America and humanity’s salvation lies buried in plain view
America and humanity’s salvation lies buried in plain view
The Great Tao (pronounced Dow) in Asian spiritual sects is represented by the yin (black, feminine) and yang (white, male) aspects of being.
When the yin and the yang in a person, or a society, are in harmonic balance, Tao, what Christians call heaven on earth, is experienced.
A memory showed up in my Facebook this morning, which pretty well sums up and diagnoses America and humanity, in the main, based what I am seeing in the news media and on Facebook and hear in conversations I have with other people in Alabama and elsewhere:
March 8, 2023
Saw on CNN this morning today is International Women’s Day, which reminded me of a poem that fell out of me one evening just before a Key West Poetry Guild monthly reading began in perhaps 2016. I posted the poem into a Reddit spirituality group a few weeks ago, and it stirred up so much controversy that the moderation board took it down. Nobody who commented seemed to understand the poem is not about a psychiatric condition, but is about a soul condition.
Bi Polar
the world’s favorite
mood disorder
the cause of all
human ails,
including wars,
if the demons aren’t counted
bi polar disorder,
the destruction of the
south pole,
the feminine,
the north pole,
he ain’t been
right in the head
since she’s been gone
About a year later, a sequel fell out of me just before a Key West Poetry Guild reading began:
Eve’s Answer
April Fool
Vexing Truth
Life is Poetry,
Poetry is Life,
There’s no more to say,
but that would
make God
a really dull boy,
now wouldn’t it,
Eve?
So, Eve,
What say you?
After all,
You have been,
still are, blamed
for everything that went wrong with
hu – MAN – i – ty.
Well, do you really want to hear
what I gotta say?
Is this one of those
be careful what you ask for
pregnancies?
Well, is it?
Probably, but say
what you wish –
I s’pect you need
to be heard.
Heard?
Funny you mention ears.
Yes, ears.
Such important receptacles.
Yet filled with concrete,
shit, propaganda, beliefs,
certainties, well,
let’s not leave out
SUPERSTITION
and
RELIGION,
should we?
By the way,
where do ya
suppose
God came from?
Or, out of?
And,
why do ya s’pose
I made Eve
in my own
IMAGE?
‘Cause Adam was
so bored and dull –
so … predictable
He was BORING!!!
the shit outta me!!!
That’s why.
Now
Shusssssh –
Don’t go round quoting me on
any of that –
I’ve had quite enough of
the religious right
ta last me
the rest of forever
Around that time, a south Alabama amiga who sometimes goes by The Empress of Fantasia, shared this poem of hers with me, which I felt summed everything up.
Pigs In Mud
All want the security of the well fed pig.
Horror at the baseness unrecognized.
A lifetime spent in shirt stuffing.
And pen comparison.
Is truth more palatable when honeyed?
Is a stark soulscape less so with the eyes of Monet?
May my affectations always be known and understood.
Then there is the Hindu Goddess standing on Krishna and expressing how she feels about how men think:
In the fall of 2002, a woman I was in love with came to me in a dream and told me, “Sloan, you married Kali!!!†I woke up in shock, as I understood the was the Hindu Goddess of destruction and resurrection, perhaps a female version of Jesus in the Gospels, if you mean destruction of the old ways of thinking and being, and bringing in the new ways. After that dream, I experienced yet another rather un-fun course in looking at myself in a mirror. I already had endured quite a few courses in mirrors, and there would be many more.
A few days ago, my best male friend, who himself has several angels known in the Bible turning him every which way but loose, came under the care of a doctor from India. When he told her that he had a friend who was told in a dream that he had married Kali, she laughed, said, “Your friend didn’t marry Kali, she married him!†I laughed, said that is so true.
From Key West’s poet laureate, Robert Frost:
The Road Not Taken
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
