Wednesday, October 24, 2012

You Must Breathe



















Image: origin unknown

When there is thick, soft silt below your feet
and water
dense and long overhead,
re-member that you must breathe.

You must fill your lungs.

You must rise, at some point,
and breathe.

This being human requires
that we let something
of this world
in.


© 2012-2020/Jamie K. Reaser
From "Coming Home: Learning to Actively Love this World"
Published by Talking Waters Press

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Tuesday, October 23, 2012

The Rhythm















Photo: (c) Jamie K. Reaser

We’ve all heard
our mother’s heart beat
from beneath her skin.

This is our rhythm –
an inherited sense
of right and righteous timing.

“Home” and “Not Home”
are sequences, patterns,
familiar and unfamiliar.

All your life,
memory has been
the drummer –
and you’ve marched.

Has it served you well –
This rhythm?
This onward march?

Recently, I’ve been lying
on the Earth in fetal position –

and listening.

This is when I really re-member
that sound, this feeling.

This is when I re-member the
ancient rhythms of
The Mother.

This is when I know
I no longer need to
march.

This is when I know
I’m Home –

Everywhere,
and always.

The First Mother
would have embodied
this rhythm.

Somewhere down the line
someone missed
a beat,

And we’ve all been missing
it ever since.

So profoundly missing it.

Now.

Head upon The Heart.

It’s up to us to re-member.

Head upon The Heart?

Cheek on bark or moss or stone.

Are you listening?

This is what the future
will hear.

~ Jamie K. Reaser, Author
Published in "Coming Home: Learning to Actively Love this World"

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Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Consumed by Death















Photo: (c) Jamie K. Reaser

Sometimes Death leaves us
there, at roadside,
without apology
or explanation.

Stillness resides in nothing
but our form,
all else whizzes past
with agendas.

The palm of my right hand
has known the pulse of the
very last heart beat
beneath feathers and fur,
and skin that I watched wrinkle
for twenty-seven years.

This is my decision:

I don’t want to be abandoned
by Death –

I want to be devoured.

I want to be taken into
Death’s wet, gnashing mouth
as a wanton carcass,

insatiable in my desire
to surrender.

I want to be consumed
in my entirety,
to be nothing to which
to attach a eulogy to.

I want to depart this world
with less than I brought
into it.

When the last morsel of me
can be described as nothing
more than the last tidbit
swallowed by Death,

then, I will know,

then, I will know,

yes, I will know,

My life had been juicy enough.


© 2012-2014/Jamie K. Reaser
From "Coming Home: Learning to Actively Love this World"
To be published by Homebound Publications in October 2015