the decision of new life

a poem for choice and remembering

Hilma af Klint — a painting that hangs above me in my home studio

Today I offer a poem. There is a reflection on where it came from at the bottom but it’s nice to first digest something first without context I find.

Read it through your own lens of life in the moment where you are right now — with your experience as the torch.

That’s always the best place to start, in my ultimately irrelevant opinion.

the decision of new life

I fell into a vortex of screens
and as usual they swallowed me
with the aching void of connection
that comes with no touch of reality
or maybe a little too much

these baring displays of vanity to which I cling
and the aching confession
that such power is easy to love
because it’s a feeling you can trust
since everyone around you does

but remember the bird on the forest trail
eyes fresh
quick and waking
to this world she had arrived
like the child who knew Heaven first
while we all tried to catch up

some new respect for the life of objects
quietly surges within me
along with the fading
of things I don’t need
the idol I feed is the hungriest in me

so I turn back
return to all I can’t see
in the family of early
peach blossoms
swelling on the trees

they are in flux like the rest of us
a raft on the sea
with those raging black waters
and the Christ on his feet

there is but still a stillness within reach

My poems are mostly a spontaneous output for when my thoughts become clouded, intangible, lacking in any logical direction or arrival. That was a long way to say, sometimes I need to write a poem when my brain gets extremely loud.
Sometimes the soul needs to speak when the mind falls short and I need a more nuanced faculty to see what’s really there. I write to recognize myself on the page. (I sing to hear my true voice)

Over Christmas I reflected on the symbolic suggestion of a baby being born into a poor family — intuited by wise men with incense who followed the stars — appearing to exemplify Divine selfless love housed fully inside the human being.

I recognize this day has become largely divorced from it’s deeper meaning and hijacked by consumerism, drowning out the earnest first urges of religious interpretations. However, I find in myself an instinct to reclaim the significance of that event — whatever it means to me each year.

These two words came to me that morning.

“New Life”

I’m never quite sure why these flashes of suddenly weighty words arrive in that way that they do (like an announcement of something very simple being freshly witnessed with the eyes of the heart?)

I think New Life is something we get to choose in every moment. Maybe it’s most meaningful when we choose it in the moments that seem most mundane or irrelevant.

I’m feeling more and more these days like all these little moments are connected.
What you choose you make room for.
What you seek out you find.
Where attention goes, fresh energy flows.

For New Life to present itself amidst the dormant or even, dying parts within — I think we must return to what’s in front of us.

Spirit speaks through the present moment — where fear cannot make a home.