Uncategorized

Imagine Perfect Thanksgiving

Imagine you live in a daily environment
where and when everything you like
is already yours if you simply ask with gratitude,
and is more frustratingly ungraspable
if you cannot acquire sufficient gratitude to ask.

And, it doesn’t even matter whom you ask.
So you need not be troubled by complexities,
historically epic narratives,
about who owns what,
and who does not,
because everyone you meet knows it is their vocation,
it is among their reasons for being,
to give you whatever you want
whenever you want it with sufficient gratitude.

How might you respond to such power and riches,
to both give and to receive
in an exchange economy
that only values gratitude?

How might we gratuitously seed our fertile black soils
and sparkling clear clean rivers,
and smile back at our perfectly protective blue sky?

I don’t imagine this gratitude power
is magical.
I would not want power to be someone else.
I could not gratefully behold beautiful body
great mind perfection
and also gratefully want to possess that mindbody.

You do have the power to ask them, with gratitude,
to help you see and hear and smell and taste their beauty,
but not to own other organic bodies
without sufficient independent power
to appreciate gratitude of desire

Becoming safely healthy polyvagal powers with others
grateful for our mutually grateful compassion,
vulnerability,
cooperatively trusting co-investments,
because your powers of acquisition
are constrained only by this fair exchange economy
of mutual free-will gratitude.

Imagine, as you mature in wanting control,
the organic chemistry of mutually engaged gratitude
when you were an unwounded infant,
without fear of competitively unresponsive
ingratitude

A polycultural pronoia economy
of positive attitudes
without any learned possibility
of experiencing negative ingratitude.

Imagine how you might have heard:
You can be anyone you desire to become
with sufficient gratitude.
You have cooperative powers
to acquire whatever you can gratefully imagine,
as innocent of longing for the unattainable
as an unborn infant

Imagine, from birth,
this divinely human experience
of continuously
relentlessly
without fear-inducing exception
without blame or shame
without negative judgment
becoming whom
and having whatever we wish for
within an ecology of mutually extending gratitude
perfectly predictable trust
having only felt warmly appreciated mutual regard

Without any magical wonder
or mysterious awe
that you are not discontinuously struggling
sometimes longing
needing to break through dispassionate unpleasant feelings
to become whom and have what other organic beings
do not gratefully wish for you.

Imagine that self-gratitude
automatically generates
re-evaluated other-gratitude,
and vice-versa
self-as-also-other regenerating gratitude.

Imagine you are a healthy organic body
with a wealthy sacred mind
living love where and when
all you can gratefully take in
is ours to give each grateful trusting other.

What happens in your imaginative chemistries
when Win v Lose games of Keep Away
revert into Win-Win nondualistic games of Give Away,
but only when productive for
and consumptive of
co-empathic gratitude?

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Uncategorized

The Senior City Center

When I entered the City Senior Center
with my Open Mic proposal
to increase resilience
and decrease apartheid dissonance

I could hear no music,
see no dancing.

The quilting room
and the game room,
even the pool tables,
were as quiet as the library,
which at least held four contemplative people
scattered in their own secluded spaces.

Like visiting a sad monastery,
without tai chi,
chi gong,
walking meditation,
and/or yoga classes
filled with abundant creaky grace.

Back then
The Senior Center felt like a sad retirement home,
day care for some,
a reprieve from unmitigated loneliness
away from an empty nest,
a dusty divorce,
tiring widow weeds,
snarky dark separations,
untimely and unwanted departures.

A place to avoid risks
of dying unhappily
in sequestered
marginalized 24/7 isolation

More anxious now
than anticipating
long weekday evenings
dark nights
and bleak winter weekends

Where no outside kindness
for aching bones
and sinus cavities
could be found
in one’s private old age tomb.

Fading
failing
irrelevant
uncherished rooms feel frightening,
sometimes angry
waiting to die stations
for prisoners of neglect

Victims of systemic trauma
aging alone
in a retiring
and not repurposing
silent place.

Now returning,
as we cooperatively rebuild
our Senior Wisdom Center,
former inmates remember ourselves
as guilty criminals,
blaming and shaming
and judging our sins
of lacking compassion

Throwing our humbled lot
in with all those Otherers
accused of Earth Matricide

Smothering our organic Center
with extractive plunder

Abortion of our regenerative Planet,
HOME plant
exploited for anthroprivileged
economic
and short-term apartisan gain.

I couldn’t feel
much active hope
for multi-regenerative communion

For sacred transmutation
of bad
and mad
and sad
becoming win/win cooperatively owned
and managed
root systemic glad

Back before we became a Senior Wisdom Center
conjoined with the City Arts Center
exploring neighborhood after-school and weekend
Open Mic
and Community SingAlong Dances
and Flash Mob WellBeing Engagement events.

This switch
from segregated Senior Center
and unhoused lack of any Youth Center
to Senior Wisdom Center
supporting neighborhood MusEcology Skill Centers

Began with cooperatively engaging
healthy CrownChakra songs
while dancing wealthy RootChakra
cooperatively co-invested rhythms

Dipolar co-arising mind/body patterns,
win/win indigenous governance systems
more friendly to universal health care minds
seeking resonant opportunities
through unitarian wealth care bodies
drawn away from risky win/lose trauma
repurposing toward resilient win/win
co-passionate engagement.

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