Saturday, September 21, 2024

BARN DOORS

 

The old barn doors, planks the color of rain, creak open, groaning.

Dust dances, swirling in rays of yellow light.

Air, the smell of leather and dung.

There’s a stirring, 

A portal, 

Knowing, 

I want to climb and hide from the world but not today.

Today, once more I reach through rays of dusty light for the mud caked shovel.

Work for the night is coming yet always remember the light.

Monday, September 16, 2024

SIGNS

                                                   

                                                            

                                                                            


Gull tracks in the sand,

on a sliver of white shell,

 as if etched by human hand,

Gull tracks again.


Tracks in the sand,

 It's as if I can hear the staccato, beating, gull heart.

 tracks on the shell,

Frozen in time.


How long ago,

On the history of tides,

were these tracks made?

Now, 

then,


Signs written in the sand, on the infinite grains of eternity.

hidden in plain sight.

Waiting to be seen.

Truth etched in the face of God.


 

Saturday, June 8, 2024

I AM

 

                                                   


        



I am that grade school child under the house on a hot summer day. It’s cool under here, lying on the cold red clay where Mom told me not to go.

I am a child walking from Joyner’s Grocery. Struggling and sweating because they scolded as I was leaving,

” Don’t mash the bread.”

So, I lift it high, holding by the tie twisted tail of the plastic bag but my shoulders scream and fail, and I must keep stopping.

I am the skinny teenager with wire rim glasses and a spray of freckles confused by the girls that came back to school more like women while I blush my read haired way down the halls.

I’m the China Fleet sailor crossing the concrete bridge into sin city of neon and street vendors and Asian hookers in hot pants,

“Hey Joe … Come ‘ere, Joe”

I am a new father cradling his son, amazed that this purplish mass of flesh with huge dark eyes has survived the trauma of birth.

I am a son of God, resting each morning and each night in the divine light of meditation and prayer.

Breath, each breath coming home, home to the cool red clay under the house and they call from the car,

“Scotty, where are you? We are going to the circus and we can’t find you.”

Saturday, December 30, 2023

 


                                           REFLECTIONS OF A USED CAR SALESMAN 

Sometimes I wonder where we have gone and where we might go. Living in a world where violence and hate are lifted in the name of Spirit, I know that at our core we are better than this.

When we let our fear of “the others” rule our actions and our beliefs we become victims of our own shortcomings.

Yet the same people who would elevate destruction also feed the poor, help the widow and orphan, build homes for those without.

What is prejudice but fear?

Long ago I was fortunate to discover that my anger was but fear evolved and in so doing I began to find the courage to at least try to live in communion with my fellows. I understand that we must defend and protect those we love and our country, yet I have come to believe that,” a power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity.”

When I stand in a voting booth or sharing what I believe to be truth, my prayer is that courage will overcome fear and I will know that each soul in this reality is a beating heart that yearns for salvation.

Would that I can act to protect each one of those beating hearts.

Wednesday, September 6, 2023

GOD ... Can You Hear Us?

 


 

Twice yesterday, I heard social commentary where one comedian then a renowned physicist spoke about an unfair God. Each stated they had cast off the idea of an omnipotent and omniscient power because they could not accept the suffering of life. Their perspective seemed to be that a benevolent, loving God would not create a world of such suffering as this.

I thought this way for many years. How could God allow abuse, addiction, cataclysmic events that kill thousands? Until I came to believe, “why not?” Did the scriptural authors  tell us that creation meant no pain? Sometimes I wonder if the Adam and Eve story is where the breakdown occurred. Were we created in His image to be without suffering until we ate from the “tree of knowledge”?

It came to me that this conundrum is much like marriage. Early we are saturated with desire and full of hope so we marry and have a honeymoon. There is usually a period of relative bliss until life begins to happen. We encounter problems and pain. “We” being the optimum word here. We move through it all together. At times we grow apart. Then at other times we grow closer. If we stick it out (for better or worse) we come to realize that all of it has taught us many lessons. We have grown stronger. We now “love” one another.

When he was 11 years old my son was diagnosed with bone cancer. It was horrifying. I can’t say there were no moments when I was angry with God. There were. Yet when all was said and done I came to a place of painful acceptance rather soon. “Bouncing molecules”, I heard myself say.

God didn’t attack my son or my family. It was literally cellular. Some cells that all of us carry dormant triggered and became active producing a tumor. The year of chemo threatened to kill him. My prayer was that his suffering ease, however that looked. My wife has shared that her prayer was that he survive.

He has survived yet with many challenges. We did too. As a result, I found that I was closer to God as I understood him beyond any place I had been before. Early morning on the greenway outside the hospital I would run into the rising sun communing with God and His creation. Life and death were near in each breath. One morning as I returned on the path I looked up to his floor … his window. The sun was bathing the side of the mostly glass children’s’ hospital. In golden  light there was a cross. I know our minds will play tricks. I kept looking as I struggled for air. The cross did not dim. It has not faded still.

My wife and I are still married. My son works alongside me now. He’s a bit cranky and hurts quite a bit yet full of spit and vinegar. Not long past he sat at my desk.

“I’d like to start going back to church, I think, Dad.”

He’s never uttered a negative word about God. If anybody has a right to be mad and or disillusioned, I’d say it was him.

Through it all my family persevered. I would say that overall, we are better for it. There are scars and cracks for sure. I think the Muslim poet Rumi spoke to it all best:

The wound is the place where the light enters you”

No doubt life is full of pain and sorrow. It is unfair and often devastating. Is God punishing us? Why would a benevolent God allow such things?

I suspect he created order from the chaos. We … this reality … are his thought and his love. There’s good and bad. I suspect what matters is how we deal with it.

I have often imagined a black American slave woman toiling in the boiling southern sun of a cotton field, singing gospel hymns in praise and wonder, smiling to the Father of her heart and salvation and I know:

“Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all the rest will be made unto you. “

Matthew 6:33

I feel sort of bad for those commentators and all who feel the same. In resentment I too once threw “the baby out with the bathwater”. I once despised what I perceived to be an unjust God.

That’s when I learned what real suffering was.

 

Tuesday, September 5, 2023

OCEAN OF TRANQUILITY

                                     


I was standing with my 5-year-old godson on the beach by water’s edge.

“The beach is my favorite place, Baba. It’s like God.”

“I feel the same way, Toby. We can share that now.”

Wind like the sound of AUM rumbles in my ear, caresses my skin, Divine Mother’s touch. I watch him there in his new oversized ball cap digging at surf’s edge. White foam tumbles out of the blue gray Atlantic, reaching for him, time and time again; myriad tendrils of foam yearning to touch this small boy playing under the universe.

Every now and then he pops up and runs back and forth with it like a sandpiper … laughing all the while.

I am older now. All the scars have weight. Each day I work through the pain of mistake after mistake, trying not to let remorse win, seeking the flow of divine witness. I have to just keep doing the next right thing.

An old, once upon a time, China Fleet sailor sitting here watching this child play at surf’s edge, indefatigable and I know … the cycle continues. Like the ebb and flow of the tide, my remorse fades as the sea calls me home, blessed home … into eternity.

As a youth I railed my plaintive cry; “I seek to find the eyes to see existence’ ocean of tranquility.”

Finally it is done.

For now.

Thursday, December 22, 2022

LONG HAIR





 

                                     

 

Our hair grew, and our hearts wilted. 

We took beauty and filled it with drugs until emaciated,

We found ourselves lying broken in the dark.

All of it seemed a bit funny yet the laughter bled,

Into a hollow place.

Gray now and wondering, I work to pay penance,

Yet the end will not come.

Arrogant still, I refuse to forgive us … forgive myself.

I’ve seen purgatory and it does not want to let me go.