I am in this world and of the greater universe at the same time. I am spirit and mind. This is a balance I can come to understand more fully by just being present to my life. What an amazing realization to follow and an almost unreal lightness to this awareness.

Respect and Honor

One should honor women.
Women are heaven, women are truth,
Women are supreme fire of transformation.
Women are Buddha, women are religious community,
Women are the perfection of wisdom.
--Candamaharosana-tantra Scripture
Reading about women and leadership in education is bringing me to more and more wonderful corners of knowledge. This is a passage that keeps bringing me to the truths about the ways women can be honored and respected by some cultures and religious practices. By digger deeper and deeper to find these ideas and ways in which building them into daily life is useful and healing, I’m able to uncover places that bring new lightness and understanding. What can be wrong in any circle of experience where we honor women and treat them as we would any who would bring us closer to truth and wisdom. . .even transformation if we are very attentive? I want to be a woman of wisdom that is welcomed into such a world. I want to be a creature of transformation with the power of supreme fire. I’m certain that kind of knowledge and action is within my reach if I can focus and move closer with each day of my experience of this life.

Near the Bottom of the Soul

Is it possible to find myself my true self
so near the bottom of the soul--
so empty the echo rings off the sides of this space
like the pebble dropping into a well
dug by hand
by one experienced
in longing?

I am so near empty tonight
even tears are hard to bring up
as witness to a life
unworthy of reflection.
Why cry when the slate is so blank?
Why mourn a loss unrecognized by no one?
What meaning can be found in nothing?

Alone, unaccounted for,
no one waits to hear the reverberations,
the sound that comes again from a call
into the darkness.

Looking up at death
is so easy.
Looking back on this life
I step away into the darkness
relieved of the body
searching for something soft to hold onto—
a child’s hand in the depth of night
probing for the comfort of warmth
of the breast or some small, sweet gesture
of humanity.

Tonight I keep death close
as a reminder
to breathe.