Thinking again today how the psalms were the best way to express things in times of grief, loss, uncertainty, disorientation etc. How art does more to hold the content of times of trauma and change, and give room for the dialogue of healing. How poetic prayer art seems required and healing in times like ours, as they always have been. So writing some more poetic pieces this week, as we continue to process so much globally together….

subversive spirituality:

To love my neighbor is my act of protest

to sit with my african friend yesterday and prophecy together

to the birds overhead—bluejays heading south…

to walk my dogs well is subversive now

to wash the dishes well before God, and as a service to my wife.

To stay in Peace at the market while waiting in the endless line,

dog marked by consumerism, materialism and every other ism there is.

Today I will compost the garden bringing my hands towards gravity

for to listen well to dirt, is to find God. And we are all compost wanting to become trees.

to enjoy eating with friends changes everything

to cry also when there are available tears

to give away my extra pecans this year

to the man with no teeth who walked by

who has known all this for a long while.

to still live well and recognize the voice of silence around us

to listen to everything which needed to come out anyway

she said, it’s always been this way for us

now we all know-to cross the road alone

when the lights flash, we have been practicing overcoming fear

for years. i have a beer and touch my friend’s hand lightly

while looking at Life in the eyes. This girl is ukranian today i think,

yesterday she was from africa, and we all sit as a family leaning into one another to hear….and bricks are flying again next door, and people are writing the word hate

in every tongue, over and over on everything…demonic graffiti

and no one seems to know towards whom, she continues

“and we can’t talk between men and women, races or generations well now

and that must change, for we must know

 we cannot tear down enough buildings, or crash our way into eternity, to end this

we have to find that house not built with hands, and begin building there.”

and we come to know this, as war jets fly too low over this cafe just now

(and everyone glances inside themselves for a second-a safety check)

and rattles the cutlery at our table.

and, then a dog wanders in (A German shepherd who remembers all the wars)

and licks the child’s face next to me with the kindness of his world

mimicking whatever world he has learned to live in and from, as creatures still do.

But us, we make up their own versions now, our own realities

each with their own reality tv show of which they are the star.

but another film is being shown in the sky  tonight,

something older than us-

an ancient cinema made of stars, constellations telling clear stories still-

it appears there is an undisturbable narrative above us,

while we can’t figure our’s out. While, bodies are still falling like shrieking treble clefts in mid air

in some quickly forgotten chamber of our towering hearts where we should’ve turned long ago.

So today, i will love my neighbor, and catch the children when they fall

 like Holden Caulfield in “Catcher in the Rye”; and try to build the next story with gold and silver and sky, for our work will be revealed later through fire; the lines we added

will be tested into relief, made readable through grief;

and i will ask the boy next door how his scouting for butterflies is going today,

and join in on chasing a Monarch to the mexican fire point plants behind our barn;

and I will to write love on my forehead with pollen, until i know her better,

that is, until i can lay down my life for you inside myself-become a seed well planted..

and write other graffiti on the walls of my heart until it is an unstained harbor

of kindness towards all,

and until I can hear/ steer you better into healing. So, today i will garden well

and take another bucket of pecans to my neighbors

and end the day thanking them for picking up my mail last week.

And watch the squirrels do their tricky tight-wire work, and think of Philipe Petite,

walking between the towers before they fell….

and try to find the Day of the Lord within my day. For proactive love is

a subversive spirituality now.