A Prayer from an Elder
Here, listen now:
This is a prayer for young writers, poets and artists
You creatives!
May you find the wrecking ball
of whatever addiction you are currently captured by
and land at a spectacular bottom
where everything you thought you knew was
wrong
wrong
oh, so stunningly wrong…
Rather like America is doing as I write this
to you, for you, to me, for me
Rather like much of the world is in post-Pandemic madness
possessed by shadow, by religiosity, drunk on money they call god
May you find yourself at the bottom of the well of self-hatred
and see the hater
May you breathe in and out and in again… breathe in even more deeply
until something new cracks your chest
shows your heart a chasm so vast you cannot close it back up
when you hear all the bad news about the end of the world
May we, together, lean into the madness without our defenses
May we drop our martyrdom and get naked on the page
on the canvas
with our tuned or untuned instruments
and play
and play
and play
May we together enter the portal of our imaginations
reclaim the energy the ego has used to hide us from ourselves
hide us from one another
come out from behind the curtains and … what?
sit empty-handed in the unknown until you hear the calling
May The Calling appear impossible
as impossible as my third horse I am grooming in another dimension
the sun hot on my shoulders
and I don’t care
May I lift her hooves and feel her belly in my hand
hope she’s pregnant with the foal of my dreams
May I find every rock packed hard into the California dirt
and scrape it out
May I love her enough to see impossible stars in a naked and black sky
May I invite you to dance?
Shall we dance like idiots in whatever way the music calls
may we hear it in our marrow and say yes
May the koan within the koan say yes
May NO contain a juicy YES that I can believe in,
that I will convince you is here NOW
if only
if only
if only
you allow the grace of the words, the paint, the song to emerge
into sweet energy
may you place your nose atop a baby’s head
or snuggle some kittens
tickle some puppies
mount our imaginal horses, blue and green and ride them into
the impossibly pink sky
where the trees smile as we ride by
and medicine rains down dreamlike and we drink it
till our wings grow wide
and we find we are condors
