Small Gifts

         WILD HEART

a poem can freeze to death
like a kitten in a blizzard

or burrow down deep
beneath drifts of snow
and ride out the storm

this poem does neither

instead it asks to be held
comforted     crooned to

it wants you to take it home
feed it     make up its bed
from some old blanket
chatter to it about anything
stroke it while it purrs

this poem says love me

its wild tiny heart
beats like a prayer
in your hands

         *

Great ideas come into the world

 as gently as doves.

Perhaps then, if we listen attentively,

we shall hear amid the uproar

of empires and nations, a faint flutter of wings,

the gentle stirring of life and hope.

-- Albert Camus --

LIKE A PRAYER IN YOUR HANDS

     Sometimes very small, seemingly unimportant gifts come our way which are easy to overlook. They're so quiet and unassuming. Our first impulse, if we notice them at all, is simply to persist in the direction we're already going, focused intently on reaching that next dazzling goal. Without achieving it we believe we can never be truly happy or blessed. Yet all the while the real treasure is right there in front of us, offered freely into our hands, if only we have the humility to receive it, the ears to hear, the eyes to see.

     You know what started this whole universe? Not the much-ballyhooed Big Bang--that was just the climax of a miracle, not its genesis. The beginning of everything must have been an infinitesimal blink in endless nothingness, a change so seemingly insignificant not even the nothingness itself registered it. But when that original, minute, solitary point appeared in otherwise overwhelming pointlessness, a cosmic seed suddenly awakened which ultimately sprouted into all the numberless blossoms of the galaxies!

     It took me a long time to realize this. My ego trip was all about the Big Picture, the Grand Gesture, the Dramatic Impact, the Earth-shaking Revelation! I was convinced that's where the action was--so that's where I wanted to be. I couldn't be bothered to slow down, quiet down, simmer down. I wanted nothing less than to save the world--and for the world to be eternally grateful afterward.

     Well, the world has yet to be saved--by me or anyone else. Meanwhile though,  I wonder how many simple but priceless gifts I missed out on because I was too busy and distracted.

     No more. "May my heart always be open to little / birds, who are the secrets of living" e.e. cummings wrote. Those "little birds" show up in multiple guises--usually unexpectedly, often inconveniently, always as messengers whose meanings are inseparable from the mystery of their own irreplaceable existence.

     Whenever they do arrive, it seems we find every excuse imaginable to blank out and walk heedlessly by. Yet if we don't; if instead we stop, turn, pay attention, and gently receive them, we discover a passageway to the secret reality of things, and our lives are changed forever.

     One such humble messenger might be a poem--if that poem speaks from the deepest truth, its words entering your soul and planting a kernel of illumination there. If this should happen, it means for one timeless instant the poet surrendered his or her own self-centered ego, thereby permitting a usually narrow, limited, individual consciousness to expand into yet another wide-open channel for the still, small voice of Divinity.

     That still, small voice is the hidden Essence of every truly humble yet infinitely precious gift. Its message is Joy, and its fulfillment is Love.

                                 *