Sacrifice and renunciation
arrived as two teachers
speaking in the evening
and waking me in the night
with a blank slate wiped briefly.
Listening to them too early
is a fierce denial
of blood and flesh and chlorophyll,
responding to demands
that are heard as a promise of power,
a reaper’s scythe applied before harvest,
slicing where no grain is grown.
These tools are sharp
and will cut away
illusion, projection, comfort, vice,
a pyre of all we know
ignited, smoking, lost.
And me learning about everyday myth
on the edge of sleep
where my body is pressed by sensation
that lives only in my mind,
knowing samsara is like this,
everywhere not real.
Yet what I also know
from this place in my waking
is that true sacrifice
means agonies of attachment,
deep compelling bonds of love
that have substance,
sons on altars with fathers in tears.
There is no cool ease here,
no shrugging off the world
in preference to space
… oh, maybe for a season,
but beauty will find you
and grasp you by the throat
so that you taste each ripe fruit
and gasp with the bright pain of love
and have no mask left
for hiding your laughter at nature’s caress.
And that is the season
for learning to work with the scythe,
when all you love
needs harvesting,
not for storage
but so the field can be readied
for new planting.
This cutting away
is painful,
it is not for the weak
as the scythe takes a practiced body
and precise mind.
There is a fierce energy
that wants to blow away illusion
so we live on the stark slab
with no ties.
Like inhale and exhale,
Gaia knows we cannot raze ourselves to rock
only,
knows we are this fragile web
of intertwinings co-breathing,
knows that rock slabs in vacuum
have no life.
And so renunciation
means seeing the illusion
in all that we love,
seeing how this real child is truly loved
and freely given,
seeing how this real small self
is precious and still just pretend,
a temporary binding of cells,
a process of sandcastle and shoreline.
A closing the door
on some pleasures
to make space for other knowing.
A grieving of losses,
a black slate wiped briefly
with real tears.