God I hate it when I just fall in love

12/29/2018

God I hate it
when I just fall in love with people
It can be so inconvenient and even debilitating
It’s like I see one…I mean really…s e e
and then that single original beautiful soul
can bring my life to a stop in appreciation

Might be a crawler or a limper
ragged man on a street corner with a sign or
a young woman wearing a baby and pushing a shopping cart or
some fellow with a worn ball cap and leather gloves and a weathered face
or it might be looking into the eyes of that bone scrawny starving baby
on the evening newscast from Yemen
that we all want to turn our eyes and overwhelmed care away from…
and suddenly I might as well
be gazing with awe into the heart of a flower

My heart just wants
to stop and send blessings and gratitude
sowing them like seeds
upon hungry lonely souls in the grocery store isles
thinking hoping perhaps

Someone maybe perhaps just one of ’em somewhere
might turn their attention and glimpse and notice
blossoming inside
this beauty I see in them
hiding within

Arising out of Earth and Sun
Moon and ten-billion-year-old Stars
weavings of ancestral fungi and bacteria
with a scattering of human cells thrown in
and now this rare opportunity in each of us
to become conscious—self-conscious
awake and aware

Isn’t that just such a beautiful thing
but it’s so darn inconvenient to a life of sleepwalking
disruptive to my life of busyness in service of worth and value
who will I become if I follow the joy of this wide open-heart
And will I even recognize the world unfolding before me
How shall I live with such inadequacy and wealth within

I fear I shall be so vulnerable
in a world gone mad
in a world where even the butterflies
need human love to survive

Notes: Here’s a recent article from the Washington Post: ‘Hyperalarming study shows massive insect loss‘.

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5 Comments

Sheelah
12/30/2018 at 6:44 pm

oh this Love-ing,,, bursting , blossoming,, wilting grieving, dying even, in to Love,, such an inconvenience this persisting vulnerable god-within who just Loves, everything, unstoppably Loves, worships even, , all of everything it creates . inconveniently stops, mid-stride, mid-breath, mid-sentence,, mid fall,, catches its own breath, gobsmacked at its own Love-childs xoxoxoox
Robin Easton
01/02/2019 at 12:49 am

Dear highly sensitive, Larry-Soul, 🙂 I’ve read this breathtaking poem many times, each time with awe and wonder. It speaks to me on SO many levels and ways that it’s taken time to feel all of its rich emotions. Like much of your BEAUTIFUL, living writing….this brought tears to my eyes. You not only took me on your stunning soul journey, but on a journey of my own.
When I came out of the Wild, Australian rainforest, NZ, Tassie, Arctic Alaska and far northern Maine (up near Baxter State Park), I had changed SO drastically and was so removed from who I’d once been and who people expected me to still be, so far removed from my own species and culture that I no longer knew how to fit in or connect. Way back then people couldn’t comprehend the life I’d lived, just as I once couldn’t have.
Even if I shared stories from my wild life, their eyes would glaze over (I might as well have been trying to describe life on a distant planet called ‘Zortec’). Lol 🙂 And, those who could comprehend it even a teeny bit, often shuddered in fear. I knew it was too much for them, too frightening (the way I had lived and the creatures I had lived with and handled).
Those first few years out of the wild, even though I live in my culture, I was SO isolated from it that I was sure I would never fit in. Then one day while snowshoeing alone in the Maine woods, tracking the almost-human prints of a small bear (out of hibernation), I stopped to listen to maple tree’s icy frozen branches…the rattle and creak like a ship at sea, speaking to me of cold retracted days. A gentle snow started to fall, as I spoke to ‘The Wild Voice’ I’d listened to and loved for years.
I asked, “How do I connect with my own kind? The life I’ve lived is so out of their realm of experience, just as it once was for me. I am too much for them. But I’d like to connect to my own kind, if I am going to be out here.”
I waited, silently with trees and falling snow. The Wild Voice spoke, “They do not need to see you and your Wild Life or where you have come from. YOU must see THEM. People often cannot feel something they have never known. Just love them…right where they are at, in their day-to-day lives, their trials and triumphs. Love freely, generously with everything you have. Love IS the only true Connection, Robin. It is what you seek, what we all seek. The rest is irrelevant.”
Ohhh, the sweet humbleness of it, the letting go and…..simply living….to Love.
I iknew the truth of it. I felt my own beating heart, and I knew, if nothing else, that I could Love. So simple, so easy for me. I could forget my own journey in the wild and trying to make THAT be the bridge. It would be decades before that would come.
As amazing as it was and is, the only true bridge is Love. Although I might share my story now, Love is always the priority, the compelling, tender force….there really is no story….only Love
Eventually, for me to love, REALLY love, everywhere I went, every soul I met, was my ‘Life Blood’, my connection to my own species….and to myself….in this culture. It became the connection I could carry with me and actively live when I went beyond The Wild World I know so well….and into the Wild World of Humans.
I soon discovered that I was vulnerable in the Wild World of Human….WITHOUT fully living this Love. That is still true today. I still HAVE to love, everything and everyone I touch and see. I am compelled to love. For me, to NOT love is to die.
Loving is what makes me Strong, my greatest strength.
You and your butterfly, and all of your exquisite emotions here confirm my choice…to love my way through the world. I think Love is the Greatest Force in the Universe.
Your poem here is deeply evocative for me, dear Larry. It speaks so highly of your beautiful, ponderous soul. I cry. Why? Because you exist! Your brilliance, your sensitivity, your compassion, your wisdom, your open heart, your LOVE of Life exists!! THAT is a miracle, Larry! After decades I now can speak with souls, like you and Sheelah, and Sabinananda and Cheryl and others who KNOW. I do not even have to speak, and you still S E E, dear Larry, and you still K N O W.
Much love and gratitude for all that you share with me and the others. You can’t imagine how grateful we are or how important you are to the Life Flow….with Us, and The Wild, and The Great Cosmos. So, so important. I am very serious, my friend.
—- I know this intensely long, and there is no need to pressure yourself to reply. It was a JOY and privilege to read you and share back.
Robin Easton
01/02/2019 at 12:56 am

Another stunningly brilliant aspect to this poem is this: “in a world where even the butterflies
need human love to survive” — To ponder that we humans are at a point in our evolution when we must remember how to LOVE the world we inhabit…for it and us to survive. Phew! That has ponderous and far reaching implications. You are such a profound ‘Seer’…seeing deeply, sensitively…fully.
Larry Glover
01/05/2019 at 5:59 pm

Oh dear Robin, I always treasure your comments and do this one as well.
I have read your comment here several times since you left it. It is so full of deep feeling and revelation, as all your writing is, that I need to sit with it a bit before responding in this way. You allow life inside at a depth of living and being that is rare among us domesticated humans; and so your reclaimation of your wild spirit is all the more special. I treasure this journey in myself as I know you do yours as well. And I just love your stories from your journeys and explorations… they are always stories of soul and spirit in the end, and always too bring me back home to myself in some deeper way. There is always a spirit of reclaimation of wholeness permeating out of your being… and for each of us, I sense that love is the weaver holding it all together. It is love through which meaning is ultimately distilled. Perhaps that is the ‘home coming.’ It is a treasure to hold you here in the home of my heart, dear Robin, and to be so reciprocally held by you.
Larry Glover
01/05/2019 at 6:07 pm

Oh Roby, these closing lines you identify in the poem ‘came late to me,’ that is, after I thought perhaps the poem was complete. Yet something haunted me about the ending…feeling not quite ‘cooked,’ until the in a world where even the butterflies
need human love to survive” emerged from the womb of invitation and reflection. And then I knew it was complete—for it was a revelation even to myself in the simple clarity and profound truth of it. In our world, where we’ve lost 76% of insects… our own survival is now indeed hinged to our ability to ‘love the butterflies.’ And the grasshoppers. And Ants. Spiders too…. Thank you Robin for our acknowledgement of this potency. Here’s the Washington Post Article: ‘Hyperalarming study shows massive insect loss.’ https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/10/15/hyperalarming-study-shows-massive-insect-loss/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.88576f63ebf8