Judgment

Oh, magical magical me

All full up and justified

As you stay over there all wrong.

Yes, this tongue in cheek sarcasm is yet another fault – or is it virtue in attempt at liberation?

Welcome back ever constant question of quality.

When attaching quality to reactions, responses, retreats, or attacks,

Not knowing much feels like knowing nothing,

And that cloud of unknowing threatens prit near full on suffocating.

Smothered by my own isolation

I know I’m hard to take,

So I let you off the hook but we both gasp for air in this dry, dirty, small, mean boat of wretchedness.

Oh, but Love: do win, do, and thank You that You can and do and will.

Release us from judgment’s mildewed, stinky hold and to the clearer, living waters we need.

I’m so sorry we miss, don’t reflect, don’t YOU. You in all Your glorious perfection: may we increasingly intersect, integrate, be better and more like You.

Perfect. Like You wondrously tell us to be too.

What an invitation! What a hope, what a thought, what a possibility!

“Isn’t it wonderful? How can it be true?”*

*Sara Groves song

“I don’t wanna talk about it”

Good for you and your new pretty flowers.

Good for you for your fun recent purchase, latest hobby, recent trip.

I don’t begrudge you these delights, but when they overshadow all else and you ask,

“Why do we have to talk about politics?”

‘Cause it feels important.

‘Cause it feels like the most important.

Here, in the richest country in the world, people are going hungry because of the actions of our government.

That feels bigger than politics. That feels like a wildly problematic value system.

People are being blown up in the Atlantic Ocean.

People can’t buy their medicine, study what they want, be who they are, love who they love, because of the power mongers who think it’s theirs to decide. (Newsflash: it’s not.)

I think about the harm, and the people dying, and ones whose livelihoods, families, hopes, homes are being stripped away, and it feels too important NOT to talk about.

You complained about your heating bill going up under the last administration, but the wealthiest people in the country just got a tax cut bigger than our income in a year, they’re being protected from accountability for grievous, heinous crimes against humanity – child humanity, no less – and you seem more annoyed that people are asking questions.

You don’t understand why I want to talk about it. I wonder why you don’t.

How can we not? Or are you afraid you might have to change your mind?

I had nothing but respect for you. As a human, as a “good” human being.

But now I just feel disappointment.

Your Christianity doesn’t seem very Christlike.

Are you not grieved that people are losing their food stamps just because they live in a blue state?

Are you not grieved that we’ve pulled SO MUCH humanitarian aid the world over that not just helped people by the millions, but that earned us goodwill?

Are you not grieved that we’re a laughing stock?

Are you not grieved that the color of ones’ skin is the sole decider of whether or not someone deserves consideration, understanding, or due process?

I guess I’m grateful to receive your kindness, as far as it goes, but I also wonder if I’m complicit to the greater problem if I receive said kindness when I know you’re not extending it to others that look or worship differently than you.

Super bummed. I wonder where the line is for you? When things are important enough to talk about?

Your discomfort may feel inconvenient, but I’d venture a guess that it’s waaay less uncomfortable than what the folks are experiencing who’re actually suffering under the aforementioned atrocities.

I mean, good for you and your comfortably oblivious life and option of not having to fear being arrested when you go to the grocery store.

But for tons and tons of other humans? Just like you? This shit is real.

I wonder when it’ll be for you?

Complacency looks like complicity and refusal to wrestle feels like hate. Not-love.

On the evolutionary continuum as a species? Let’s be better. Let’s share more, uplift more, grow in awareness, put ourselves in someone else’s shoes, help more. Not less. Not go backwards like we are right now.

Let’s start by tryna talk about it. We’re not business as usual. We’re in good vs. evil, right vs. wrong territory. It matters.

Liberation (of motherhood and otherwise)

Sometimes I think I could stay here
All quiet and thoughtful up on this mountaintop
If only I could remain undisturbed

And left alone

THEN what a difference I’d make

And then I remember that I have you to thank

For all my best and worst rising to the surface

You help catalyze all my grandness and terribleness

And all this facing’s what makes a person whole

Without your love

Without you to love

I’d just be all face

And no facing

Void of depths

Too heavy on shallow heights

Thank you for all your yous

Meeting all my me.

And please, God, may my me (with You) liberate their mes as much as they’ve saved mine.

Expenditures of loving these all that fills right up:

Love’s liberation

Craftiness

Wondering if adding to the beauty

May also take from it.

Not always or necessarily, and thankfully not exclusively.

But if indulging one’s craft

Does more to contribute to self indulgence

(And this may be a given to some degree)

Then “adding to the beauty”

Is a misspeak.

Before one satisfies one’s desire to create, or pursue, or whatever,

There’s something of a decision:

Will I serve them, or will I serve me?

(One’s “craft” = one)

If I decide to serve me (one)

There may creep in an eventual sense of entitlement.

And if not acknowledged and made to stand in its

Truthful non-entitlement place,

May grow – quiet-like – but insidious.

And if not checked,

And then if not indulged,

The ‘I’s not indulged.

And if the I’s not indulged

It must be your fault.

And if the self can convince the self it’s your fault

– That it was somehow owed its “autonomy”

And not paid what it was owed –

Then you must be punished

– Whoever “you” are that was replaced, misplaced by my craft.

I might not tell you.

But quietly hold on to resentment

(When I didn’t quiet the voice’s demands, I got to stay mad and entitled)

Hold it, feed it, coddle it, start to act in its favor ‘stead of yours.

And soon, there’s no beauty to be seen,

No pure craft to be had.

Only I, me, my and the muddle of inanimate “craft” in my hands.

Love’s Thrill

When the children came, “thrill” left

Replaced by care and caution and love’s breadth

Not always safe: the pursuit of safe.

Lots may die in the wake of hesitate.

But ah! That is not all there is.

Before them wonder was a largely private (selfish) affair

After them – with them, because of them – I am expanded

Expanded in delight not just my own, but in delight in theirs

What a gift! What a gift to be enlarged

And stretched beyond my own thin skin

These trenches and crumbs are not beneath me

These are where the real life is – the full life is

Forced outward love stretches all my womanhood

– anyone’s personhood through parenthood –

Battle waged I am forced to reckon with these, with me

To find that my self’s death is the truest liberty

To be present and free from my own way:

(Not just in order to indulge another’s whim)

– But to provide what’s needed –

This is liberation: realizing wholly the love within.

So to find I’ve grown – and am willing more still –

Becomes the delight of sacrifice – true love’s thrill

To find that before I gloried in the small

I’d venture I knew Glory not at all.