Journey of the Heart

Heidegger said that we find ourselves in "thrownness."  In other words, we are thrown into the world as we find it, and we piece ourselves and the world together from our surroundings. This poem reflects a time in my life that was very happy yet also very painful, when I worked in an x-rated video store. I knew that some of the people came to the store for human contact, whatever a smile meant to them, and yes, I had real connections to some of them. I am able to dole out small dollops of random kindness for no reason at all. Those were also my years in College studying creative writing, and I had a wonderful group of friends. We all had hard lives in Montreal, which is a rough town, according to Americans, but we had fun, and shared our knowledge and learned from one another. Although my circle of friends are not in the poem per se, I still feel I was very vibrant and loving at the time because I was surrounded by the good energy of friendship. ...

This poem incorporates an image I had in one of my blogs about writing, and that image was of walking on thin ice. It was not my idea to write this poem. A friend suggested I make a poem from the concepts in this passage of my blog about writing:   " Writing is like walking on thin ice. Life is often like walking on thin ice, too. Writing and life. These things are not the same, but both are ways of walking on thin ice. One teaches us how to do the other better. We get solace knowing that at least there is help out there, and that we are not alone in this world where the surface is everything, and it is frozen, maybe." I wanted to expand this into a more spiritual space to make a poem out of it, so I incorporated God and prayer. Also, time and its flow and stasis was a metaphysical concept that made its way to the fore as I worked with this passage from my blog. Ice Poem Words are the way I glide across ice. The sun slips whispers into ...

I wrote this poem as a reaction to several monotheistic traditions I have come into contact with in my life. I am very struck by the idea in Jewish traditions that an apt reaction to God’s creation is profound sadness because the world is so beautiful and poignant.  This idea is contained in The Wailing Wall. I also have a Muslim friend who I have been talking to about religious matters, and he taught me that God and Nature are not the same thing.  In my own Anglican heritage, I realize there is a lot of rejoicing around nature, and this particularly shows in Anglican hymns that celebrate the trees and birds. This poem contains some of all of these thoughts, and how these different traditions might play out in a spiritual truth.  It is my larger hope for the world that the three monotheistic traditions of the Pentateuch -Judaism, Islam, and Christianity-, will one day find peace with each other as we learn to grow by interacting with one anot...