The Gift of Love

 

Raja Tilkian

 Love follows me around

until I turn towards it

and see my own face

shining inside this Heart.

Love walks away

and leaves me alone,

but only when I close my eyes to it

and wonder where it is.

For Love is always beaming it’s glow

no matter if I come or go,

it is always loving me,

living me,

being what it is, through me

in perfect glory and attention.

There is nothing else I could do

but dance with it,

praising “thank you”

and feel it’s beautiful warmth.

There is really no place to go

no thing to comprehend

when the feeling heart is full

and when I am a fool for it.

I go mad with love,

crazy for it’s current.

It pulses inside these veins

and moves the body triumphant.

I must shout it out from rooftops,

quickly grab the one beside me.

See, see! Can’t you feel it too?

My eyes alive with fire,

my heart melting in its heat,

this jubilee is You as Me

and Us as It.

Can’t you See?

This is It,

This is All there Is!

Jim Tolles

I Want to Tell You

 

Engin Aykurt

 I want to tell you

that you’ve arrived.

The darkness is done.

The day has come.

All your dreams are manifesting

All your seeds of joy are

ready for harvesting.

I want to tell you

that every shredding pain and

terrifying trauma was worth it

that you are special for it,

chosen to deliver all those whom you love to

honeysuckle, sweet liberation.

I want to tell you

that the twisted birth canal of the mother wound has been

straightened,

the fractured father pain made molten,

reformed.

The ancestral and cultural distortions

reckoned with, reoriented, and righted.

Instead…

Instead, I must tell you

that your brain has not yet endured

a quarter of the aches of

rewiring pain

to clarity;

your heart has not arrested in

cardiac frustration from the thousandth

deceitful arrow plucked from its tender ventricles;

your bones have not cracked and

the venom marrow not yet been

sucked clean.

I must tell you that

the expected congregations of celebrations are

crickets

if not total silence.

The deep dark of social malaise

and disease still spreads.

The rain of illusion still pours into your veins from a culture lost

in the pitch black of

suffering sleep.

And more.

There is so much more I MUST

tell you

so that a freeing dawn lightens your

life,

your load.

Buckle down.

Bear the next grief, the next ton of sorrow.

Drive through the resistance to your liberation

and the false prospects of a golden age.

Do this

so that I can tell you one day

You have arrived.

The darkness is done.

The day has come.

Jim Tolles

Being Alive

 

Jeremy Bishop 

Deep sea diver, she casts her net,

and yet swims down deeper below,

where the light is transfixed to go, into the darkness…into the abyss

where a seeming ominous world is really filled with goodness that is luminous

But only few have ever traveled to….

For the body and mind must be prepared, must be developed and strengthened

to see that light that blinds

and still come out the other side.

For it can break you in two if you are not ready.

It can shatter all of you,

and all of you will be left to pieces,

shambles of the self you knew.

Like Humpty Dumpty, who will pick you up?

Who will put you back together?

Only the force that made you could.

But before then, you will be left on the border

of divinity and madness, swimming through the tides

of aliveness

with your unconscious wide open

with the powers of creation and destruction at your grip

with the unseen world louder and brighter and more real

than anything else the body could see or hear.

The inner world will rage and roar like a carnival.

Up will be down, down will be up.

The flaming dragon will fling you to every side

with no remorse or restraint

only fire burning in his eyes.

Right will become wrong, wrong will make no more sense,

and blurring insanity will have filled your cup

until it is overflowing again

into a pool of illusions

with glimpses, you will see,

See so crystal clearly

for sanity will wake back up

and then you will slip back into the darkness and depths

that none around have traveled, so how can they help you climb back up?

No, no, something else must do it….

the inner Savior must come find you,

must take your hand and guide you

into the clear waters of redemption

into the good earth of your amendment

where all is balanced and retained

both the moisture from the rain

and the Sunlight’s nutrients penetrating deep

into your Soul’s enclave.

You are going to need it all.

All Nature must come alive within

and make its home in your heart.

All elements must become the family that supports and nourishes,

become the members that grow you and know you

and teach you and learn you

back in, back out….

sanity starts peaking in

reaching in to your body and mind

til you again have your sight

for this world

for that which you see

and all that you see, that cannot be seen

will become a language between secret friends

and talking and communicating and understanding

will become easy

and you will find yourself happy about this descent.

You will be happy you unraveled out and back again

and are no longer cursing the pains of the world inflicted upon you

by the ignorance of man.

You will come to see the glory that lives in all of them too

and this world will become only, yet unimaginably beautiful to you.

Everything in it….the mad, the sad, the artful and the bore

all will come to be delighted in

and find temperance and feeling for

living inside the softness which cannot be maimed

inside the glow that reflects all rays.

Yes, surely this is what all the madness was for

to get us kneeling on our hands and knees

in utter awe of all the beauty that stands before

poised with the brilliance of sobriety

that comes with the hum of a quiet mind

which melts the heart with wonder and gladness

simply at the experience of being alive.

Jim Tolles