Author: C.M. Rivers

Refugees Welcome

There are the small crystals you left as blessings, tucked just beneath the earth.

There is the love you have for everyone you feel separated from.

And there are the invisible arrows that keep you on the path, your path, all your life, so that when other people try to yoke you with their doubts and question what you’re doing, you know enough not to listen.

The learning seems to come geologically slow, but you do eventually learn when to forget them and pay attention to the voice emanating from your center.  Through deep listening, through the acknowledgement of that voice, you come to know your center, and you come to hold it.  And the things you expect from yourself begin to change.

There are the great vertical stones you have glimpsed in dreams, and also the smaller, more rounded ones along the shore.

There are the bells on the necks of all the ponies, the raindrops, fall as they may.  There are the trees, connected – like all of us – in unseen ways by unseen roots.  There is the road, the path, your shoes, yellow rice, steam rising from a bowl of soup.

All the prayers you hold inside are on display in the world around you, before you.  You don’t need anyone’s advice to learn how to see.  You only need the courage and will it takes to look – that which you already possess, but do not always choose.  Its only requirement is that you choose it above all else.

There are places to rest along the miles of all your days, if you will only sit.  There are ferries to take you across all the rivers, if you will only board them.

There are ways to remember you are not your body, if you will only forget about your clothes and your appearance.

Allow yourself to sleep.  When you wake it will still be there: this yearning to bring all knowledge inward, this thirst to move on, out, through, up, into, from all the trials you’ve undergone.

Take your time, that’s what it’s there for.

Love returns to your heart as you walk to the ends of the earth.

Now, choose something to burn.  What will it be?

 

Humpty Trumpty

You know how it is:

one minute you’re riding high.

The next you’ve had a great fall,

and what’s done is done.

You’ve thrown your fit,

made your mess.

 

Then comes the pulling

together of yourself,

the attempt to reestablish

your place on the shelf.

The king’s men

won’t be of much use

since you betrayed them all.

And the horses…

you drove them away,

remember?

How Loons Say Goodnight

Are you out there?

Yes.

Are you okay?

I am.

Good night then.

Night.

 

 

 

There Is So Much I Want To Tell You (Part Two)

There is so much I want to tell you about the middle way, about evenness, neither embracing nor rejecting.  This idea that everything just shape-shifts, and nothing is ever really gained or lost in the sense of how we define gain and loss, out of our profound longing for the security that absolutes appear to give us.  It turns out security is an illusion, so we might as well begin making choices aligned with our inner voice and dare to discover the truth of who we really are.

The world never stops sending us messages, if we might only find the courage and clear sight to receive them.

There is so much I want to tell you about wild horses, bows and arrows, primordial warriors, the retracting claws of mountain lions, about locks and pulleys, windmills, Tasmania, the alphabet, Maoris, archaeological discoveries, lost cities beneath overgrown jungles, the jaguar (he who kills with one leap) moving through the world alone except to mate.

It doesn’t matter what the song is, or if it’s even playing at all: it’s always there inside you, dormant yet vibrantly alive with the vastness you contain, the spaciousness around your heart that you often forget is there but then notice again, reminded when you sit quietly and take a long, slow breath.

I want to tell you about the marches of ants and the fiestas of rats, though you already know.  The unseen houses of cottontail rabbits born naked and blind, the smoky jungle frog and the violet orchid, the harpy eagle waiting high up in a ceiba tree for eleven hours to snatch his prey, like some avian samurai of the rainforest.  The love I have for so many people, and the brokenness I feel at having lost so many.  The visions I have of roads that wind through the countryside.  I see a rucksack, a hat, a walking stick.

Strange, how there’s no money in bending spoons, walking through walls, eating fire, poetry.

 

 

There Is So Much I Want To Tell You, Part One

There is so much I want to tell you about living life with curiosity.  New wonders are awakened, old ones slip out of reach but remain ever-touchable in one’s heart and spirit.  Thanks be to the Great Mystery, Great Spirit, ever-present, ever-steady, touchable.

There is so much I want to tell you.  You, who buy gold candlesticks for saints.  You, who give your grief to the earth and sea piece by piece.  You, who linger in the garden of your own heart.  You, who bravely sit in silence and observe the mind going round and round.

You, who visit that certain holiness hanging around the homeless, the broken, seeing those qualities in yourself also.  Just seeing them and still giving thanks and polarizing yourself into a laser beam of non-reactive calm.  You wear that certain holiness like a halo, like a legend, a myth, an intimate devastation.

“Thanks” by W.S. Merwin

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
standing by the windows looking out
in our directions
back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you
over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you
with the animals dying around us
taking our feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
thank you we are saying and waving
dark though it is
W.S. Merwin

Easy Does It

Why do you have to try so hard to make sense of the part of you that glows?  Quit trying to find cryptic meanings and just glow because you were made to.  Switch off the machine of your curiosity, your gears are grinding and they need to cool down.

Never mind the unknown ages of starfish and disperse your intricate web of energy.  Glow, and be willing to believe in yourself. 

Funny how we all live so close together we’re practically stitched, but fake separation.  Your country has its wonders, glorious, its atrocities, shameful.    

Maybe you’re a great white shark – you didn’t intend any of this.  How others perceive you does not define who you are.  Maybe you’re a hammerhead, a mermaid, I don’t know.  Maybe you fan the water like a whale’s fluke, sway like seagrass, eat from the smooth prism of an abalone shell.

Maybe you’re a pollinator: without you all life would vanish, humanity owes itself to you.  But the burden doesn’t matter, the concept isn’t even within your field of awareness.

You just rise every morning and do what you were made to do: your work.  What, you may ask yourself, is my work?  Don’t let anyone else answer that question for you.