Jane Tawel

Free from The Beautiful Prison

Free from The Beautiful Prison

By Jane Tawel

February 13, 2025

Thoughts embrace me,

not as the lover that I think they are,

but as the ever multiplying,

tightening, restricting coils

of a deadly snake;

which in the end, and endlessly,

goes ‘round and ‘round and ‘round,

sucking out all my life, until it

Strikes!

And all my thoughts and

the “I” of me

will be no more.

What a waste of Time

my thoughts have been.

Words create and — Oh!

How I love them!

And yet words, when given

so much power

deny the True I AM.

Words create a false me,

deny the Real, and the real me.

So many words,

so little Time.

Words create barriers to my freedom to exist.

Why do we hate it so much when words escape us?

Why do we hold on to words that

we once thought belonged to who we are —

even if they hurt us?

With our first word, “Ma-ma”,

we make our choice and in our last breath,

we regret words spoken and unspoken.

“Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.”*

Words are lovely as they reach across

the chasms of our communication,

the hopes of our interactions,

the rallying cries as we come together.

Our words create stories that can keep us —

safe and warm.

We are our own Scheherazade.

Words also keep us apart.

And as they spin

their endless tales of that which was

and fear of that which might be,

they create the webs which constrict

the formless, namelessness of Life,

like a giant spider

we weave and weave and weave .

Oh, how I adore a good abstract word,

a metaphor, a sensory description,

a symbol!

Oh, how I long for words that make me feel

Loved, cared for

Seen.

But oh, what better joy

to live in the Spaces

to feel without words,

to Be.

If only I could escape my words.

Words — The Beautiful Prison.

Wordless, Nameless One,

Accept my prayer,

with groans too deep for words:

Create in my, Oh, God — just…

Create.

Create me like a baby

with only cries and sounds of joy

to tell you how I feel

and who I Am.

No — Create ME, O, God.

IAM.

Let me be a new and emptied skin-clothed vessel,

ready for the new wine of ***

Being —

unattached, unthinking,

with only this one thought –

of only this one Word —

The Word from the beginning,

that was, and is, and evermore shall Be.

That Word beyond Thought,

Beyond Ego, beyond Me;

the only Meaning

that shall never, as I will, die.

“But I, in one short sleep past,

will wake eternally,

and death shall be no more;

death, thou shalt die.”****

Awake, My Soul! and be emptied

to be stilled by Holy Stillness,

and in peace, to live,

As One.

With many thanks for those whose thoughts and words are high above mine own.

*Robert Frost, “The Road Less Taken”

**The Bible

***Jesus, The Christ

**** John Donne, “Death Be Not Proud”

And along with these, thank you to the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh and Eckhart Tolle among so many others.

One Step, One Brick

by Jane Tawel

In 2018, I posted a quote by that great “worker in the fields”, Dorothy Day:

The sense of futility is one of the greatest evils of the day.…People say, “What can one person do? What is the sense of our small effort?” They cannot see that we can only lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time; we can be responsible only for the one action of the present moment.

Reading this post of mine from a previous time of great and deep weltanschuaang (2018) and my quoting Dorothy Day back then, I remind myself that the feeling of futility or hopelessness is static and keeps one feeling incompetent to do the smallest things. And I am reminded that Mother Teresa said that not all of us can do great things but that even I can do small things with great love. And I believe that ultimately as Judeo-Christian wisdom teaches, “only three things will remain”: trust in Something bigger than ourselves; hope that, as that great Black Preacher, Martin Luther King said, “the arc of the universe bends toward justice; and Divine Love, available to all humans, Love that ignores ego and self-interest for that which lasts. And the greatest thing that shall remain, beyond nation, beyond “stuff”, and even beyond the self, and indeed, the only thing we can ever know of God, is Love. But even our deepest held belief is a fragile thing and it wavers with each storm, my friends. It can be very hard to see the light in the face of darkness, so each moment I will try to forget all the things I think I believe and I will simply walk forward, one step taken at a time, by the sheer will of a freeing Love. By going through suffering, not trying to get around it, we do find peace. One step. One moment. One small act of love. One hand reaching out. One at a time.

“Peace is present right here and now, in ourselves and in everything we do and see. Every breath we take, every step we take, can be filled with peace, joy, and serenity. The question is whether or not we are in touch with it. We need only to be awake, alive in the present moment.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace Is Every Step.

“My peace I offer you too. Not the peace this world offers, but a peace that will pass your wildest imaginings, a peace that passes your beliefs, a peace that passes your understanding.” — Jesus, The Christ,

I shall take my responsibility in this present moment seriously, but I shall not look at the fortress of hate and greed being built against the True Truth. I shall mourn but not hate those who tear down that which others have worked hard to build, not seeing through their foolishness and greed and hatred the Good things — things of justice, and open-mindedness, of sharing and acceptance and care and kindness. I shall lay down my one small brick at a time in my own back yard, not as a wall to keep people out, but as a wall to support the vines of love that I choose to plant and hope to grow. I shall plant one small seed at a time, and trust that the Mountain will move.

Will I Stand Up?

by Jane Tawel

Will I Stand Up?

By Jane Tawel

February 2, 2025

Will I stand up,

if courage fails?

If lies prevail

and all seems lost?

Will I stand up

when others scoff?

When I’m cast off

as weak and frail?

Today I stand

upon The Rock

and weep to see

a House once strong,

now willful, prideful

tearing down

its firm foundations

its Cornerstone,

erecting bent beliefs

on shifting sands.

Will I stand up

when hope is torn

from bleeding Heart

from bleeding Hands?

No —

I shall fall…

But I will raise

No flag,

No creed,

No weapon but,

The Banner of

God’s Love for All,

Yes! — “All!” I’ll cry,

with my last breath,

and though I can not stand —

I’ll crawl.

Crossing the Road on The Way

by Jane Tawel

Crossing the Road on The Way

By Jane Tawel

January 26, 2025

Resting my head on small, fragile hands,

too fragile to hold the world up.

What would happen if I dropped the world?

What would happen if I gave my thoughts

— Up?

Holding my heart,

pushing it deeper within.

Stunting or fronting true selves.

Who would I be if I opened the cage?

What would emerge if my heart was set free?

How much Love can a soft heart give?

Why, All the Love that there is.

Embracing the shattered,

the least and the lost,

Inside me —

but also in them.

How would I live?

if I–

Stopped.

Looked.

and Listened……..

before crossing the road

On The Way?

Fall and Flow

by Jane Tawel

Fall and Flow

By Jane Tawel

January 22, 2025

Beginning —

A bud appears on a dung heap

Beauty despite, beauty despite….

Somehow from garbage,

New birth.

New shoots reach up

from old roots,

Searching

Dreaming

Creating Hope.

Stay small,

as small as you can be.

In this Un-brave New World,

find your courage in

laughter,

meekness,

small acts of kindness.

Become curious.

Be curious only about —

What you can see

What you can smell

What you can taste

What you can hear

What you can touch.

Keep your focus on

What you can experience in this moment

and perhaps, what you can change.

Nothing but what is real for you

needs to intrude on your reality.

Use your fear wisely

and then fear not.

This is not the beginning of the end.

This is the end of yet another beginning.

Many have come and gone before

And for you, there is only —

This time

This place

This now

This task.

Find those to whom

you alone can help,

find those to whom you

would do unto

as you would have them do

unto you.

Herein, lies peace.

Trust that you can fight for right,

and stand up for Goodness

but only where you are planted.

Be a beautiful small flower.

The garbage is only here

to help you flourish and grow.

Let other people tend their own gardens

or wallow in their own dung heaps

as they will.

They are not for you.

Endings…..

A leaf falls from a tree

A wave flows out to the Ocean

And dust returns to dust

Let go

Fall

Flow

And you will find where you have come from

and return.

Child’s Play Prayer

by Jane Tawel

Unsplash: Omer Haktan Bulut, Photographer

Child’s Play Prayer

By Jane Tawel

January 18, 2025

Hi.

I don’t understand You,

and that’s okay,

but I know You are my Parent.

I knew You when I

was in Your Womb, Mommy.

I knew You from the first day

You held my weak and wandering

eyes in Your loving gaze,

caressing me with Your thoughts.

I know how strong You are, Daddy,

because time and time again,

no matter how big I have grown,

You have lifted me up

on Your strong shoulders,

and held me in your strong hands.

Forgive me for growing up

to think I had to earn your love.

Forgive me for thinking You could

ever love me less if You also

loved my brothers and sisters

just as much as You love me.

Forgive me for thinking

I could ever put Your Love aside

like a memento from the Past,

store it in a little box,

shelving with other books

I might take down and read sometimes.

Your Love is not a once upon a time thing.

Your Love is not one thing at all.

Your Love is One —

not You. not Me.

I am Yours, and You are Mine.

Mommy. Daddy. Creator. Love.

You, Parent-Creator,

are higher than my highest thoughts,

and lower than my deepest desires.

Release me from want —

from needing

from needing or pretending

to be an adult around You —

an adult full of doing and thinking,

not trusting and resting

at peace

at home

in Your Love.

Help me flunk my test today,

so I will relearn how to go out and play.

Let me be again

Be… again…

Your dearly beloved

Child.

Amen.

Right Now, Right Here

Right Now, Right Here

By Jane Tawel

January 2, 2025

So full of grief for moments past

So anxious for next moment

So bitter that this life won’t last

So rife with pain and mindless foment.

I wander blindly, thought to thought

Not seeing, hearing, tasting.

I miss what Is for what is Not

While precious Nows go wasting.

This morning as I woke — my dream

did linger in my consciousness

And for a moment, it did seem

I could escape this awful mess

of all the negativity that I allowed to fester,

and so, I set my mind to be an open-minded quester.

I realized what I called my life,

was really just a reverie,

but I had wasted so much time

in future fears and burdening memory.

I vowed this day to change the way

that I would think, and act, and live in

this precious moment — just that — no more.

No future fears — the past forgiven.

This Now, I will embrace, explore

with senses full, mean thoughts all emptied,

and previous ghosts of hopeless frenzy

I banish now from my True Being.

I’ll breathe. Take steps. True Self. Vast. Freeing.

As Shakespeare said: “Life’s what we’re dreaming.”

The Wise One said: “All comes in season.

As Jesus said, “No need to worry.”

And Buddha said, “Please stop your hurry.”

Hello, sweet Now,

I greet You anew.

The Whys and Hows,

I’ll leave to You.

My life is just Right Now, Right Here —

This moment, — Precious, Treasured, Dear.

I open to the glory of

My Self as just a story of

a birth, a life, a death — and then?

One moment more — I wake — reborn again.

This Perfect Gift

by Jane Tawel

This Perfect Gift

By Jane Tawel

December 19, 2024

When I was born,

Someone gave me a beautiful container.

It was perfect, just as it was.

People marveled over it –

“How lovely”, they said.

Right from the beginning,

I knew, without knowing,

that this container was a marvel,

an endless delight, to explore,

to caress, to wonder at.

And everyone agreed.

I enjoyed endless hours

playing with my container,

just hanging out and being

with my container.

Even so young, I knew

that to care for this container —

this vessel of perfect form and function,

this earthy, natural, but divine mystery —

was a responsibility and a gift.

Perfectly formed but oh, so fragile,

the container got its first ding

at two years old,

when it fell against a coffee table.

“Just a little scratch,” they said,

“no need to worry”.

But everyone did begin to worry then.

And suddenly it was very important

to protect my container from any more hurts.

And the container

began to be kept a bit apart from me.

The distance between myself

and my container would keep it safe.

When I started school

was the first time I realized

that not everyone knew

how beautiful my container was.

Not everyone treasured it as I did,

So, I began to hide my container,

wrapping it up tightly

concealing its gorgeous curves,

masking its earthy smells,

painting over my container’s natural colors.

I wanted my container to look like everyone else —

No, better than everyone else.

Because I was told that all containers

were in some sort of contest,

and that the only thing one’s container

was good for,

was being more beautiful, or stronger,

or thinner or sexier or faster

than everyone else’s container.

When I got a job

and became an adult,

I often lost track of what I did with my container,

I was so busy.

The container was used

when it had a purpose.

And the life of the mind

which became all of me…

Well,

that is so important, isn’t it?

One day I had a child,

and Someone gave her

a beautiful container.

And I wish I could say

that it changed how I felt

about my own lost love of

my container, but…

It didn’t.

And though I marveled

at the perfection of my child’s

own beautiful, perfect container,

and though I tried all her life,

to explain how perfect her container was,

how she could be proud of it,

and how she should love it with all her heart

as the perfect divinely inspired gift that it was —

Instead…

she saw how I felt about my own container.

She saw and heard and took into herself,

all my fears and insecurities and ignorance

about our containers.

I am still so sad about that.

I am trying to forgive myself.

I wish my ignorance could be our bliss,

But I am just sad,

Because we really did have,

Do have,

Still have,

these perfect, beautiful containers –

these gifts.

Now I am old,

And I look at this old container —

so beaten up and beaten down

so marred and scratched and worn —

And yet — I see,

it is still so perfect —

a treasure.

And every day I am more and more aware

of what a gift we are given when

we are born and given our containers.

We come to life

with a perfect vessel,

formed in the forges of unseen Gods.

We are given all we need

as we carry our containers for a short time;

Carrying on caring for ourselves,

Carrying on caring for others,

Carrying on caring for our Mother Earth,

Carrying on and carried in a perfect container.

And now that I am old,

I am once again struck by the

Mystery of my container.

And then one day,

Sooner, but hopefully later,

I will no longer have this container.

It will be gone, returned to dust

as all temporal things must do.

And when my vessel is gone,

Alas!

Forgive!

Acceptance!

Love!

Oh, what will I do,

when this container is no more?

What will I do?

Ah –

That is the is greatest mystery of all.

A Word in a Stroke of Luck

A Word in a Stroke of Luck

By Jane Tawel

December 7, 2024

I shall call You, “Good”.

You are My Good.

You mean ALL for The Good.

I shall call upon You in the night,

“Oh, My Good!”

“Help us, Dear Good”.

I will meditate

on the World’s Beauty of Good.

I will stand in awe

in the World’s Mystery of Good.

I will put my trust in the power of Good.

For You, are a Good, Good, Good-ness.

I will love You, Oh, my Good;

and have faith that Good-ness

will not only follow me and mine

All the days of this lifetime,

but that I shall dwell in the House of Good

Forever and ever.

Amen.

Words are funny, shallow, flitting things.

Poor words, they try so hard.

And though they fail again and again,

we pick them back up, dust them off, and try once more

to use them to explain,

to use words to understand,

to take words and try to

put an outer shell to what is inside of us –

What is Inside of All.

Poor Words! How exhausted they must be!

They beg us to give them a rest.

But instead, we invent algorithms

to create more and more words

again and again and again

done by computers so words

have less meaning than even the

words of a worm might have.

We think in constant gales of words

Ghosts of words of past and future

Words with no meaning at all.

So, we never have to be still.

And the Silence will never touch us

surrounded by,

hunkered down,

lost and alone

in our fortresses of words.

Oh, Poor Words!

Words swim upstream —

light, floating inconsequentially

in the Ocean of True Truth,

in the Ocean of Unspoken Meaning beyond Meaning.

And there they go again!

Lost. Irretrievable. Unspoken. Too late. Too soon.

We only shut up when we’re dead.

What a Stroke of Luck for me!

For this morning,

as I grumbled over Past and Future,

A mind consumed in a mire of useless wording,

I happened to be writing something on a page,

And carelessly my mind glitched

on spelling, “God”.

And accidentally adding another “o” —

A Stroke of Luck in One Small Stroke!

And Oh, my Soul!

Oh, Joy!

I happened to have slipped upon

a banana peel of misspelling

and landed in a Heaven of New Insight!

With my one small stroke of pen,

with one tiny letter,

with one mistake (I thought) —

I have thrown out a buoy into the

Raging Tides of Time and Space.

And now I think I may make it

to The Shore.

Yes, you may laugh

Or shake your head at me

Or frown at my naivety or lack of theory,

And you may still cling to what you need to believe

about a God you want to call your own,

whose name has been taken in vain so many times

that it has lost all meaning.

But for me –

that one change, that “O”,

has quite suddenly!

made all the difference to me.

Oh, My Good!

I praise You for the Word,

for one small word to

change my angers and my fears into

a fledgling, hoping love of You.

Thank you for all my broken words,

that like a child with chalk in hand

search for You with fleeting strokes

on the sidewalks of this Life.

Thank you for one small circle

to begin to shape

the circle of this Life

of one small soul,

for All.

Today may I Be.

Still.

And Know.

That You.

Are.

GOOD.

Wilderness

Wilderness

By Jane Tawel

November 26, 2024

In a certain moment,

a peace comes over me,

unasked for,

Gift.

And I am glad to be in the Wilderness

with You.

I was part and particle

of the masses and

Mass hysteria

of all that thinks

it knows and is.

The noise filled me

but never fulfilled its promises.

But now that I, alone, do wander

through this path-y, spiraling Life,

and wonder through

this endless, fleeting Time,

I know the Mountain never speaks,

except within my aching, still-born heart.

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by Jane Tawel

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by Jane Tawel

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