Turning Dreams into Manifestations

A wise man once said: we are either creating value or we are busy destroying the value that is around us.  I think what he meant is that our unexamined habits of mind and being erode the vitality of all that we experience, see, and finally, think.  The unexamined life, as Socrates once wrote, isn’t worth living.

Silence opens us to the forgotten world of immediacy, feeling, and true life.  Just sitting, sipping tea, watching the sunrise.  Sometimes, in such moments, we are able to transcend the grip of time-consciousness, the pressure of the hours, the propulsion forward into our days.  Then we become pure “Presence.”  Aware, egoless, in touch with the deeper harmonies and energies of the universe.  I am certain that this was the consciousness with which the great saints and seers of the ages found the power to heal hearts and transform dreams into manifestations of “the good.”

This poem, forthcoming in my collection Mending Prayer Rugs, attempts to express a moment of essential communion with the life we are given — nothing special, exquisitely ordinary, sacred.

 

                     Matins

Each morning, there are the soft bodied animals,

            lapping their bowls in the dark.

There is the woman who descends to feed them,

            and listen to the rain

 at daybreak on a small stoop

           under an ocean of sky

before the mind has fully roused, or

           the world resumed its savage campaigns.

This may be the great sacrament,

           this drinking the rain,

this listening in secret devotion,

            green as a morning in childhood.