The process of finding the definition of life

Everyday, is the measure of gain and of loss;

It is growing in the knowledge of Love and of Eternity,

It is carrying a mortal cross.

Most of my days, my life is wasted

In distant reveries; my energies

I tend to squander or dissipate;

I have lost the order of living and

Its spiritual connections I cannot keep straight.

So, I must stop,

Whenever this becomes conscious and

I must realign what I think, do and say

To the center of my simply being

With a few moments

When I sleep, play or pray.

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There is nothing around me

In the things that I see

That can give me a taste of Eternity;

All the images and icons and memories

Are but human endeavor to find sacred and holy.

It is only when I feel the weight of the cross,

When I am naked and humble with less gain and more loss

And the comfort and caution into the wind I can toss

That my vision and my sense would seem to clear.

Then nothing is everything

And I am a part;

And my living is loving

What is close to the heart;

Where the journey is the end

Just as sure as the start

And the silence is the season

That would steer

All my longings

To a wandering in the desert

With the knowledge

That they are all just passing years

And the Promised Land is the only expectation

I should ever want

To see or to taste or to hear.

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I have no control over that which is given to me

As I enter the world from the dark and the quiet

Each day I begin;

From the birth day at which I started it all through

The years that I strove to manage it,

The elusive spin.

But so soon will come a day

With no need for observation

Of the others’ response;

The dark and the silence

Will all of my attention

By my dying

Be my living

Entrance.

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The quest for the constant Presence

Like we had with God before the fall

Is the battle to recapture the silence

Of the innocence

From the shadow of the pall

That covers it with the noise and confusion

From everything but that which we had

Because now we must find the truth for ourselves

Of the difference between the good and the bad.

The practice of the constant Presence

Requires our death

To what we hold so dear

So that the voice of God that we knew so well

Once again in the silence we can hear.

The quest is the mark of our knowledge

Of the measure of our gain and our loss.

The practice is the presence of the One that came first

And our comfort with the way of His Cross.

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Profanity is thinking

That the world is mine

Or that I belong to the flesh;

It is turning my soul to a lesser good,

It is putting my God to the test;

It is forgetting that tomorrow or soon

I am dust

And remembering too much

What was past too much lust;

It is wanting to have

What I want as I must

And rejecting the holy within.

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Life is a dance,

A back and forward romance,

Between myself and the other outside me.

It is the world;

It is love;

It is a God high above;

Sometimes push,

Sometimes shove,

Sometimes embracing;

Giving meaning to the present

In an exercise of life

We cut the past and future cleanly

As if this moment were a knife

Forgetting all we hold inside ourselves

Now all is music,

Nothing strife

And the movement is the only spirit that really matters.

So today you are too close to me,

Tomorrow far too distant

And one look and you are next to me

In the turning of an instant

In my memory,

In my mind,

In the feelings I will find

Where my soul will try to wind

Itself a dervish.

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There is never enough distance

Between the sun’s setting and its rising

For my soul to see its own light

Through the acts of compromising

That it comes upon in the heat of the battle

Of our separate journeys shining

In their glory

In their wakings

In their day.

What can I say of the struggle

Or the conflict that life seems to be?

How can I move to the center

From the edges

Where I seek to be free?

When will I find what is comfort

In the experience of solitary?

Where just being becomes

Both to play and to pray.

Like the angels and the animals

And the children and the saints;

They move quickly past the suffering

And the list of their complaints

That the thinking man and his troubled history

For himself and his neighbor paints

Because he believes the place where he is

Is his to stay.

Forgetting the will of the Father

That keeps all that is good for our use;

Intending to employ what is ignorance

As the basis of his excuse;

Not caring that in his persistence

He is hell bent by his choice of abuse

Instead of the meek and the humble

And the spiritual way.

That the God-man, the Savior, the Christ, the Ideal

Did purport to put forward

Both with love and with zeal

That the poor he might lift up

And the sick he might heal

If only they could hear

What He had to say.

In the dark and in the quiet

In the isolation of each heart

Where the prize is the intention

And the end is just the start

Where the distance from each other

Never leaves anyone apart

Despite no light, too much suffering

And umbrae.

2012.10.03.0900 ©