The Sweetest of All Virtues
He pushed and pushed and pushed
her with callous indifference, and she
retreated and retreated and retreated into
a fortress of martyr-less forgiveness,
leaving him to anguish her decision to
stay or leave him, despite his risky health
condition; and he could no longer push
her with his witless conceit, because she
was not there to bear it, dutifully present
but morally impregnable—the sweetest
of all virtues, patience; and the fear
of God possessed him.
The Spirit of the Depths
Lecture after lecture after lecture,
podcast after podcast after podcast, and
interview after interview after interview
he says a variation, or brilliant iteration,
of the same old truths, forging, forging,
and more forging, forever forging new
rules to live by to find the way to his,
and our true self (he has forged 24 rules
so far; 12 to ward off the chaos, and 12
more for good measure); it’s getting
quite
fatiguing, listening to him speaking,
and I`m wondering why I even bother.
But being a memoirist and a poet, I have
to stay abreast of today`s thought process,
and bring some measure of clarity to
the spirit of the depths.
I began to find it difficult to swallow,
and I wondered why. Was the cause physical,
or metaphysical? Or did the metaphysical
cause the physical? I sat back and pondered
my predicament, and I saw that some people
were so blissfully ensconced in their ego
that I could not swallow who they were,
or what they had to say, a prejudice that got
me thinking about my physical condition;
and as painful as it was for me to swallow,
I knew that I had to let people be who they
were, however annoying they could be; and
when I stopped judging people, my trouble
swallowing began to disappear.
A New Karmic Awakening
There will always be a need for religion,
because there are no atheists in the foxholes
of life; but COVID-19, from wherever
it has come, from a wet market in
Wuhan
or bio lab, was sent by the gods to expand
our awareness of our existential predicament
and posit a new premise for our being, from
the primal conceit of selfish living that willful
anti-vaxxers refuse to admit, to communal
empathy and partaking; and as COVID-19
displaces the blind crutch of religion, a new
karmic awakening will guide us through
the grief of this merciful pandemic.
The Most Precious Diamonds
I watched a movie on Netflix this morning,
Blood Diamond, a heart-wrenching story
of Danny Archer’s quest to smuggle a precious
pink diamond out of Sierra Leone with Solomon
Vandy, who dug it up after his family was
scattered, his hometown ravaged, and he was
forced into slave labor at an illegal mining
operation in Sierra Leone run by the Revolutionary
United Front. Solomon hides the precious pink
diamond in the sand, but word gets out about it,
and Danny Archer, an amoral 31-year-old South
African former mercenary who deals in smuggling
illegal diamonds, wants to start a new life with
the precious pink diamond that he bargains with
Solomon if he can reunite him with his family;
and as in all good adventure stories, Danny Archer
falls for Maddy Bowen, a liberal American war
journalist digging for a big story on the illegal
diamond industry. But when Danny and Solomon
recover the precious pink diamond, as well as
Solomon’s ten-year-old son who was turned into
a boy soldier by the blood-thirsty revolutionary
army, which nearly cost them their life going back
to Sierra Leone to retrieve the precious pink
diamond, Danny could not flee to safety with
Solomon and his son. Critically wounded, he calls
Maddy on his mobile phone and shares his last
words with her, how it might have been for them
under different circumstances, and the story
is brought to bitter-sweet resolution with Solomon
selling the precious pink diamond for millions
and getting his family back from the refugee camp.
and Mandy getting the full story on the corrupt
diamond trade industry. It would’ve been a happy
ending had Danny not died; but he did die, and
his last words to Maddy spoke to his change
of heart that Solomon’s love for his family had
impacted, and in that moment of self-redemption,
I saw with poetic clarity that the most precious
diamonds in the world are not pure crystals
of carbon atoms formed deep within the Earth’s
crust over millions of years under conditions
of intense heat and pressure, but the crystalized
meaning of our own individual life-stories formed
under the daily heat and pressure of the human
condition, which Danny Archer’s courageous life
symbolized when he sacrificed it for Solomon
Vandy and his precious family.
A Grotesque Parody
The more I got into the movie
Don’t Look Up, the less real it seemed
to me, and soon it became a satire
of the human predicament; but the movie
went further, and it soon evolved
from a satire into parody, and I laughed
at the genius of the plotline. But the
parody grew so dark it became grotesque,
and I came away from that movie feeling
like I had been treated like a fool,
and out of five stars I gave it two, but
only for its star performers.
The Right Frame of Mind
The time is quickly approaching when
the veils of life will lift, and the barriers
to love and understanding will fade
away; but until that time comes, the polar
opposites will continue to play.
It’s to the nature of our soul’s evolution
to grow from seed to its own fruit-bearing
tree; but as distinct as each globe of soul
fruit may be, the taste will always be the
same goodness of life-giving service.
It’s all about attitude, the right frame
of mind that sets soul free from the prison
of its ego/shadow personality; and it matters
not which path we take in life, they all
lead to the same place eventually.
