What Matters Now

  Photo of Casa Del Sol in Ghost Ranch, NM 

(c) 2008 RSS

I woke this morning with a fresh memory dream of our trip to Ghost Ranch in New Mexico. We attended a wonderful week there with our friend Debora S. About ten of us gathered to write and create our lives as prayers. Here's a poem from that time:

What matters now:

Is the eagle

hidden by the ink

of the night sky,

the coyote stretching

from her den

after a day of sleeping,

the snake,

sunrise orange,

warming herself beneath

a stone, on the edge of an arroyo.

What matters now

is that I am breathing,

like them, alive,

thinking not in words,

though my hands write

and know the heart of the words.

No mind is vast

enough for God’s voices.

Yet we can be the eagle

or the coyote or the snake.

Move out into

your animal life,

no plan tonight

except to dance through

the silvered slivers

of moonlight.

There is no river to ford,

as the sand is still

warm and moist

from yesterday’s stormy sun.

There’s no thought

of last nights dream of mice

running in fields of mesquite,

only the urge to follow their scent,

only the path unseen by others.

I am free in this world

as you are free,

my friend.

Let us awaken from the serious

and dive straight into the dark.

There a million strands of

precious silver leading you

onto a new adventure,

leading you into the canyons

and brooding stillness of the mountain,

into the quaking

cottonwood forest song.

Awe lives there.

And you will find

that you live there too.

Home in the night and free.

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Painting of Casa Del Sol

 

(c) 2008 RSS