My soul knows this place.
It wants comfort. A hand, a caress, a kiss,
but i know that i too
did not come into this world to be comforted.
Work is at hand, floors to be cleaned,
old junk taken to the dump
dust bunnies swept from closets.

I am not the beautiful man i imagined myself to be.
Just ordinary, full of pain, neurotic and wounded
Yes, light has penetrated, and blessings have arrived,
for that i am eternally grateful.
And i am even grateful to see the places that have gone unloved
and the work that has gone undone.
The emerging Self is grateful to feel this writhing and moaning
worm make itself visible.

For how else can this old parasite
be convinced to leave for good.
If not for the Light, i could stay in the damp dark basement forever.
But the work that needs to be done, it is not for me
but for the children and the flowers,
this ancient Worm was not my creation
and the songs i sing are not mine.

Let this be done.
Enough tears have been shed, and enough whining and self pity.
It's nothing really, in a world of horrors, and children being bombed.
Nothing to speak of, when all hell is breaking loose
And the Light of the earth herself,
breaks through all of the basements of the world
And as the old structures give way, built as they are on foundations
of greed and selfish madness,
there is yet a moment where all seems possible
and the destruction of the world
a necessary sorrow
to allow the flowers of light
to shine in new meadows
where love and love only is worshipped
and each gesture to each other
is made from the purest of hearts
with no agenda, hidden or otherwise
other than to meet
my Self,
dancing in a World of Light.

(I have written on this topic several times recently in my blog. But definitions change as i change....)

Success.
The concept requires that i step out of this moment, and away from my current situation, and compare one picture of success with another.
This is the very slippery nature of this concept. And i can pretend to be spiritual and beyond notions of success...

But i am not. I still want success. So what is it that i want?
And what if my life so far is a failure? By whose standards is it a success, and by whose standards is it a failure?

For the cockroaches, success is measured one way.
For a stockbroker, success is measured by money.
For a farmer, harvesting healthy vegetables and fruits.
For a lover, a kiss.
For the paratrooper, jumping invisibly behind enemy lines, without getting snarled up in the lines.
For a singer, a song that lifts the soul.

The root of success is to leave all notions of success behind.
And when one of my personalities craves success, to kindly humor it.
Success is leaving this mad talk inside the brain, and surrendering to the love that manifests
as squash and computers and cleaning floors and spider webs.
Loving lovers, and being alert on the highway.
Forgetting success, and remembering who we are,
moment by moment,

success is a fantasy, and which of us can speak of success
when we are living in a dream?

This used to be a fox....or maybe it still is a fox, only in another manifestation.
I used to be a spiritual person.
I used to know who i was.
I used to consider myself a failure at times.
And sometimes a wonderful caring man.
And sometimes a pitiful neurotic basket case.
Brilliant, intelligent, far seeing and wise.
Short sighted, lost in momentary pleasure.
I’ve been it all.
And a lot of it i’m not proud of.
Some of what i have been proud of seems about as solid as this fox.
I’m disintegrating.
I’d like it to happen before, i return to the earth,
fur and bones.