A Lesson in Love

I wrote this particularly dark piece in November of 2015 after having just found out that the man I thought would be the love I had always wanted and had been waiting for was… well, not who he presented himself to be.  It hurts my heart to read this but it remains valuable as a reminder of the power I allowed someone else to have over me… a lesson I won’t soon forget. 

 

 You Are the Lucky One

 

“If I laugh just a little bit

Maybe I can recall the way that I used to be, before you

And sleep at night – and dream”

Cat Stevens

 

Will that time ever come to be or am I

Destined to spend forever wanting,

 

Dreaming and remembering

Your presence in my life.

 

Sometimes it seems like it was all just a dream, but it can’t be because

I still feel your hands on my body in the night,

 

I smell the scent of your skin in my bed and

See your light in my soul.

 

In my dreams I hold you, I feel your arms surround me and

Taste your mouth on mine.

 

You hold me close as I listen to your words,

Words you whisper in my ear

 

As you make love to me as only you can do.

Your passion is overwhelming, your hunger for me insatiable.

 

How does that end, how can passion like that just stop?

Where did it go?

 

Does she make you feel like I did?

Does she make you forget me?

 

If so, than I guess you are the lucky one.

Lucky to go from one love to the next without taking a breath.

 

No nights lost in the pain of what was

Or of what could have been and the why of it all.

 

No time spent in a wanting so intense that it drags you to the bottom of a dark pit,

A pit with steep, slippery sides, with no end, no way out,

 

No footholds, no dreams, just darkness, only darkness.

It is not the soft, comforting darkness of our times in each other’s arms,

 

Those times in the dark of night when we were the only two awake in the world,

Two alone sharing nights of love and trust, sweetness and heat, but

 

It is a cold and lifeless darkness, the kind that smothers you in ink, sucks the breath from

Your lungs and crushes your skull with its heaviness.

 

A paralyzing, frightening darkness that turns your thoughts back in on themselves to

Deceive and choke you,

A darkness that disguises all the goodness in the world and soaks it in pain and anger.

 

This is such a terrible place to be … I can’t find my way out…

But I am glad that you have not been sucked into the pit as well,

 

Because the only thing worse than being here alone would be

Knowing you were here too but hiding from me in the darkness.

 

 

 

 

He Understood

When I stopped talking to God,

He stopped talking to me.

When I stopped listening to him,

He stopped listening to me.

He is not spiteful,

Just  honest.

When I blamed him for my circumstances,

He shed a single tear in eternity and was sad for my choices.

When I was angry with him for a death,

He understood.

When I questioned the reasons for my being,

He sent inaudible words of encouragement into the lonely darkness of my soul, words only I could hear.

When I pulled my hand from his grasp,

He stood back and quietly waited for my return with infinite patience.

And when my errant ways finally did lead me back to him,

He treated me as if I had never left.

 

He Didn’t Answer

I heard a bird singing his heart out this morning,

So I stood beneath the tree and caught the broken heart as it fell.

“Good catch” said God, as he took the heart from my hands, healed it and tucked it back in the bird’s breast.

“God, can you do the same for me?” I asked,

He didn’t answer…

Maybe he was busy helping the bird and didn’t hear me, 

Or maybe he has just stopped listening.

I Am Here

I am finally, totally, here and I will never leave you.

You don’t ever have to be lonely or afraid again.

I am here.

Through the years I have come and gone.

Sometimes stayed close, but sometimes stayed away.

At times I was lost to you in this secular world,

Tied up by my thoughts and indifference.

But a change has come, an awakening. 

It has happened slowing, in subtle ways and small steps and now,

I am here.

I will hold you while you sleep.

I will witness your dreams and shoo away your nightmares.

I will hold your heart and put its broken pieces back together.

You will never be away from me again.

I am here.

It will be just you and me now, you and me forever.

There is duality but no separation as I have come home to the place I never left.

Back to the heart that has been the same

Throughout all time.

I am here.

I will finally step into the job that was mine

All along.

I will be your protector, your biggest fan, your patient teacher

And, most of all, your greatest love.

I am here.

I am sorry you have suffered, have been abused, unloved and broken.

I have learned that you are defenseless against the world without me, so now,

I am here.

Here with clarity, purpose, vision, emptiness, power and love.

  Never to leave you again.

To do so would be impossible because I now see that I am you, I am your heart and soul, your “I Am” with no beginning and no end.

You are my vehicle for experiencing the world, for sensing and knowing the manifested arising from the un-manifested.

  You are my beating heart, my body friend and my charge to protect.

  You are my very own

human—being.

An Everlasting Light

I need to see the moon lit patterns of white and shadow on the grass and hear how they speak to me once more.

The chimes are calling me again from the silence of my soul to look, listen and observe.

I need to hear the hungry owl’s cries in the night, feel its silent wings move swiftly in the darkness,

Too swiftly for its pray, and watch with detachment the

Swift death, natural and inevitable, made a villain only

By my thoughts.

I need to leave my disturbed thoughts and become the stillness in the chaos,

I need to reenter the silent swiftness of the owl’s wings and moon shadows.

 

For it is the only place to be and

The only place where I have ever existed.

I must never be distracted again.

My being had begun to seep away while I was preoccupied,

Distracted by another, an unnatural evil but one of my own making.

 

But the owl’s wings are bringing me home now,

My time of regression is done, but it has taken its toll.

 

My heart is weaker, my thoughts harder to read.

There is never regressing without damage to my soul.

 

Solitude and stillness, as a getaway to the road back, are coming into view…

The road back leads to the place of reclamation of my soul,

 

Back to the essence of bliss, to the everlasting light and to

His hand in mine.

 

Dissolved in the Liquid Son

 

Impostors by fate but originally

Miracles at birth.

Now holed up in falsities and

Missing the point.

Unsettled souls reap only what

They sow, they received no gifts and are giving none in return.

No promises are kept, no dreams fulfilled.

Maybe next time they say, but next time never comes.

It is the same ending, over and over and over.

A sadness steeped in familiarity, with

Seduction, for its own sake,

The only prize.

It is a shallow, stagnate prize

But the only reward there is.

It is time to break this spell of soullessness and

Open to the pain and recognition of your deluded being.

Absorb it, take it in and by doing so defuse

Its dark energy.

Deny its claim on you,

Step away from its hold and

Watch, watch as it shrinks

And fades.

Watch it be consumed by the light,

And dissolved in the liquid love of the Son.

Watch it be taken from you

To hurt you no more.

Awaken and feel the light and goodness

Of who God made you to be.

It is there, already in you, see it for yourself

And when you do…

Pain will lose its sting and

Darkness will be no more.

 

 

A Robin Sings at Dawn

 

A robin sings at dawn and

The day breaks on a new world.

 

A world different from the one

The sun set on yesterday.

 

It is the same earth but

A new world.

 

My world is not the same as yours and

Your world can never be the same as mine as I am not you.

 

Our eyes work in the same way, yet

See everything differently.

 

A million souls have been lost since yesterday, but

A million more were born.

 

We are not alone or the same…

 

Watch the progression of the wind through the trees.

Notice how each tree moves to its own song and in its own world.

 

As do we…

 

Do you feel the same breeze that moves the trees?

Do you know and hear their songs?

 

They hear mine…

 

Today, even my heart is different than yesterday’s,

Is yours?

 

In the night my dreams change me and

I wake up in a new world.

 

It happens every morning,

But it’s never the same.

 

The world’s consistency is but an illusion.

 

The ferns leaning against my porch screens are a little taller than they were before.

 

Overnight, more geranium buds have opened and

The garden has drunk up all the water I gave to it yesterday.

 

Everything has changed

Yet appears the same.

The illusion is well practiced and convincing,

 

Or is it?

 

After all, the Robin never fails to sing at dawn.

 

 

Rain

The sound of rain takes me to a place of inner peace as it

Falls in sheets, slides down the roof and over its edge in a curtain of water.

Tree leaves dance with the weight of the rain and

Flowers wash their faces in its freshness.

The sky is lower on rainy days and

Holds me close to the ground.

Forest sounds are muted and muffled and

Light is  defused into grayness.

It is not a sad and depressing grayness,

But a soothing and peaceful shade,

Full of the necessity of remembered sorrows and joys.

I love a  rainy day that is soft and dark.  It begs me to stop, rest, and be mindful of my surroundings and loves.

It reminds me to take the time to be lulled by the patter of rain on the windows

Into a place of inner stillness,

And there remain, content to just be and

Accept what is.