Wishful Thinking

https://unsplash.com/@jason_edmunds

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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. 

Free from The Beautiful Prison

Hasan Almasi — Unsplash

Free from The Beautiful Prison

By Jane Tawel

February 13, 2025

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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.

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What a waste of Time

my thoughts have been.

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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 .

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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.

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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.

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© Jane Tawel, 2025

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.

Meditation-1, Prayer – 0

The Sound of Silence: Leaf
“The Sound of Silence: Leaf” by fotologic is licensed under CC BY 2.0

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Meditation -1, Prayer – 0

By Jane Tawel

January 12, 2022

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If I meditate on you,

seeing through you today,

as you were when young, as you will be when old,

then all my telling and all I am told,

fades away, and I see you.

and I see me, at last,

free;

but it is a freedom, frightening,

and I prefer to chain myself again

to outcomes and perceptions.

I will try again tomorrow,

to see through you to the little child,

and I will replant my own seed

in the womb of wholeness,

at least if only

for just a fleeting moment of conception.

In new conception, one finds Eternal Love.

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If I meditate on You,

I feel fear and uncertainty,

because I think of You as a thought,

and that You should be somewhere.

Instead, You are every where,

The Seeker and the Sought are One.

I despair—

You are never going to come,

but You are here and now, instead,

and that I can’t get through my head,

and my heart aches with the anger of my aloneness.

If I but give myself away,

to lack of desire and lack of days,

then Eternity creates anew,

the me in You.

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Give way, oh my Mind, to Heart of pure release.

Remorse is but a fire consuming,

but repentance waters the seeds of True Life.

What is a prayer, if not a certainty of Answering?

And the answer comes in Silence,

and the Silence is the womb.

*

© Jane Tawel, January 12, 2022

Is This my Prayer, my Meditation, my Breath? Who Am I Today?

Prayer for Beginners | Desiring God

Is This my Prayer, my Meditation, my Breath? Who Am I Today?

By Jane Tawel

November 22, 2021

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Be right.

Be the light.

When darkness comes, breathe it in again and again,

until I am finally able to exhale only light.

Hold all things lightly in my hands,

so that my hands may be open to receive more.

As soon as is possible, and as soon as is right,

 with love for others,

I will seek to depart from the wrong paths I take.

I will shun the wrong companionship

 of hate and fear and anger.

I will seek to return to All that has been True Truth

from the Beginning, to the End of All Time,

and I will choose only

Love.

My faith will be

love of family, love of friends, love of enemy,

love of The Divine and love of self.

Following the One Way, I will Be In…

and there I will realize that All is In

and only nothingness is outside…

and Life is

a Heaven on Earth that I simply call Home.

Peacefully, with self-care,

and with wisdom and care for others,

I will seek to return my wrong self to my True Self.

Within only this single moment, I will seek to find,

and knock, to have the doors opened,

and ask only to live in peaceful harmony within The Question.

Today I find only today’s steps on The Path,

and it is enough to lead further in and further up

to Compassion without suffering,

Liberation without judgment,

Insight without fear,

and Joy without limits.

Inside, numinous and alive,

longing to escape into light and resurrection,

Shalom is wholeness.

Outside, awesome and wondrous,

God is, I Am,

longing to enter in the mystery,

 and begin The Dance.

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© Jane Tawel November 22, 2021

A Meditation on the Oxymoron of California Rain

A Meditation on the Oxymoron of California Rain

January 11, 2015

By Jane Tawel

Millions of other worlds’ elsewhere- rains later,

Dry heaves of rain drops fall.

Alone in the dripping desert of skyscrapers,

Goldberry’s bastard heir keeps the dance.

She worships the sight of

The spittle of the gods in the gutters.

Genuflecting in baptismal puddles,

She parts the seas of cautious cars.

The pittance of little sparks of firewater,

crackling wet,

Makes a solitary drumbeat

for her dance of The Tribe.

My real world is best lit

through drizzled gorgeous grey.

In a world gone mad looking for the sun,

God shelters me best in rain.