Monday, March 1, 2010

The Beginning Place



RED ROVER RED ROVER


gruff and needy, jumbled but sparse
which way back to the beginning place
strange to be this walking blank wall

so many cracks in it some small others
huge--let's explore one

here's a boy with his face on crooked
alert yet unconscious at the same time
squally and loud, caged by shadows

he loved to collect glittering stones

there's a girl with an X on her forehead
a dying tree--marked for the chainsaw

red rover red rover let night come over

that was one way to invoke the Powers
another was lying awake in a narrow bed
darkness crowding the corners of the room

secretly awesomely
They towered around
invisible silent summoning

what took him by the hand then

will never let go


*

WHICH WAY BACK TO THE BEGINNING PLACE


I get lost every day. Lost in my fears, my needs, my wounds, my angers, my ego. Lost through the thousand and one ways our world seduces, distracts, demands, cajoles. I flail around all over the map, but I still can't figure out how to get back home.

Which way back to the Beginning Place, to that bright, clear, calm Eye at the center of my life's often furious storm? How do I return to the free, innocent, joyous Child of the Universe I was, and am, and ultimately will always be?

Stripping down bare naked in public is easy these days, and can even earn you a fortune--just ask Lady Ga Ga. Or go to any of a gazillion Internet porn sites. Somebody's getting rich! But the flip side of all this blatant flaunting of exposed bodies, is just how closed off and rigidly armored we are when it comes to honestly, openly, vulnerably, experiencing and revealing our own estranged souls.

Yet this is the only way I know to reconnect to that Beginning Place inside me. Although the further I wander into confusion--running from phantoms of terror, chasing after mirages of desire--the harder it is to find my way back, because the more layers of ego-armor I must painfully strip off first before I can do so.

My ego has one overriding obsession: to prevent me from consciously facing the truth about just how wrong-headed and absurd my false, preening posture of self-importance is. The surefire way to do this, my ego figures, is to perpetrate a dazzling con job on everybody else, then vaunt my paraded magnificence while gazing into the mesmerizing mirror of their presumed adulation.

This flimflam, however, only pulls me further and further from my Beginning Place, since it compels me, more and more, to project the ratification of my identity outside myself, thereby making me utterly dependent on the adulation of others. Whereas the true essence of my being, my real identity, my indestructible self-worth, can only be discovered inside me--paradoxically, only when the noisy, turbulent river of "I" finally disappears at last, emptied into the infinite cosmic ocean of All-That-Is.

Here is my Beginning Place! Here's where the innocent, open, naked, trusting child at the bull's eye of my whole being is always at Home--not separate, isolated, distrustful, enslaved; but connected, embraced, joyful, free! This child knows a secret my ego stubbornly denies: at the primal core of all creation, there is no "I"; there's only WE.

Whatever the cost, however many fears, wounds, rages and resistances I must encounter, nothing's more important than rediscovering that Child of the Universe inside me! As long as I can still do this, then, no matter how far I've strayed, how lost I've become, I'll always be able to find my way back Home. I always know I can begin again.

***









1 comment:

  1. Great entry, Bob, but where's the next one? You've got us all worked up out here waiting for you to drop some more beauty and knowledge on us, and, alas, no beauty or knowledge!

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