If Only . . .

If Only I Could …

I spent most of my life strutting around, touting the answers, thinking I know. 

Then life flattened me, uprooting everything, including all those so-called answers.

Learning to live the questions completely changed the trajectory of my life in such an aggravating and life-giving way.

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers. . . . Live the questions now.” (Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet)

If only I could …

Think like everyone thinks.
Believe what everyone believes.
Be like everyone else.

… but that’s not the shape of my heart

If only I could …

Not think, not care about what is real and true.

Be oblivious to the cognitive dissonance screaming in my head and heart.

Ignore the dissonance of the difference between what is real and the lifetime of fictions in my head.

Live in a box, a container of conditioning full of that which I’ve been told all of my life.

Live in a cocoon, all snug and warm, comfortable and secure, and so nicely certain.

Believe what I was told to believe, that system of beliefs that is delivered to your door predetermined primarily by zip codes, comfort zones, and religious and social bubbles.

Download the myths and mores of culture and automatically accept them and believe, conforming to this world.

Shrink the dimensions of my mind back to what it was before it expanded to see, feel, and understand a whole new paradigm and a whole new world.

Unsee the depth and breadth and richness that I have been shown once I let go of dogma.

… but that’s not the shape of my heart

If only I could …

Turn away from the pale and downtrodden, the battered and bruised, the tattered and torn.

Look at pain and suffering without feeling that pain and suffering.

Stop my heart from weeping from being so totally open and tender to the other and to the realities and suffering of this life.

Create a world and life view that allows me to define and label, systematize and index everything, especially boundlessness and limitlessness, mystery and awe; everything I can't understand.

Create god in my image and anthropomorphically pin on him all of the good and strong characteristics of humankind, then looking and saying, "it is good."

… but that’s not the shape of my heart

If only I could …

Define and label it all; everyone, everything.

Judge without misjudgment, label without mislabeling, know without mistake.

Live life on the surface, content without digging deeper.

Leave undiscovered and unexplored my interior landscape.

Live by the myths of old, accepting their stories and definitions, predictions and prescriptions, rules and rituals.

Accept external authority without the hard work of discernment.

Allow others to do my thinking for me and just do, think, and be what I’m told.

Join the herd and abandon my renegade mind; nicely conformed and silenced.

Take the easy way rather than a way less traveled.

Sleep while the world turns and burns.

Give in and give up, giving homage to the gods of our age..

Live a life of comfort, security, and certainty.

… but that's not the shape of my heart.

I only I could …

Close my eyes.

Close my ears.

Close my mind.

Close my heart.

Close my will.

Live my life with clenched fists rather than open hands

… but that's not the shape of my heart.

If only I could …

life would be so nice, easy, comfortable, secure, certain; a beautiful facade.

If only . . .

The first revolution is when you change your mind about how you look at things and see that there might be another way to look at it that you have not been shown. (Gil Scott-Heron)

The problem for me is that the only people I can ask about God are fellow humans. I’ve had enough of God created in our image. So the only questions I can ask are without words and in silence; waiting… not for an answer… but waiting for the sake of waiting. Embracing the mystery in sheer wonder of it all. (RI)

"For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can’t readily accept the God formula, the big answers don’t remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us." (Charles Bukowski)