“The world needs your rebellion and the true song of your exile. In what has been banned from your life, you find a medicine to heal all that has been kept from our world. We must find the place within where things have been muted and give that a voice. Until those things are spoken, no truth can find its way forward. The world needs your unbelonging. It needs your disagreements, your exclusion, your ache to tear the false constructions down, to find the world behind this one.” Toko-Pa Turner
I hear someone pouring out her heart about a wrenching upset,
something burdening her whole being,
something precious to her,
it may be as simple as a slight,
or an all out attack on her honor.
Or she may be troubled about something like a relationship struggle,
or a time when someone treated her rudely,
or she stubbed her toe and it brought out all of her frustrations.
And I catch my breath.
Because it strikes me to my core
in that moment,
that I have to push past the old programming
shoved at me perpetually, daily, hourly
stating that nothing matters save giving up
yourself and your concerns to Christ’s love.
There’s no need to overflow, to spill,
to let it show because it can all just rest at the cross.
I remember this in a flash, a moment when my heart
instantly feels deeply with and for another
all while the program’s smashing attempts to haunt,
to strip, to devalue value itself clashes
with the natural flow.
We are not our own, see, we belong to Jesus.
As long as you can bring it all to him,
corral it into submission to how he has solved everything
(though good folks die and honorable names are smeared),
then you can rest knowing all is well even if it doesn’t look well,
or feel swell, or even feel at all.
It hits me in the solar plexus.
Oh how that program shatters the value,
the soul, the heart of what it is
to. be. human.
And I am achingly grateful to feel,
to be moved by the biggest and the smallest
concerns of those who are changed by what life is.
Think of what it might be like to have that cut off,
to be only allowed to feel deeply into what someone else supposedly did for you,
something that negates any reason to grieve, cutting short,
masectomizing, castrating the heart of being human.
I sit with the realization and allow it to flood
any lingering hardened fields,
places where I smashed my humanity flat,
suffocating breath and pulse.
I sit and watch the water work its way in
and past the resistance to being flesh and blood real.
I am beyond grateful to know the depths,
the feelings from the stubbed toes to the unspeakable losses,
to the quiet joys and splashy promises bearing hope
and to know that I can treasure them all until time to pass them along,
sacrificing nothing but the lie that we are not truly beautifully whole
as we let go of our crutches and learn to walk our stories
amongst ancient witnesses who have learned there is love,
there is divinely radical grace in losing the Jesus no one should know.
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.
“I love Jesus. I love the Pagan Solstice Christmas pine. I love Mother Earth, I love Goddess Shakti. I love my Buddha-heart. I love freedom from religious authority. I love the perfect consistency of my contradictions. I love luscious berries of fire and mistletoe clustered on the cross of paradox. I love the tree of life, where I am ripening fruit. I love the newborn sun.
And I love what my body says to my soul. ‘Every particle of me is made of Matter, Mater, Mother Dust, each atom a cathedral where pilgrims arrive from the stars to celebrate the miracle of flesh. O my soul, You irradiate the world through me. I am your dance. Let there be no more talk of our difference.’ And so after thousands of years of religious combat, my body and my soul are Christalized in one magnum mysterium.
And where does this mystery occur? In the nameless roadside shrine of my chest, in a flame that never stops burning yet has never been lit until Now. Here I celebrate the birth of God, who is this Breath.” Fred LaMotte
“A BRAVE AND STARTLING TRUTH
We, this people, on a small and lonely planet
Traveling through casual space
Past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns
To a destination where all signs tell us
It is possible and imperative that we learn
A brave and startling truth
And when we come to it
To the day of peacemaking
When we release our fingers
From fists of hostility
And allow the pure air to cool our palms
When we come to it
When the curtain falls on the minstrel show of hate
And faces sooted with scorn are scrubbed clean
When battlefields and coliseum
No longer rake our unique and particular sons and daughters
Up with the bruised and bloody grass
To lie in identical plots in foreign soil
When the rapacious storming of the churches
The screaming racket in the temples have ceased
When the pennants are waving gaily
When the banners of the world tremble
Stoutly in the good, clean breeze
When we come to it
When we let the rifles fall from our shoulders
And children dress their dolls in flags of truce
When land mines of death have been removed
And the aged can walk into evenings of peace
When religious ritual is not perfumed
By the incense of burning flesh
And childhood dreams are not kicked awake
By nightmares of abuse
When we come to it
Then we will confess that not the Pyramids
With their stones set in mysterious perfection
Nor the Gardens of Babylon
Hanging as eternal beauty
In our collective memory
Not the Grand Canyon
Kindled into delicious color
By Western sunsets
Nor the Danube, flowing its blue soul into Europe
Not the sacred peak of Mount Fuji
Stretching to the Rising Sun
Neither Father Amazon nor Mother Mississippi who, without favor,
Nurture all creatures in the depths and on the shores
These are not the only wonders of the world
When we come to it
We, this people, on this minuscule and kithless globe
Who reach daily for the bomb, the blade and the dagger
Yet who petition in the dark for tokens of peace
We, this people on this mote of matter
In whose mouths abide cankerous words
Which challenge our very existence
Yet out of those same mouths
Come songs of such exquisite sweetness
That the heart falters in its labor
And the body is quieted into awe
We, this people, on this small and drifting planet
Whose hands can strike with such abandon
That in a twinkling, life is sapped from the living
Yet those same hands can touch with such healing, irresistible tenderness
That the haughty neck is happy to bow
And the proud back is glad to bend
Out of such chaos, of such contradiction
We learn that we are neither devils nor divines
When we come to it
We, this people, on this wayward, floating body
Created on this earth, of this earth
Have the power to fashion for this earth
A climate where every man and every woman
Can live freely without sanctimonious piety
Without crippling fear
When we come to it
We must confess that we are the possible
We are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world
That is when, and only when
We come to it.” Maya Angelou
“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
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”)
We wend and reach ’round curves,
our circles and circuits of intent.
And whether we mean them to or whether we’re oblivious,
our days become us as we stretch
towards sun’s warmth with hope,
and a strange courage revealed
only by life’s catastrophes.
While we break, our resilience refines itself
sifting through the bits left behind,
a quiet knowing we’ve yet to find,
and ’round another bend, a field of growth flourishes as we weep.
Though we sleep through days on end,
awaiting a less raging grief,
these circles and curves unfold us
eternally towards the sun.
I ran so far across noble terrain, full of intent to prove love makes us whole,
to prove love is what we’re here for,
to prove unity grows from and within love,
to prove the living of this life truly worthwhile,
to prove love can transform all the worst demons,
to be empowered despite loss, to be present ‘though pushing through disease,
to be accepting and expectant without entitlement because love,
and so, I ran hard at the work, in the work, in the rest and the play of it all.
And I hiked.
And I climbed.
And I fell, and I fucked some things up.
And I coasted, and I even flew.
And here I am looking down and across the miles behind me.
And I have loss and miscarriage where I least expected.
And I have declarations of love coming at me that ring empty, devoid of any action to make it real,
And rejection of who I am, of how I am who I am, blithe, unseeing and judgmental eyes looking back at me, forgetting when we laughed and held on, forgetting all the love knitting.
And I have proof of love’s work and unity where I least tried and with some unexpected.
And I have uncommon bonds, those seldom known, the kind of connections few experience.
And I have proof I can persist and release, celebrate and grieve.
And I know that love doesn’t make us whole as much as it melts into loss, imparting resilience, filling up the cracks.
And love doesn’t raise the dead, this I know, too.
And I have a crisis of meaning if I look at the lost harvest and the heartaches love couldn’t resolve.
And I have endless grief if I look long at the hurt life handed the ones I thought I could protect, the disease I thought preventable, the power I thought I had, we had.
And I want not to run.
I want not to climb.
I want to release proving.
I want to accept what needs accepting.
I stand looking at the path behind me and there’s a woman clawing her way up the summit.
Her hands are amazing, their strength endless and her legs flex with all the sinew I once knew.
The sun has loved her and the moon, too.
The earth delights in her ministrations.
The rivers know her soul intimately and she sings their songs.
One glance at her climbing my way and I know.
She’s singing and has paint on her chin, ink on her palms, dirt under short fingernails.
There’s a bit of moss and flower in her hair, wild.
She has some wands on her back, ones I thought were forever gone.
Those locks are flaming red, none of the sprinkles of gray gracing my own head.
She isn’t smiling, but she keeps singing strange chants tugging at my core.
She simply won’t stop.
She’s got the air of one who knows and instantly I remember her from dreams past and from dances under leaves, twirling innocence.
We were one, before the running began.
And I can’t remember anymore when it began.
But she couldn’t keep up with me in the clamor of my proving or the running towards meaning.
She had to do her own thing until I stopped.
She grips for the final reach and grasps up at my hand,
And we pull each other up.
She stands now in front of me and we’re facing.
And she wants to know if I’m ready now to know the deeper work of tRuth,
the one not dependent on proving anything.
She wants to know if I’m finished racing for what is and was always right here.
She knows the foundational work and breaking up of my defenses has been more relevant than all the racing to prove.
She knows the running for love, climbing and building, resting and dancing are not made futile by the scant returns or the seeming and actual loss.
She just knows more deeply what is more important than any other work now.
She knows me as my own teacher and my own saboteur.
She hugs the grieving, weeps the years ravaged by an illness that has yet to release me.
And she reminds me, insists I see that the miles stretched out behind us reveal the real, the deepest work of love was made more by love itself and by open-heart collisions than by the most potent intent or tenacious presence.
And so, now we can begin
singing,
singing,
singing
over these bones.
Oh, we sway as the day’s dance pauses in the hum of moon and sun
and some ancient knowing calls us to feast in the now,
in the everydayness of our unearthings.
We stretch and weep and shout, ousting stagnations,
blooming towards the sun as we turn for one more run.
And one more run becomes us
‘til the next sleeping awakens deeper, truer love being,
love showing truth in the face of the dark histories,
and in the aftermath of all that suggests futility
the dance remains,
but we are never the same.
J. Ruth Kelly 