We are living in extraordinary times.  Our understanding of life as a planet-wide, delicate, yet creatively responsive phenomena, is becoming clearer than ever, while at the same time, we humans seem to marching, robot fashion, into an authoritarian form of money driven governance that makes the novels of Brave New World and 1984 seem almost benign. 

 
In September of 2000, I wrote a poem called “Sufficient Love to See”.  So much has happened since then.  America as an institution, has come out of the closet and revealed itself to be a morally bankrupt, authoritarian, military-industrial golem/bully –  the shadow side of its original aspiration for freedom, justice and respect for all.  The global financial system has shown itself to be the alliance of blind delusion, greed and fear that it really is.  Nature, in all her unimaginable vastness and complexity is increasingly reminding us where we really stand.  All of this could be simply overwhelming or it could be just the spur that each of us needs, not to fuel the fires of anxiety,  desperation and grasping for certainty, but to grow our roots even deeper into the loam of  living sanity.  (The original version of this poem can be found in “A Sheaf of Poems 1991 – 2000”, in the Green Dharma Treasury section on Poetry.)

Sufficient Love to See

The path of awakening is all around you.
It is the life you are living.
It is the place where you are.
It is the mind that is experiencing.

Just pause and allow the looking to deepen.
the hearing,
the smelling
the tasting,
the touching,
the thinking.

Do you have sufficient love to see?
That’s a big question!

Feel the fullness of being;
within and around,
awake, responsive, engaging;
It’s everyone.
A living tapestry of infinite depth and dimension.

When the heart is flowering . . .
When curiosity is working its wondrous mystery in the very fabric of one’s body . . .
When interest and question are probing, caressing, fathoming;
teasing out with endless appreciation the richness of ‘other’ . . .
When the doorways of sensing are wide open, allowing lightness;
the joy of discovery . . .

Then . . .
We experience wherever we are to be a treasure,
bursting prison walls of alienation and self absorption,
a flood of joy, cascading forth,
watering the wholesome seeds of everyone.