I just read a piece by Josh Mitteldorf on Shanthi, which I really recommend reading. This poem does not have much Shanthi in it. It is written at the edge of the dualistic universe where many of us are poised at a kind of door. What if all the alarm clocks in the United States went off at once? I think we are almost at that point.

::::::::

If this matters,
does that also have to matter?

If this is true
then what about that,
which is (or was?) also true?

Can't those two truths
walk side by side
for a while longer?

That used to be the case,
when there was more time

And more truth.

Maybe it's just me, but
I thought as I got older
that there would be
less and less to argue about.
But instead,
there is more.

And there is less.

The world has crabs.
It has butterflies.
And it has people walking upside down,
sideways
and backwards.
But it's not a circus anymore.

It's a sideshow.

And nowhere,
(as if it matters)
is there a perfect person,
only perfect fools.

There is a peg
on which to hang all our failures.

And there is a door to open.

And there is an opportunity
to walk out
into a world that badly needs us
to understand something,
quick.

The fact is,
if we don't comprehend
what we need to do,
there will be no more crabs.

There will be no more butterflies.

And if we don't figure this out,
and I mean fast!,
we're going to find out
that we're really not that important.

And if that happens
then it will also be true
that we never were.

(Article changed on March 3, 2019 at 14:42)

Authors Website: https://garylindorff.wordpress.com

Authors Bio:

Gary Lindorff is a poet, writer, blogger and author of five nonfiction books, three collections of poetry, "Children to the Mountain", "The Last recurrent Dream" (Two Plum Press), "Conversations with Poetry (coauthored with Tom Cowan), and a memoir, "Finding Myself in Time: Facing the Music". Lindorff calls himself an activist poet, channeling his activism through poetic voice. He also writes with other voices in other poetic styles: ecstatic, experimental and performance and a new genre, sand-blasted poems where he randomly picks sentence fragments from books drawn from his library, lists them, divides them into stanzas and looks for patterns. Sand-blasted poems are meant to be performed aloud with musical accompaniment.


He is a practicing dream worker(with a strong, Jungian background) and a shamanic practitioner. His shamanic work is continually deepening his partnership with the land. This work can assume many forms, solo and communal, among them: prayer, vision questing, ritual sweating, and sharing stories by the fire. He is a born-pacifist and attempts to walk the path of non-violence believing that no war is necessary or inevitable.