Unexpected Visitor

                 WHAT IT WANTS

it wants to hide alone in the white silence
it wants to care and not to care    it wants

not to want   it wants to be quiet and still

it wants to scurry with the ants

              getting high on a crumb of sugar

it wants to glitter from the crow's eye

it wants slithering back under a wet rock

it wants ten soul kisses and twenty slaps
it wants a river cascading wildly through it

it wants the trees to whisper oracles again

it wants you to hold it and start singing
it wants to soar far away but never leave

it wants not to have to count mountains

it wants the night to seduce the daytime

it wants sunlight sowing seeds on the abyss

it wants to say your name over and over
it wants curl up and sleep by the fireplace

it wants to smolder like a ruby in your heart

                               *

The unexpected and the incredible

belong in this world.

Only then is life whole.

For me the world has from the beginning

been infinite and ungraspable.

-- Carl Jung --

TO SMOLDER LIKE A RUBY IN YOUR HEART

     Where do we come from? Who are we? Where do we go? What does our meeting here, now, actually mean? Why have our distinct journeys converged at this time, this place? How have we been conditioned to no longer ask these questions, cease even to think about them?

     We might get together every day, chatter away on Facebook, text till our fingers are numb, twitter like magpies--yet do we even know each other? Have we ever really even met?

     To truly encounter another--The Other--this confounds me, staggers me, stops me in my tracks! Somehow, as never before, I finally meet myself. Most of us, most of the time, do all we can to avoid such a soul-capsizing experience. Our typically busy, noisy, rushing, acquiring, consuming, goal-oriented lifestyles guarantee we'll succeed.

     Our hugest blind spot is right smack at the bull's-eye: authentic connection, transparent interrelatedness--nothing less than an unmediated communion of souls. Which takes unhurried time, uncrowded space, uncluttered silence, undivided attention--all those treasures we carelessly squander, because we sacrifice them on the altars of success, achievement, appearance, or simply the harsh, daily struggle just to survive.

     Yet this genius for direct empathy, for intimate identification, is what above all makes me human. To avoid and deny it dehumanizes me. Nothing else I try to substitute will ever work. It will only morph into another addiction which further alienates me from my own nature, and so from any meaningful, transformative relationships with others as well.

     Here's a paradox: I can't deeply know and unconditionally love my innermost self unless I'm willing to risk deeply knowing and unconditionally loving someone else--and to being deeply known and unconditionally loved by them in return. The mindset which blares we're each fundamentally separate, isolated, competing entities is a lie. The truth: at the elemental core of what it means to exist, we're all One.

     Can you bear to have the naked reality of another smolder like a ruby in your heart? Can you bear that another enshrines you in their heart, throbbing with the same dusky, glowing, unfathomable fire? Can you bear to discover how this alarming, unprecedented love inspires you to embrace--for the first time!--the unalloyed Essence of all you most supremely, profoundly are?

     Say "Yes." Don't hold back for one wasted second. Say "Yes." Now!

                             *