You there.
Have you forgotten something?
Something about choosing?
Look around: is this the world you promised yourself?

I want to know who you could become
if the conditions were just right.
I want to know the you that's possible
with just enough thunder
and just enough sun.

Who taught you the human smile,
and did it ever land
in the living tissues of your human heart
beating miracles for free -
or is your face always onstage?

When you speak do you hear that one
as the oldest friend
since your microcosmic firework of conception,
which made creatures of the earth and sky alike
shudder with jollity and not know why,

or does your own voice
still sound to you like a stranger?
I want to know if you need permission
to arrive home right now
into your body longing to learn you.

Do you know breath as always a holy door?
Who are you when you breathe
down deep, at last allowed to feel it all,
and your hair bursts into flame, and you remember:

we don't choose once and it's over,
but are asked to re-engage in every instant.
Look around: this very world
needs your arrival now, like sun
and like thunder, now and now and now.

​    - Brooke McNamara

You will have to decide
if you want this--
want the blessing
that comes to you
on an ordinary day
when you are minding
your own path,
bent on the task before you
that you have done
a hundred times,
a thousand.

You will have to choose
for yourself
whether you will attend
to the signs,
whether you will open your eyes
to the searing light, the heat,
whether you will open
your ears, your heart
to the voice
that knows your name,
that tells you this place
where you stand--
this ground so familiar
and therefore unregarded--
is, in fact,
holy.

​You will have to discern
whether you have
defenses enough
to rebuff the call,
excuses sufficient
to withstand the pull
of what blazes before you;
whether you will
hide your face,
will turn away
back toward--
what, exactly?​

​No path from here
could ever be
ordinary again,
could ever become
unstrange to you
whose seeing
has been scorched
beyond all salving.

You will know your path
not by how it shines
before you
but by how it burns
within you,
leaving you whole
as you go from here
blazing with
your inarticulate,
your inescapable
yes.
​
    - Jan Richardson

If not now
when? Who will sing
the praises of this place
if not you?
Can you make love
with limp excuses?
Just one word
in your own voice
would cock the heads of robins,
but today they listen only to worms.
Every morning
a thousand birds
give the world a chorus of themselves
without hesitation or regret.
All through the day
the trees and sky
speak in the hushed voices of lovers,
and in the night
the grasses sigh in the warm hands
of the evening breeze
while fireflies flash their honest love
to the distant stars passing overhead.
When you are ready, 
join the conversation--
It still needs the strong and delicate
sound of your voice.

    - Thomas Griffin

​Dawn has never broken.
She is very much in one piece,
and what a piece!
If you're lucky, you'll catch her where she lives,
Between black and white.
But you'd better pay attention.
She's a tease and won't suffer fools
So keep your eyes open.

And watch her slip on that gentle orange dress with the pink sash.
And watch her slip out night's window, no one the wiser.
And watch her do her exotic dance between heaven and earth
Heating
Heating
Heating to the burning point
Until she's got you so dizzy you close your eyes for 20 seconds.

When you open them
She's gone.

And all that remains is gentle laughter
Just beyond the horizon.

​    - Lee Brewster

Let's be clear about this:
It isn't the same as being sick
and getting better. It isn't 
changing your mind at the last minute
or pushing away from the brink.
The only way to be born again
is to die. The Phoenix doesn't just
go up in a blaze of glory. It
feels the fire lick up and sizzle
every feather, until each quill becomes
a column of flame carried straight to the core.
Whatever the legend of re-birth, there is always
time in the fire, under the ground,
hanging on the cross or the tree.
Don't skip over that part of the story.
If you would be reborn, you have to die.
But what then? After the dying
how are we to rise again into new life?
The earth, the hero, the god, you and I--
how does any of us find our way back
from the Valley of the Shadow?
The same way we die:
Walk into the light.

​    - Lynn Ungar

Deliver us, O Truth, O Love, from quiet prayer
from polite and politically correct language,
from appropriate gesture and form
and whatever else we think we must put forth to invoke
or to praise You.

Let us instead pray dangerously –
wantonly, lustily, passionately.
Let us demand with every ounce of our strength,
let us storm the gates of heaven, let us shake up ourselves
and our plaster saints from the sleep of years.

Let us pray dangerously.
Let us throw ourselves from the top of the tower,
let us risk a descent to the darkest region of the abyss,
let us put our head in the lion’s mouth
and direct our feet to the entrance of the dragon’s cave.

Let us pray dangerously.
Let us not hold back a little portion,
dealing out our lives–our precious minutes and our energies–like some efficient accountant.
Let us rather pray dangerously — unsafe, profligate, wasteful!

Let us ask for nothing less than the Infinite to ravage us.
Let us ask for nothing less than annihilation in the
Fires of Love.

Let us not pray in holy half-measures nor walk
the middle path
for too long,
but pray madly, foolishly.
Let us be too ecstatic,
let us be too overwhelmed with sorrow and remorse,
let us be undone, and dismembered…and gladly.

Left to our own devices, ah what structures of deceit
we have created;
what battlements erected, what labyrinths woven,
what traps set for ourselves, and then
fallen into. Enough.

Let us pray dangerously — hot prayer, wet prayer, fierce prayer,
fiery prayer, improper prayer,
exuberant prayer, drunken and completely unrealistic prayer.

Let us say Yes, again and again and again.
and Yes some more.
Let us pray dangerously,

the most dangerous prayer is YES. 

    - Regina Sara Ryan​

​Friend, hope for the Guest while you are alive.
Jump into experience while you are alive!
Think... and think... while you are alive.
What you call 'salvation' belongs to the time before death.

If you don't break your ropes while you're alive,
do you think
ghosts will do it after?

The idea that the soul will join with the ecstatic
just because the body is rotten -
that is all fantasy.
What is found now is found then.
If you find nothing now,
you will simply end up with an apartment
in the City of Death.
If you make love with the divine now, in the next life
you will have the face of satisfied desire.
So plunge into the truth, find out who the Teacher is,
believe in the Great Sound!

Kabir says this: When the Guest is being search for,
it is the intensity of the longing for the Guest
that does all the work.
Look at me, and you will see a slave of that intensity.

    - Kabir, translation by Robert Bly

...Want only what is true.
This will lead you to the well of your deepest sorrows.
Follow that passageway, all the way down;
Become the dark emptiness of your absent core.
Be still. Don't measure the waiting.
Be still. Let the waiting become a fire.
Be still. Let the fire show you its secret heart;
a strand of clear light running through you.
Gather yourself there, and the luminous universe opens.
In the vast expanse, fathomless, infinite ocean of light,
Lose yourself, and find yourself, and become what you already are.

    - Jennifer Welwood

Is the question from the back of the room; I cannot
Quite see the student asking it, but it’s deep-voiced
And challenging and I assume it’s a guy. Because I
Want to rub music and language together and gawk
At the flames, I say. Because poetry, if it takes fire,
Cracks people’s masks, and assaults arrogance, and
Sucks you beneath the surface of words towards why
We use them. Because we have been singing before
There ‘were’ words and it’s healthy to remember that.
Because the great poems are about you and me both
And there is damned little we will be able to discuss
In the normal flow of the river and it’s good for both
Of us to stand together quietly for a while in a poem.
Because why the hell not ? What is it exactly that we
Should count as time better spent ? You cannot spare
Two minutes for a poem ? Sure, it might be pompous
Arty muck, and you demand your two minutes back,
But what if it isn’t ? What if it shivers you, or startles
You awake, or makes you weep remembering a time
When you sang all day too, and everything was made
Of music and light and colors and slabs of shimmer ?
‘What if’, brother – that’s my answer to your question.

    - Brian Doyle

​Belonging is a river
not a goal.
Every point is holy--
but you cannot linger there
without losing yourself
for you are the motion
of your journey.
No idea,
no attainment,
no goal,
can encompass
the truth
which lives only as it dies
into new life.
You are the pain--
let it go.
You are the joy--
let it go.
You are actions taken and not taken--
let them go.
You are the dream--
let it go.
Move with the mark
of the unknown upon you
and life will enter your blood like a river.
This world was always holy
and you were always a rising flame
upon its altar.

​    - Bernadette Miller