Change – A Thread You Follow

A New Home

I have yet to attend a funeral where the officiant
declares, The deceased has gone to hell.  Does 
that absence, or avoidance, create some strange
disservice to those who survive?  Perhaps a 
detriment to the deceased?  It is our enormous 
error to view the present state of nature 
as a punishment for divinely-prohibited, fruit-
nibbling.  While there are those who still feel 
that the sun is the center of their universe, 
I choose to bring the newborn baby home
with the expectation that tradition will give
her all that has been created and fall away
to something terribly and wonderfully new.

Paved Over

Trails connect trails
through these woodlands
walked from period to period,
paleo to post-modern.

Treaties have made the steps
easier for some and more painful
and deadly for those who shared
the space for living their lives.

Slick service and bringing
in the lead and gold prevailed 
over values told and possibilities
for calls of patience and comfort.

Now, this place is paved for parking
lot conversations held by those who
say they need no refuge but continue 
to ask, How does everybody feel?

Hell(o)

I said, "I accidentally dropped
the "o" from Hello this morning
and created..."

She leaped in, "Stop!  Don't finish!
A little bit of that always goes
a long way."

I asked, "Are you suggesting that we
should do what the soul calls for?"

She replied, "Only if all parties 
recognize that there are three sides
to every argument."

Thinking out loud, I said, "How is talking
about it now seen as a threat?"

"Because," she answered, "change
never comes from the delights
of being comfortable."

Palm Sunday

How many more calculations must be made
to be free of belief in miracles when sunlight
falls with such graceful abandon?  Lip-biting 
onlookers have not awakened to shout their 
derisions to fools who still remain lost 
in the dregs of bad vodka.  Scolding mothers 
have not found anything to pray upon.  
Wonders wander around centers of being
long forgotten.  A daughter cries for attention 
in the loneliest corner.  Dry compassion 
waits for those less well-fed.  A donkey-rider
enters the city claiming to possess the secret
of being in relationship with God and neighbor.

2 – Of Change

(Found Poem in Michel de Montainge’s “Of Solitude” translated by George B. Ives)

Let us answer on behalf of ambition who gives us a taste for solitude.

It is not that the wise man can not live content everywhere,
aye, and alone, in the throng of a palace.
But we do not always intelligently seek the pathway to this end.

          (Often we think that we have abandoned affairs
          when we have only changed them.)

Consequently, because we are quit of the court and the marketplace,
we are not quit of the chief torments of our life.

Ambition, avarice, irresolution, fear, and all greedy desires,
do not desert us when we change our abiding-place.

     (Socrates was told that a certain person had not changed
     for the better in his travels.  "I must believe it," said he,
     "for he carried himself with him.")

We carry our fetters with us;
it is not complete liberty;
we still turn our eyes toward what we have left;
our thoughts are full of it.