Author: Jane Tawel

Still not old enough to know better. I root around and explore ideas in philosophy, spirituality, poetry, Judeo-Christian Worldview, family, relationships, and art. Often torn between encouragement & self-directed chastisement, I may sputter, but I still keep trying to move forward.

Accomplishments Are So Over-Rated in Pet Heaven on Earth

Beni and Raoul

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Accomplishments Are So Over-Rated in Pet Heaven

By Jane Tawel

October 25, 2021

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When I was about ten or eleven, my mom moved her four kids to Monmouth, Illinois to be near our dad who had left us but we didn’t know it yet. And as I often say to Raoul, this could have been the beginning of my being a heroin addict or a serial killer, but instead I went into acting. Going into theater by way of getting an MFA, is the most expensive kind of psychotherapy a girl can get and it was worth every penny because today I am an ex-English teacher slash secretary slash waitress looking forward to someday having monthly Social Security checks in the high two figures. But then, I got to be a mom for a couple of decades, which is the hardest greatest best paid job in the world, so … Meh! to my dreams of sitting on the Tonight Show riffing about my latest accomplishments. Which brings me to the point – accomplishments.

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This past week Raoul and I got to puppy-sit our only grandpuppy, Beni. Grand-paw and I have several adorable grand-cats but only one grandpuppy. And while this Grandmeow loves all her grandcritters equally, Grandpaw Raoul has fallen head-over-tails in love with Beni. Look at that face and you can see why we both are rather smitten (exhausted but smitten). And let me tell you something beneficial about loving one of God’s critters as opposed to loving one of God’s children. Loving an animal, especially a pet, especially a cute but naughty, tear-up-your-slippers, accident-on-the-floor, wake-you-at-an-unholy-hour, nip-at-your-calves little beastie –being in a relationship with a critter is a giant wake-up call to what I think God and Jesus and all other spiritually minded Beings mean when they try to teach us about “heaven on earth”.  The reasons are many but here are a few I woke up to this morning, as my old girl Daisy and I adjusted to Beni being back home with his Mommy.

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Why Animals “Get” Heaven on Earth More than People “Get” It:

  1. Animals are very forgiving. They don’t spend any time at all stewing over past spankings or harsh words. They encourage their humans to do the same. If you are going to have an animal in your life, get ready to find forgiveness easy, which can be unsettling, because we really should find forgiveness and asking forgiveness much more easy with the people in our lives –like we do with our pets.
  2. Many animals, but especially the dogs I have observed love everything that you share with them and that they can share with you. They love life. Everything is always new to a dog because it is a new moment to experience it. Same walk?  “Let’s explore!” Bad smell, good smell, pee smell, food smell – “Mmmmgrrrr, I Love It!” The Mailman is at the door again– “ Who are you? WOOF! WOOF! Heeeelllllloooooooo!”  Same ball thrown for the five-millionth time? – “This is so much fun! Here I brought it back to you, Mommy. Want to play tug-of-war again? Okay, throw it again!  Isn’t this fun!!! Do it again! Again! Again!” Oh, if I could love living life in just this moment, like a dog does. That alone would bring me a heaven to earth.
  3. Animals have a sure, secure, and content sense of who they are without having any ego at all. Name one animal you have met with an inflated sense of ego? (Well, okay, cats. Let’s just say, cats have an ego, but can we really say it is an inflated ego? I mean, maybe when kitty gives you that look, they really are trying to communicate to you: “Oh, foolish human, do you not yet recognize a goddess when you see one?”)
Justine’s cat Artemis (yes, like the goddess) studying theology with me

But back to the sense of self of animals (probably sans kitties).

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On the flip side of animals having no egos, name one beast you have met that isn’t completely content and at peace with being who they are. It doesn’t matter one bit to your chihuahua that his isn’t as big as the Great Dane’s or to the alley cat on your street that the Siamese in the mansion has a more expensive fur on than hers. Animals exist in the absolute center of what psychologists and spiritual people call the “True Self”, not the “False Self”. And one thing I noticed about Raoul and I during our pup-sitting week, we became more our True Selves – more loving, more giving, but also more needing and more accepting – of the love we each shared together and individually with our grand-puppy. Granted, we would not sustain this if we had him for years instead of a week, and I know this because we have had dogs our whole family life and sustaining the kind of love we had with Beni this week is an impossibility, which brings me back to Thank God! our pets are so forgiving. Living in the kind of world we think of as a perfect world is hard work, just like taking care of a pet, but it is the kind of hard work whose greatest and perhaps only accomplishment is a loving relationship where I know myself as I am and accept you as someone you are and we both are at peace with who we are while also trying to be better together. If we took care of other humans as well as we do our pets, what a heaven on earth this would be.  Maybe for a while we should think of  The Golden Rule as saying, “Do unto others as you would have your pets do unto you.”

  • Finally (for today’s revelations) Animals help us think differently about Time. We didn’t “accomplish” much with Beni around, at least not as much as we could have if he weren’t around and that was wonderful –because we were with Beni –and today we will get to go back to accomplishing more and it will be a bit sad and depressing, and lonely and not as meaningful – because we aren’t with Beni.

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And when I look at my life, so many of the truly meaningful parts were when I wasn’t really accomplishing all that much. I never did accomplish a great acting career, and yet, my theatre teachers, and my experiences when I was acting, were some of the critical ones that shaped and defined me in ways I am still unpacking.

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And my memories of my children growing up? I don’t treasure all the things I “helped” them accomplish or the things we accomplished together, or the trophies or awards they got, nearly as much as I treasure the times we snuggled in the Big Bed reading or singing or just snuggling. Or the times I sat in the yard or by the pool and just listened to them play. Or talks around festival tables. Or traditions we shared. Or bike rides or walking dogs and picking up fallen leaves or pretty stones or shells on the beach. Or the times we splashed in mud puddles or laughed at silly jokes or took pre-technology-kid-coma-inducing long car trips, or….. we just were us together, accomplishing nothing. Nothing but relationship.

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So my mom took us to Monmouth, Illinois to accomplish something with my dad, but it didn’t. It was always a great sorrow to her, which I only understood much later. You know, my mom passed this summer – I keep waking up or being startled at odd times during the day to realize that all over again – she is gone. wow. If you have someone in your life that you deeply loved that died, this year or fifty years ago, you know what I mean. Time changes forever when that person you loved so much is no longer in the same Time-plane that you are. I don’t know what Time-plane my mom is in now, or what any of my departed loved ones live in now that is a kind of  “Heaven-Time”, but I think they must be in something like an Eternal Puppy Time; a Pet-Time when there is nothing more important to accomplish than loving everyone and everything around you. And smelling stuff. And snuggling.

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When someone you love leaves, like Beni left us last night temporarily, and my mom left us this summer, less temporarily; then you realize that it sure didn’t always feel like heaven on earth when you were with them, but that you can, if you try, hang on to the heaven on earth moments that happen in all true relationships and in all True Selves. Because it was really heaven on earth when they were with you because heaven is just another word for Love—the kind of love that loves others with a sense that renewal and newness are in our power to create together, with enjoyment in doing the same things over and over, with the kind of love that forgives and asks to be forgiven knowing that soon you will both forget the bad thing ever even happened. Heaven on earth is simply loving what you are, not what you can do, and loving relationships more than accomplishments.

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Heavenly love is the earthiest kind of love there is because we are all  just critters of this amazing, wonderful Earth, full of smells and accidents to be cleaned up, and sounds, and the same people who can get on your last nerve but keep showing up, and an Earth rooted deep in Time and yet ever expanding, expanding just enough to keep holding on to each other and also allowing each other to run. We are all part of the Earth, revolving into days and nights and if we try hard enough to stop trying, part of the great DNA Dance of All Living Things, things and humans and beasts that can for a little while – maybe even a week — lose track of Time completely because we are caring for a puppy and we are in love and because of someone else, we are loving life so much that heaven is on earth.

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Living like you are worthy of living in heaven forever is really just living like you are the most special person to the most special pet you have ever known. One of my husband’s favorite songs when he was growing up was one that Donny Osmond sang and the famous refrain was, “And they call it puppy love”. 

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Find your “puppy love” today, whether it is in an actual doggie pet, or kitty-goddess, or human man-child, or needy friend, or that other-you that needs you to love her today. Go into the world looking for the messes you can clean-up and the forgivness you can offer. Apologize for your wrongs to others as if you just kicked the dog who wasn’t doing anything other than being herself. Sniff things, and touch things, and enjoy your feed  even if it is the same chow you had every day this week. Look into the eyes of the people you care about and let them know you need them and that also you are there for them when they need you. Take a nap when you are tired and don’t feel guilty about. Take a walk. Take lots of walks. And if love is something you are desperate for, like it was for my mom when she moved to try to find love with my father, but only finally found when she had grandchildren — if you want love — then don’t hang your tail and let your ears droop and give up. Never grow weary as you keep chasing and fetching and bringing love back to lay at the feet of Love. Just keep doing it. Just keep loving and asking for love. Keep the ball in play and you will find heaven on earth. Again, and again, and again.

My Mom: Gram and her grandkids

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© Jane Tawel, October 25, 2021

Not Knowing Left from Right

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Not Knowing Left from Right

By Jane Tawel

October 20, 2021

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I am directionally challenged,

not knowing left from right,

which has worked to my advantage,

in silly political fights.

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And if you ask me up? or down?

My head will spin quite right around,

for even heaven and hell, my dear.

are not out there but present with us here, I fear.

We don’t have that much far to go,

to peer inside to what we know,

and lose the bad, to find the good,

within us is Eternal Flow.

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The truth is?—Life is seek and sway.

So, walk in circles to walk The Way.

By finding what you think’s outside,

You’ll find you have The Way inside.

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Yes, to The God, direction-less,

I hope that I can do my best,

and not know what is out or in,

or on my right, or on my left,

or left behind, or up ahead,

or down below, or up above,

but that I will get lost and tossed,

and topsy-turvy in True North’s Love.

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© Jane Tawel October 20, 2021

A Lack Recognized May Lead to Why

forest trees marked with question marks
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A Lack Recognized May Lead to Why

By Jane Tawel

October 19, 2021

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A lack of contentment often leads us,

when really, it should follow.

It takes us out of acceptance and peace,

and into pursuits most hollow.

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With no sense of acquiring completion,

We look not inwards but out,

to therapy, religion, addiction,

or buying or trading in love’s parody.

Without Presence and cohesion

We are lured by the sirens of repletion.

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We wake, immediately dissatisfied,

and search within books or tasks,

and we think we are looking for answers,

but all we’re left with are questions we ask, ask, ask.

It’s the Why, and the Why, and the Why that we lack.

It’s “The Reason” we keep looking for.

It’s the focus on what we once had once before,

It’s the looking beyond for a new exit door,

It’s the upping our game in the need to outscore,

And we buy and we buy so we don’t feel so poor,

and we’re always left lonely and searching for more.

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And you surely can hear in rhymes’ reiteration,

the mode we live in is vast acceleration.

So, to leave us all with just one bit of advice,

Let the worries and joys of today all suffice.

For yesterday can be the gift that you seek,

if you let your heart’s memories be lovingly tweaked,

and keep only the good and the healthful remembrance,

for the rest is a burden and ill-causing encumbrance.

And Tomorrow – why that is the gift we don’t have yet.

So why think what might happen?–that’s just a fool’s bad bet.

If we know that by waking tomorrow we win,

then to anticipate sorrow is truly a sin.

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So Rejoice! You have Choice!

Choose today to embrace–

just your time, just your self, just your life in this place!

And no matter how bad your life truly is seeming,

You’re important – remember, your life has a meaning.

You’re created by special intent and design.

You are loved. You are God’s child. You are truly divine.

So today, treat yourself as if you’re more than matter,

Because Someone believes that you really do “matter”.

You are You. We are We. They are They. I am I.

And that’s it. That is all. That alone, answers, “Why”.

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© Jane Tawel October 19, 2021

The Child’s and My Circle

30 Easy Sidewalk Chalk Ideas that will Keep Kids Busy for Hours - Simply Well Balanced
Simply-Well-Balanced

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The Child’s and My Circle

By Jane Tawel

October 9, 2021

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Within me, every molecule

is still the little child.

She longs for my protection

but also, to run wild.

She was, but also is now;

and though I don’t know how,

she asks for my tomorrows,

to also let her be.

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Without,

 I gaze with glazéd heart,

upon a world that glistens.

And if I only listen

to what comes whispered,

deep inside the stillness,

all integrates and merges.

Yes, I am on the verge of

Soul and soul emerging.

Then I and All have meaning

if and only if I stop demeaning

The Flow, the Interbeing.

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My life is not an arc or line.

It is a lovely, broken circle.

And every moment,

point by point,

the circle formless, forms.

Each empty space,

each place misshapen,

asks my adult for perseveration.

The child is offered chalk and ink

to recreate today

the incomplete and always turning,

Circle of my life.

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Respect and innocence await my adult fear

to give my child permission to

explore, imagine, anticipate,

and often just to rest.

The universe teems

with puddles of hope to jump in,

and Love watches for me to enter The Stream,

 raw and ready,

purposeful as an infant to receive.

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Create in me, Oh, Oneness One,

relation, integration, adoration.

And manifest in me,

a childlike curiosity,

a vision of not what is,

but what might be;

the only thing that is forever,

the real deal,

eternally real–

the insurrection of wonder.

And may amazement of all things,

bright and beautiful,

formless, wordless, true–

be freed in me,

once more to play

in awe of Life,

at peace with other children.

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© Jane Tawel, October 2021

Walls

grayscale photo of man between shingle wall
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Walls

By Jane Tawel

September 25, 2021

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I wake and sleep to thoughts,

that my mind makes into strong walls

defending me against peace and rest.

And as my self tries to leap over

the bricks and mortar of my so-called beliefs,

I get caught in the tangles like barbed wire

constructed by doubt and fear

 at the highest points of my mind’s reach.

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Some days there are brambles in my memories

of you and them,

and they sting like nettles,

and I refuse the salve of letting go.

The air is so close,

and the storm threatens like unforgiveness.

I panic in the calm

knowing that this too, feels like death.

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Then, and only then,

does something in my mind break

and the pieces fall into place

forming a rickety ladder of

something made from something I cannot know;

a ladder somehow, for a moment, strong enough

sure enough to trust enough

 to scale the walls.

And I feel as I scramble within the brambles,

that love is hidden like rose buds, yet to bloom.

I can see through walls;

the soul rises and falls,

with the hope that all that ever existed

was your love and their love

and my love

and for a moment, just a moment,

I have fallen onto the other side

of faith.

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© Jane Tawel, September 2021

The Bucket List I Never Made, Come True

Shackelford Island Ponies

The Bucket List I Never Made, Come True

By Jane Tawel

September 13, 2021

I have never made nor contemplated making a bucket list. I have absolutely nothing against making one, and I love to hear about other folks’ items on their bucket lists. I find them incredibly revelatory and hopeful. And of course, like everyone, I play the game of “someday, I would like to….”  or “before I die, I want to….”.  When a person’s dreams die, they aren’t just old, they are dead, no matter if a physical body indicates otherwise. As The Bard says, “we are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep” – all too soon that sleep comes, so have at it with those Bucket Lists while ye may!

So, when I kick it, you won’t find a hidden Bucket List among my many pieces of revelatory, self-incriminating written logs. Then yesterday, something happened; and though I never went in search of greatness from a list of To Do’s Before Doom’s Day, a Bucket List item was thrust upon me. Shakespeare once more, said it first: “Some are born with Bucket Lists, some achieve their Bucket Lists, and some have Bucket Lists thrust upon them.”

I am visiting the beautiful (there is just no other word for the topography here) State of North Carolina where one of my darling daughters works and lives with my grand-furbies, Artemis and Apollo.  Apollo is up and awake with me right now, being the young whippersnapper that he is, and he is bouncing all over the house waiting for his mistress to get up and feed him. I am forbidden to feed him, and if he bites my finger in hunger or starts chewing on the cord of my laptop, I am supposed to somehow catch him and shove him in his little time-out cage until said darling daughter arises to give him his breakfast. It’s hard being a Grand-meow who can’t spoil her dear grand-furby, but, the wrath of an adult child is nothing to mess around with I have found, being four adult-children down at the count. I love them more than my own life, but I miss them when they were little tykes and all I had to do was hold them tight when they were upset or kiss them when they were sad or laugh along with them at some silly thing that never made sense in hindsight but was just a way to joy in the moment. Now I am a helpless old thing against the tides and times that they have inherited from me personally and from my generation in general and from all the good and bad we try to control in the world and in ourselves with various degrees of success and failure. May the sins of my children’s mother not be carried on to the third and fourth generation*, but may I be forgiven the consequences of my mea culpas in their lovely, much-loved lives and futures.

My children all have Bucket Lists. They don’t share a lot of the items with me and that is as it should be. Bucket Lists should not be made into common currency or YouTubes, Tik-Toks or even movies with famous actors filling in for real people. Bucket lists should have a few sharable items: I would like to visit New Zealand. I would like to finish a Marathon. Stuff like that. But mostly Bucket Lists should be those hidden, cherished, held-close desires of the heart that let us dream of what might be in a perfect world, personal and public. They should be full of items that let us imagine being something other than what we are today, with a hope and prayer of doing at least some of those things.  Most importantly, Bucket List dreams should be about being all that we imagine the Human Being is capable of doing and being, whatever that might mean to me, or you, or my child, or your friend. And the lovely thing about a Bucket List is mine doesn’t have to be at all like yours to be valid and important.  Bucket Lists just might be the most uncompromised by cultural, national, or religious symbol of the most personal / communal Dream-Worlds of Endless Life Possibilities ideas in existence. I mean, isn’t Heaven really, just another word for Bucket List? Isn’t Heaven is also just another symbol for that endless eternal ability to be and do everything that the human divine soul was created to be and do? Isn’t the ultimate Bucket List really just another form of desiring a glorious, godly, divine, and endlessly available and possibility-enhanced Eternal Life?

A Bucket List is not just about creating an amazing future though, as I found yesterday. It is also about our deepest selves’ broken pieces being a little bit patched up; our short-circuits reconnected. The items on a list about things we want to do before we kick the bucket, reveal what got broken, or subverted, or short-circuited or stopped just that little bit short of realization. A Bucket List is not just about what may happen but what should have happened. We like to imagine a better future when we can’t deal with the bad stuff in the past or the present, (another reason so many religions got the underprivileged, non-wielding Bucket List folks, like slaves or minorities, living for Heaven, instead of focusing on what could be done about the present problems in their lives).  Thinking about the fact that we are still alive enough to have hopes, dreams and desires – big ones, like the ones on a Bucket List – return us to the possibilities we imagined when we were children; when we still had dreams, when as children we envisioned an eternal future without any limitations. Our Bucket Lists are about finally going skydiving, because we dreamt of flying like Peter Pan, when we were children; or  we want to check off a safari, and riding an elephant, because we imagined as children that we were wild animals roaming the jungles. When we were young, we romped together in our imagined worlds of play and  in our freedom from soul-sucking jobs, or relationships that were hard, or physical ailments that meant we were unable to walk or move without pain, let alone check off our list the desire to surf Maui. Bucket Lists return us to not just hope for the future, or a belief we can fix something in the past, but also to at least for one minute, a joy in the fact, that “where there is life now, there is hope”. Bucket Lists are really about suddenly being present to ourselves as valuable, worth-while, dreaming, hoping, believing beings.

Yesterday my daughter and husband and I took a ferry to an island in North Carolina with a lighthouse. Seeing lighthouses is literally on my husband’s Bucket List, and we were able to check that off his personal list, with the help of his beloved daughter, by seeing two of the beautiful lighthouses that still operate today. Lighthouses were created to keep sailors and ships safe from the world’s dangerous waters and unforeseen shoals.  Maybe Bucket Lists do the same for people. 

On our way to the island yesterday, we passed Shackelford Banks. And as our captain, slowly passed by the banks, there they were — my eyes are tearing up as I write this, and remember it now– just as yesterday without anticipation, I found myself silently crying as I saw something that I immediately knew had been on my Bucket List without my ever understanding it was there. There in front of me were three wild Shackelford ponies, one a foal still gangly and unsure in the shallows.

When I was about eight years old, and my parents were a mess and going through a divorce that they never told their four kids about, and at a time I didn’t realize how what another relative was doing to me wasn’t appropriate, and my childhood seemed to be getting snatched away from me but I didn’t know it, my father, gave me a book called “Misty of Chincoteague”. It’s a famous children’s book by Marguerite Henry. You should read it if you still have a bit of child in your heart, or at least get it for a child you know and love. Later, when my dad let me choose a pinto pony for my own, he let me call it “Misty”. After a few years of my broken family being in a strange existence that isn’t about Bucket Lists at all, my mom remarried and moved us away and I rarely saw my dad and never saw Misty again. I guess she must have died, along with my own childhood.

Yesterday I saw those wild ponies, not on the Chincoteague of my youthful book-inspired dreams, but on Shackelford Island, while I sat next to the dreams I never knew I had – a husband of thirty-three years and one of my own dear, beloved children, grown to adulthood with her own shared and private dreams and Bucket List items. And the little girl I was, Janie Karen, came rushing up to meet me in the sight of those horses, and I realized: “I made it. I made it here to see this – to see them – to see Misty—after all these years. I did it. I made the dreams I never knew I had come true.”

And I checked off an item from the Bucket List I have never made:

#1: I will keep my childlike faith. I will continue to imagine and dream and look for the wild ponies in life, where ever they may appear.

“And it shall come to pass, that your young ones shall be divinely inspired; and your old ones shall dream dreams; and all will have the ability to plan the future with imagination and wisdom.” **

© Jane Tawel, September 2021

*Deuteronomy 5:9

** Joel 2:28 (paraphrased by me)

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How Much We Must Unknow to Understand

green and yellow fish on water
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By Jane Tawel

September 6, 2021

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To allude to a fact, is to release it to deeper understanding.

To allude to the past, is to increase its future expanding.

To cling to knowledge is a losing game,

as shallow as a puddle, as fleeting as fame.

Oh, to have faith in what is not known,

is the key to a wisdom that is not blown

by the winds of the time or the waves of the tides,

of humans’ small knowledge and man’s foolish pride.

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If there is a God, then She must have a splendor

that surpasses religion or nation or gender.

Yes, there is a God, and He rises above,

even our greatest poets’ small odes to great love.

Yes, there is a Being, beyond all our facts,

known not through our creeds, but just by the acts

of the people who yearn for a soul free from self,

and the people who learn less from books on a shelf,

than by doing and proving that the self has to die,

for the Soul of Eternity to be truly alive.

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How much, how much we must lose to gain.

What fields of faith, in one buried grain.

Embrace the story and the mysteries.

Let the present flow into past histories.

Release the need to understand,

and wholeness and holiness will expand.

Don’t limit today by confines of the mind,

and as all seekers, you may find,

that God is present and God is close,

and God is faith, and love, and hope.

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How much there is we must un-know,

for the faith of Eternity to be planted, and grow.

For faith is the action that shores-up our belief,

and rescues our odysseys from the sirens’ reefs,

of limited knowledge, which ours always must be,

in a world in which there is just one guarantee –

that as small as I am in life misunderstood—

God is here. God is love. God is peace. God is Good.

**

© Jane Tawel September 6, 2021

Today begins Rosh Hashanah, and this poem was inspired albeit poorly done, in reverence and appreciation for the profound teachings of Abraham Joshua Heschel. Though he would point out that I have read merely his books, Rabbi Heschel, a man of faith for all religions, nations, and peoples, through his books of  profound thoughts and faith has taught me more than I can begin to express in my own small words of gratitude. Shalom to you and yours — Jane

Hidden God Hiding Love

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Hidden God Hiding Love

By Jane Tawel

August 29, 2021

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God hides.

All truth speakers know this.

All truth seekers show this,

in The Way they treat others.

We don’t know why God hides,

but it must have something to do,

with us, not God.

After all, a God who hides must love us very much.

For who can see God and live?

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Love is not particularly our human forté.

And the kind of loves we mistake for Love,

perhaps the one that hovers and smothers,

in a needy insecure desire;

or love in a parent’s or lover’s missional bait and switch;

or love that demands returns on love’s investments

until a better investment comes around;

or love that claims to sacrifice,

while in reality,

it only takes and takes love unto one’s self,

 in the name of charity for others;

these things we all accept as if we know their meaning.

But the still small voice within us, always cries: “Lack! Lack!”

These false loves we accept and make stories about,

and award and honor those we think did it selflessly,

and so, we spin and protect the tall tales of selfless Eros;

and miss the truth myths of Agape love.

And we die false sacrifices in the name of love,

never having lived in the sacrifice of God’s Love.

Or we love others, with only their false names on our lips

because for most of us we think that kind of love is the best we can do,

and because the names we have given them are the only names we know.

We have not yet repented of our love,

and confessed that our hearts are still mostly made of stone.

We have not stopped to listen to the hidden song within,

the others or ourselves,

and stopped-up the noise of love-songs,

and stripped away the names of our families or feudal tribes.

We fear without our names,

the only names we know,

we will not know who we are.

But that is only because we have not yet received our white stones.

But we put far too much faith in knowing who we are;

“Be still. Stop your stories. And Know God, I Am. you are.”

*

Oh, put aside your childish things, and fairy tales.

There is no white knight riding forth to save you.

You have salvation within yourself.

Arise from your deathbed and live.

*

Selfless love is a cancerous myth,

full of false gods and false loves,

spreading through our lives like locusts in fields of grain.

Make your story about loving yourself.

God loves Himself;

and love is of God and everyone who truly loves,

is born out of God.

Make your story about loving everyone.

God loves everyone;

and this hard love, like a hidden diamond,

 is hidden even from God Himself,

so that all may be loved.

*

God’s Love is hidden,

Like all treasure chests are.

God’s love lies hidden within my very chest walls.

And if I can not sense its Presence

in myself, I will never sense it

in my brother, mother, sister, friend, child and

Yes, even hidden, like a lost coin, in my enemy.

If my Truth is not seeking

The Hidden God in me, and

God’s Love hidden in you,

then all truth is a lie

and all loves are hates.

*

Just because the God in me

lies buried

under the eons of fallen, rotten fruit

from Eden’s deserted crop,

the pearl of great price is also buried there;

gifted, not earned; found, not banked on;

apart from all I have nurtured or harvested;

a part and piece of all that is

my solitary humanness, my island, myself,

 alive and a-love within the Divine Whole.

*

And just because the God in

you, or me, or them, or us

may be hidden under layers,

and layers of the dusts-bowls of fruitlessness,

of the arid wastelands of anger and fear,

of the decimating wars without and within

or the shackles placed on us by the concepts of slavery or sin;

just because we feel alone

or alone,

or sometimes we are so very all alone;

just because we can’t see clearly,

and all is muddled in minds gone rancid from the infections of information,

and our hearts hurt so bad from longing for love,

and our eyes sting from trying to see through,

the crusted over with dirty things

cracked mirrors of our souls;

and the world has been unformed and fomented

by our own lusts and dirtied hands;

none of that means anything

 if The God Who formed the Universe,

who formed us each in the World’s Womb,

is still playing peek-a-boo,

with us Her children,

and when we are afraid in this world of hide-and-seek,

that we will never find God,

She is reaching out Her Hands,

and God suddenly appears

to hold us in Her Love.

*

In the world of false loves,

We grope blindly and fall, and fall, and fall.

But that doesn’t mean that now and then,

if we keep our eyes open,

and keep stepping out with faith,

and keep our lamps filled with oil,

every now and then, and eventually with practice,

and giving up, and with, (I am afraid to say it) a lot of dying to that which is dead;

every now and then,

the Living Hidden will peek-out and peer

 through the most unremarkable people,

unremarkable people like myself;

and beauty will appear in the most undesirable things and places;

and Love will be like nothing we could ever imagine happening in ourselves.

And by finding the hidden and divine Love within ourselves,

we will find God.

*

This Way is the only Way.

And This Story is the only Story.

And This Love is the only True Love.

When I love only and completely

the God in you,

and when I love the God in me,

then we who still seek,

will see God.

And we will live.

© Jane Tawel,  August 2021

Our Little Life-Boats

by Jane Tawel

https://unsplash.com/photos/3ZFbnY2jXlg

Our Little Life Boats

By Jane Tawel

August 22, 2021

A long, long time ago and only yesterday, the materials for making my little life’s boat, were gathered in secret by the DNA of my Scottish, Irish, American Indian ancestors. But the real craft, the trued and tried boat itself, was crafted by the Great Crafter in the secrets that stretch back to the Beginning and stretch forward to the End of Time which never is. Like all carrying agents, large and small, puny and mighty, all that sail on this Ocean we call Life, or The World, my boat is unique and also it is exactly like every other little boat as well. My little boat, so small compared to others, yet just as specially made, will sail, in spurts and starts, or travel full-steam ahead, and go and go until the boat is moored someday as it was meant to be in the Eternal or until it crashes on the rocky shores of Ego or Despair. This is the truth about all sailing crafts, though many never know it because we either tie our boats up on shore, or we create a false shore in the water. But all true Truths try to teach us that our boats were made for motion in the ocean.

*

I am a little sailboat, who has long had the need for The Wind in my sails. I am lucky that quite early, I was taught what sails are for and what they are not for. I was as unlucky as many when my sails were brutally torn or holes were punched in the hull, the very soul of my ship. But I was not as unlucky as many, and I have managed. So, I have rebuilt my little boat many times with the help of others and that thing that true sailors call luck and that saints call grace.  I have kept my faith in The Wind, which no one can control, and yet it exists. I have often sailed in the right direction with the North Star and Morning Star as guides. I have often sailed in the wrong direction and lost my way. Mostly though, I regret to confess, I have mistaken a mirage of my safety while moored to the dock for what I was meant to live as life on a boat.

*

 There are many great ships that have sailed The Ocean, and sail it still, mighty and amazing in their superiority to most of our little folks’ small crafts. There are great ships with names like Caesar, or Pharaoh, or Titan of Industry, and many of these boats become enormous, powerfully engine-ed ships, making their way through The Ocean without need of The Wind, barely feeling the waves, never fearing the storms, and barely knowing they are moving at all, more like stagnant cities in the water than moving vessels. They put aside their sails and have no more need of The Wind. They take what they need from the Lands they conquer and leave behind. They take oil and slaves and buy more life vests than they could ever use; they sail their gigantic boats, boats that could house whole nations but only have enough room for one’s self. These have stopped being boats at all, and we look at those ships and we all want to have one of those ships, too. We want to be safe and saved and unafraid with everything we will ever need forever and ever, amen. And we look at our little tiny battered, torn-sailed little boats and we hate them and we hate us and we want to be them, the big safe ships. We look at the great steady cruisers and we long to have no need of The Wind; and we yearn to be in the Ocean but to control the way the Ocean takes us, like the great shipbuilders seem to do. And we forget that we are all created to be working sailors, not passengers. And we ignore what our heart tries to tell us, that even those with the biggest ships, will one day too find that The Ocean is bigger than they are. Perhaps when The Wind has wrecked the big ships upon the shoals of shallowness, or the sandbars of Eternal Truths, they too will long to once more sail a little boat.

*

Perhaps we will all, large and small, no matter how safe or how broken we think our boats are, someday find that The Ocean sends us an unlooked for buoy or a suddenly appearing piece of the Mast’s Wood; and we will each have one more chance to leave shore, and grab on to what The Ocean provides, and we will once more, like children, relearn a love of sending our little crafts out into The Ocean.

*

My boat’s sails have been tattered and torn so many times.  I was not born a good sailor, and perhaps that has saved me. I have had to rely on The Wind’s benevolent appearing and disappearing, on the Ocean’s grace in storms and dead calm. I have had to depend on the help of fellow travelers who sailed alongside me, sometimes just keeping me company in the loneliness of Ocean life, sometimes teaching me something vital about how to sail, sometimes showing me what not to do by their own foolish choices at sea, sometimes sharing a compass that helped me navigate. And sometimes there have been those fellow sailors who, with great love, have helped me pick up the pieces of my little boat that I had allowed to break apart when I hit some shoals, or had left to rot in dock. And every once in a while, there was no one to help me, but only Someone to whisper across the waves:

 “Fear not. Be still. Have faith. And know what you think you do not know. Don’t look at the waves. Keep your eyes on Me.”

*

I would like to say that I have been sailing The Ocean for six decades now, but I have mostly left my little boat docked uselessly in port. I kept thinking I was safer on shore, tied up to the Pier, with those I thought were peers and I felt already the salvation of knowledge of the things I had read about on “How to Sail” without ever needing to do the things it takes to set sail. I could tell you how to sail, but I rarely have experienced the thrill and dangers of sailing. So, I have spent a lifetime mostly feeling I should be happy that I had a little boat but never really knowing the purpose of my boat or why life seemed mostly rudderless and my sails sagged depressedly, longing for A Wind I would never risk meeting head-on.  I have mostly lived by peering out, rather than journeying out.  I have stayed on shore with all the best charts and maps but rarely finding the courage to launch my craft again and again, failure after failure, frightening success after frightening success, prophetically, mysteriously, in weakness and in strength, in death first and then life, baptized again and again by misadventure and death at Sea, and by setting my course, going into the Deeps, into the Pontus, into the waves left by The Wake of He who first Crafted and Who crafted the Sailor in me.

*

Last night there was a Red Sky and so I awoke today hoping for a sailor’s delight. But this morning the sky is still red- Warning! Warning! This morning the Ocean is covered over by Heavens which are a shade of red, red the color of shed blood; blood like the blood from two huge hands mangled by the nails of working His Boat and sailing The Ocean like no One has ever sailed it before or since, though we who know are supposed to have tried. And I am afraid. And I am uncertain I even know which direction to go. And The Great Sailor and all those before me who have managed to sail in His Wake are calling me to set out, while the sirens of safety in the numbers docked on shore make more and more knots in the ropes that tie me down.

*

What will my story’s end be? People call that a legacy, but most of us just leave with an unfinished story. I will not be leaving a beautiful houseboat, or massive warship, or richly outfitted yacht behind for those who carry on in The Ocean, those few who sailed close enough to my little craft to say, “I knew her” “My boat sailed for a time with hers” “I saw her boat on the shore”. I will have no lasting control over what becomes of those who carry on my boat’s DNA or those who may have learned something about their own boats by the teachings I have done or failed to do on “How to Sail”. But one thing I am learning. If I leave my little boat safely moored to this shore; if I am tethered to the sandbars of cares and needs and self and greeds; if I keep setting sail only to turn back again to dock my fears and doubts and insecurities and failings, instead of facing them head on, sailing into The Wind; if I do not daily, moment by moment, cure and polish and then test the seaworthiness of my little boat, I will never actually be in the boat. I will spend my Time, looking at my boat from outside of it. I will spend my Life, looking at my Life, from outside of it. If do not let the Winds fill its sails, my boat will never be what it was crafted to be. If I don’t let The Wind fill me, I will never be what I was Crafted to Truly Be.

*

A boat that is moored to the cares of the shore, can’t leave a wake. A boat leaves a wake when it is moving through The Ocean. We are each uniquely created by The Great Ship-Crafter to live life in the Ocean. We are given the ability to calm the waves and quell the storms, if we only have enough faith to start sailing, and once we start, to not look back at the sirens, and not look ahead at things that are mere mirages, but to point our little boats Due North, and let The Wind sail us towards what we were meant to call “Home”. Because if you are sailing The Ocean, one day you will wake up and realize that all along, you have been carrying your true home with you. Your little life’s boat has always been your Home.

*

 Despite what any of us try to tell ourselves, none of us has ever seen the Far Shore from this shore. It is only when we are in The Ocean, that we understand that we were neither created to stay safely on this shore, nor were we created to try to reach the other Shore. We were created to row as hard as we need, to crew alongside those who sail within our latitudes and longitudes, to drift when we can’t feel The Wind and wait for Her to fill us again, to float and enjoy the beauty that is above us, below us, and all around us as we travel; to navigate with both honest fear and wise courage, and above all to be at Home when we Move and keep Moving within in and upon The Great Ocean.

*

What will I leave in the wake of my life?  I pray that the flotsam and jetsam of my poorer decisions and weaknesses in sailing, will be carried away by The Great Ocean’s grace. I pray that my wake will leave a clearer sense of direction for those who sail behind me. I pray that there will be a small wake from my life’s little boat; a wake that leads others Due North, a wake that I leave when my boat is no longer seen by any but those on the Far Shore. I pray that above all, my wake will send waves to both near and far shores that swoosh with something that sounds faintly like something The Ocean would breathe, something like a person who had dipped her hands into the water and made small little circles of waves, something that sounds like what water would sound like if it were breathing in and out, ebbing and flowing. I hope that I will set sail enough times that my life-boat will leave a small little wake that sends waves gently lapping towards the world’s shores, and the children’s little life boats; a sound of waves in my wake that whispers something like this:

Shhhheeeeeee loooooved. Sheeeeeee whoosshhhh, llllllloved whiiiisssssh.  She loved. She loved. She loves. She loves. Love….. Love……Love……..

*

© Jane Tawel, August 2021

I-Thou Consciousness

by Jane Tawel

Clarissa and I, her mom

I-Thou Consciousness

By Jane Tawel

August 9, 2021

*

Oh, God!

Are You not conscious

without my Being,

conscious of You?

*

I-Thou revolts

and revises the mundane,

profane, explainers,

complainers, man-splainers,

and painful, painful, pain.

You are both bane

and that small niggling voice

that makes me whole again,

if only temporarily, I fear, My Dear.

*

Oh- the pain!

I used to obsess about you

and that one time that you let me draw near.

Remember how the rain fell?

Rain, falling like the tears of our laughter.

Did I only imagine it?—

snot coming out of Your nose?! Hahaha…

and our laughter driving away your hurt,

my hurt, The Whole World’s In Your Hands Hurt,

like a rainbow.

You were once my rainbow.

*

I sometimes resign myself and I,

to doing the will of the dearest child

and Thou.

But, if not in fact,

in the ever-changing, ever the same,

universe of quantum physics

of the Ineffable Essence of Other

and others, and other days…

(perhaps actions are over-rated at the best of times).

*

Becoming,

Thy Will be done.

Your heart still held tenderly, carefully,

as if stone could ever remain unbroken.

Your pulse, beating close to mine,

as close as the womb I once shared.

Becoming what must be Willed.

Becoming, whatever in the world it means,

to always circle back to Love.

*

© Jane Tawel  August 9, 2021

Written on the birthdate of my daughter, Clarissa Sandrine