Please allow me to read my poem to you. I think this will be a very enjoyable experience for you. Among other perks, you can hear my intonations, the rhythms I have built in, and feel the power-keys. What does this have to do with “unifying”? That will be revealed in the final, surprising line.
P.S. Please leave a comment, at the bottom of the page. It is so good to get feedback. Creating and posting can feel lonely at times. I am open to your appreciations, tweaks, and even constructive critiques.
And/Or three Inquiries to comment on:
1. What was it like for you to “take the journey” through the three ways (the three acts) of looking for Home?
2. Can you feel the power, revelation and comfort in the final line?
3. How do YOU experience “Home as Everywhere?”
___________________________________
P.S.S. Now, here’s the poem also in print…
Act I. You Think Counting Is the Way
You decide to sit atop this summer forest floor—
Packs of green ramming through wreckage of Autumn colors.
You think your way Home can start here.
Multiple tiny lives brew and teem
On this mix of Death and Life.
But no account to you—you’re intent on a plan:
“This place should calm me.
I’ll count my breaths,”
You’ve been taught: this is your way Home.
Act II. Enter Deeper … into Listening
But before you can count
Oh, those Summer Greens—shimmering, wilding … wilding,
Whispering, “come unto me, all ye that travail.”
Your ears now perked, you realize you can only hear
A single cricket — chirp-ing … chirp-ing:
Your heart’s ba-boom, ba-boom, in syncopation.
Wait! You hear more music snaking about:
Saplings singing songs of summer’s urgings;
Blue bonnets bobbing to the beat of breezes.
Act III. Go Deeper … Into Sensing
A single ant crawls on your ankle,
Shocking you into a surge of sensing,
Dropping your soul through the forest floor:
Smell the hair of bear galumphing back to its den;
Feel the warmth of the sun’s glitter crackling open
Treasure chests in tiny seeds, root sap, bulbs.
Ride this nexus of roots — follow the ancient Songlines
Across the span of water- and worm-holes, across Indra’s Net, bejeweled:
Where Home is latticeworked through Everywhere.
… Where Home is latticeworked through Everywhere.
By Frederic, Red Feather Lakes, CO. Summer Solstice, 2019
PLEASE SEE COMMENTS JUST BELOW
Please leave a comment. It is so good to get feedback. Creating and posting can feel lonely at times. I am open to your appreciations, tweaks, and even constructive critiques.
And/Or three Inquiries to comment on:
1. What was it like for you to “take the journey” through the three ways (the three acts) of looking for Home?
2. Can you feel the power, revelation and comfort in the final line?
3. How do YOU experience “Home as Everywhere?”
Thank you Eric, for such a beautiful and full appreciation of this poem….
“Frederic,
Thank you for the poem. I like the part in Act I where it says this is the way you’ve been taught to return home, by counting the breath.
Counting the breath is supposed to take me home in yoga, but I find it does so in playing trombone more than in yoga.
I feel home when I’m playing my trombone because it takes me back to high school when I took lessons from DSO players to follow my passion.
Also, I’ve learned to answer “the breath” whenever I am asked “but who are you really?” It’s also the answer in every trombone master class when they say “what’s the most important element of playing?”
Act II, listening, reminds me of the way I feel when I hear cicadas. Their falling drone reminds me of growing up in Oaklawn. listening to cicadas.
The sound equates with summer. The lazy, falling drone takes me home to the house on Hood St. I would lie in the hammock on the front screen porch reading Pogo, which was over my head politically, but I didn’t care.
I have experienced Act III in the last few years when I have found myself standing still in the sun, feeling the warmth, looking at the sky, and accepting the scene around me, utterly content and unambitious.
Eric”
Kathryn, thank you for your comment that you sent by email:
“Thank you for the sweet poem. I thought it was lovely and well done. I didn’t guess the ending but it resonates. I wholeheartedly agree!
K”
1. What was it like for you to “take the journey” through the three ways (the three acts) of looking for Home?
A sense of calm, exploration, and ease.
2. Can you feel the power, revelation and comfort in the final line?
Absolutely. Where Home is latticeworked through Everywhere. “All roads, lead home” connections in nature are all intertwined here, on our earthly home.
3. How do YOU experience “Home as Everywhere?”
By way of being aware that I am part of our natural world. A a blade of grass, a bear, an ant or a human; I belong and am rhythm as well.
Thank you Frederic. While the imagery is vivid and artful throughout each act,
I especially connected with the ending.
And found resources to deepen my understanding of:
Song Lines
https://youtu.be/kVOG-RKTFIo
Indra’s Net
https://www.scienceandnonduality.com/article/the-indras-net
This is so beautiful!!!!
Thank you, Frederic, for being your poetic invitiation to what is possible for me thru sensing and presencing what is, in each moment of my being.
I am learning that my allowing and bringing loving kindness and compassion to each of my emotions, as they show up inside of me, is my way of worming my way thru the dark, chaotic, mysterious root system of my being, until some new awareness surfaces in my consciousness and invites me toward what is possible.
With loving gratitude,
Greg
Speaks to my heart, brother…”where home is lattice-worked everywhere.” 🙏❤️
Thank you for the word dance journey – I am especially grateful for the gift of “songlines” (song lines) a new word for this esoteric privileged One! How could I have lived without it for sooooo long – and for “shocking me into a surge of sensing”
These . are comments on the poem that I (Frederic) received via my email, and wanted to post here also:
“I loved your reading of your poem. What I noticed and admired / enjoyed the most was your breathing. I let the words wash over me and focused on your breath. I still have your voice in my head.
Lovely brother…wonderful to see, feel and hear you sharing your gifts in putting our juicy messy life experience into words. Bowing 🙂
This was lovely- thanks!
Absolutely loved it Frederico!! I am “lattice – worked” now!”
Good morning Frederic,
Thank you for sending this poem! In my wonderfully full life, I started my spiritual journey in the 70s, and I have been to dozens of retreats over the years. I studied Buddhism in Thailand for two years, Hinduism in Nepal for 3 months and the native people’s worship of nature and the earth – and of course, Christianity in the good ol’ USA. I have traveled the world and observed peoples worshipping in Mecca and in the slums of Mumbai. I have comfortably settled in my own divinity knowing that we are 99% the Energy of Source. I am aware that I create my own happiness and I’m happy to tell you that I pretty much succeed in that task daily. I rest in gratitude as I know that while I’m appreciating everything around me, I am connecting to Source. Believe me, I struggled for many years to get to where I am now, but I have come full circle and am quite content with my relationship to the divine within. Please know that I’m sure you’re lovely retreats in the mountains are totally beautiful, but I feel at this point I’ve done much of that work. I also realize that you cannot connect often enough to the divine, but my interest now lies in how I can take my divine energy to affect community good.
I wish you the best of everything, and I know that what you’re doing is very important, so congratulations!!
I bow to you,
Deborah💓💕
Oh YES!!!! I closed my eyes and was grateful for You delivering the words … as my imagination held onto you tightly so as not to miss the next inviting words.
I was able to SEE with you, I was able to HEAR with you, I was able to BREATHE in with you.
My Being loved the adventure. Thanking the Mysterious Presence that powerfully flowed through you. 🙏