Your Smiling Gaze

Take your gaze far,

There is always so much to see.

And maybe you don’t take your mind

on a journey to the past,

where epics and legends gone by

want to sweep you off your feet

until you fall, like Alice did, down

to where nothing will fit the same.

Maybe you don’t surrender your mind

to the distant future, which,

like all the galaxies in the cosmos,

form the most entrancing worlds,

maybe the scariest ones too,

that, no matter how much you want to,

you cannot bring your fingers to touch.

Maybe, as you cast your gaze to glory,

bringing that contented smile to your face,

you are finding yourself in the position of things,

feeling your heart beat the tune of your life,

the thrum echoing the earth’s great pulse,

and maybe you come into this great force,

with a moment of recognition: I am here,

I am fully awake to this moment. I am. I am.

 

– tt

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The Glimmer is You

We know that the dark helps us
to see light, and we know this is
a scientific fact and this is also
a figurative way of thinking.
What’s evil casts a light on the good,
What scares us teaches us about
what gives us comfort, hope, joy.
Have you ever noticed that
objects in silhouette, as dark
as dark can be (because of the light),
never look quite as dark as the blackness
of a tunnel, or of a deep, starless night
(or a day lost to despair)?
A thing at its darkest, surrounded
and inflected by the great and powerful sun,
retains the brightness that
has given it life, does not invite
the void, never-ending, never-sweet.
We fall into darkness (the way
we fall in love); a silhouette is
sculpted in relief, its contours
made of light; there is no falling,
only emergence. The silhouettes
of autumn, the most moving of all:
not hesitant, but lingering,
The glimmer is the dying of a day
still living,
The glimmer is soft and yearning,
The glimmer is you.

-TT

Finding Joy

Joy was there in the early morning,

Hoping we wouldn’t pass her by

In a world that always offers so much

To weary souls and striving minds

Living off the landscapes of our old stories,

Joy, that other most primal of emotions,

Waiting with a fierceness of strength,

Like the trees and mountains that

Fuse with our ancestral lines in evolution,

Yet with a love-laced gentility and grace,

Because she has weathered our histories,

She knows what we think we have needed

And what we can, when we try, come to know,

And she is there, on the other side of knowledge,

Her edges glinting in the new day’s sun,

Her borders diffusing at day’s fiery end,

And her capacity for play is infinite,

And her sparkle and reach will never wane,

And we can find her everywhere,

Everywhere.

 

– TS

Life is Me

 

We are not here to hide
behind the veil of our fears,
glimpsing out into the world
as though it is not always
running wildly within us,
as though we are not
part of the bright evolution

We are not here to be
more faint, muted or faded
than the world we balk from
as though we need to be smaller,
or for our actions be less brave
than the the bold expressions
that stir our souls everyday

We are here to sing like the opera
that glitters under our skin,
to dance to the rhythmic cadences
that spring from Earth’s core,
to sculpt our bodies like gold and
feel it rise through us like fire:
This life is ours to claim!

– TS

All the Brilliant Things

sometimes

i want to gather

the most exquisite patterns

the most transporting paintings

like a mural-sized piece of outsider art

I found once by a Japanese artist in Toronto

that put a lifetime of colour and emotion onto one plane

together with the books

that fold all the way through time

that i can only spread out in my imagination

and it is not a spreading out so much as

a tunneling through, an accordion expansion

so that i can traverse them as i would

a dense forest trail in which everything lives

and also every loved one

i would like to gather

all of this brilliance around me

like a pile of crisp autumn leaves

and I’d like to take a deep breath at dawn

and finally, finally understand what i have,

and say thank you for waiting, and dive right in. TS

Seeing Peace

like pouring love

over an open field

 

or making hot tea

made of comfort

 

finding moss

made of patience

 

an elixir of innocence

in freshly-fallen snow

 

like the sun turning

flitting leaves to gold

 

like a hug that

changes the world

 

we make our way there

through here and now,

 

tinting what we find

with our aspirations,

 

inflecting these with

our every action,

 

so that we can see hope

so that we can touch peace. – TS

Our Many, Our Whole

My body, my land.

Containing all the stories

all the world in it,

but they are not all my own.

The whole is not simple,

vague or even pure.

We must never stop

listening to how this swirl

this totality morphs into the

particularities of me and

you, as we strive

and struggle to bring ourselves

to the whole with compassion

and understanding.

We are one, yes,

but it doesn’t end here;

we are still so incomplete

in our knowing,

if not our being.

May we always

listen

honour

respect

commit

to the mosaic of our

distinct stories.

Our bodies

Our landscapes,

Our jewels

build something

beautiful together. – TS