It’s only been a few days,
but I’m back for more.
The life of an addict.
My moments have become cracked glass,
but there is a hint of honey in my tears.
It’s been
a bittersweet epiphany:
I’m not cut out
to be the person
I’ve been being.
I’m a crash test dummy
careening into the wall
of nothing whatsoever.
For a moment
I was full and clear,
a moment without the traffic,
unfettered,
remembering
what he told me,
hugging it close to my chest,
wanting to tell complete strangers about it,
holding it up to the sky
from time to time
like the negative image
of the moment when
everything had changed for me.
But then I failed
to meet the deadline
and they were disappointed.
The sole of my
right shoe split open,
and the guest speaker
told me how she
was fighting every day
to save the rest of us
from our own destruction,
which seemed staggeringly
meaningful,
and the teacher
encouraged me to take
a more effective stance
in my child’s future,
and they forgot
to put the dressing
on the side,
and I was spoken to again
about my grasp
on the situation.
Or lack thereof.
Wouldn’t I have thought
someone in my position
would have realized
what was happening?
And so here I am.
Trembling a tad.
Flowing.
Holy.
Ready.
I need this.
The thing is:
I’ll never live up to myself.
That type of suffering
will set you free.
Jesus meets my gaze,
holds a finger to his lips
to seal this pact of silence,
then decides to wash my hair.
Afterwards we sit
at the little table
by the back porch
and I empty my pockets
of the crumpled scraps of paper.
He helps me spread them flat
on the table.
good
accepting
reliable
happy
responsible
inspired
loving
kind
helpful
trustworthy
vulnerable
deserving
We examine them together.
I’m getting anxious.
This is the hard part.
Where I give one up.
One at least.
He’d take them all if I let him,
but the thought alone is crushing.
It’s all I have left… these aspirations.
The life of an addict.
He wants me to run on empty.
He wants my face to be a mystery.
So lizards will stop chewing
when I stumble past,
and wonder,
Where’d that come from?
He does…
He.
He?
This.
This heart of mine
that understands me perfectly
and keeps trying to let me in on the secret.
Embracing Forever 
sounds so wonderful
to have one,
yes, just one,
he or she
or gender unspecified,
who believes
so fully
in crash test dummies
& in you 🙂
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You remind me of a sentiment from A Course in Miracles, that one truly healed being heals the whole. It’s only a matter of time until all beings then accept what has been given… Just one being who knows so deeply the truth of our “existence”, holds the door open for all to step beyond suffering… I find there’s lots of beings holding open the doors… Beings of all paths and flags… We forget sometimes, in our difficulty, we tread a path lined with grace… I do, anyway…
Peace
Michael
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I wonder if a guest sneaker could be your next speaker, hehe!
Michael, these keep getting better and better..
but alas, there is no comparison in nondual world.
So let’s just say these keep showing us the magic inside you that sees the light of day.
God knows, (and Hafiz too), there is so much more ready to break on through..
love and light,
Linda
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Thank you, Linda… Much appreciated… We all have a long line of brilliance within us waiting to be served! Sharing in the healing herbs of inspiration with you is a joy.
As a brief aside, it will probably be the weekend before I catch up with your award, but I haven’t forgotten…
Many Thanks
Michael
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Your poetry seems to be accelerating in intensity and magnificence. Or maybe it has always been and i am just perceiving it that way 🙂
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I think this is a question for which there is no right answer, and it shows the way unfolding never occurs in isolation. We are always moving together, whether we realize it or not… 🙂
Michael
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Michael, I can’t find the words that would classify as COMMENT. Reading this was an experience, I weaved into it, out of it, I fell into memories, I clung to my moment and staying in it and then flickered between where I have been, where I am now, and felt myself at times toying with the future tense. Perhaps an awkward way of expressing my gratitude for moving me in mysterious ways. I will read this over and over again. I have been, I am and I will be moved by these words. Peace, Harlon
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Harlon, I’m grateful for your note here. Thanks for sharing these feelings. I love how we can nudge one another through the mysteries within ourselves…
You remind me, in one of those unrelated but zany connections the mind makes, of being in the car on a long road trip with my sisters back when we were ten and eight and seven. My sisters would complain: “Mom *whiny voice* Michael’s making comments again…” Oh, the joys of teasing those we love…
Blessings
Michael
PS – I think the Orioles are moving north! The hummingbirds arrived today and have been buzzing the periphery…
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Harlon, you nailed it.
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Hi Lynnclaire,
I saw your note on Harlon’s site and have slowly been trying to come to an understanding of what the Mereon Matrix is. After a few brief attempts, please let me know if I am coming close to understanding… (these are my own words…) The Mereon Matrix is a dynamic geometric pattern discovered to exist in a cymatic study of water excited by the Theta Frequency, that provides a model for the emergence of diversity from unity.
I think there is much more to this, as suggested by the link you sent me, though I can’t quite tell what that would be. I am interested in learning more about it, but the book available from the site is over $100 and out of my range presently, and the information available on the web-site appears to be limited to the experiential response to observation of the pattern, which is indeed intriguing but doesn’t explore what I sense are further implications you have identified. In the black and white cymatic video, I loved the moment when the structure as a whole began to rotate about its center, and clearly there is some meaning or underlying order hinting through this pattern…
What would you recommend to learn more?
Thank you-
Michael
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Read this:
http://www.adyashanti.org/index.php?file=print_writings_inner&writingid=28
In the end Jesus/Awareness/The Mystery will take then all. Eventually we will all run on empty. I’m still stuck in the striving stage apparently so I rest in that as best I can, but I have faith that, as Adya says, inexplicably it will come.
Alison
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Great link. Thanks a lot for sharing.
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Thanks for the beautiful link, Alison. Yes, my little scraps of paper are being claimed one by one. I like that phrase running on empty, too. It cracks me up. The car chortles and wheezes, sputters, then finally dies. Now what. Oh yeah! It never needed gas, anyway! And off we go… Giggling our heads off… WHAM! Yes, if we don’t pay attention, we could still hit a pothole… 🙂 But it’s funny now. This mad world of circumstance and legislation… It comes for me when I stop worrying about being a being. If I resist the fact that I’m here too much, it seems to reinforce it all. When I let whatever comes flow through me, I cease to exist, but the experience of creating as a locus of joy within a boundless field is heightened. We have different e-mail addresses. It can be as much an accentuation of our underlying unity as the opposite, if we let it all mean the same thing…
Thank you for the dialogue…
Michael
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Beautiful again. I love how you make the emotions tangible. How gut wrenching it feels to cross the bridge from person to no-person.
The whole game is not about becoming a better person. It is not about leveling the screen character up to level 100. Rather , it is about remembering that we are not the screen character at all. But that we are the one sitting in front of the computer, who is watching, playing, and who has programmed the whole game.
The character traits are nothing to get rid of. Only the attachment to them needs to be got rid of.
The atachment is the sense of “I can only BE HAPPY if I experience myself as that particular type of person. I can only FEEL WORTHY if I experience myself as that type of person.”
And really, holding on to these traits generates/creates events where you can experience yourself as such. Helpers attract circumstances where they can help. Problem solvers attract circumstances where they can solve problems. (And then they moan about the stress.)
Peace,
Karin
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Thank you, Karin. Yes, I agree with what you are saying, and have been taking your medicine to heart about the relationship of holding these traits, and the way they generate a particular type of experience. I saw a clip of a video a few months ago by Matt Kahn, and he said something like, “You have to become the safest person for you to be around.” It really hit home. His point was that when we’re completely safe (accepting) of precisely who we are, these needs to leverage our experiences into developing our personhood fall away. Then we’re free to simply express the joy at work within us. One of the beauties of life is that it provides the opportunity to witness these dynamics as they flower in our experience.
I also think, and have for some time, that it’s not about withdrawing from the point at which experience arises within us– the locus of our awareness– but allowing all that is to flower through that point of being. We’re nodes through which creation happens. When we make it personal, we can lose the fullness of this understanding, but I think when we allow the personal to serve the whole, and truly accept nothing we do matters to the fullness that we are, then new and creative pathways for experience can emerge… Words are difficult here. It’s not about being a better person, but it is (for me) about being a whole person. A free person. A present person.
I think we are saying much the same thing. Your thoughts here have been very helpful to me. You should know that…
Much Love
Michael
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Thank you for letting me know that my thoughts have been helpful.
You wrote, “We’re nodes through which creation happens. ” Yes, very true.
So , my comments on this blog are part of this impersonal creation. I really wondered why I felt so compelled to write about this creation process in detail since you seemed to know it all already. But still, I felt moved to write. It is indeed an impersonal process.
I think I get what you are saying about being a whole person.
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Great quote by Matt Khan. 🙂
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Filling your inbox with likes as I too sit in the sun drying my hair – spooked by the way your words can capture a life, once thought to be mine.
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Nicely put Marga. H ❤
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Yes, whose life is it, anyways!? The past is littered with these shed skins…
Hope all is well in your branch of the majesty…
Michael
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Your words are “staggeringly meaningful”. Though I do not always understand, I bow down in respect and admiration for they move me and bring me to another world. Love, Ellen
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Thank you, Ellen. I do not always understand, either. It’s kind of like picking the heart’s lock by intuition. I hope all is well on your end. I am listening to a symphony of peepers this evening, and have glimpsed my first bat slipping across the face of the stars, and disappearing into the shadows of trees… Sending it your way…
Peace
Michael
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Sounds lovely. I miss the peepers. Here planes and cars and people. We saw our first bat last weekend and the weekend before a porcupine!! Enjoy!
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How to relinquish what we imagine we have built? Difficult indeed: “If I can just tweak this a little, polish those some more, get myself some of that.” All that is ‘this’, ‘those’ and ‘that’ – the building debris of the subject-entity, the perfect little bricks that we stand upon the sands.
A marvellous work Michael; you never cease to amaze with your ability to look upon the world from a different perspective. Keep challenging us my noble friend, for everyone comes along in the end.
Hariod ❤
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Challenging you!? Hardly, my friend. I do love your line: everyone comes along in the end. This is true. And in the final coming along, the routes to reaching that point seem to diminish altogether in their importance, do they not?
Much Love
Michael
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Absolutely Michael, each ‘route’ (or path) seeming no more than the wake pattern of our particular little boat-life, a temporary etching upon the surface of the one great ocean. I am reminded of something the Buddha was reputed to have said to two monks who were being disparaging as regards an opposing doctrine; he asked them why they were doing so, saying all it amounted to was them spitting at heaven, and that the spittle would land back upon their faces. H ❤
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You Are Cut perfectly.
There’s that feeling, sometimes, of timidy; and then after moving through the fear that seems so ancient and unending, the shame just drains out – and you are happy to have nothing holding you back… The only thing left is… a real you – a ‘you’ that’s anything the moment needs, flowing from your center – the fountain.
It’s just what came to me, Michael…
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You said it perfectly, Ka. The freedom to be only what’s needed. Not what we desire. Yet no less than we desire. Holding experience in such a way that what is desired and what is needed have annihilated one another as distinctions through the purity of their joining…
Love is the perfect solvent…
Michael
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Thanks Michael, living metaphor…
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My pleasure! Thanks for stopping by once again. I may misinterpret your comment, but it reminded me of the way the lives we offer when we are free are indeed symbols or representations of an underlying meaning. It is there for a moment, like a bird perching on a branch, and then it is gone! We are living metaphors of the ineffable…
Michael
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“A metaphor is a figure of speech in which one thing is said to be another.” So we are living metaphors of the ineffable, we are…
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I am purposefully ending my time here on WP today, right here! I love the way you express yourself and it is so wonderful to read how people respond to you. I hope I don’t appear intrusive by pressing “like” to most of the comments, I just get caught up in the conversation and wish to add how moved I am by the whole of it!
I got a nudge of something a little different while reading, so I will just say that I send you loving energy. Have a super weekend, Michael ❤
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Ha! Like away, Lorrie! I think it is a great way, as Hariod had suggested, for people to acknowledge their appreciation of one another’s thoughts and musings. Thank you for the loving energy, which I offer in return. Know that the circumstances in life that pull me into these explorations are ultimately very good, though challenging at times to navigate. Learning to walk on our own involves a few wobbly steps at the beginning… That’s why it’s good to have a few friends around… 🙂
Have a great weekend-
Michael
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I get it…I get it completely! I had a dream early this morning where you told me almost the same thing you wrote above! Very strange!!
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Excellent! The truth is descending upon us from all directions…
Michael
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Sweet. Bitter. Sweet. Bitter.
Spiralling in and out of all of the picture you paint Michael …
… the addiction.you call it. Is it?
So many times, so many cycles in my life.
Inwards. Outwards. Inwards. Outwards. Inwards … and then outwards again …
Is it an addiction? Is it how it simply is …
An infinity of infinty loops? Up a spiralling helix?
Or is it down?
I don’t know.
I follow my nose.
Your poem sheds a sweetly resonant fragrance.
With love xoxo
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I love your closing here, Christina. Thank you for that. And I do think addiction can be an appropriate analogy for what I was trying to describe. There is the temptation of thinking the accomplishment of one’s own being remains an unfinished business… that still, we could be better, that there is some improvement required before we access the fullness of our own heart with complete freedom… These are not entirely correct perceptions or sentiments, obviously, but they flow down the river, and we watch them pass by, until we’re running on empty… 🙂
Love
Michael
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Smiling as the thoughts flow in over ‘not being cut out to be the person I’ve been being’ :):):)
And at the realization that the thing really is that: I’ll never live up to ‘the idea’ of myself.
I embrace this me as it is in this second and smile again at the inspired, loving, accepting, deserving scraps 🙂 Hugs!
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Thank you, PR… Yes, it’s challenging ground to cover. Giving up on the ideals that we choose and make part of our identity. I’m different because I choose to be more x, y, z… I think it can serve for a time, particularly when it’s a true desire and not a point of comparison with others, but even so, the training wheels of trying and aspiring eventually shimmy and shake right off! Embracing all beings as they are in this second, and always have been, and ever shall be… 🙂
Much Love
Michael
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Michael , my hurting heart is soaring somewhere , anywhere , nowhere , from the glory and grace of your words …every cell in my body is vibrating with pain , joy , hope , I’m not sure how to untangle them …I only know I want a perfect soul and I saw a glimpse of everyone’s just now through tears from your poetry …I love you …megxxx
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Hi Meg, I’m not sure this place can be untangled. I think there’s at least a period of time when we have all these things at once coming into being. Asking for the blessing of our attentiveness. There’s a line in A Course of Love you made me think of…
Must pain accompany love and loss? Is this the price you pay, you ask, for opening up your heart? And yet, should you be asked if you would have other than the love you would not answer yes. What else is worth such cost, such suffering, so many tears? What else would you not let go when pain comes near, as a hand would drop a burning ember? What other pain would you hold closely, a grief not to be given up? What other pain would you be so unwilling to sacrifice?
Think not that these are senseless questions, made to bring love and pain together and there to leave you unaided and
unhelped, for pain and love kept together in this way makes no sense, and yet makes the greatest sense of all. These questions merely prove love’s value. What else do you value more?
I’m quite sure you are a perfect soul, Meg. A perfect Meg. A perfect you. A perfect perfect. I’m also quite sure that the desire to know it is the holy fuel of the beauty you share with us… I love you, too…
Michael
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I agree with all the great feedback above and would just like to add that if I could like this more than once, I would. It is well written and powerful. Five stars and best wishes!
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Thank you very much, JoAnne! This was the result of one of those fast-moving boots I was mentioning on your site recently… 🙂
Peace
Michael
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