asleep...waking...woke

 

Some things to ponder about waking up: 

The Official C.S. Lewis Group (Facebook)

Was CS Lewis a believing Christian or a mystical Christian?

Sloan Bashinsky

A mystic has direct experience with what Christians call God, and with angels, and even with demons, and so the mystic does not believe any longer, but knows such exist. For example, St. Francis of Assisi, Saint Anthony of the Desert, St. John of the Cross. There have been mystics in other religions, such as the Sufi Rumi, and his spiritual teacher Shams. Mystics tend to feel kinda like the kid born on Mars in Robert Heinlein’s book, STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND. Was CS Lewis a mystic? I don’t know, but he truly was a remarkable man, and perhaps, like some mystics, he simply kept to himself that he was having direct experiences with supernatural beings.

Here’s a link to a novel by a mystic, me: HEAVY WAIT: A Strange Tale. Free read, no ads.

https://archive.org/details/heavy-wait-a-strange-tale_202212/mode/2up    

Poetic Outlaws (Facebook)
“When a writer is swayed with his fame and his fortune, you can float him down the river with the turds. ”
― Charles Bukowski 

 

Poetic Outlaws (Facebook)

The Waking

By: Theodore Roethke

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.

I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?

I hear my being dance from ear to ear.

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close behind me, which are you?

God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,

And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?

The lonely worm climbs up a winding stair;

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do

To you and me; so take the lively air;

And, lovely, learn by going where to go.
This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

I learn by going where I have to go. 

Sloan Bashinskky

I also found waking up, so to speak, was a journey with lots of twists and turns and missteps and surprises and moving forward. A few poems that fell out of me in the early 1990s seemed to forecast how it would be going for me. Here's the first. 

 

Dead poets are poets who never write

Who obey shoulds and oughts

Who live to please others

Who value money over God

Who die without ever having lived

Death is their mark

Dead poets are remembered by the living

Living poets are remembered by time

Dead poets never sing their song

Living poets nover stop singing it

The difference between the two is this:

One worships fear, the other life 

 

To be a dead poet is hard

It requires being someone else

To be a living poet is easy

It only means being myself

One choice is hell, the other heaven

That is what is meant by free will

The American right, fueled by Donald Trump, delights in calling the American left names, such as socialists, communists, woke. 

Yet, have the American right ever lived in a real socialist or communist country? 

Have they ever experienced the cleansing of the Lord promoted in the New Testament Letter to the Hebrews? 

Have they ever experienced the baptism in fire and in Spirit of the Jesus in the Gospels? 

Does the American right have any clue what being woke really is?

As for the American left, led by Joe Biden ...

I heard a funny report many years ago about a wandering tribe in America called the Fukawis, who were forever getting lost and gathering in a circle and sitting down and holding hands closing their eyes and chanting, "Where the fuck are we?! Where the fuck are we?!"

Meanwhile, here's the second poem that fell of me in the early 1990s and suggested where I was headed:

I happened upon a mockingbird

singing his fool head off.

I asked him how and why he sang?

But all he did was look ahead,

all he did was sing.

He never turned to see if I was watching,

Or listened for money jingling in my pockets,

Or asked if I liked his music,

Or expected a recording contract.

He was too busy singing

to pay any attention to me.

Thus did I learn

the greatest sin of all

is to kill a mockingbird. 

And here's the third:

Who invented the rule that poetry must rhyme, have pentameter, be cast into verse? Yes, please tell me who, just  who, invented that really silly rule? Surely it wasn't the maker of the first stone - otherwise, there'd be no stones to break all those slavin' rules!

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com