poetry – Jane Tawel

The Game

The Game

By Jane Tawel

October 22, 2026

The World has always

been full of grifters.

To con ourselves is the first step

We take towards “adulthood”.

The second is to con others,

Playing the game

to convince them we are

the roles we play.

Our natural tendency and desire

to win by luck

or place of birth

or beliefs in passing knowledge

of how to game the System —

writ large on decaying papyrus —

these things we tell ourselves

are what we have learned

what we have earned

by whom and what we are.

And the Question of what it all means

dies with the Quest of the More.

And we no longer play games

like children do — curious, free, delighted —

But like con artists who play to win

At any cost

At any loss

of self, or soul, or Awe.

Playing the short-con,

is the uniquely human achievement.

And on days the die lands on red,

We smile thinking we have won.

And on days the die lands on black,

We turn away —

Angry, afraid, jealous of the gods

who we believe

have stacked the decks against us.

Preferring to think our lives

will never bankrupt our souls

we find a new table to play at

to eat at

to rattle the cup

that contains the pips we call

“Reality”.

We live in the uncertainty

of why we never seem to win

that which we think we most value.

And we tell ourselves that even

when the Game Room of Life

closes and all our chips

must be turned in (like it or not),

we hope and pray

there will be more games to play

in some new casino we call Heaven,

a future myth we have gambled on

while only temporarily here

playing Blackjack with our souls.

So few of us have found the Truth and lived it.

Fewer still have listened and followed.

There was a man from Galilee

and one from Quren village

who entered all the holy gambling places

and with the mighty swords of Words alone,

turned over the gambling tables

and walked out Whole and Free.

And both said humbly, “All you must do,

Is simply follow Me.”

And the gaming table

was refashioned into a Communion Table

where all know “they have plenty and are rich”*.

This life is not a game

and we are not the players

but the played.

We have inherited

a Sacred Trust –

to squander it, is to die.

To invest it in our Holy Being,

will resurrect the soul to Eternity Now.

One can not gamble with Presence:

it simply Is.

“Oh, Human, what are you —

that God has you in Mind?

God, why do you visit us

and care?”**

We do not know or understand.

But do we really have to?

Can we not walk away

from the games we play

the unrealities we create?

And stand in awe and mystery —

Amazed? Awake? Alive?

The Whole World is within us —

A Kingdom of God

And nothing is a gamble

And nothing is lacking

And there is nothing to fear.

Be Still.

Trust.

I AM.

No games to stop at.

Just Flow.

Beyond luck.

Beyond entitlement.

Beyond fear of loss.

Beyond death.

“They that place their bets

upon The Good-Love

shall be made whole and free forever.”***

For God has always played

the Long Con.

*Lao Tzu Proverb

** Psalm 8:4

*** Isaiah 40:31

The Smell of The Crowd

The Smell of The Crowd

By Jane Tawel

October 8, 2026

Can you imagine what they smelled like?

That rag-tag bunch of men who smelled like fish?

Those women who smelled of childbirth?

(no time for baptismal purification, with all that housework

for her ladyship);

The gardeners who arrived,

Necks bent permanently from kneeling in the mud and manure?

(no time to change from cultivating his honorable so and so’s garden)

And all those little children!?

(who let them come?)

Kids so used to being neither seen nor heard,

Unable to remember what it was to play,

Day after day, picking through the garbage thrown out in the streets,

(as many of their families had been)

Children came.

Children who smelled like, well,

children.

These were the multitudes with no free time

for baths or baptisms,

no spare change for deodorants

or gifts of frankincense and myrrh.

A people with no paid vacations

or access to spas.

In fact, probably a lot of them

knew they’d lose their jobs,

or get beaten by their mistresses

(if they were allowed to return to work).

Maybe some of the teenagers

had run away from home –

Just to hear Him speak.

By some miraculous communication,

Long before telegraphs or cellphones

Before television or Tik-Tok,

These stinky multitudes got The Word.

Straight to their hearts, His words

The Word

Found them.

And they Knew! Knew!

They had to, simply had to,

Leave everything if they must,

and come to Jesus.

They Knew! Knew!

That they would be welcomed by Someone

Who was wise, and good,

and who cared about them.

Little did they imagine,

That they would be loved.

That they would in all their odiferous reality,

Be seen as something More,

Be touched as flesh that mattered

Be heard with their questions of importance,

And be inhaled like a fresh Breath of Life.

They wept and laughed and hugged each other,

To think they would be

Embraced by Someone who Loved them.

They could barely imagine.

Barely hope or pray

That they would be accepted as they were,

Loved even.

But they were.

But can you imagine,

in your fresh clothes washed by Tide,

And your shampooed hair, smelling of gardenias,

And your brushed teeth compliments of Crest –

Can you imagine —

Just for a moment —

All of that disgusting, decaying flesh

pressed up all around

Each other and Him?

All of those calloused hands that dug the earth

or hauled the catch,

or wiped the bottoms of the rich and famous?

Can you get a hint

of the smell of those armpits that sweated

in the harsh sun and the baking furnace rooms

in the private gardens of the wealthy

and the gated houses of the powerful?

Can you smell the oozing pus

from their scrapped and bloodied knees

bowed, and bowed, and bowing again and again

in the endless service of those

with leisure and time and place and money

those who could imagine they had

cleaned away for one more day

the body’s smell of daily dying?

And can you imagine their surprise

When Jesus didn’t ask them to bow down,

Or even to help out?

But He invited them to sit and be served.

And to eat. Relax. Chill out. Enjoy.

“Take eat, there is plenty. More than enough.”

(Even his closest friends thought he was a bit nutty).

But Jesus knew he was preparing them to one day hear:

“This bread is my body, given for you. Take. Eat.”

Oh, yes.

The dirty masses snuck away

from those too busy and with hands to clean to come

to hear a Man who had a different definition

of being clean.

Can you imagine?

Can you smell the needy stench?

And Jesus not only gathered them,

Invited them in,

Fed them,

And taught them things they’d only dreamed about,

But He stuck his nose deep in their

Greasy hair,

and smelly armpits,

and knees that knelt in putrid labor all day long

and the hands of tiny children, sticky with snot.

And He held them.

And He loved them.

And He Imbibed —

every stinky, smelly, poverty-stricken, bodily-entombed

one of them.

After all –

Jesus came

to smell like one of us.

And He smiled as He chased the scent.

Being One with The Hound of Heaven.

Jesus knew that The Kingdom

was not behind the walls or in the mansions,

But right there in the Unseen masses,

But who had eyes to see;

And right there with those with ears to hear;

And in the so-called Untouchables,

But who had open hands, willing to hold them out to others

and touch the Hand of God.

And Jesus knew that in the pungent scrums

pressing up against Him,

were a multitude of noses,

broken, misshapen, fractured

by years of being stuck to the grindstones of the temporal

but there with Him,

ready and able to smell the fragrance of The Eternal Holy.

And little did they know,

That with every sense informing Christ’s soul,

He was preparing for the ultimate Reek

of His body, hung like offal on a Roman Cross,

And the decaying stench of His body,

Given for us,

So that we might go

and smell likewise.

Jesus gave the poor and lost and least

a strong whiff

of what it means to live within a Kingdom

Imbued with the Earthy,

smelly, pungent scent of humanness

and yet — -

within each,

there lurked

the aroma of the Divine.

And He encouraged us

to go —

and smell likewise.

Laying Down the Heavy Bags

Laying Down the Heavy Bags

By Jane Tawel

October 5, 2026

Slogging through,

hauling around these heavy bags

of selves, and roles,

of identities I have collected —

sometimes the weight of all of them

is more than I can bear.

But to leave them alone and unguarded

Beside the Road is scary.

What would it feel like to be so light?

Who would I be without my stuff of self?

Even the celestial bodies

I have assumed to wear

as coats of many colors

are nothing more than history’s passing fads.

And I am just a tad tired

of being used by my need to believe.

Belief is over-rated as a weight-bearing device.

To be lightened, without load, is scary.

To give up a closet full of theories

Leaves me lighter than I can bear.

The air is too thin

without the ballast of my strong convictions.

I’ve never been a fan of flight.

To be Light is scary.

Darkness has covered a multitude of sins.

But I have found quite lately

that the burdens I have carried

are making holes in the fabric of my life

and despite my attempts at staying under cover,

the holes keep letting the Light shine through.

There are many ways to lay down what we carry.

And I am finding that if I do not volunteer

to let go and leave my illusive, leaden payloads behind,

then bit by bit,

the holes torn in the fabric I have donned

of selves meant to disguise the soul –

those very holes enlarge,

and fill the empty spaces —

and whether I mean to or not,

I leave all my tattered rags of my small self

Scattered higgledy-piggledy

in my wandering wake.

I imagine someday you may find me

(or at least I hope You do)

crawling and inching ahead along the path,

an unknown, unknowing infant,

naked, unashamed,

and Weightless.

This House

This House

By Jane Tawel

October 2, 2026

This house

will be the last I live in

(it was coincidently also the first, though not the same)

And I will never leave this house

Until I do

Giving it up, as all things must

Eventually Be given up

Where I will go

when I leave this house

No one knows

But I will Be

As ever I have been

Just me

But houseless

Though never homeless

Haikus of Grace

Haikus of Grace

By Jane Tawel

September 12, 2026

Breaking through, like waves

that shift the sandy dunes of fate.

In rolls the tide of Grace.

Unearned merit moves

Reveling in the slow and languid dance

Partnered in loving embraces of Grace.

Grace skirts the narrow edges.

I must be moved from perceived safe middle-grounds

To find the rim and rind of the Divine.

Haikus of Trust

Haikus of Trust

By Jane Tawel

Frightened, hard, closed fists.

Yearning, open hands.

Faith is in the unknowning.

A Tree grows in light.

The night stunts its reach.

But the roots grow in the dark.

I have great fear of going blind.

To see nothing would impair my sense of self.

But what senses of Otherness would rise in me,

the blind traveler,

were I to keep walking?

The Gore and Glory of Gardens

The Gore and Glory of Gardens

By Jane Tawel

August 27, 2026

How glorious to get gory in the garden.

The scratch of thorns on forearms,

the blisters from the dig with gloveless trowels,

the sweat in pits and crevices of this

amazing bucket of blood and water

that Nature has formed around my soul

to care for my small patch of Mother Earth.

I felt once young and clean again today,

to shape the world with loving shears and mulch.

To mix my blood with Wood and Fruit —

the trellises like crosses,

and vines with open mouths and wounds,

accepting my small part in their salvation.

We small shoots in the ever-growing Universe,

have so much love to give,

have so much love to receive.

To be afraid of change and growth,

is to experience, once more,

our Banishment from The Garden.

I look at the dandelions,

determined to take their place among the flowers of the world,

And I say to them,

“We are not so different, You and I”.

Today, I told the lilies of my field

that though the heating Sun

would kill them now,

their regal raiment was secure;

for beauty never really dies.

And as I brutally cut away

the dead and dying parts

of branch and leaf and husk,

I sang a song of blessing

on the roots and shoots and buds.

I told the bees who looked at me askance,

“A garden must suffer to thrive,

A garden must die to live,

A garden will give and give and give

And you, dear bees and I, must care for Her

with all the skills and love together we can bring”.

A Garden is a glorious, gory thing.

How wonder-full to walk in The Garden,

Returned to The Presence,

at One with small, real, lovely things.

A cosmos contained in a back yard,

shedding blood and sap and dew,

continually dying cells

and resurrecting Life.

We are meant to be

at One,

as Kin,

at Home,

returned to Eden,

in small patches of soil.

Not From, Not To, But Are

Not From, Not To, But Are

By Jane Tawel

It is not where you are from

Nor where you are going

Not from, not to,

But are.

How very silly we have been

to stand on what is behind us

(that belonged to someone else).

Or to look toward what we imagine is before us

(tomorrow never comes for it is always now)

What a tragi-comedy we live

To bank on what is on the bank

To live clinging to the shore

And to miss what is right here

right Now

and which is always without effort

moving, floating, streaming –

Oh! — the Current can not be

dammed with words.

We were made to feel

the Flow

Water and blood flow

We see water flow

We can feel it flow through our hands

Impossible to grasp.

We sense blood flow

Through veins, heart pumping

Surging life through bodies made

of dancing molecules.

In life, water and blood flow separately

But in Death, water and blood flow out together.

In death, we know they are one

as we are One.

When life flows out of this cask of blood and bones,

of sensibility and sinew,

of dermis and dreams,

the container will no longer be needed.

And we will join the Great Flow

Flowing out and on

“Deep and wide

Deep and wide

There’s a Fountain flowing deep and wide”**.

“Don’t wait”! cry the angels,

“Join the Great Flow now!”

Letting go

Releasing

No judgement

No fear

You are already in and of.

There is no need to know

There is only experiencing.

One joins the Stream

And then knows without knowing

That the Water flowing

is also the swirl of Light.

** These words are from an old children’s Sunday School song called “Deep and Wide”. We knew more as children, it seems.

The Truth Is in the Spaces

The Truth Is in the Spaces

By Jane Tawel

July 24, 2026

Words are signposts only,

along the Narrow Way.

If you rush from point to point,

word to word,

you will never reach

the destination,

the place that you call “The Truth”.

Words will keep you traveling, traveling, traveling;

Anxious to find the right signs, or

Arguing with your copilots

Certain in your certainty,

that only you know best,

that your way is the Only!! route,

the single road to Happiness, to Heaven, or to Holiness;

And never knowing deeply, truly,

that there are many trued and true paths

leading Home.

Words, especially those on ancient maps,

can also keep you stuck,

content to stay within your deepening rut.

Eventually you can dig yourself

so far down and down and down

you barely have a finger to raise above your ditch,

a small and useless pointer at the stars which you can’t see,

down there in the dark and dank, determined ditch you’ve dug.

Or perhaps you raise an angry, upright digit

raised in indignation, raised against

the perceived enemies out there,

a digit wiggling out and up,

a solitary soldier in the slumbering stand you take

against awakening

and climbing up and out into

the fresh air of the Open Road.

For a long time, inviting others

to join you in your rut

can make you feel safe.

Until the floods come.

Your muscles that once could have found The Way,

Out into the Open Air, free in the Wide and Open Spaces,

are too weak by now, atrophied by the fears of your Unknowing.

You have languished long, far from the Road,

feeling secure in the tight confines of your pit,

Unable to pull yourself out of the rut of

your necessary belief that somehow, stuck down there,

you will eventually rise to Something, Somewhere Else.

But a pit leads no-where, my friend.

And in the hidey- hole that you’ve dug,

you never see the many ropes

that others have thrown down

to let you pull yourself out from

the ditch that you have dug around yourself.

So many lovely, lovely things,

have through the eons

of this lovely, lovely World’s circuitous

spiraling, mysteriously moving expedition,

thrown out life-lines,

shown, not spoken,

and pointed to all the Truth we ever need to know,

to Trust that only Love can lead The Way.

Nature has the truest Trueline.

Her roots have been threaded by Eternity,

threaded into thick, strong cords,

leading in and out, and down and up,

The Way of Our Salvation.

The World is full of Glory

to save us from drowning

in idolatry of texts,

from continually bashing ourselves

upon the rocky walls we make

out of our own silly and inflated egos.

Nature has never built a wall.

When the Flood comes,

and finds you in your high-walled ditch,

Words won’t help you float.

You need something with air in it for that,

Something that breathes,

Something buoyant like a raft.

Cast aside your useless euphemisms,

your cries and yells and sermons,

your documents and equations

none of these can save you.

You can only release yourself to The Flow.

Let go

and float

and let The River lift you up and out,

out from in your trenches,

out from your revenges and your fears,

and let The Water take you,

clean you and restore you,

back from chosen Death to freely given Life.

Trust the Flow.

All Rivers flow to The Source.

Truth is not a map

that anybody owns.

The Way is the play between,

the give and take

and push and shove

and gentle flow of

of letting go;

the looking up and out

and gazing long

at what is not there to be seen

but that which opens us.

And when we do not know

then we know

it is not our seeing that matters,

because we sense

we, at last, are Seen.

Don’t throw away your maps,

but rest assured,

while Compasses are often useful things,

True Truth is only in the gaps.

Truth is in the spaces –

The small bits and gentle pauses

The breaths between the hub-bub

and the clean-rooms that scour out

the hubris of our “feeling”

that we are right and they are wrong.

Peace is only found in the spaces

between the small stones in your shoes,

only in the vast open-places

glimpsed only

out of the corner of your eyes,

perhaps magnified into

kaleidoscopic wonder

by tears of sorrow or

tears of aching Awe.

I wish they had used better punctuation

in the things that Jesus said.

There needs to be a lot of Space —

— Between —

between the Truths that only Love can know.

I add a lot of dashes —

Between the words of Christ.

I AM —

The Way —

The Truth —

The Life —

Seek —

and you will find.

Love —

Love.

Yes — let me live and move and

Find my being

in the Dashes —

I Am-ness —

And Your IAm.

my seeking —

and Your finding.

my longing —

and the only thing that fills that longing —

Love.

The Spirit People do not hand us maps —

We make those up ourselves.

And while a map can be a useful thing,

we shouldn’t mistake it for The Way.

Look for the crevices and cracks –

There is a crack in everything,

That’s how the Light gets in.*

Look up from your maps,

And follow The Light.

There is a Light in The Window,

and The Light of The World

will lead us Home.

*by Leonard Cohen, “Anthem”

YOU

YOU

By Jane Tawel

June 10, 2026

Open our eyes,

and let us see.

YOU are Way,

not wall.

YOU are the Open Door

not the closed borders.

YOU are process,

not product.

YOU are not container,

but Cosmos.

YOU are OTHER,

and yet, not other.

Like a MOTHER,

YOU womb me,

Birth me,

Nurse me,

And with opened eyes,

I see only YOU,

And YOU and I are One.

May the Light of Your Love,

Blind us into healed eyes

and new sight.

May the Grace of Your Goodness,

cause us to stumble from our marches

so that we may hold out hands of help

to the bruised and to the fallen.

May the Wonder of Your World,

make us weep with longing

and humble us, and gladden us

to care for this Our Home,

with the same parental care

that YOU, oh, Father care for Your World.

May we fall in love once again,

with this our Home, and these,

our Brothers and our Sisters;

And may we treat all Life — as YOU do —

with the same kindness and nurture

that a Gardener and Farmer gives

the blessed, life-giving Land.

May the Freedom of Your Mercy

Heal our hatreds.

May the selflessness of Your Justice,

replace our false desire for punishment.

And in the Court of Your judgement,

May the oppressed be restored,

the prisoner set free,

the lame walk and the leper dance.

And May Your rivers of righteousness roll down,

rolling and roiling,

as the first become last,

and the last are the first,

and all tumble and meld

into the Oneness that is

Your Kingdom come.

Parent, Creator, Foundation, Friend:

May the Love that is

Of YOU,

And that is beyond comprehension,

May the Mystery of Love that You are

and that You can only be, and can be no other —

May that same Love

that is beyond all human understanding,

and that is also the miracle of Love

available to all humble hearts,

Keep our feet inching forward on The Way,

Keep our minds open to Your Truth,

Keep our wills muscular with the joy of Your Spirit,

And may our hearts beat as One

with You and with All that You Love.

May the Lure of Your Love,

make me, as You were and are,

a fisher of lives —

to patiently cast out the lure of your love

to catch them and release them

back into the OCEAN of YOU,

Just as YOU have caught and released

this small guppy of a girl.

May it Be.

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