Tag Archives: grief

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Invoking Emmanuel

If now is your time
in this final threshold
between life
and death,
then this is our passion time,
remembered past
torn from imaged future.

I cannot bear this burden
this loss
this relinquishment of relationship
in which wealth fully invests
in knowing
and growing our love
together.

If now is our time,
I would accompany you
embrace you
full bodied
with these emphatic tears
of sad
sacred gratitude
for all we have been
togathering.

Not needing,
in this transition,
to bear tomorrow’s weight
adjusting to a crippling hole
in my heart,
gaping mind,
useless body
unable to touch you
with voice
and passionate loving choice.

If now is your time
to depart,
then we leave together
as far as our compassionate bodies
our co-emphatic minds
can yet embrace
this eternal
reverent severance space

Slow dancing,
soft breathing
in-between silent mortal dusk
and immortal dawn
of disembodied love

Becoming, already,
and much too soon,
some new emergent rebirth
of divine memories
within

As without,
touched by grace
written across each face
in which I may search
for your cherished trace
of reconnection
to this soulful time
and transition place

Interceding prayers
between daylight’s empowering life
and twilight’s disengaging death
apart.

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Abortive Trauma Tales

When you and your wife visited,
you shared a question asked by a pastor
of a raped
and thereby pregnant
vulnerably young and questioning parishioner.

“If your unborn child survived
his first year
and walked back into your home
do you think you would still want to kill him?”

Probably not,
I’m thinking.
And,
perhaps more pastorally significant
and responsible,
how can we, in resilient compassion for ourselves
and for those who trespass against us
mitigate sacred rage
against ancient sins of our predative Fathers?

The next morning
over coffee and breakfast
your wife told a surprising story
of meeting a woman
in a Carolina church basement
who boldly claimed to be
an unapologetic pagan

Certainly not repenting;
more like recruiting

UnStraight out proud wiki
without thinking that might be an appropriate sin
for inviting healing prayer
rather than embracing
as if possessing a pure and virtuous soul
matriarchally regathering
HolyEarthPeace Spirits.

Your wife’s response
cautiously avoided Retribution Is Mine!
weaponized words,
another patriarchal sin of our historied Fathers

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say that before”
right out in public
toward lunchtime on a bright spring day
and certainly not in a ChristChurch basement

I silently wondered why your wife did not seem to feel
this pagan should be aborted

Stoned to death
or at least hanged
for defying the Good News
of Straight White King James
colonizing Jesus.

If there was a conversation about how many pagans may feel
about abortion of healthy tribal lives
or Great White Father rape,
or the somewhat wider history
of patriarchal predation against matriarchal wisdom
she did not mention such old crone witchery

Studying dark theistic codes of dueling history
usually tolerating abortions of Othered human lives
for exceptional survival reasons
emerging throughout traumatic transition years
for various viciously circling reasons

A well-capitalized
verbally articulate
personalized monotheistic God
might appear to be against
polytheistic Muses and Witches and Goddesses
within EarthTribe mind-spirited space,
political place,
economic race

On the Othered,
and safely aborted, hand
pantheistic spiritual commitments
supporting multicultural
animistic
pantheistic
panentheistic
polycultural respect
may more resiliently redevelop
sacred
sentient
holy spirited life
at the EarthTribal
universally uniting EarthPeace level
of sacred passion

Respect for our interdependent thriving lives
does not mean we are not also
abortionists to survive the trauma
of invasive felt predations,
biological
and ecological
and theological
and political.

Divine respect for co-infested fertile life
might include respect for death
and gratitude for EarthTribe lives sacrificed

As we hold hands
and bow our heads
with gratitude
for hungry stomachs satisfied,
for sacred quenching waters,
outs and ins of healthy bodies,
backs and forths of wealthy minds

With trust our thirst
for tribal trust
does not imply that when and what I swallow,
I abort

And do not also co-invest
in this our cooperative resilience

Health care giving
and receiving
EarthTribe sentient wealth

Respect for dark
deeply raging
patriarchal trauma
does not imply
disrespect for more therapeutic
matriarchal light.

And just so,
I reversely suppose,
universal peace
uniting holy spirited respect
for resilient
brilliant sentient life

Does not imply
disrespect for trauma,
despair
and death

Which I had been struggling with
when you and your wife visited,
and you shared your story
of a raped
and thereby pregnant
young and traumatized parishioner.

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Hate-Love Relationship

Where we embrace love,
Grief is as strong as death;
love lost.

Where we are afflicted with hate,
Gratitude is as strong as death;
loss wished for.

Grief rages against loss,
Yet gratitude lost
can become violently angered,
terrorist frightened
of present and future
as past’s reincarnate vulnerable pain.

Grief begins
felt in solitary vulnerability.
Gratitude eventually heals
through transparently shared solidarity.

Love is as strong as
mortality’s vulnerable weakness.
No more,
no less,
as these merge into one healing face
of gratitude for co-relational gain
more than mere absence of pain.

Habitual love,
Earth-inhabiting resonant life,
Eco-regenerativity
as strong as
Ego-relationality.

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Uncategorized

Fear InBetween Faith

Gratitude’s past grief
brief repast

When re-articulating grief
becomes transparently warm passion,
yet without terrifying overheated anger,
we are together filled with resonantly vulnerable sound
and traumatic sight,

Therein opens new possibilities,
avenues,
tides,
streams,
neurological highways
surfing for resiliently polypathic gratitude,

An experiential reminder,
a virtuous feedback loop,
in which daily reborn life intends love
extends above
down beyond,
deeply rooted within
all Other
awareness;

Grief of anciently fore-shadowed separation
to repair EarthTribe’s loyal gratitude.

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A Last Beautiful Day

It’s a beautiful day
It’s a beautiful day
It’s a beautiful day
to go out and play.

If your name is D,
D D D D D
It’s a beautiful day
for a D through an A
on back to awesome other
DD da-days
to go out and play.

It’s a beautiful day
It’s a beautiful day
It’s a beautiful day
to go out and play.

If ya wanna avoid some trouble
and your Trumps are marching double
time, and climates start to rumble
Inside voices in full tumble

It s a great day
to take your butt outside and play
Go on ahead and freely stray
Come back when you’re ready to active pray
we learn to cooperate our play
before this last green outside day
was safely felt just yesterday

It’s a beautiful day
It’s a beautiful day
It’s a beautiful day
to go outside
this one last tide
to pray and play
a cooperating day.

D D D D day
go on out and play
it’s your last beautiful day
to have a fresh breath play.

It’s a beautiful night
It’s a beautiful night
It’s a beautiful night
to spin out of sight.

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GLTY Anawim

A Taoist’s View of Bill Plotkin’s
Wounded Southern Orphan.

Really, dear,
that’s too long for a co-inviting title,
How about just-us for
Wounded Taoist Anawim?

Oh
I don’t think we want to go
grieving back there,
Those early teenage years
of viral WinLose hurts
and monocultural bullying.

Wounds of WesternYang against EasternYin anger
and fear of never regaining newborn WinWin
sacred childhood innocence
resonance
resilience.

Depressions and repressions
and lack of WinWin integrity guilt,
and abundance of LoseLose punishing jealousy,
and Loser victim shame
and NegativEnergy dark-yin karma.

Wounds of WinLose adolescent orphans
now compulsive
impulsive bipolar wounded ways
acting out WinLose internal-external retributions

And WinWin polypathic restorations
of innocent childhood
co-relationally free of LoseLose monoculturing
Yang against Yin
Outside against matriarchal Inside
LoseLose quarrels
yang bullying,
raping
and retributively shaming and guilting
terror
and cognitive dissonance
and chronic stress
and RightBrain nutritional sleep deprivation
and polyphonic polypathic polycultural outcome withdrawal
of innocent childhood healthy wealth
WinWin ZeroZones.

Wounded Sacred Orphans within
and without,
perennially planting
and harvesting
Immature Win-Yang
co-defined as
Lose MatriarchalYin
RightBrain sacred nutritional induction
cooperative invitations,
organic
as not so very much strategic nutritional tactics
for Future Search
cooperative outdoor-organic meetings
plannings
installations in Green ReForesting HealthSpace.

Resounding cooperatives
of and for DNA-RNA ZeroZone coinvestment
in cooperative research,
neither WinLose against
nor WinWin for WinLose
intuited adolescent
confusingly chaotic
assumptions,

LeftBrain-NorthWestBrain historically encultured
by WiseElder RightBrain-SouthEastBrain’s
sacred RNA-Green CoOperative EcoHealth
ecologically, and yet also theologically,
articulating
languaged polynomials
of ZeroZone identities
cooperative bilaterals
dipolar co-arisings WinWin secular health
bipolar co-gravitations LoseLose sacred wealth.

I was thinking of something
a bit less complex
and more Plotkin dynamically flowing.

South Wounded Orphans
complement WinNorthWest-WinSouthEast strengths
of reintegrating WiseElder North
by holding an essential cooperative southeastern GLBTQ leadership key
to sacred ego-ecological climate healing
of our fractal Adolescent Identity Wounds
for SpringTime Orphans,
unchosen
unsung
undanced seeds of adolescence

Adolescent MotherTrees can yin-sing, dear
but it’s harder to hear
they can dance through nurturing roots
long before those festive swaying branches.

MotherTrees
and smaller plants
and their WinWin pollinators too,
And their WinLose voracious predators
all becoming climate uninvited,
especially wherever we overpopulate
turning from WinWin EarthTribe thriving
back toward WinLose Wounded Adolescent Orphans
doing our innocent best
to survive such LoseLose TLGB
Lose-matriarchal to Lose-patriarchal
yin/yang-trending grief

Without YinSquared
WinWin EnLightening
DeepLearning Green Plotkin Fractal-CoOperatives
inside both outside and
Left with ElderRight
secular-sacred bicameral
dipolar co-arising
Solidarity with PolyPathically Wounded.

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Death Sentences

Death leaves a sacred hole
where once lived a whole relationship
with both potential future
and a now more cherished past

Still seen
and heard
and smelled,
tasted and felt, sensed
and incensed
through an echoing hole of darkly bitter loss.

I would be a hypocrite
and a liar
if I were to condemn
our sons and their cherished friends
for cowardice
or craziness
for choosing to end their lives.

When government sanctioned taking of life
goes on and on and on
we call this the cost of just wars
or a death penalty
rather than a life forfeit.
Yet it is the living
who repay this price.

It could be more honest
to call these deliberate extractions
a death investment
and perpetual re-investment
of a culture not yet sure of how radically vulnerable
compassionate life could
and should
become.

Death investment repeated as long as politically expedient,
and also personally poignant
whether self or other inflicted
or something in-between.

I do not grieve his loss of future
but my own

For to grieve my own lost future,
all we might have yet become together,
is honest,
and holy

While to grieve his lost future
is to dishonor his choice
and his compulsion
to part ways
when life felt too dishonest
to bear another traumatic day.

To be born
before or after
or beside and aside one’s right-felt time
and nurturing place
is already loss of future
sent through messages past
as love grows too thin and faded
lust for life descends too jaded,
loss of faith
for hope
arising futures now lost.

I would not dishonor,
too easily dismiss,
suicidal loss of life
as complete insanity
as if I could claim,
with full integrity,
that inhumane and too-patriarchal living losses
are not shy of full-grown sanity.

As this day closes,
this time and place
in tears of loss
without fanfare,
without deadly sentences
much less farewells,
I yet lack courage
of my own despair
about our future of continuing death investment
as measured by my own limits
for tolerating inane insanity,
vitriolic violence,
absurd abuse
of calling deliberate death investments a penalty
as if any life were something reasonably erased
through ultimatum fines
for having had an unfortunate birth day.

This death leaves a sacred hole
where once lived a whole relationship
of futures cast together
now gently placed
apart.

What did he see
that I have not yet felt
strongly enough
to choose to never see again?

This question changes those left behind
for the rest of our haunted days and nights.

Why him,
and not yet me,
not yet us?

 

In honored memory of Greg, lived Large, yet much too short, measures of suicide and other death investments.

 

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Untimely Silence

Most folks I loved
died when I was in my thirties.
Not just people,
but our San Francisco bohemian mecca lifestyle,
our 365 days and nights celebration
turned into an epidemic of waiting
and watching
and mourning our losses,
wondering about possibilities of survival.

What could remain for us,
for me,
for this place?
What could become my purpose
our purpose
for any lonely future of diaspora survivors?

My closest friend,
a happily married matriarch
with two adolescent children,
died of breast cancer
when I was in my early forties.

Perhaps this was my final straw.
I have not reconstructed any friendships since.

This reminds me of my maternal grandfather,
who lived into his eighties
but as his quantity of years continued
his quality of celebrated convivial life shrank
through loss of two wives
and all their friends,
his generation of neighbors,
and then his hearing.

He told me
not long before he passed
he was not sure
if his loss of hearing was a curse
or a blessing,
prohibiting him from cultivating renewing friendships
only to be lost yet again.

My own hearing is not perfect
yet I seem unwilling to listen
for any more friends,
loved ones I could no better afford to lose
than those already gone.

Yet still I wonder
about therapeutic reasons for my survival.
As fertile celebrations fade to dusty memory,
my capacity to comprehend why I still breathe,
yet my generation of intentional families has long passed,
shrunk to incomprehensible mystery
as did my revered grandfather’s hearing.

The best I can hear,
through this epidemic distance,
I rescued by adoption
then by love
four hurt children
no one else wanted,
and each continues teaching me how to love hims and her,
when I listen well,
in their distinctive needy ways and broken means.

Yet even here
with these final four
I night sweat in guilty worry
about how they could best thrive
when I can, at last,
no longer hear them,
nor they me.

Most folks I loved
died when I was young,
leaving me to wonder
severed prospects for survival.

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