Every wave comes from the same ocean,
Both the curls, and the ones that thrash you

Balancing isn’t a tightrope,
It’s a different wave every time

The first time paddling out is the hardest

It’s okay to duck some waves,
There’s always more.

You can’t wait for perfect conditions,
if you are going to catch a wave

You can die doing what you love,

Hang Loose

Author Reflection: I’m not sure why I love to use surfing metaphors, I can barely swim.

How do we acquire a taste for the bitterness of life,
Without small sips,
Without the pallet,
Without paying attention to it all?

Author Reflection: With acceptance, even what is painful can be savored.

Always to the same destination,
The heart cave.

Without form or qualities,
The guru always sits waiting.

Ganapatiye took me to a village today,
rather than the cave.

There, my inner family dwelled,
All of their beautiful imperfections,
In a kaleidoscope of past parts,
And future possibilities.

Author Reflection: In a recently joined community, it was asked, “Have we forgotten how to be villagers?” A response stuck with me all day, and was the prompt for this poem,
“The Village resides in the heart.”

Where do I even start in a time like this

I think of Ram Das’s altar with photographs of Bush Kissinger Nixon Trump

I don’t know how to start loving uncovered evils that remain redacted

Love Everyone.

The rest is karma or Peter’s or the three beings who will decide your fate

The rest is what I thought the conscious was for

The conscious that would face it all again on the death bed

The cross isn’t heavy if the heart is as light as a feather

Love Everyone.

I dream of hunger strikes and marches and parades as grand as triumphs in recognition of survivors

Of justice and reparations and rotten fruit and a different kind of stocks

Of men providing women support rather than solutions for feelings

Of divestment and sacrifice and the village being more important than any one villager

I think of how else to put off and avoid and abstain and distract and delay asking how to

Love Everyone.

I don’t know how to, today

Author Reflection: It is okay, to not know how, that was the case at one time for everything you now do.

PS: There is intentionally little punctuation - love it or hate it, everything is part of a written poem.

We could find ways to nourish the masses,
We instead find ways to nourish profits.

We could find ways to eliminate cancer,
We instead find ways to eliminate costs.

I’m not against technologies,
I just dream of better applications.

Authors Note: I was once the only student in a Uni course to raise their hand at the question, “Does anyone here think GMOs have a purpose in modern agriculture?”

Both are visions of the future,
Both have changed the world,
Both are just pieces of art.

Author Note: Imagine the future you’d like your descendants to grow up in. What does it feel like to be a child there? Now show us.

How would they find it after you’ve gone?
How would it be better,
Than you found it?

Author Note: What’s that? Yup! Even the soul is something to find, something to leave better than you found it.

What looked like possession,
Was just an illusion to stumble over.

Knowledge shined the stone into a gem,
But it could not fill the hole.

Author Note: stack the stones of knowledge for those to come, there’s no value in possessing it.

Friends said she was the one,
Who managed to tame the lion,
And for a time that was true.

She wore red lipstick to see his body,
Skipping family who sat in the waiting room,
It wasn’t that she was special,
She just knew what she wanted.

Author Note: Based on a True Story

I’m not trying to reach perfection,
It wouldn’t arrive.

I don’t want to find something perfect,
I wouldn’t be satisfied again.

I can’t be sold a perfect life,
I wouldn’t want the descent.

I don’t desire perfect,
I wouldn’t want it to change.

The letter I,
Isn’t in perfect.

Author note: this poem has struggled to find composition for weeks prior to publication. It would qualify as a poem that was “painful” to write. Perfection isn’t a place.

If the economy is the top priority,
What isn’t?

Poems can be found everywhere, this one was found in an NPR story about a US electorate poll on voting priorities.

Love,
is not having enough time

Author Reflection: When I feel big emotions, like the feeling of let down that I won’t get to see everyone who is important to me on a trip home, I often turn towards the macro-lens; the interconnected-ness’ the “bigger than any one of us.” In doing so, the emotion becomes infused with both the divine and the human; thus the emotion is processed as both. I’m feeling this big emotion because I am these two paradoxical things, divine and human; and so are you.

I’ll kiss you with bare feet,
and see you with closed eyes.

I’ll still be dancing with you,
when I leave this body.

I will be sharing poems like these on their own schedule, with the occasional poem sent to the Inner Magic Subscription via off-week emails.

Author reflection: I’ve always admired the devotional poems of Sufi and writings of Urdu Shayari (poets). I find that they bring me closer to my love of the divine. In attempting to write my own, I often look to the feeling of love I have for those in my life. This is a recognition that I am loving god by loving any other. The expansion of that feeling for everyone and everything is what loving god is to me.