Polish The Prized Gift

Celebrate life and death within each taken breath. Begin to know each leaf, each pebble, every bud, every thorn that’s laid upon your path. Greet all with wonder and marvel inside the big world that can be found within a child's eyes. Be inclusive and not exclusive in the way you greet all things animate and inanimate. Give them room to form themselves within your mind. Try to see love in a thick mud hole and anger in an over ripe pear. Listen to the ocean and hear all of time afloat in a corked bottle. Watch a flock of birds fly in a circle and know that gravity pulls where everything revolves around a center; a pin-point between life and death, and that you are at that apex day and night. Be joyous about your breath and rejoice for the living pulse in all things, for every molecule is breathing the same breath in the whole of life. Love the stream, the river and the sea: all water is blood and blood is water within you and me.

Find the hidden metaphor in each grain of sand, each leaf within the wind, every road walked from beginning to end. Give tribute to even the dust on tabletops and the smallest pain within the heart until it stops. Let nothing go untouched, unnoticed in the sky or on the ground or deep within the sea. Remember the scent of an April mist or a lost lover to eternity. Taste a snowflake or a raindrop at the tip of your tongue. Listen to a brook sing a lullaby in its babbled bubbling song, carried along over rocks and rills. Feel your way around in night’s stumbling-black just to know your own blindness beyond the ends of your fingertips. Stand in a canyon and yell out your lover’s name in lament to feel the echo return to press against you like the resounding stones. Touch the growing velvet-felt on a moss covered wall and know the glory that is to be touched and noted in every liberated breath. So breathe and be the poet with every tick or flick in time. Look into the darkness that holds the stars along with the timeless slip of moon. See the whispered passing, and know the ghost of yourself dissolved onto a sheet of paper to remind the world to weep and laugh.

© RH Peat 8/16/09 10:49am

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