separated from the rich milk the excellent cows gave, these were mine she was giving away.  The strawberries summed up my resentment.

‘You can’t keep giving away our profits!’ I said. ‘You have given away half of all our produce!’

She turned to me and in a voice I have not forgotten with the lesson that has stayed with me.

‘These are mine’, she said.  ‘I will do with them what I please.  These are for me to give away if I want to.  No one can tell me who to give to.  My friends may never do anything for me but if one of them does some thing for my children or my grandchildren,  then that will be payment for  me.’

I have thought often of that lesson in gift giving, in giving what is yours.  In the course of my days, when someone did something for me I did not expect, there was the lesson in strawberries.  When so much has been done for our children by their friends and ours, the lesson in strawberries comes up.

When time, whole weekends of time, have been given to sit with a sick child, to listen to an impoverished spirit, to make dinner when the task seems insurmountable and appetite non-existent, to do any of these when time has become our most precious commodity, it is a gift of Spirit.  When a check arrived unexpectedly from someone whose only reason was ‘I remember how I would have felt to have received this’ or the someones who oftentimes helped our children through school because ‘it was done for me.’

I thought of the lesson in strawberries.

As I review a life where so much has been done for me and mine, from sources unexpected, I am grateful for the lesson in strawberries.   My mother gave what was hers to give, what she worked for and gave freely.  She was paying it forward long before the idea became novel.  I do not forget.

When we are asked to pay forward for gifts given and received, we must remember the lesson this lady of ten thousand lions strong leveled me.  As the world works and fights to uphold democracies all over,  we must remember from where most of us come. 

I see my grandmother in the wrinkled old faces that I find mirrored every day.  With tears pleading simply to go home.  Will I forever see Richard Engel embrace that lined face younger than I am with a history I will never match?  And a devastated country fractured beyond recall surrounding? 

Let us pay it forward so the children’s children not have to assuage our anguish forever.  Pray let it be so.

To Remember is our Liberation. . .I remember once or many times saying that I wish to pick up a book and understand what they were saying.  I wanted wisdom.  I wanted to understand.  I wanted there to be a difference about me that others could see and say she is different.  I am different.  Our words are the same but meanings  others cannot relate to..

I wanted to shake the world and say, look what is going on.  I want to say look at the heart of the other.  And if you look at the heart of  the other you will see nothing else.   But before you do, you must look at your self.

To change history. . .a new path. . .

I had been at sixes and sevens (so to speak) this week.  I should explain that the idiom means things being in great doubt with me.

The idiom is centuries old coming from (more nearly surmised) the English.  Since I married into an Anglo Saxon Protestant family,  I was introduced to what were strange customs for me.  And this idiom was one of puzzling language.

Since being just twenty, eager to please, I learned quickly, both joyfully and askance sometimes.

Leading me to conclude at almost a decade less than a century, that for peace to ensue among men of diversity, those things which unify us as a species should be taught in all schools along with the differences in cultures.

It seems the differences in worlds (and words) and we are just one of many, are prime fodder for simmering anguish.

How we are united in so many ways fade in many minds while the differences sadly become up front.  And the differences wielded so well are the fears quietly smoldering unknown even to the holder but when given voice turn to rage.

Tyrants live in various houses and use their tools so wisely they leave Heaven aghast as to the hurt that is done.  Tyrants need not use hostility.  They need not use weapons which destroy anything but self-esteem.

And many are they who use their own neglected self esteem to drain the other of pity and sympathy and strength.  And because the tyrants feel

To change history. . .a new path. . .

I had been at sixes and sevens (so to speak) this week.  I should explain that the idiom means things being in great doubt with me.

The idiom is centuries old coming from (more nearly surmised) the English.  Since I married into an Anglo Saxon Protestant family,  I was introduced to what were strange customs for me.  And this idiom was one of puzzling language.

Since being just twenty, eager to please, I learned quickly, both joyfully and askance sometimes.

Leading me to conclude at almost a decade less than a century, that for peace to ensue among men of diversity, those things which unify us as a species should be taught in all schools along with the differences in cultures.

It seems the differences in worlds (and words) and we are just one of many, are prime fodder for simmering anguish.

How we are united in so many ways fade in many minds while the differences sadly become up front.  And the differences wielded so well are the fears quietly smoldering unknown even to the holder but when given voice turn to rage.

Tyrants live in various houses and use their tools so wisely they leave Heaven aghast as to the hurt that is done.  Tyrants need not use hostility.  They need not use weapons which destroy anything but self-esteem.

And many are they who use their own neglected self esteem to drain the other of pity and sympathy and strength.  And because the tyrants feel

For Sitting On The Porch. . .

It is a night
for sitting on the porch.
The night is soft
and there is a breeze about.
Soft.  A love night. . .
How could it be better?

Only to share with an Other
whose eyes see as mine do;
the shapes of the trees
against the darkening sky.
The maples are round
like balloons;
the irregular Tamarac
whose wispy needles
look like bare branches.

The feel of the night
like a caress,
a loving touch,
a whisper.

I was the night  and all of my Self  in it.