I made the above video to express some feelings about my own life, how time passes and we don’t recognize, see, feel, experience the beauty, the life right there in front of us. We take too much for granted.
We live as kings and queens but die a thousand deaths by not seeing the beauty, the miraculous right before our eyes. So much about “living well” is really about appreciating the reality before us - reverence. It’s a religious attitude that some have but so many don’t.
Oh yeah, when something unfortunate happens to us and self-pity rears its head … we count our blessings. But then, it is back to sleepwalking through existence and stupefying ourselves with automatic living, the senselessly blind back and forth of night and day. We homo sapien sapien, the “meaning makers” are so poor at making meaning of our daily lives. So poor.
If there is one thing I’d ask of us all, it would be that each morning and each night, we round things off with a thought and prayer of gratitude for just being here, existing, being given permission to exist at all. I ask us all to make room for the sacred again. The sacred that is the understanding that everything is connected. We are all connected and thus, our brother’s keeper.
So few see it. It’s too “there”, right in front of us. The most obvious things in life are the hardest to see. Gravity is there all around us - yet it took millennia for someone to recognize it, name it.
Gratitude though, isn’t just a passive state. It is also a recognition of the “other”, those who can’t take for granted so much of the things we do. It’s a calling for brotherhood, in our shared existence. My bread is your absence of bread - let me share it. My luck is your misfortune - let me give you some. My health is your sickness - let me help you be well.
All of us need to just go out into the world - abandon all our devices, our books, our things. Go out into the world and just breathe and then begin to see what is there, for what it is. Turn off the machine, the ghost in the machine. Be. Tune in. Connect. Drop out and into everything. Let the earth feed you from her empty bowl.
I resolve
I resolve
to wear more purple
and not to pull up my socks
should they fall,
to eat more strawberries
in the sun, one after one.
I resolve
to look more closely,
at the smaller things
buttons, spiders, dandelion dust, wedding rings,
to sit more on swings.
I resolve
to stay longer in bed awake
and think and dream
about a boat I want but
will never make.
I resolve
to kiss my gal a little longer
to make love stronger,
more often pull her in,
to always, in all things, in spirit
begin, being …..
I resolve
to play with children,
like one of them,
and collect fire trucks,
and climb trees
and get my knees green again.
I resolve
to tell my mother I love her
a thousand times, all at once,
and tell her she did well
thought all can so very well tell.
I resolve
to think of the good every day
and in suffering
know what I may
not be otherwise,
each of us a crooked surprise.
I resolve
to look in that little fish’s eye,
the next time she’s hooked,
to ask for more soup
and look where others haven’t looked.
I resolve
to look up more skirts
to sword fight with willow sticks
to spread my peanut butter just a little more thick
to burn, forget, the length of my wet wick.
I resolve
to lick my dog back
and to take a crack,
at what I’ve never dreamed,
to believe and pass by
all things that I’ve only seemed.
I resolve
to have my cake and eat it too
but if others need,
bread ‘ll have to do.
I resolve
to do what needs to be done
even if they don’t see the good.
I resolve
to buy myself more flowers
and to pick more wild ones
- the scraggly beauty of my love’s
luscious hair,
to sit by streams
waiting for the gull on the rock
fishing
to be there.
I resolve
to listen to more of life’s honest
on and off, up and down,
to lose myself in rhythm
and in that strange way
be found.
I resolve
to suck longer on fresh peaches
to not see the ugliness in leeches
to go wherever my will reaches
and getting there,
eat my bread in joy,
drink my wine in peace
for this day will never
come again,
just like this new year
will never again
ask when.
See What Is Really There