Enough with Theology—at Last!
Tell me please, dear soul,
when you walk upon the Earth
do the soles of your feet
touch your mother with your heart?
And when you walk with this love
do you not find pleasure and joy
in caressing her with your every step?
Do you not walk deliberately
like the tortoise
offering prayers of gratitude
for the gifts of air and water and soil
for food and the companionship of kinship
with the rooted ones
four legged and winged and swimmers
and crawling ones too?
Do you not nourish your life
your very spirit with this loving embrace
of sole and soil and soul?
Does not this embrace
bring alive within you
eyes and mind innately drawn
to mystery and curiosity, beauty and belonging?
Tell me please, dear one,
does this not make you a practitioner
of the world’s oldest religion,
the original religion of love
of awe and wonder too,
the Mother religion?
Now please, tell me too,
what more theology
might anyone ever need?
“If our religion is based on salvation,
our chief emotions will be fear and trembling.
If our religion is based on wonder, our chief emotion will be gratitude.”
— Carl Jung
Dedication: Two dear friends walked slowly with me through the forest recently as this poem came to me, though neither was with me in body. And so it is to each of you I dedicate the inner revealing this poem is for me. You each inspire me with your walking upon Earth ‘like a tortoise.’ Thank you, Robin (Roby) Easton, author of Naked in Eden, and Emmanuel Karisa Baya, co-founder with his wife, Jescar Mbuche, of the Magarini Children Center and Organic Demonstration Farm, in Kenya. Emmanuel is also the author of a paper i shall soon post, and a philosophy, Peace From the Soil.
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Robin Easton
02/03/2019 at 11:12 pmOhhhh, dear Larry, I have visited and experienced this poem several times since the day that you shared it. I still cannot read it….feel it….without tears running. I have pondered what it is I feel that brings tears. I do know that the tears are right and true. I think your ability to see and so generously honor….what you see….is very profound for me. I have seen tears in my deer’s eyes when I spoke such tenderness with them. They too know Love and connection, soul to soul, Life knows….ITself. And you honor what is alive and whole and vibrant and yearning and ‘right’…soooooo exquisitely, so beautifully. Your honoring and sharing what you experience and feel…comes from one who ‘knows’, heart and soul, the intimate, tender, yearning for the Ultimate Connection, the Sweetest Love….possible. Yes….all theology, all religions, spiritual traditions are all but invisible to me…in the overwhelming Love of my connection to the Living Earth, to Infinite Stars and the Great Unknown….everything else is insignificant. Forgive me, dear soul, if that sounds rude, but just is….what happens to me. Yes, dear, dear friend, I am in tears. In some of Earth’s most remote places, hundreds of miles ‘away from’, I have laid my bare body upon the Living Earth and wailed the sweet agony of my return ‘Home’, my return to my Right Place. Some feelings are sooooo huge…they need wailing. Thank you for this beautiful honoring of me, Emmanuel, yourself, all of us who yearn to return ‘Home’.
Jean Sampson
02/04/2019 at 3:44 amLarry had beautifully and honestly written about you, the person who is one with Nature and all liveing beings, including the ones that we usually do not consider liveing, such as rocks. So beautiful and so true, <3 <3