God

This is an old poem, I wrote some time ago...

God

It's like awakening
from the dream
of your deepest fear
and your true name

And falling back asleep
to the lone black bird's
morning song
to false dawn

The Night

The night

I am driving down the highway.
It is night. There are few lights on the road.
The darkness swells. It envelops me.
Ancient, primordial night surrounds me. Timeless.

And here I am seeing it. My thought’s silence.
I become perception, before thought.
Promethean perception. Before words.
Just the dark sea of awareness surrounding me.
Just the dark sea of awareness that is me.

And I forget my name, and my position, and my rank.

Up ahead I see the lights of town.
I drive towards them.

Away from the deep darkness towards the lights.
And there is humanity surrounding me.
Placing its net upon reality,
Creating a dream upon this planet,
A dream that will last only briefly.

As I enter town, I become at once a little child, and a man.
I am my father driving me home through the city,
and I am myself, as a child, being driven.

The lights reflect through the car.
There is a strange comfort that I find in the sound of the car as it goes over the concrete bridges.
There is a strange comfort that I find in the headlights reflected upon my father’s eyes.

There is still a world.
Though the darkness has enveloped us, there is still a world.
And in this dark sea, there are so many happenings,
and if I were lost,
I could wash up on the shore of any of these small little dreams happening around me.

"My Soul Has Grown Deep"

"My Soul has grown deep, like rivers"
--Langston Hughes

I have an uncle who sends me poems from time to time. Recently he sent me the poem, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" by Langston Hughes. There was a particular line in that poem that just jumped out to me, it was almost as if I could feel the words in my body, "my soul has grown deep, like rivers." To me, that is life, to live, to experience, to grow deep into soulfulness, into the world, while we go upwards to spirit. We grown down, and we grow up.

To grow down is to grow into the world, into the sorrows of the world, to all that is passing, and to live anyway. As Joseph Campbell says, "to participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world."

I learned just yesterday, that a friend, who up until the last year or so had been diligently walking his path, committed suicide. He was a good human being. He had worked so hard on his path. He had committed to his Self, but he ran up against a place in himself, in his ego, that just was relentless, and despite our best efforts no one that I knew could reach him. He just disappeared.

Evidently, the police found his cell phone and called around looking for next of kin. That's how I found out.

It's hard to know what to say.

You see some one open to their Self, open to life, open to their heart. And then you see them shut down, close out their self, their life, their heart. Just like that. You remember those moments when they were alive, when they were themselves, and you remember those moments that were hints of what was to come, things they said, things they did, the way they acted.

What can you say? His work will continue on a plane other than this one. My prayer for him is that eventually he'll let go of his anger and his self hatred and he'll come back to his Self, to his Soul, to who he truly is, to who he has always been.

And so we live, and our experiences shape us, define us, and we grow deep, etched in stone, like rivers carving out canyons in our souls, places that take us deeper into life, into this world, and ourselves, into the living mystery.