Living Forward, leaving our dead-past behind

I age into olding years, and my mind forgets what I did yesterday or--smoke!
--already forgot I turned on the broiler 10 minutes ago.
Even the name of my favorite poet won’t show up in my mind, and I have to go over
to one of our many bookshelves and run my fingers down until a biography of her shows up.
Good grief.

Yet in the middle of the many a sleepless night, my brain harps on mistakes, also-ran diligent efforts, regrets, tragedies of 30, 40, 50 years ago...

So it was serendipitous that recently I came across an old Walt Whitman poem—“O Living always...”


O LIVING always—Always dying!
O the burials of me past and present,
O me while I stride ahead, material, visible, imperious as ever;
O me, what I was for years, now dead, (I lament not, I am
content;)
O to disengage myself from those corpses of me, which I turn
and look at where I cast them,
To pass on, (O living! always living!) and leave the corpses
behind.

--Walt Whitman

I’m not imperious, and am confused why Whitman would still be wielding such a corpse-creating wrong.

BUT I do find myself dragging untold numbers of heavy former corpses—chained to me now, dragging me down and backward—
as I struggle up life’s sisyphusian mountain crag.

And dragging dead 'me’s' is far more difficult than rolling a large rock like the Greek did.

So, in this new year of 2019, every day, I resolved and am working each day to cut loose more past 'me’s'
the dead ashed lapses of the past,
and cast them backward into
the before n’ gone chasm.

Rejoicing in growing Redwood sprouts I planted in the past, here and now, I am--

LIVING FORWARD!

LIVING THE A’S

AWAKE
AWARE
AMAZED
AWED
ALERT
ANALYTICAL
ALTRUISTIC
ARDENT
AVID
ADVANCE

To become new in the present moment, not be a corpse’d has been—regressing, regretting, reverting…

As the wise teacher Thich Nhat Hanh wrote:

In the Light,

Daniel Wilcox

Awake to Seek

Wake

Up and suit yourself,

Into the floundering pattern-mudded

Consciousness of this our finite skin---

Into a being 'berthed' bemused, beseemed morning

So like the proverbial hog, the typical sow of the round ring

Who as life's suitors are led about by their snouted 'knows;'

Beshrewed, besotted, bemired so we instinctively grunt,

Following our sensual, careening awareness

Or our dutiful grindstoned routine,

We press our life's suit 'til evening

Or wallow down

To our suited

Wake.



by Daniel Wilcox

First pub. in Moria Poetry

--


in the time of Darkness

to commune with the Ultimately Real
in the midst of our utter loss
in the darkened night of alone
to contemplate despite a soon demise,
to live in the Infinite's silence
deafens our wayward heart and leaves
our confused mind bereft;
the Divine answers no pleas
our anguished request left--

Selah

to hope against midnight's despair
to trust in all that is blessedly Fair,
so Beautiful, Right, Good and Just
despite our world history of horror
for naught, and absurd;
we seek
a slight glimmer
of the billion-lighted
meaning shimmering briefly
in our finite reason and creative awareness,
before the cosmos spun into place,
eternally ever always
Ultimate
Becoming.

Selah

In the Light,

Daniel Wilcox