Epistle to Myself

Dear Son,

before knowing what you really are,

you need to know just who you think you are.

I thought I was a person.

I had a headful of beliefs and one of them was me.

That me was re-formulated in the Sixties,

so a lot it was anti-war, pro-human rights,

and wondered when it all went wrong in my America.

I studied post-graduate American history

and found it never was exactly right.

In one important way, this was my spiritual beginning;

deconstruction needs to start at home.

In time I saw that war and all injustices are not

a matter of my being right

and someone else’s being wrong,

but essentially the fact I think there is a me and my

and someone else in opposition as another.

This personal assumption I’m a person is

the one original division from which all

division finds its origin.

Every little thing a person does

to get ahead, assert itself, insinuate its way

to some position of importance is

the primal swamp of war and all injustice.

So as long as I am thinking I’m a person,

there are hostilities and their infringements.

But being on the never hand,

love, Aum.

The River, a Road, and I

Every day I walk the road along the river, 

I want to walk the road along the river every day. 

Twenty years I’ve lived along this spacious river, 

in a less than thousand dollar rental 

in the middle of half-million dollar properties 

amid this precious priceless panorama.

Walking on this road I see a luminous mile of river,

and a mile of river is like ten thousand miles of heaven.

Ten thousand miles of heaven is something

no one ever knows and I see it every day.

What hand inserted me within this jeweled setting?

Across the river is an eastern white pine wilderness,

and in my heart is similar wilderness. Spirit talks to spirit.

There’s not a useless word within that conversation.

Here’s a road and there’s the river, and I’m the source of both,

although I’m never either. Not two, we say. Not two.