Heart Bowls …

Great mother, lover goddess within…
Make for me huge heart bowls bigger than life itself,
bigger than all the worst spills and hurtiest moments,
bigger than the ocean in my soul or the crater in my heart,
bigger than the highways in my mind and the ache that just won’t quit,
bigger than what has been or what could be.
Goddess… make them especially to receive, to insist on welcoming,
to persist in opening, accepting a partaking,
refusing the worst breaking of heart,
make them especially and shape them ruthlessly for love’s bigger feasts,
the ones we spread after betrayal, after misunderstanding,
after the long, long con
the one we watched knowing, seeing others’ schemes
and hoping they’d somehow fizzle out…
Make them relentlessly open to being open again,
to lavishing on top of loss,
for holding more than all the worst or the last best
or the limits of our creativity…
Make them in the face of grief,
in the face of all those limitations I cannot overcome…
Teach me to rest within their stillness knowing,
growing welcome for all I cannot fathom just yet,
all that might be if I could just nest
in their ancient, restoring grace supreme.
Teach me how to use their round and receptive energy to begin again…
and again.

Radical Empathy

Walk a mile or two… remove yourself from your so-very-right perspective and ask yourself why you support what you support…

When Does It Begin To Matter?

These times simmer us all along a story of eventual boiling, critical massness, whether we acknowledge the kitchen exists, or the stove, or the fire underneath the pot or the pot or…

We can say it doesn’t matter, that we can’t make a difference by raising our voice but how else have we made changes without shedding blood? And don’t we want to avoid that one in particular? Would we rather send troops to corrupt wars, pat them on the back with a grin, say our prayers repeatedly, send out all the best energy and hope it all works out well enough or could we maybe consider speaking the truth to established “time-honored” realities gone stagnant and toxic? Especially when those traditions quickly boot their once-revered boots, now seasoned veterans, into a purgatory of loss, of benefits soured and help non-existent. Why would anyone perpetuate such? Could we maybe ask ourselves why we see no point in voicing our opinions but have no problem supporting the send-off of troops? What perversion of truth are we embodying when we embrace such twisted contradictions of love? We can’t make a difference with our voices united in opposition to corruption but somehow we can make a difference sending young folk to their confusion if not their deaths?

And while we’re at the love shore: Why are we so in love with our dramas, our many ministrations for the injured and the cornered more than we are in love with preventing the injuries, the agonies, the worries about loved ones entrenched in “time-honored” dead end ventures? While we should never abandon our love for the wounded, it’s a vastly wicked farce of love to embrace futility of voice while clinging fiercely to our weapons of warfare and all the seeming heroics inevitable. We bind soldier to soldier on fields meant only for greed, their scuffle to keep each other alive somehow proving one man or woman can get another’s back in the sands of murky foreign purpose. We tell ourselves it justifies the futility of it all as we grin and play the romantic charade game of hide the truth. Can we not encourage our youth to occupy our own soil here in these anorexic lands where we starve out soulfulness minute by minute everyday? Not in some distant land where our presence creates enemies and problems so much more horrific than any we could have interrupted.

It’s like some sick roundy round with value, with preciousness itself. It’s like we don’t want it. We’d rather injure it, send it abroad into suicidal zones of alleged honor, duty and freedom before doing the most effective thing we can do to protect what we love, to further love itself. See, if we are real warriors, we speak the truth to centuries of corruption. We stand our ground, refusing violence. We question the powers that be and we do it endlessly until the reign of corruption ends, occupying truth, insisting on a fierce love that refuses the same old delusions and capitulations to overwhelming corruption.

When will it begin to matter? Until it does, we pose. We pose notions of care, of concern, of sincerity itself when we refuse to believe our voices can turn a tide in love, for love, as love.  How is it that our hands wielding weapons have more power than our voices sending out energy, uncovering truth, discovering purpose that embraces what matters, birthing and nurturing love? It is not so. Don’t believe there’s no point because if you believe there’s no point in a voice raised, then your belief in everything else is nowhere, nothing. Not one part of the human expression, not one movement of the body is without purpose and the fact that all the world is mostly ignorant of this truth is why we are where we are today, on the stove, working our way up to an ugly boil, refusing love itself. So, when? When does it begin to matter? And when do people realize what once stood on the edge of lands noble, possibly occupying honorable purpose, what once defended freedom is now a machine killing innocence? And no ancient semi-heroic history will redeem what is now. Only what we choose now, only when we embrace how much it matters now, only then will we stand a chance of avoiding devastating loss.

Carry Me Fast

“Teach me how to trust
my heart,
my mind,
my intuition,
my inner knowing,
the senses
of my body,
the blessings of my spirit,
teach me how to trust these things,
so that I may enter my sacred space and love
beyond my fear
And thus walk in balance
with the passing of each glorious sun…”

Lakota Prayer

Ruth’s Response…

Sweep me past the rubble
carry me fast to river rapid
where earth’s gentle cooling touch
washes “me” away, shredding scant no-face,
remnants of long-erected defenses
and
all of life’s angsty debris,
pour in, over, all around me
keeping vessel shiny, new
setting soul free
again and again.

deepriverinstagram2
Deep River, NC, 2013, j ruth kelly, all rights reserved

Bless the Birds?

“As you proceed through life, following your own path, birds will shit on you. Don’t bother to brush it off. Getting a comedic view of your situation gives you spiritual distance. Having a sense of humor saves you.” Joseph Campbell

I have to say bird shite has been finding a sure path to my er, path lately. Literally and metaphorically. This quote’s a great reminder to keep laughing. And dancing…

Do You Have Choice Yet?

Presence begets presence. Condemnation and fear begets more conditioned thinking and antics to look better but what’s real? Presence… or, as Tolle is saying here, consciousness. Awakening…

“Choice implies consciousness – a high degree of consciousness. Without it, you have no choice. Choice begins the moment you disidentify from the mind and its conditioned patterns, the moment you become present….Nobody chooses dysfunction, conflict, pain. Nobody chooses insanity. They happen because there is not enough presence in you to dissolve the past, not enough light to dispel the darkness. You are not fully here. You have not quite woken up yet. In the meantime, the conditioned mind is running your life.” Eckhart Tolle

If we embrace this as truth, how will it revolutionize our parenting, our teaching, our counselling, our rehabilitation of ourselves and those life has entrusted us to love? And what awakens us?

Questions worth asking…

Tiger Mom Nonsense

Warning: Rant alert. I can be ruthlessly honest and somewhat brutal.

Apparently, the word on Tiger moms is that it’s actually debatable as to whether or not the “tiger” approach is destructive. We seem to be regressing on so many levels this past year and a half I shouldn’t be surprised. But this one pulls my anger daemon out of the box with a tiger snarl.

So, I had to have my say and I’m having it here too, copied from a comment on a “news source.”

The issue this doesn’t address is the one of the forming/shaping of the will and the development of authenticity.

When your parents’ will is the only allowed willful reality or the mainly dominating reality, you lose the caliber of awareness of what your own will is uniquely moved by, motivated towards and put here on this earth to accomplish. Your ability to know your own bull vs. your true vision and personal truths is smashed “for your own good.” Instead you have the insertion of a dominating fear-based (posing as this thought process: life is tough, the only way to succeed is through Borg-like “dedication” because you could fail otherwise.) ruthless drive-not-your-own. What do you learn? You learn that you can endure and you learn a strength that is created not of yourself as much as in reaction to the possible consequences (all unpleasant) should you not comply. And it sure looks good to the world in terms of regimental basic “success” if you pull it off. (And hey! That’s all that matters! Soul? Soulfulness? Alive and authentically YOU? Pssshhhh. Who cares?! It’s about how you make your parents look and whether or not they will have to worry about you being fed and clothed.) So you’re now doctor, lawyer, teacher, scientist. But who are you, really? The most formative years were spent with a controlling, dominating set of caregivers and from that you were shaped. Authenticity? Good luck with that.

Who you are outside of a fear of failure, recriminations and status-loss? You’ll have to create that anew WHILE you’re embracing responsibilities that RESTRICT your ability to create because you truly don’t have as many choices as you did in childhood, you get to unearth what was buried by “tiger” nonsense while the world asks you to be an adult. While I’m not Asian or Asian-American, I too was raised by tiger parents. It’s not a great thing. If you think you can be raised with tiger fear and not be changed in ways devastating, then your mind has been pretty thoroughly hijacked from a young age. And you believe your chronological age gives you some expertise on it when you’re really just frozen in time, complying and loyal. Tiger shmiger. It’s all fear. Show me the real tiger women and men who are raising their kids fiercely in love, snarling at b.s. and conjuring up the authenticity goodies and creative outbursts while training with consequences married to compassion and fearless faith in the goodness of humanity AS WELL as a healthy awareness of the sometimes wicked slipperiness of the human experience. That’s no small feat. Deluding yourself and posing tyranny as “tiger” is insulting to tigers. Wake up.

We don’t facilitate the emergence of a person by putting on the tyrant’s cloak. Instead, we facilitate the assembly of a robot (with suppressed gold and rubies and beautiful dirt and grime and grit and roar) who has to learn her brain, his brain and all the wonders of the soul while healing the damage (and sometimes just facing some things that can’t be repaired very well). The nonsense in the concept of this style of parenting as anything other than fearful, insecure, bullying is an insult to whatever image, animal or icon we cling to in order to dress it up.

My inner tiger would happily bag this predator and move on with a snarl and bloody teeth.