tangle

late night meditation, 01.25.17, 2/30

tonight, i gave in, and it — and i — felt so tiny, tired, weak.
i sat down to listen to God and write what i heard,
and instead i got pulled into
scrolling and scrolling and scrolling,
one horror after the next, apocalyptic proclamations,
our full human fear writ small: strange how
the end of all humanity can be compressed
into a status, a headline, 140 characters.

how does it come to this?
and how do i extricate myself from this swirl and drown
while still staying awake, facing hard truths, forging a heart
steely enough to call a lie a lie and
molten enough to blaze a path through walls and
elemental enough to recognize itself in every enemy?

here’s a hard truth, then: it’s looking more and more
like the thing i fear most is not the doomsday headlines,
but rather what i might hear if i just sat
in a dark room, in silence, inside my breath and heartbeat,
waiting for You to speak into my feverish uncertainty.
why is that the hardest thing of all?

i am, tonight and so many nights, like my own child,
who wakes up sweaty and half-drenched in dreams,
who cries out for comfort and a soft hand on her back,
who just wants to hear the Mother whisper
the promise, over and over, that everything will be alright.

rumi says, move outside the tangle of fear-thinking. live in silence.

he must have known how difficult it is to do this —
to move outside of fear, the sticky-sweet stifling web of it —
or he wouldn’t have transcribed it
from some (no doubt) divine interaction.
everything about rumi is like the best friend who loves you,
trying to shake you out of your stupor,
trying to tell you that God’s out on the step,
waiting for you to unlock the door.

it’s so late, and i am drunk with dread,
but i’m stumbling toward the threshold.