Type A Dream

My dreams would be
somebody else's nightmare.
In them, I am always
looking after multiple children,
all under the age of five,
including twin babies.
I am baking masses of things 
from scratch,
and the cat is giving birth to kittens,
(I dont even have a cat!)


Simultaneously,
I am running a laundry.
A load of whites simmers
in the big kettle 
over the open fire
(just to make this situation 
slightly more challenging -
no mod cons in MY dreams!)
and there is a cacophony of noise
to keep me rattled and distracted.


Then I wake up.


Thank God.

Waking becomes 
a dream.
Time for tea.
Make mine a double,
after such a busy night.

Somewhere......

El Camino de Santiago - image by frescotours.com

Somewhere
on a grassy field
kissed golden

by the falling light
my friends are
still dancing
to the beat
of Mullingar

at sunset.

We are all

sun-kissed,

and joyous-

and as young

as we

will ever be.

This time

I'm dancing too.

Somewhere a peasant

with warm eyes

steps and steps

around the

ancient mountain.

The prayer wheels turn

and all is timeless.

One breath, one breath.

I follow him

in search of

the snow leopard.

Next lifetime,

in Dharamsala!

Somewhere

in a parallel

reality,

a Buddhist

does tai chi

against the

setting sun

one early

summer evening.

We follow him,

in trance,

we follow him.

This time I move

with grace.

Somewhere

it is high

on a hilltop

on Easter morning

and five friends

are meditating

the sunrise up.

Above us,

on the mountain,

there is singing,

like an angel choir.

I lift off.

I see the planet

below

from space.

The veils

between the worlds

lift

long enough

for one

little peek.

And somewhere

-since I'm dreaming now-

my familiar

walks the

sacred pathways of

El Camino de Santiago,

sleeps on stone slabs

and completes

the pilgrimage

in my stead.

We're not done yet.

Now we're floating

across the wide brown plains

of the Serengeti

at sunrise

in a hot air balloon.

Soul journeys?

Dreams? Remembrance

of lifetimes

past or those to come?

Sometimes it is

enough

simply

to dream.

Love Poem From the Past

[Today I posted a love poem at Poetry Pantry for Poets United that made me think about that man in the 1980's I never really stopped loving. The other poem can be found here:

http://stardreamingwithsherrybluesky.blogspot.com/2010/07/these-days.html

I decided to post this poem here this morning, in the spirit of reverie.

This man and I between us had five teenagers and a seven year old, so it was a miracle we lasted the year and a half that we did. All of the teenagers were acting up, no one was adjusting and, though I still loved him, I moved out to return my children to equilibrium, which didnt happen anyway. Within the next couple of years, three of them were out on their own.

I wrote this during our last months together. His favorite saying was "No easy answers", when what I wanted was commitment and "we'll get through this". The fact that my feelings never changed for him, and have lasted all these years, shows me perhaps I should have stayed. But I was accustomed to putting my kids first, and he let me go without protest, in itself an answer. In those days, I wrote on an old manual Underwood typewriter my Grandpa gave me when I was 11. I remember sitting out back in the indoor greenhouse, and typing this. I never had to change one word. I handed it to him, asking "Please dont laugh at me" and how he came to find me and hold me, after he read it. Sigh.

Here's the poem:]

THOUGHTS THAT DIDNT MAKE IT AS A POEM
September 15, 1983

sometimes I'd like
to just chase clouds
and dream,
roll downhill
through buttercups
and clover
and pretend
there'll be a time
someday
when all the
pain and struggle
will be over.

When I lie beside you
my tears are not for joy
(though there is joy
in all I've found
in you)
but for chagrin
that even in finding
all I have been seeking
it's still real life,
each day
with its own struggles
and I still must stay
so strong.
Not halving the load,
each of us packs
his own burden,
and all we can
hope to do
is try to comfort
and take comfort in
each other.

Hello,
fellow traveler.
Your path is
so like mine.
Like two oxen in a field
did we stumble
and stagger
over rocks
and hillocks
to meet
and try to pull
our load
in tandem.
How we fight
the bitter harness,
our eyes raised
skyward
to where
the world
is free,
up to our knees
in mud
with a head
full of dreams,
flogging
flogging
-to what avail?-

hello, Brother Dreamer.
When you hold me,
comfort
is the only word
I know.
I see
your spirit
striving
and I admire
your beauty
for surviving.

Let me help you.
Let me tell you
how you help me
by giving me days
when I feel life is all
I ever wanted it to be.

And on days
when my spirit
cries
it doesnt want
any more
just no more
pain and struggle,
you help me
just by being there,
you share,
and in your sharing
you bring forth
all my caring.

Hello, friend.
Your hand in mine
doesnt make
the load any lighter
but it sure
feels friendly.
And there is
a rightness
being here
with you
that I dont need
to put words to.
I'm glad
I didnt miss
this part of
the highway,
so much nicer
walking here
with you.
I'd have missed
so much
I'm learning
on my own.
And I may cry
sometimes
because
there is no
easy way
but all I have
to do
is look at you
to know
I'd rather
share the struggle
here with you
day by day
than take
the easiest path
leading any other way.

SHINE

(Raymond Brian "Brick" Baker, my dad)

Music is part of my heritage. It's in my genes. I was conceived, marinated and raised in music, and from the time I was small, I wanted to be a singer. My father had begun as a classical violinist, but had then fallen in love with jazz. Still in his youth, he switched to alto sax and clarinet and joined a band, to the dismay of his parents. Ever after, they rued the day they bought him his first saxaphone, blaming the music scene for his subsequent alcoholism and the downhill turning of his life, which had begun so full of promise.

My dad was hugely talented, and he bitterly watched lesser musicians, with whom he had played as a young man, pass him by and rise to some measure of success and fame. He never made the connection between his drinking and his inability to hold a job for long, in the music field or out of it. He had a very hard time with the emergence of rock 'n roll, and used to sit snorting with disgust at the television. "That's not music!" When in his cups, he'd stick out his tongue at the set and make a blowing noise: "Phphphphphphphphphphphpht!" But he was too transfixed with rage to change the channel.

Because of him, and because all the other kids loved them and I wanted to be different, I didnt immediately swoon over Elvis and the Beatles. The music of the '40's serenaded my life: Pennies From Heaven, I'll Get By, Stardust, As Time Goes By. They still have the power to take me right back, to my parents' lives in Kelowna. It is the love songs of their era, not mine, that I remember best.

(My folks on the dock in Kelowna, late 40's)

My mother liked to tell how my dad taught me, at age fifteen months, to do the musician's backwards hand-clap, on the knee, to the beat: "choo-whish-te-choo, whish-te-choo", and how I had the tempo down pat. Nights when the party atmosphere had not yet degenerated into shouting and the crashing of fallen bodies in the living room, sometimes they would get me out of bed, in my ratty plaid dressing gown, to perform for the company. I'd wail winsomely "Happiness Is Just a Thing Called Joe", do a self-taught little dance routine with a big grin, then go back to bed, feeling like a star. It was only a matter of time until I'd be discovered.

I longed to play an instrument. I would stand beside friends as they played the piano, looking at the musical notes I could not decipher, with tears in my eyes. Music was a magical language and I uninitiated into its mystery. I ached with longing to sit at the keyboard and play, express all the music I felt so strongly inside me. I asked my mother for lessons. But we were poor; she said she didnt want to waste the money.

All I had was my battered little boxed record player. I would close my bedroom door, turn it on, leave the world of pain and confusion I lived in behind me, and enter a new one, filled with music, hope and the dream of a better life.

There was high excitement when my dad came home on the weekend with new albums; in those days they were 33 and a thirds. One time he bought five, a rare extravagance in our circumstances, then got drunk and sat on them, smashing them before he'd even played them all.

I was twelve when I bought my first record with my babysitting money. It was a 45: "Twilight Time". My dad hovered anxiously as I put it on the turntable. As its slow notes and pure tones sounded, he relaxed. "I guess I dont have to worry about your taste in music," he approved. High praise!

(My dad on the wharf on Okanagan Lake in Kelowna, likely in the late 40's)

Briefly, my mom did allow singing lessons when I was eleven. I was sent to an aged old nun, who sat at the keyboard resignedly plunking out the notes, bored and disinterested, as I stood in my school uniform and sang "There Was a Little Green Elf" without conviction. I even was entered into a singing competition and somehow managed to get through it without disgracing myself. Nor did I stun those assembled with an electrifying performance. I just couldnt get too worked up about a little green elf. (I can still remember that song today!) My mother and father sat in the audience, one of the only times I remember them attending an event of mine. The judges, bored, noted down my mark without enthusiasm. It was clear that this was not to be my fast track to fame. I stopped going to lessons and returned to my preferred music, about love and pain.

Also briefly, my mother enrolled me for ballroom dance lessons, to help me with the awkward passage from twelve to teen. There was one shining evening when I performed at the Stanley Park tea room, and stole the show from a roomful of adult performers. Somewhere there's a photograph of me groovin' to the beat, the instructor beaming down at me as I did the Swing, glowing and laughing into the camera.

But it was with my records, in the privacy of my room, where I unleashed my real voice, the voice of my longing, that no one but my long-suffering family ever heard.

I was in my Grandma's back room listening to the radio when I first heard Brenda Lee on the radio. I stood stock still with a shock of recognition. She was singing her big hit "I'm Sorry", and I recognized that her vocal range was exactly like mine. I could sing like her! I had to get her records! I was further excited when the announcer said she was only thirteen years old, like me: a little bitty girl with a great big voice, who was already a star.

Brenda Lee saw me through my teens. My mother called what I did up in my room "coon shouting", as I balefully sang with all the dramatic anguish of my teens. I thought a coon was an animal, and didnt get the connection. I vaguely pictured some men out in the bush, hollering for raccoons. It was only later that I realised, with a start, that it was a racial slur, intended to diminish that heartfelt singing that expressed all the pain I had no words for, all those bright dreams that one day I would lose the acute self-consciousness that prevented me from being the person I knew I was meant to be. One day I would spread my wings and fly beyond this life of pain and limitation. As long as I could sing like this in my room, the possibility existed that one day I would sing before an audience, and they would like it. They would like me. One day I would shine.

It didnt happen. My stronger need was to provide myself with the kind of home and family I hadnt yet experienced, the story book life promised by all the books and movies and the songs that fed my dreams. Marriage, babies and heartbreak claimed the next two decades of my life.

I didnt sing at all during my marriage. But after it, music once again claimed my soul and rode along with me. My children remember me singing. I sang along with Abba, with Joan Baez, with Stevie Knicks, with The Bells, the Beatles and Elton John. In my little house full of children, I sang for the joy of living, for the morning breaking, for the dream of a love that had not yet come. I sang for happiness and hope. I sang the song that was mine.

I have become a great appreciater and encourager of musicians, of anyone with talent. I want them to not be held back by what had held me back. "Go for it!" I tell them. "You're terrific! Shine on!" I encourage them to throw off all the self-consciousness I had not been able to conquer, to feel "good enough", to assume the confidence I was unable to muster. To believe in themselves as I had not been able to, and to go for their dreams. Part of my encouragement is vicarious; they can do what I did not, can live that part of the dream for me, that alternate reality, that road untaken, due to the circumstances that shaped my early world.

Years when I worked in a coffeehouse, I was the most rapt of listeners, the music inside me still aching for release, but this time flying along on the fingers and voices of others. The musicians always said they didnt need a big audience as long as they had me to listen to them :)

Music is still a passion, and I still cant play a single instrument, still am too inhibited to leap about at dances and release the beat pounding within me, to set it free. I stopped singing some years back; I lost my voice when I got ill. It is enough now to listen, to applaud others in their golden moments, to join my being with its music to the All That Is, the great song of life.

Acceptance finally comes that it is too late to be a young star rising; too late to be the youngest published author in Canada; too late to be the person I once dreamed that I would be.

But it isnt too late, it is never too late, to shine.

MANDARIN MOON

I awake in the deep dark

of the night

to see

a huge round

full-faced moon

staring in

at me

as if it had zoomed close

with my eyes closed,

I catching it

unawares

before it rose.

There she sat,

perched in the bowl

of my old tree,

like an over-sized

Christmas ornament

thus adorning

just for me

the starkly bare

and brittle branches and,

much more,

allowing me to see

its beauty

closer

than I ever have

before.

I stare back:

eternal purveyor

of myth and mystery,

as if it holds the secret

of whatever is to be

and has ventured thus

to urge me forth

from out

my purple bed,

to find a path

where all my

broken dreams

can be

much better fed.

This radiant

so-close moon

and I agree:

surrender to no man,

and yet,

in giving

I'm most free.

This silvery ambassador

is urging me

to find a way

to give

all that I can -

Mandarin Midnight Moon

that sailed here

last night

from Japan.

STAR VOYAGER

[Shaman's Journey - from deviantart.com]

[This poem was given to me in a dream. I woke from sleep, seeing the Shaman's face right before my eyes, swiftly writing it down, as the dream and his face slipped away, faster than I could write. Posted for Poetry Jam: Visions]

Time traveling,

winging through the cosmos,

my body

its own spacecraft-

nothing between

my Self

and all the stars,

bathing in their friendly light,

riding the vortex,

upward hurled,

traveling through Forever,

awesome

Sky-world.

Cosmic beings,

giant creatures

green and blue,

beckon me

to join them,

this journey

all the proof

(I always knew)

that we are One,

speaking a language

of the heart

that needs no words,

sharing a universe

where we all belong,

making music

in which we are all notes

of the same song.

Then, as I waken,

eyes open

and for sure

no longer dreaming,

I see

a painted mask,

First Nations warrior,

his face alive,

suspended there

before me.

He looks at me,

behind his painted mask,

Medicine man,

intensely kind and wise,

and, strangely unafraid,

I do not hide

but hold his shaman's glance

beguiling,

as he looks deeply,

deep into my eyes,

and smiling.

[When this waking dream happened to me, I had just collapsed with chronic fatigue but did not yet know what was wrong with me. I found the shaman's face so kind and reassuring, like he was telling me I would be all right. And I was.]

WAKING FROM THE DREAM

John-John Kennedy salutes his fallen father

Waking from the dream........and holding the vision of change:
my relief at the election of Barak Obama 2008

[I am referring in this piece to my frustration with George W. Bush's presidency, not to the United States as a whole, or its wonderful people, so many of whom are striving to do great work in the world. And to my relief and joy when a new era was ushered in, one that inspired my hopefulness to reawaken. I cried with joy the night Obama was elected. This piece was written in the days just preceding voting day.]

It is November 1963. Our grade twelve class is facing a TV at the front of the room. There is not a sound, not a rustle, as we watch the horse and cart carrying John F. Kennedy's casket clip-clop past his wife and two small children. Jacquie is wearing a black veil, her beautiful face stricken yet composed, bearing her loss with dignity and a controlled grace. Caroline stands on her right, face heart-shaped and bereft. On Jacquie's left, John-John, three years old, in his little overcoat and short pants, raises his hand in a final salute to his father, a gesture that rips out the hearts of the nation.

In the 60's, we are the generation that thinks we will change the world. And we almost do, until, one by one, all of our leaders and visionaries are assassinated. Our generation rises up against the status quo and challenges it all: the capitalistic ethos, the war in Viet Nam, the "do as we say, not as we do" code we've been raised by. We have some visionaries capable of painting on a bigger canvas, dreaming a bigger dream than the world has dared to dream thus far.

Gandhi preceded us, standing against an entire nation to free the shackles of his people. One small man, armed with a walking stick and wearing a loin cloth, faced down the might of the British Empire, insisting that they let his people go. His assassination in 1948 is the first shot heard around the world, the first of all those that will follow, extinguishing our luminaries one by one, till it seems that a blanket of darkness and greed has covered the planet.

Before JFK's assassination, it is Camelot. Girls wear flouncy dresses; young men in sports coats slick back their hair and act debonair. There is a young charismatic leader in the White House, we still have some innocence, and everything is possible. Till the unthinkable happens, he is slain before our eyes on television screens across the land, and Camelot comes to a crashing end.

April 4, 1968. Martin Luther King has a dream. His words the night before he is assassinated reveal a prescience that he will be killed. "Like everyone, I would like to live a long life. But I'm not concerned with that. For I have been to the mountain top and I have seen the Promised Land." One more shot rings out in the early hours of the morning. One more leader with a golden tongue, far-reaching vision, and a thirst for justice slain.

The late 60's, the early 70's: in San Francisco in Haight-Ashbury, in Vancouver along Fourth Avenue, the young throw over the traces and are exploring everything: counter-culture, drugs, rock 'n roll, Eastern philosophy. Peaceful long-haired smiling beings in unbelievably interesting clothing stroll up and down the streets: "Peace 'n Love, baby, Peace 'n Love." There are anti-war protests during which the Law of the Land clubs, beats and even shoots young college students for saying the war in Viet Nam is wrong. (A fact borne out indisputably some years down the road. We apparently learn nothing from this.)

Then along comes Bobby. With him as President, the world WILL change. Until a morning in June, 1968. I am a young wife then, in Alert Bay. I am standing in my living room, stunned by the words coming from the radio. It cant be true, but it is. My husband has just come home from work. He looks at me. Disbelievingly, I tell him, "They've shot Bobby." By now, the dream is dying. We are hearing its death rattle. Everyone who dares to dream is shot, gotten out of the way, by those who cling to power and corruption and wealth literally to the death.

But John Lennon's voice can be heard above the despair, trying to light the way of the broken-hearted: "You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one."

The music of John Lennon, Elton John, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Carly Simon, Simon and Garfunkle, is the backdrop of our days in the 70's. We know the world is out of whack, but we have been soundly trounced, our voices silenced with clubs and guns. We are just living now. The world has taken a turning down a darker path, with LBJ and "Tricky Dick". Conspiracy theories abound, and personal survival replaces changing a world that refuses to change. We pour our angst into music and poetry and bad love affairs, sullen soldiers marching to a beat we have not chosen. Still trying to believe.

Then on December 8, 1980 a final shot rings out: a crazy man has shot John Lennon. Thousands pour into Central Park in disbelief, standing vigil, holding candles aloft, tears pouring down their faces, as they sway back and forth to "All We Need Is Love."

It is too much. Our heroes, our visionaries are all dead and we are left with Darwin's nightmare, a system gone awry. [Darwin's Nightmare is the title of a documentary about the fishing industry harvesting perch in the Nile. The predatory fish, which has wiped out the native species, is sold in European markets, while the local natives starve.]

"The dream is over, what can I say?" mourns John's voice from beyond the grave. Our dreams all got derailed somewhere along the way.

But the more gunfire tries to silence those voices, the more powerful they become. Years later, all of those fallen heroes still live, their voices ringing out from television and computer screens, and across the airwaves. There is a catch at my heart and tears close by, every time I hear the words and music of those long-gone dreaming days when we lost our round-eyed innocence. Just this way are their dreams still alive, in the hearts of aging baby boomers looking out at a world gone mad, where profit is everything, even at the potential cost of humanity's survival.

It is 2008: now we are looking back at horrible wars fought for highly selective political or financial purpose: Operation Desert Storm, Operation "Enduring Freedom". [This piece is about the political will to wage war, not about the brave men and women who are sent to do the fighting. May they all come home.] War is everywhere, on-going troubles in Ireland, Kosovo, Georgia/Russia, the Middle East, Africa. Tibet has been suffering, ignored, for decades. No enduring freedom for them. The USA administration, so quick to leap aggressively into areas where oil or political might is at stake, and even the United Nations, supposed upholder of international rights and freedoms, responds with indifference when genocide and starvation are wiping out the peoples of Rwanda or Darfur. Then the towers fall on 9/11, a wake-up call if ever there was one.

"Could it be," asks Arundhati Roy in The Algebra of Infinite Justice, "that the stygian anger that led to the [9/11] attacks has its taproot not in American freedom and democracy, but in the US government's record of commitment and support to.....military and economic terrorism, insurgency, military dictatorship, religious bigotry and unimaginable genocide (outside America)? Terrorism is the symptom, not the disease......If it is to be contained, the first step is for America to at least acknowledge that it shares the planet with other nations, with other human beings....."

John Lennon's assassination marked the death of an era. The interval since has been one of corporate greed and pillage, and military intrusion. [Again, political decisions, with the young men and women of the nation sent to pay the price.] The world's image of the US has changed from the cool conquering heroes and flyboys who arrived during World War II as liberators, to a bully whose presumption is "might makes right."

In the 70's, we were like rebellious adolescents. We got slapped down, went underground for a time, and learned some things. We are much older now, and wiser. We can dream a farther-reaching dream and take the steps to get there. Dream, all crones and creaky-jointed crooners, of a global community working and aligning itself in harmony with Mother Nature, harnessing the power of wind and water, sharing the resources of the earth among ALL its peoples, and bringing us into a kinder, gentler dawn. It's time to dust off those broken dreams, put on our granny glasses, and conjure up the thousand years of peace that has been prophesied and whose time has come. These turbulent times are the birth pangs of a new age trying to be born. I remember the words of a song sung by three gentle B'hai musicians back in coffeehouse days:

"It is time to turn swords

into ploughshares,

to till the hearts of all men...."

There is a struggle between dark and light forces all over the earth right now. But I remain stubbornly hopeful. After a long time without heroes, a young man of the people has risen up once again with a vision of Change. And we are so ready for Change! In Barak Obama, I feel a hope I havent felt since Bobby Kennedy was shot. But I fear for him. In my experience, every time a man of the people has risen up, he has been felled and silenced. I dont even want to put that thought out into the universe, but I pray for his protection.

The last election was a stolen one; this time the groundroots swell of the common man backing Obama tells me we've had enough of political corruption and war-mongering. It is the dawn of a new epoch: we must turn towards the light; we cannot continue in the darkness. Each one of us can add our small flicker to the growing light of conscious choice we are being called upon to make. We are beaten down, but it is not yet too late to redeem the dulling of our bright beginnings, of what we owe to our fallen heroes, who were the voices of our youth.

We need more than a dream now. We need a shift in human consciousness across the planet so far-reaching that every peasant in a hillside cave in Afghanistan, every suffering monk in Tibet, and every starving orphaned child in Darfur can feel it. This planet is battered, distressed and storm-tossed. Mother Earth is expressing her displeasure, and we are reaping the whirlwind. But my heart refuses to give up hope that there will be a turning in the tide of human consciousness. It may take a series of disasters so stark that humans have no choice but to return to more modest and sustainable living. What will it take to make the warring factions all over the world put down their guns and feed their people? Einstein said he was certain of one thing: "If World War Three is fought with nuclear weapons, World War Four will be fought with rocks and clubs."

But "Love is the intuitive knowledge of our hearts," says Marianne Williamson in The Age of Miracles. And I believe. "As we look, not back nor forward, but deep within, we see a light that is greater than the darkness of the world, a hope that surpasses the understanding of the world, and a love that is greater than all the hatred in the world....we shall follow that light........toward humanity's rebirth."

As I sit on my porch swing, exhausted by the life I have lived and the losses I have weathered - that we all as a species have weathered collectively - I add my small push to shift, shift! the tide of universal consciousness out of the darkness, into the light of a brand new day. It is happening now, consciousness is rising across the planet so strongly we can feel it! Each of us can add our own little nudge, to tip it over the edge into a vast global awakening. We can dream a kinder, fairer world into existence, we can speak it, we can pray it, we can march for it, we can vote with our feet and our pocketbooks for it. With enough of us holding the vision, it isnt too late yet to change the world.

SITTING ON A PORCH SWING

There is a woman sitting on a porch swing.
She is rocking
to ease
the hard little kernel of pain
she has always carried
under her valiant smile,
the strain of sadness underlying
the positive talk,
the unrelenting hope,
the dismayed recognition
at the way it has all turned out
so far from the once upon a time visions
of long ago,
for so long dreaming one day it would all be
so much better.

She is rocking upon the tide of all those dreams:
the one she made come true -
the ten years out of sixty when she lived her own life-
and the ones she finally gave up on
She is rocking upon the tide of What Is
having long ago learned to find happiness
within its framework.

She is rocking under a blue sky
full of birdsong. squirrel chatter
and the call of the raven
She is rocking under
lowering storm clouds
of smokey gray,
thunder rumbling,
splitting across the sky,
the fresh scent of rain as it splatters
against the tin roof.
She is rocking under the night sky,
and star dreaming
She is rocking under the
full round grandmother moon
and is feeling the presence of crones
on the night-time air:
strong resolute women who do
what is put before them
because no one else will
and there is no choice
when someone has to
feed the children

She is rocking her way
to the end of her life
letting go of the past,
letting go of all fractious and
inharmonious bodies,
distancing herself from all the
crisis and clamour and youthful drama
her age has no energy for,
gathering her limited energy, conserving,
for the needs of the present day
letting go of the dreams once dreamed
and the years that cannot come again,
leting go of Home and making a home where she is,
trying to be grateful for struggle
Because It Could Always Be Worse,
(and often is!)

She is trying to cling to the vanishing life that is hers
under the claims and demands that would gobble it all
and then burp unperturbed at its ending
having eaten its fill.

She is longing for long white empty beaches
and the roar of the waves,
the cry of the gulls, the eagle soaring wind-swept skies,
and the picky-toeing progress of the blue heron,
serene at the inlet's edge
and no humans anywhere within sight or hearing
but her.
She is longing for her last years to be her own
something of her own choosing
having only chosen once - maybe twice -
in her entire life of responsibility
for herself
All the rest was for others,
the pitfall of those who take seriously
the role of mother.

While rocking, she achieves the state of No Thought,
that Nirvana the sages and mystics seek through practice
is effortless for her
for she is too exhausted to think
Inner peace disguised as exhaustion
or vice versa
She rocks and thoughts flit
like the little birds in the hedgerow
and fly fast away
She rocks and promises herself
that one day at a time
is all she has to manage
The rest will take care of itself
She prays for relief
that some of the burdens be lifted
But she doesnt believe enough
they ever will

One day she will rise wraith-like
from all the burdens that claim her
and will fly to a farther shore.
She would rather stay here
for she really likes the scenery
on planet earth
But she likes it best without people
all their egoes and clamour
and inflated self-worth

On her porch swing she mutters oaths and incantations:
sometimes "Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!" when she remembers
something incredibly oafish she once said
sometimes "Shift....shift.....shift....." as she tries to add
her small push to the collective consciousness

Somewhere monks bow to the tone of a fulsome bell
Somewhere nomads hunger for food and justice
Somewhere ignorant armies clash and thunder
Somewhere butterflies follow their migration of pure wonder
Somewhere a whale gives a mighty blow,
then dives, then breaches
and always always always
her heart trods
those long and empty beaches
On her porch swing she is with them all,
all but the fighting.
She has no fight in her,
her striving is for surviving

Today her first great grandchild has come to planet earth
and all the hope she has blesses this birth.

Damian, born June 12, 2006

With his buddy, Lukey

Every now and then

I look up and out

from this hobbled existence

through a window of miracles

and glimpse

a heron gliding by

like a grim and skinny matron

clutching her pocketbook

under a stiff wing,

or a shimmery rainbow,

gossamer valentine from the deity,

or the silent promise of daybreak

every day brand new upon the planet

or a patch of blue amidst gray storm clouds

or the stalwart enduring heartbeat

of a thousand year old cedar,

eagle peering down

from its topmost scrag

Every now and then a brand new miracle occurs:

a baby catching its first breath

utters its protesting cry

at leaving its gloried heaven

to endure this planet's pain

Each time we celebrate with joy

a new soul's journey

is beginning

once again

Every now and then I look up

beyond the burden and the blessings

at the vast and constant sky

and remember

what I'm doing here

and why

OM SHANTI

September 2, 2002

Om Shanti.
(I am a peaceful soul.)

Peaceful
as the ancient wise old
stones
that rise up gray
against a brooding sky
as detached
as the dove-shaped clouds
that wisp serenely
by

Our souls have
traveled
far
'cross distant galaxies
from their home of silence
beyond the stars
From the moment we are born,
we are returning
along a pathway
that is
uniquely
ours

Om Shanti
I am a very
peaceful soul.
Tell me your dream,
and is it peaceful too?
How came we here
to this veiled question
written on the sky?
Another path diverging:
walk on,
or just go by

We live this life like a dream
that is dreaming itself.
Bemused we ponder
the way
we're meant to take
We sleepwalk
through our
solitary choices
and, at dream's end,
of one accord,
we wake.