New poem: "The Great River of Life"

 

 

The Great River of Life

 

Watching a podcast this morning—Paul VanderKlay’s

“Comparing Notes on the Rise and Remains of the Jordan

Peterson Phenomenon,” a zealous young podcaster talking

with the older, seasoned podcaster—an image suddenly

popped into my mind of two very spirited talkative men

in a canoe paddling upstream in a river of very fast-flowing

water; and no matter how hard they paddled, they weren’t

getting anywhere. The poetic image spoke to me, telling

me what I refused to see. As hard as they paddled against

the currents of the Great River of Life, I could see they

weren’t making any headway, despite all the progress they

felt they were making. I knew this, because with Gurdjieff’s

imperative of conscious effort and intentional suffering

I had “worked” my way through the most powerful currents

of the Great River of Life and found my own individual way

to the headwaters of my true self in the Body of God, the

Great Ocean of Love and Mercy where all new souls come

from and are destined to return to when life has made us

ready. And as I watched the eager podcasters paddling like

mad comparing notes on the trail-blazing iconoclast whose

book “12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos” inspired

my own book “One Rule to Live By: Be Good,” I saw that I

was wasting my time; and I stopped watching the podcast

and got on with the rest of my day, reading some Hirshfield

poetry from her new book The Asking, editing my new book,

We May be Tiny but We’re Not Small for an hour or so, and

then I went out to our back yard and blew the new batch

of fall leaves that the howling winds had shed from

our stubborn oak trees last night.

 

Composed in Tiny Beaches,

Georgian Bay, Southcentral, Ontario

Wednesday, November 19, 2025