Colors of Life – Ram Dass & Being

Ram Dass & BeingI watched an entire season of Ram Dass teachings and all the quotes this week are his.

The teachings had everything in it from his disliking of people, to his sexuality, to his questioning of Enlightenment. But what I noticed throughout the entire season it’s about being. He was just being.

How difficult it is for most of us to just be. Just sit still to quiet the mind and just be. So much of what we learn is to be a doer or a thinker or a seeker.

“The thinking mind is what is busy. You have to stay in your heart. You have to be in your heart. Be in your heart. The rest is up here in your head where you are doing, doing, doing.” 

The idea of being is just being. We have the answers to our lives, but we don’t sit quietly to hear what they are saying. There is more to us than this three-dimensional physical plane. We see this in our dreams, meditations and sometimes we get that aha moment when we talk to somebody or watch a TV show or overhear someone speaking. It’s amazing to me when you get those little nudges and I don’t know where they come from. Is it intuition? Is it our higher self, our angels, spirit guides? In the past, when I have fought these nudges, I will fall flat on my face. So, follow that intuition, Spirit guides, higher self, etc. because it’s usually right. “Remember, we are all affecting the world every moment, whether we mean to or not. Our actions and states of mind matter, because we’re so deeply interconnected with one another. Working on our own consciousness is the most important thing that we are doing at any moment, and being love is the supreme creative act.”

These nudges told me to write and publish my poetry. I was scared to do that because yes; I was exposing who I was. I was afraid I would not be accepted. The opposite happened. I was accepted. This same little nudge came to me constantly for two years to start up the Poetic Resurrection podcast. I didn’t know what the podcast should be about. I knew it would not be about acting. Then, during the pandemic, I saw people marching and helping at food banks and I thought, how wonderful would life be if we had self-love and self-acceptance? With these acceptances, it would be easy to accept and love others. There would be no fear of loss. Whichever direction these nudges are directing you, they need to be of a kind heart.

Unconditional love really exists in each of us. It is part of our deep inner being. It is not so much an active emotion as a state of being. It’s not ‘I love you’ for this or that reason, not ‘I love you if you love me.’ It’s love for no reason, love without an object.”

The poem for this week is Continuum from Inspire Me: Perception.

Continuum

Spring florets glimmer
In afternoon light
Scent of fresh tulips
Myths of existence—fables

Trembling in 90 degrees
Veneer of tears
Illusions of turmoil
Created by self
Head spins—Pandora’s Box

Seven sins tap across the stage of
A cardinal songbird
As the earthfall cleanses itself
Hope gathers irises
For a rainbow bridge

Oyá* conjures and flees storm
Yemaya*—mother disapproves
Amazon and Niger Rivers
Dominated
Femininity protected

Travel—Antipodes
Indian ocean with full moonlight
Glistens as the waves erupt
Hera’s* vengeful heart
Aches from illegitimate family

Crumbled mirror of water
Tears cascade past seven years,
Moisture blooms lilies of death
Phoenix’s ashes resurrected
In endless evolution

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  • Oyá uses tornados as her weapon and raises dead armies to use as her warriors.
  • Yemaya is a powerful orisha who’s the mother of living things.
  • Hera is Zeus’ wife, best known for her jealousy of Zeus’s other family.

 

Colors of Life – The Little Girl

The Little GirlYesterday, I was honored to once again interview Luis J. Rodriguez for an upcoming episode on Poetic Resurrection. We spoke for about two hours and we had an amazing conversation about many subjects, including sexual abuse. Being a survivor of this, I had written the poem The Little Girl featured in my first book, Inspire Me: Raw. I’m grateful to my parents for being there for me. It was an experience I thought I had overcome since I could talk about the situation. But, I hadn’t.

It wasn’t until I wrote the poem that I could release the shame and trauma I was holding onto. It served no purpose but to keep me down. Why would I want to hold on to that? The situation is that we sometimes don’t know we’re still holding onto the past. It has a way of showing up as a trigger and that’s when I knew I had to work on letting go. I don’t believe in “forgive and forget”. Yes, I can forgive, but you don’t forget. You learn to forgive them and yourself for holding onto so much pain throughout your life.

I’ve noticed many survivors talk about their experience and I wanted to do the same; I just wrote from the perspective of the child, because the child doesn’t understand.

Listen to the Poetic Resurrection Podcast here or at PR Podcast

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The Little Girl from Inspire Me: Raw

The little girl walks to school
Tenements line gray streets
She does well in school
Her five-year-old stature
Shows resistance & strength

Drawings of prismic colors
Joy and glee adorn her face
Hesitant to show teacher
Waiting for praise—teacher questions
She understood but couldn’t answer

Teacher screams at her
Points—to disappear into
The sea of moveable desk
She gazes at her tattered shoes
Her friend speaks English, she does not

Colorless teacher was unkind
To the little girl
Who only speaks Spanish
Tears flow down her face
She hides – the teasing kids

Goes home, keeps to herself
Pretends to be an actress
Living a world that wasn’t her own
Only hearing voices of a different land
Citizens we are, but not considered same

Pretending so young to be okay
Her seven-year-old friend
Said she wanted to play
A store basement, dark and clammy
Her friend gazes on while she screams
“It hurts,”. “Why did you do this?”

A teenage boy
Took friend’s innocence and
Now he’s taken the little girl’s
Her soul and worth
But she doesn’t understand

The store owner saves her,
Atop soaring stairs
Bold voice of disgust
Vibrates the crypt
Boy halts, he runs

She now rests at home
A peeling grey wood porch
Third-floor view—sits on step
Sunless hallway
Looking at the sky so blue

Doesn’t know how she got there
Mind’s a haze of events
Discolored panties, hand washed often
Advertise the status of her little life

The bandages trying to hold
The innocence lost. It’s too late
Mom looks at her—
Turns away and cries.
Did she do something wrong?
Sorry you’re hurting; doesn’t know what to do

I’m sorry mom
Don’t mean to make you cry
Don’t mean to make you cry
Tears never came to me
The little girl who didn’t understand