The True Chapters of Life
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ddangler

BLESSING FOR UNREQUITED LOVE

Other Authors

A blessing on the eyes that do not see me as I wish.
A blessing to the ears that can never hear the far inward
footfall of my own shy heart. Blessings to the life
in you that will live without me, to the open door
that now and forever takes you away from me,
blessings to the path that you follow alone and blessings
to the path that awaits you, joining with another.

A blessing for the way you will not know me
in the years to come, and with it, a blind outstretched
blessing of my hands on anything or anyone
that cannot ever come to know me fully as I am,
and therefore, a blessing even, for the way I will
never fully know myself, above all, the deepest, kindest
wishes of my own hidden and untrammeled heart
for what you had to hide from me in you.

Let me be generous enough and large enough
and brave enough to say goodbye to you
without understanding, to let you go
into your own understanding, may you always
be in the sweet central, hidden shadow
of my memory without needing to know who you were
when you first came, who you were when you stayed
and who you will become in your freedom
now that you have passed through my life and gone.

…

‘BLESSING FOR UNREQUITED LOVE’
The Bell and the Blackbird
Poetry by David Whyte
APRIL 2018 © David Whyte and Many Rivers Press

ddangler

I Am That I Am

Other Authors

What happens when we die?  What happens to me?  Myself.

Myself?  Myself?  That’s the problem.  That’s the whole problem with the whole thing.  Myself.  Self.  That’s not right.  That just isn’t right.  That isn’t.  There is none.

The body stops a cell at a time.  But the brain keeps firing those neurons. Little lightening bolts, like fireworks inside.  And I thought I’d despair and feel afraid but I’m too busy in this moment, remembering. 

Of course.  I remember that every atom in my body is forged in a star.  This matter, this body, is mostly just empty space after all.  And solid matter is just energy vibrating very slowly and there is no me. There never was.

The electrons in my body just mingle and dance with the electrons of the ground below me and the air.  I’m no longer breathing and I remember that there is no point when any of that ends and I begin.

I remember, I am energy, not memory.  Not self.  My name, my personality, all came after me.  I was before them and I will be after.  Everything else is pictures picked up along the way.  Fleeting little dreamlettes, printed on the tissue of my dying brain.  And I and the lightening that jumps between.  I am the energy firing the neurons.  And I’m returning just by remembering.  I’m returning home.

I’m just like a drop of water falling back into the ocean of which it’s always been a part.  All things a part.  All of us, a part.  You, me, the little girl, my mother, my father, the puppy, everyone that has ever been.  Every animal, every plant, every star, every galaxy, all of it.

There are more galaxies than grains of sand on the beach.  And that’s what we’re talking about when we say god.  The one.  The cosmos and its infinite dreams. 

We are the cosmos dreaming of itself.  It’s simple a dream that I think it’s my life, every time. 

But now, in the split second I remember.  In the moment I remember.  The instant I remember, I comprehend everything at once.  There is no time.  There is no death.  Life is a dream.  It’s a wish.  And again, and again and again and again and again, and again on into eternity.

And I am all of it.  I am everything.  I am all.  I am that I am.

Midnight Mass, 2021

ddangler

The Facts of Life

Other Authors

That you were born
and you will die.

That you will sometimes love enough
and sometimes not.

That you will lie
if only to yourself.

That you will get tired.

That you will learn most from the situations
you did not choose.

That there will be some things that move you
more than you can say.

That you will live
that you must be loved.

That you will avoid questions most urgently in need of
your attention.

That you began as the fusion of a sperm and an egg
of two people who once were strangers
and may well still be.

That life isn’t fair.
That life is sometimes good
and sometimes better than good.

That life is often not so good.

That life is real
and if you can survive it, well,
survive it well
with love
and art
and meaning given
where meaning’s scarce.

That you will learn to live with regret.
That you will learn to live with respect.

That the structures that constrict you
may not be permanently constraining.

That you will probably be okay.

That you must accept change
before you die
but you will die anyway.

So you might as well live
and you might as well love.
You might as well love.
You might as well love.

BY PÁDRAIG Ó TUAMA

ddangler

Honor your dark night

Other Authors

The dark times leave their mark and make you a person of insight and compassion. Oscar Wilde, an Victorian writer jailed for his homosexuality, went through a dark night of the soul and wrote from this place, ‘My desire to live is as intense as ever, and though my heart is broken, hearts are made to be broken. That is why God sends sorrow to the world. To me, suffering seems now a sacramental thing, that makes those whom it touches holy.’

Give yourself what you need at the deepest level. Care for your soul rather than cure it. Arrange your life such that you can be tender and kind to yourself. Talk with those you love about subtleties of your struggle and don’t allow any of us to give you an easy answer. Loss, even death, is a mystery that if you can honor your own experience, may give you a glimpse of the divine.

ddangler

Living with Paradox

Other Authors

“The soul has its own sets of rules which are not the same as those of life. Unlike the steady forward movement of progress, reaching goals, achieving dreams, the events of the soul have little concern for outcomes, even achievement.

The soul events are cyclic & repetitive. Familiar themes come round and round. The past is more important than the future. The living and the dead have equal roles. Emotions and the sense of meaning are paramount. Pleasures are deep and pain can reach the very foundation of our existence.

The soul is more concerned with the dynamics of the heart and imagination. Moods, attitudes, influences, aspirations, and fears also ask for a degree of sophistication in our response.

The soul doesn’t evolve or grow. It cycles and twist, repeats and reprises, echoing ancient themes common to all human beings. The soul cares little for outward success, but rather looks at places deep within, both at the individual level and the archetypal world.

The soul is always circling home and calls us to a foreign and strange world. The soul is constantly homesick and yearns for its own milieu. The odyssey of the soul is not a straight line of progress. Rather it is a drifting at sea, a floating towards home, not an evolution towards perfection.

Live as though nothing exists except momentarily in its present form. We should remain attached to nothing, not even to our philosophy of life or our spiritual pat. Better to be present to what is happening than to be lost in our ideas and beliefs.

If we were to embrace the past without excessive judgment and calmly step, not leap, into the future, we might feel the vitality of the all-embracing soul.

The secret of a soul-based life is to allow someone or something other than the usual self to be in charge.”

– Thomas Moore, Original Self: Living with Paradox and Originality

ddangler

Legacy of an adopted child

Other Authors

(Author Unknown)

poem-reading

Once there were two women

Who never knew each other.

One you do not remember,

The other you call mother.

Two different lives

Shaped to make yours one.

One became your guiding star,

The other became your sun.

The first gave you life

And the second taught you to live it.

The first gave you a need for love

And the second was there to give it.

One gave you a nationality,

The other gave you a name.

One gave you a seed of talent,

The other gave you an aim.

One gave you emotions,

The other calmed your fears.

One saw your first sweet smile,

The other dried your tears.

One gave you up —

It was all that she could do.

The other prayed for a child

And God led her straight to you.

And now you ask me

Through your tears,

The age-old question

Through the years:

Heredity or environment

Which are you the product of?

Neither, my darling — neither,

Just two different kinds of love

ddangler

The Labyrinth

Other Authors

“Each person is no simple, one-dimensional self. There is a labyrinth within our soul. What we think and desire often comes into conflict with what we do. Below the surface of our conscious awareness, a vast, unknown rootage determines our actions. The unconscious is a powerful and continuous presence. Every life lives out of and struggles with this inner night, which cast it’s challenging and fecund shadows over everything we do and think and feel. We are earthen vessels that hold the treasure. Yet, aspects of the treasure are darker and more dangerous than we allow ourselves to imagine. But, when the unconscious becomes illuminated, it’s darker forces no longer hold us prisoner.”

-John O’Donohue

ddangler

Choose Joy

Other Authors

Choose joy. Choose it like a child chooses the shoe to put on the right foot, the crayon to paint a sky. Choose it at first consciously, effort fully, pressing against the weight of a world heavy with reasons for sorrow, restless with need for action.

Feel the sorrow, take the action, but keep pressing the weight of joy against it all, until it becomes mindless, automated, like gravity pulling the stream down its course; until it becomes an inner law of nature. If Viktor Frankl can exclaim “yes to life, in spite of everything!” — and what an everything he lived through — then so can any one of us amid the rubble of our plans, so trifling by comparison. Joy is not a function of a life free of friction and frustration, but a function of focus — an inner elevation by the fulcrum of choice.

Delight in the age-salted man on the street corner waiting for the light to change, his age-salted dog beside him, each inclined toward the other with the angular subtlety of absolute devotion.

Delight in the little girl zooming past you on her little bicycle, this fierce emissary of the future, rainbow tassels waving from her handlebars and a hundred beaded braids spilling from her golden helmet.

Delight in the snail taking an afternoon to traverse the abyssal crack in the sidewalk for the sake of pasturing on a single blade of grass.

Delight in the tiny new leaf, so shy and so shamelessly lush, unfurling from the crooked stem of the parched geranium.

Lara Seven Gryffn

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