Remember

In the whirlwind of your ordinary, strange and wonderful life,

farting and thinking, feeling and sleeping,

hoping and wanting and righting and wronging…

Take a breath and remember,

remember the blood that moves red

in the rivers and streams of your borrowed body,

Remember the heart that beats its prayer-drum,

Each pulse another bead on the great mala of your life

Stringing a necklace of moments

treasured or hated or ignored.

Remember the cathedral sky above you,

kissed by shreds of feathered life, storm-flung and beautiful

dancing with dark clouds and the broken light of a far-off sun.

Remember the earth beneath your animal feet

and feel the diamonds and coal that make your bones and teeth.

Remember the tread of those who share this unfurling fern moment of ever-new life

As you walk in the company of wild claws and soft paws

elephant thick or mouse skitter quick.

All of those mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers,

Sons and daughters and friends and lovers

who give us place and meaning.

Know the time that frames you,

the echoes of history still sounding in the deep places of your DNA,

Vikings and monastery priests,

queens and cavemen,

reptiles, meteors and volcanos.

Sense the mists of what is still to come

The fearful scaled monsters and winged beings of impossible beauty

Turning and strange, showing glimpses of themselves through the fog of what might be.

Breathe, drop, open, imagine, dream, be.

Be.

Touch that which we all are born to be,

Seed of life on the great arching tree of existence,

trunk and branches spread across eternity,

across the forever universe…

more stars than all the sand of all the beaches of the world.

Let them all go for a few heartbeats,

all those balls that you are holding in the air

(what a circus artist you are! what a circus this is!)

the ‘who I am’, the ‘what I could be’, the grind and the joy

The name and the shape, the dream and the hope.

Remember the breath that asks for nothing,

give thanks

and if some quiet is offered, take off your shoes,

step gently towards the opening glade in the forest of your thoughts and feelings.

There, in the silent woods the wide-eyed wild one waits for you,

Shy, tender and powerful beyond the need for power.

Rest with her, your cheek on her soft flank

his warm breath in time with yours.

Beyond intimacy, beyond friendship

the love of you for you,

the love of life for life’s expression.

Your lover has never been here with you,

not your mother or your father,

and surely the one that you think you are

is lost and wandering somewhere amid the trees.

Only the one that you are in the silence

when no one is asking or telling

knows the secret pathways.

Love, love and love again

Until even love is gone

And only the still centre of the deer’s amber eye remains

Reflecting the truth of a heart of majesty and light

Of simplicity and emptiness.

Remember my love,

Remember dear friend,

Remember stranger,

Remember.