Wishful Thinking

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Wishful Thinking

By Jane Tawel

November 28, 2025

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Candid contemplations resounding hollowly,

for who can know the parameters of any single thought.

The heart knows, but has no words.

The heart knows, but has no thoughts.

The heart knows, but as it pounds and beats

with that which can only divine love –

with that which is — only Divine Love — 

the mind steps in to silence it

with rage, or lust, or fear

that masquerade as intellect,

pretending to protect,

but only punishing the heart.

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To ask the heart to take control

is to ask silence to speak,

love to look,

and caring to control all feckless fantasies.

To ask the heart to understand

is to fall back on humanity’s first thought,

that the only idea at all that is a good one,

is that only God is Good.

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The mind’s machinations and convoluted fears

are based on the illusions

that the power of merely wishful thinking

can do anything but lead us down

wide, wide, wide brambled paths:

paths that lead from one dream to another.

The heart knows

that only The Narrow Path

leads us Home.

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Our minds, that we created

out of forbidden fruit and falling skies,

to work or use or strain or stain — 

are simply skipping, broken records of the brain,

or anxious agitations of notyetnotyetnotyet.

We take such pride, we fight so hard,

for what we think we know.

The mind is like a boxer in the ring

always and everywhere trying to prove everything

basing its illusions on its might and solidity,

only to find the terrible, unbeatable opponent

is one’s own supercilious, smugly dissatisfied self.

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The heart rests, like a cat in the sun.

The heart is quiet, like the moment before dawn.

The heart is full of beauty, as Spring’s first bloom.

The heart is safe and peaceful, as a baby in the Womb.

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As I have this small time,

Now, and only Everlastingly Now,

through Grace alone, gifted to me,

may my vision and my will

be Grace-bound, full of Light and Love, and freed

from my mind’s prideful prison of ego and need,

until I have become whole-ly Heart-led,

and holy in deed.

And if that is wishful thinking of the heart — 

so let it Be.

© Jane Tawel, 2025

Note: Some of this may come from my working through thoughts after a cool story I heard about some neuroscientists who invented one of those machines that they put on people’s heads to measure their thoughts and brain waves etc. The scientists took this head helmet contraption to a monastery to study the brain waves and thoughts of a group of Buddhist monks, but when the scientists asked the monks to put the machines on their heads, all the monks burst out laughing. When the brain-experts asked why they were laughing the monks told them they had designed the machine incorrectly and that if they wanted to measure people’s thoughts, the machines had to be designed to fit here — and they all pointed at their hearts.