Listen and Learn Your Lessons

 Listen to the following three poems on the Audio page, and then allow yourself some time to reflect and write in your journal about whatever comes up for you.    

When you are finished, put your journal down and let your lesson “rise.” Good writing is like homemade bread and takes time to rise. Resist the urge to read it over, criticize, cross out, or share too soon. Let it alone. Give it time.

 

Give yourself time, too. You are writing for the person you are becoming. 

 

Then, at least a week—or better, a month—later, return to what you have written and read it now that the writing—and you—have had the time to rise.

 

From this perspective of the self you are rising into and becoming (what some people call the “higher self” and I call the deep, inner voice of wisdom), you will be able to reflect back upon your earlier writing and have the wisdom to understand what your deep, inner voice was saying.

 

Fire Lesson

Fire rises when all else falls away.

So light is loss, so simple burn.

 
Smoke rises, too, the sign of what is

going, the promise of return.


The sky is the place our minds go to look

for nothingness, but even then great clouds come in.

 
I have learned to greet absence as an opportunity.

To see the violence of constant win.


Still I dream of one thing I cannot lose.

An end to hardness, and nothing more to choose.

 

~

 

Cave Lesson

 
You ask me to join you in your cave, and I do.


I sit down on the damp floor and we watch the dark walls

dripping with yellow light from the candle.

 
You are like that light,

I tell you.

 
See how you affect everything around you.


You do not believe me.

 
It takes time.


I breathe out.  I let go of my impatience,

even though I know candles do eventually burn out.

 
I must let you take your time.

 

~

 

Leaf Lesson


This is what we have forgotten:

the way the water collects

at the bottom of each leaf

overnight. And in that drop

is a tear. And in that tear

is a spider. And when the drop

falls, you can hear the spider

singing as she throws silk

back onto the leaf. In this

falling and singing and

coming back up is a circle

of motion that can save us,

if only we would hear it.