Who you think you are
and who I think I am
is similar to wind and trees
we sing songs of sixpence
we table our woes
so we can find them again someday
on the same table, for we never moved them,
still we are surprised to see them in the same spot after all these years
of sorting pepper shakers and salt shakers,
cayenne and black,
sugar and cinnamon,
we thought we had it all figured out
yet felt so enlivened to know we didn’t.
We were so alive once
when we knew nothing
of expert and student
doctor and patient
helper and helpee
even the very simple me and you.
The water streams down the rocks in any case
the wind blows the trees,
and then in an earthquake, perhaps,
the trees impact what we call wind.
Yet what we call wind is simply air and the forces that move it.
What I call me is a body and a spirit that moves it,
moves me to leap, to collapse,
to celebrate and mourn
all in the name of equality
whether it seems that way or not.
All in the name of mutuality with every single particle of existence
there ever was and ever will be
and every particle of life that is screaming
for liberation right now-
for example, an ant crawling across a field of grass–
I might call that ant slow, but how will I connect with the ant?
By watching, suspending my agenda,
and knowing that the spirit of the ant has value
is a gift for its existence alone.
It is existence right now that
liberates some cells in my heart, some
ineffable parts of me–
etheric, ethereal, and for me the most real,
for the ether is more expansive than the earth and
doctor/patient
helper/helpee
expert student
are figments of our collective imagination
as we circle around our very own version of an ant farm,
or so it may look like from above or afar.
I’m whispering all these secrets to you to move closer to now
to move closer to a we that is not you or me–
yet what troubles me is when I lose this very magic
when trauma takes over and grips me,
telling me there is no now,
telling me safety is in a bottle or a can
or a title or a billfold
or a binder or an embrace.
I cry sometimes because my safety always comes
in the form of an embrace or a feather,
something so far from the future
and indifferent to the past
yet there are things from the past that come back to save me
there are tears I have yet to cry,
for this love we moves towards,
it takes time.
There’s so much to unravel, even when at moments all is simple
and straight, blissful and heartfelt
there are more knots to untie
as we have all separated so much,
the hierarchy can look so real
my tears get delayed
in the name of “sanity” or “reality” or
the honest word: conformity.
I am a conformist like any other
yet when I cry, I cry for the piece of each of us
that is not.
Connection is this,
this “insanity,” this
wildness, madness if you will–
this love that will not stop at anything
and knows the “we” I yearn for when I play any role.
When I sing any song.
II.
Tempting it can be to correct or deliver “peer run services”
yet peer once meant two individuals with a similar world view
and now it means nothing
and perhaps the word “peer” was never anything
but an assumption,
an evaluation,
an assessment that you are like me
and perhaps we are exactly alike in one way
and completely different in another.
So peers must be all of us or none of us
so doctors are peers
teachers are peers
police officers are peers
ants, babies, blades of grass…
where do we draw the line if a line must be drawn?
It’s always all or nothing
yet it’s never all or nothing
and reality can contradict itself
so many times it becomes madness
and we diagnose objective reality itself
as quite insane and schizophrenic
making the label holders closer
to the truth of all things
that lies within all things
and is told in so many stories
felt in as many ways.
To diagnose one person is to diagnose reality itself.
To diagnose reality itself is honest
and beautiful
for if reality were not schizophrenic
or multiple personality
or bipolar
or anxious
or manic
there would be no us,
no dynamic interplay of forces coming together
and apart,
there would be no beauty
no movement
no nothing.
By splitting off and becoming mad, reality
has always been moving towards a diagnosis
of Love.
Or Love and Disorder as the DSM may have it.