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January 7, 2022
Why wait until 71?
By Gary Lindorff
71 years ago I was born. / My soul chose to be born. / And, what's more, I was born 71 years ago with a dream.
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71 years ago I was born.
My soul chose to be born.
And, what's more, I was born 71 years ago with a dream.
You know how hard it is to remember dreams?
I think that is true for the dreams we are born with.
But, fortunately, our souls never forget.
That's a good thing and it should be enough,
But often we also forget that we have a soul!
We may even be embarrassed by the suggestion
That such a thing as a soul is more than just a fluffy metaphor.
Imagine! But how could we forget such a thing.
But it's not so much that we forget we have a soul,
But we get caught up in all the drama of life
Because it seems like that's all there is
And the soul gets pushed aside
Like a homeless person.
But there she is, standing by the road
In the cold, holding a hand-written sign that says,
"Please stop. I am your soul."
Or "Your dream for food."
But you don't stop. Sometimes you don't even slow down.
For 40 or 50 years I mean, we don't slow down!
But then the drama of life begins to sour and fade
And something triggers our memory of our birth-dream.
Like maybe we get word that someone
That we haven't seen since childhood just died,
And all the drama, in spite of all the hype and fanfare
Doesn't seem all that important for the moment.
Somebody said to watch for a surprise in the credits.
So we watch the credits scroll for another 5 years.
But then, if we are lucky,
There is a soft knock on the door. It's our soul
And she or he says, "I have something for you."
And that can happen to people late in life.
The sad part is we might have to grow old
Before our soul comes home. Or even sadder,
We wait for all the credits to end
And there is no surprise, and only then,
When we are staring at a blank screen,
Do we realize, there is more to life than drama.
Much, much more.
(Article changed on Jan 08, 2022 at 1:00 PM EST)
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.