Prayer #4 (in the aftermath of rape)
Let me not do more than slam, hammer, pound
and send all the contents smashing against the ground,
the wall, glasses, books, whatever in the vicinity of this holy rage.
Let me not grind my teeth endlessly or linger too long
in the fantasy of obliterating the one who trampled innocence.
Call the gatekeepers, please.
Call the standard bearers, too.
Rouse the warriors against the wave of scurrying human cowardice
that reaches rapidly to blank out, redact accountability
and stroke, stroke, stroke the enablers.
Let me not be so done with children posing adulthood
so fury-blind that I alienate them every last one
in the fallout of the brutalization of one actual child.
Open our eyes to the beasts we pursue in the hopes to subdue,
subsume and subjugate, feeding our own inner monsters
while we weep under the light of the moon
wondering why our children have been devoured.
Stop the generational wreckage smash and crash
rolling through the fast lane in the here and now.
For once, end the long game, the one where the children pay
and pay, and pay for the violations of the fathers.
Keep us all sane, keep us all open to being better people
so the ones who’ve paid a price not their own,
can know safety in our presence.
Make our lives, our days, our minds, our hearts
and our actions a refuge from delusion and insanity.
Waken the dead, the walking dead
who thrive more in pretending love
than the doing of care, of forethought, of protection.
Wash over the blistering wounds made,
the whispering haunt and the innocence fade.
Conjure from the cracks a tree more resilient,
refusing that perpetual derision as it rolls downhill,
mocking how precious the sighs and pulse
of our children, our heritage, our hope.
Conjure creation’s cure, a resounding war cry,
calling from the heart of mother and father divine a raging justice,
insisting growth, smashing lies and building newness in the after.
Spread the Love!
Power Over
“What posturing and performance share in common is a deep disconnect between the inspired heart and our gut instincts, between rising up and sensing ground where all life dissolves into the rich humus of earth. Make no mistake white bodies are capable of sensing deeply and can become conscious of the insidious ways that colonization is held within our flesh and blood. We may squirm and distract ourselves, but we have what it takes to dissolve these century-old impulses to cage, control and power over body. With awareness, we can begin to recognize our conditioning and through attention we can allow our primal impulses to grow a capacity to dissolve the distortions and claim life-supportive gestures and expressions.” Liz Koch, excerpted from the post on her website, Core Awareness, titled “White Bodies, Psoas, & Gesturing Power Over”
We colonized the land and the people of the land we now call the United States of America and we colonized our own bodies. Power over is the rabid beast created when we divorce ourselves from being soft, hairy animal human. We infused our religious beliefs with power over. We insisted on obedience like we insisted on this land, raping and violating the bodies of children in the name of discipline and good behavior and, for some, godliness. I can say that my daughter and two sons have birthed me because they broke my heart open and opened me up to my own tenderness and the validity of the wild human. I could not fathom how the sort of discipline inflicted on me, and on my sisters, in the name of Jesus was anything remotely connected to love and that realization occurred when a baby girl came out of my body. Everything changed. Who was this sacred creature? How could you thump her on the forehead for speaking her mind or challenging you at the dinner table? How? You must be divorced from your own body, colonized from head to toe to soul if you do this and you must be addicted to power over. Dethroning the inner tyrant anchored on the seat of the heart and placed there by fear, that is a work on which to commit a life. Enshrining love as a fully-muscled set of doings and thinkings and makings of solid evidence of love and value decolonizes the body, rids the mind of toxins long dormant. And the work never ends. There is no arrival. I don’t know what I’d do without people like James Baldwin who lives though he’s gone and Liz Koch who is here and now shining light on needful truths.
Here’s to freedom from power over and losing all the baggage that goes with it.
Spread the Love!
Prayer #1 (For Michael)
May your whole body/soul/spirit shift in alliance with the well-being
of eternal and perpetual grace, renewal and wholeness.
May you breathe deeply into your worth and know the love that upholds your life
and has held you close all of your days, even when you least felt that comfort.
May you stretch your arms out wide, reaching far and further still out to places
you feel most inhibited, afraid to reach for fear of rejection, for fear of vulnerability,
for fear of your own beauty being more than you can contain.
May every corpuscle, muscle, vein, artery, organ, system,
neural impulse, heartbeat, rumble of your being vibe with the jive of clarity,
unobstructed, unhindered, blossoming wellness.
May you soak up the sun of healing.
May you know the love that upholds us all as a bliss-force flowing
through every fiber of your being
as you breathe in, breathe out,
breathe deeply the life force sustaining us all.
Spread the Love!
Salvation
Semi-cultic subcultures wanna love you, baby.
They wanna show you the way and draw you to their great God, Jesus,
showcasing his masterpiece affliction, the covid19 pestilence,
an example of his latest work to call people to him.
Ain’t nuthin’ better than a viral attraction to the best God. Ever.
He must love us, see, ‘cause if we don’t do right,
he gonna kill us all.
See, now you know it’s love, when it’s open wide or die.
Yeah, man, they got the viral meme for sure.
See they hug rapists and invite them to dinner.
Say one thing won’t happen and do it anyway.
Invite you to forgive them for violating you for decades.
And they just don’t understand how they got to where they are today
where you won’t hug them or come out to play.
They don’t know when you push that gas pedal,
and steer in that direction you will most definitely arrive
at that exact location,
‘Cause they got it all upside down and inside out
with shame for the one who made an appearance after being invited by a court to do so
and nothing but cutesy terms of endearment for the man who raped their daughter.
Over and over again.
Wear the badge of honor, Ruth.
Wear it proudly and loudly.
They are ashamed of you.
These who see love thus.
These who can do no wrong.
These who lie, claim Christ falsely and have mutilated their own souls.
They find you an embarrassment.
Glory to Goddess, you are finally saved.
Spread the Love!
The Five Minute Truce
They’re negotiating rug space and Tootsie’s claws eventually alter Apollo’s thoughts on territorial claims. He’ll have to take what he can get when he can get it. O.o
Spread the Love!
Not Just Water…
“They both listened silently to the water, which to them was not just water, but the voice of life, the voice of Being, the voice of perpetual Becoming.”
Hermann Hesse – Siddhartha
Spread the Love!
A Mere Formality
We say one thing and do the other, standing back as they roll out a defense against our own depravity.
Their fury.
But the recriminations we face if we validate it…
Oh hell to the no, we’re heavenly folk, not guilty broke.
See, now that we’ve had a history of bullying the four of them for decades,
their fury is real, is wholly healthy, so we’ll declare them intimidating
(we’re cornering the market on “isn’t that rich” since our parenting creed
for decades was “you must break their spirit”. so, how fitting
that we are intimidated by their full-grown adulthood,
and if you fall for our excuses, then you’re one of us, the morally insane.)
and the fact that our betrayals commenced
well before their valid fury unfurled, that fact will be an irrelevant fact.
The women. Got angry. They ranted. They threw down ultimatums.
Nothing more to know here, for there is no greater sin than women angry and demanding.
Rant after we betray, and legitimize our treachery by that rant because, well, female.
We’ll send letters declaring our total loss to understand the situation, as well.
See, we’re the slickest shit.
We can vote for Trump and call ourselves the “called out ones.”
He gropes and violates and gets elected so, our time has come, too.
We’re real cozy with violators. They earn nicknames, not shame, and a place at our table.
Most especially if they violated our own.
We can malign those who trusted us after we rebuked them for not trusting us previously
to not do the thing we did, after all, do, so hey ho, we’re noble souls.
The joke is on them, the four we slander, hammer and malign.
We have cornered.
The market on.
Duplicity Divine.
Moral Insanity.
All that the Good Book refers to when dragging up Leviathan, we are it.
And we would invite you to have tea with our murky pet.
Just don’t get mad at us if we violate truth or devour you without regret.
We’ll use it against you, judge you unforgiving, call you uncouth,
Invite you to court and play on your ignorance of just how dark our hearts can be.
(the witnesses we invite from your childhood will be part of a “mere formality”)
Spread the Love!
The Wings of The Dawn – In Memoriam Edward J. Goldgehn
Psalm 139
O Lord, You have searched me and known me.
2 You know when I sit down and when I rise up;
You understand my thought from afar.
3 You scrutinize my path and my lying down,
And are intimately acquainted with all my ways.
4 Even before there is a word on my tongue,
Behold, O Lord, You know it all.
5 You have enclosed me behind and before,
And laid Your hand upon me.
6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me;
It is too high, I cannot attain to it.
7 Where can I go from Your Spirit?
Or where can I flee from Your presence?
8 If I ascend to heaven, You are there;
If I make my bed in Sheol, behold, You are there.
9 If I take the wings of the dawn,
If I dwell in the remotest part of the sea,
10 Even there Your hand will lead me,
And Your right hand will lay hold of me.
11 If I say, “Surely the darkness will overwhelm me,
And the light around me will be night,”
12 Even the darkness is not dark to You,
And the night is as bright as the day.
Darkness and light are alike to You.
13 For You formed my inward parts;
You wove me in my mother’s womb.
14 I will give thanks to You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
Wonderful are Your works,
And my soul knows it very well.
15 My frame was not hidden from You,
When I was made in secret,
And skillfully wrought in the depths of the earth;
16 Your eyes have seen my unformed substance;
And in Your book were all written
The days that were ordained for me,
When as yet there was not one of them.
17 How precious also are Your thoughts to me, O God!
How vast is the sum of them!
18 If I should count them, they would outnumber the sand.
When I awake, I am still with You.
Ed Goldgehn’s absence from the world of his beloved wife, Deanna, family and friends is felt on what can only be described as cataclysmic levels. The shock continues to etch reminders in our hearts and minds of how immeasurably precious our time is here on our beautiful earth, in our fleeting lives.
Ed’s spirit remains. His imprint alive.
I, for one, am grateful for the gifts his uniqueness wrought, spilling into my own world in ways only Ed could do. He will always be not only the brainy, eyebrow-arched zinger of a man who loved my dearest friend in his distinct and empowering way, but he will also ever remain in my esteem, as a fellow member of the notorious tribe, The Scorpio.
Ed opened many doors and fostered innumerable possibilities with his creative spirit and brilliance, planting seeds of success.
He is desperately missed.
Spread the Love!
Jonah-Like
“Jonah-like we all have to be spit out of the belly of family and cultural assumptions, a new person, freed and unqualified. But this is one of the purposes we have seen for dark nights of the soul: to prune, to cleanse, and sort out the essential from the illusory. We have to do something with our anger other than suppress it or vent it. There are a thousand possibilities, but each of them has to honor the emotion while giving it form and meaning. Ultimately, you transform your anger through a channeling of your life force, and this liberated vitality gives you your presence as a unique personality.” Thomas Moore [Dark Nights of The Soul]
It’s time to get back to the book I started, finish it and set it free. Onward.
J. Ruth Kelly 