Spiritiuality – Jane Tawel

Chirps

by Jane Tawel

Chirps

by Jane Tawel

October 14, 2025

My Dear Child,

My baby,

My heart and life —

The second you left my womb, we were separated.

No longer the chirps of your small heart would be embraced

so close to mine that our hearts were as one.

And just so, I was separated from You, Oh, God,

the moment I left Your Womb.

And now my heart searches for the Beat of Your Heart,

to be so close as to be One Beating Heart.

The bird outside my still-dark window

Chirps on the beat.

On the beat of the second hand — he chirps.

On the beat of my heart — he chirps.

On the drumbeat of my ever-pounding heart and mind — he chirps.

On the tick-tock of my since-birth-impending-death — he chirps.

And dawn begins her shallow light —

a poor substitute for the Son’s power.

Now my little bird is silent –

Where has he gone?

And I am present in this moment.

And I am present in my life.

And I am present in the Now.

Until the rights of the Risen Sun call me to action.

But in this last moment between night and day,

In Perfect Stillness,

I seek presence in You, O, God.

The sun, I believe, is in full-blare mode,

but I don’t know for sure, as I plan away my day.

The chirps of many birds make me aware

of all the business of finding our daily bread.

And I am lost in Time again.

Lists of things to do and do.

Lost in things to plan or shun.

Lost in things ended or not yet begun.

Chirp-chirp. Tick-Tock.

Time to dig in the dirt for worms.

The cacophony of the many chirps has begun.

I cannot give them all my attention.

Can I for just a moment,

Listen closely to what is already within myself,

and the small, silent gifts of my own spaciousness?

Can I find The Womb in me?

And cradle the little baby trusting in me to grow?

Between each call of bird-song,

there is the Still Small Self —

The Self that calms the many siren calls

of this illusory world.

And I for just one precious, peaceful moment —

even in the blinding, deafening darkness of the Day,

Float in the Heavens prepared for me

in Love’s Embracing, bracing freedom,

set for me before the beginning of the World.

But Time and Space so cruelly clip our wings.

And yet, I have once or twice seen that it is True,

that the Whole Cosmos beckons

in the still small voice heard only in darkness.

The voice of God comes only before the Dawn.

Just as my grasping, pecking beak

hunts for another worm to save for tomorrow,

The world begins to close Her curtain on the Sun.

And I have a choice –

Continue to hunt for treasures I can not eat now

nor save for tomorrow?

Or return to The Nest and rest?

The Ground of All Being whispers:

“Return to the Womb. Return to the Womb”.

And all my yearning sleeps

as I Awaken.

I float in the embryonic wonder of this present moment.

And Our Hearts chirp to the beat of Love and Life.

Separate, no more.

Again, One with You.

The Clearing of Rain

The Clearing of Rain

By Jane Tawel

Rain clears me

The sight and sound and smell of water

Coming like manna from the sky

It moves me to poetry.

It stuns me into true meditation.

It opens me to prayer.

Here in the desert-land

of my large, busy city,

we have so little rain

It comes in drips and drabbles.

We have so much of everything here.

And yes, so little.

So many stars on the sidewalks,

so few stars in the sky.

So many buildings soaring

so few shelters for the poor.

So much money spent

so little shared.

So much sun and heat and fire,

and oh, my soul! — so little rain.

I think perhaps we cursed ourselves,

here in this land of grabbers,

when we stopped The People

from their rain dances on The Land.

The Sky-Child has cried all His tears

and has no more.

And The Land has gathered Sky’s tears

into Her deepest womb

where, perhaps we gobblers can not devour them

as we have devoured all Nature’s other gifts.

To strain to hear the tiny drops of rain

reminds me of how hard it is to hear God

with so many plastic gods competing for attention.

The god of AmEx and of Capital One.

The god of the Amazon that rains our money

only on one man as the rainfall in the amazon dries up

to fill my coffee cup.

The great gods masquerading as freedom

concealing the real terror behind their force;

hiding the fact, that they are storm clouds of desire

gathering, ever and ever gathering,

but never coming down among us,

never healing the gardens we plant,

never baptizing us

to give us Life.

Create in me, a new heart, O God,

One that makes a desert of my desires,

compared to my thirst to find

a Kingdom of Quenching others’ thirst,

on Earth,

as it is in the Heavens.

To smell the water

sent from heaven

knowing what it is up against

as it bravely tries to turn to green

our dead desert yards

reminds me even when Hope

is a faint scent of bare possibility,

we must remember —

this land has died before

and it will die again.

And then — perhaps only then —

The rains will return.

May the children, once more,

Dance in puddles left by many rains.

And in this arid, barren fullness,

may we, who have wrinkled

our skins with our endless searches,

our flying to find the sun;

we who have deadened our hides

as we have deadened our hearts;

we who have wasted the water

as we have wasted our precious hours —

may we be cleansed in floods of Love,

Love for our Mother Earth and Father Sky,

Love for our children and our enemies alike.

Baptized with the fire of Our Holy Spirits,

may we dance rain dances once more,

and running out into the deluge,

may we wait with hope for the rain,

with mouths empty and open.

Traveling Towards Flight, I Hope

Traveling Towards Flight, I Hope

By Jane Tawel

September 19, 2025

I try not to ask myself too many questions.

After a while — and all this time —

It is exhausting to interrogate myself so much —

it only leads to judgment.

The comfort zone is best enjoyed

when only judging others.

I judge them with my anger

so that I may spend freely.

I judge them with my fears

to cover-up my fear of death.

But mostly to cover-over my fear of Life.

Or perhaps it is most often that I judge

to color-over my own lies —

to color outside my own lines.

I am good at coloring outside the lines

of topical belief-systems.

To take the next step, it must be small.

And I must be small.

Like Alice, I must drink the draught

that comes only from a creative heart,

and shrink my self into a Space

large enough to hold my Self.

True Truth is a butterfly —

Out there, flitting freely, no one knows where it may appear….

floating on the wind, like The Wind,

as the Holy Spirit says it does.

We may glimpse it but cannot grasp it.

But we must keep our eyes trained

on the horizons of our heart

and in Hope, the cocoon relaxes its bindings,

the fetters of our fears

and bonds of our desires

loosen, like the hand of an imprisoned adult,

we let go the grasping

and let the inner child go free.

Only a caterpillar can dream of crawling.

And so, I will today, embrace the moment

of crawling inch by inch,

dragging my insatiable, tiny belly

along this lovely, precious land.

Crawling inch by inch,

toward Flight.

“And what we shall be then,

We do not know,

But we know we will be

Changed.”

Traveling towards flight,

I inch painfully

towards Hope.

One Day I Shall Move On

https://unsplash.com/photos/a-suitcase-on-a-staircase-SrSLOWMnYWg

One Day I Shall Move On

August 29, 2025

This tube of flesh

has held my sorrows well.

But what I am and where I’m going

I can’t truly tell.

Ta-roo! Ta-rah!

The show goes on.

But one day as the clowns dance out

without my laughing smiles;

and one day slipping from my shoes,

I’ll leave the endless, winding miles.

I will be moving on — oh yes!

I will be moving on.

I do not know where I will be

when I am just the Self of Me,

but now each tender step I take,

and every thought I try to make,

I hold quite lightly, no hold or grasp.

Embracing precious moments as my last.

For this sweet Now is fully mine

with just a hint of Eternity’s divine.

One day I’ll leave this world of show and go.

And where I’m headed, though I do not know,

I trust the Good that Love will lead me there.

I know that, though you’ll think that I am gone,

Please know, I just left baggage.

I have moved on.

I Am Sad for Those Who Choose To Be So Small

I Am Sad for Those Who Choose To Be So Small

By Jane Tawel

August 15, 2025

I pity those who choose to be so small.

Especially those perhaps, who,

elevated to heights of grandeur,

living as this world’s supposedly elites

given prestige, power, and wealth,

who stand upon the mountain tops —

and yet, choose to crawl in the dirt

where they see only the specks of dirt in others’ eyes,

where they throw dirt at others attempting to dehumanize them;

where they debase themselves with petty actions,

meant to hurt others in their quest for more —

more power — there is never enough;

more things — there are never enough;

more wealth — there is never enough;

more attention — there is never enough;

more fame, and praise, and adulation — there are never enough.

More and more and more……

Because there is never enough.

Because they — are never enough.

I can only pity them.

How little they know.

How little they are.

I feel sad for those who choose to be so small.

They make the world hold up a fun-house mirror

allowing them to appear to themselves as big and grand,

as huge as their egos fight to make them feel.

I feel sad but it is hard for me to feel empathy

because I am still angry at the harm they do to others.

Why do small people become bullies?

If we all see in a cloudy mirror, darkly,

how sad it must be for those the world makes appear

so much bigger than the rest of us,

to sometimes get a glimpse of their true selves,

of the small needy child reflected back.

I wish Someone would tell them:

“It is the humble who inherit true life”.

I wish Someone would hold them

like the little angry, fearful children that they are.

And A Good Parent would say, “Fear not, for I-AM with you”.

And then they would no longer be angry that they too will die someday.

And then they would no longer be afraid to share their toys.

Because they would know that The Good Parent has enough

for all of us.

And that The Good Parent believes that each of us IS enough.

Because we are all Her children.

Even the naughty ones.

Even the ones who try to appear so big.

Even the small ones.

Even you and me.

And all of us small children,

could Be — One. Big. Happy Family.

I feel sad for those who choose to be so small.

I too, have chosen to be small, to stay small,

to let my ego convince me that it must grow and grow and grow…

By being right,

By being in charge and in control,

By being this or that or “someone”.

I, too, have made myself small

by making myself feel bigger

compared to someone else –

a friend, a boss, a spouse, a child, a stranger.

I, too, have chosen smallness of spirit,

Not realizing that smallness is never Spirit.

For how can something small contain

The Spirit?

How can any small container hold

that which is enormous, spacious, eternal?

I have used the same methods the large people use

to make myself small –

I have used anger and fear and judgment

And I have used them against you –

And I have used them against me —

And I have thought that those things reduced you compared to me.

And I have thought those fears and angers and judgements against myself

were things I could hold on to as important —

But they aren’t important unless I use them to grow;

Unless I use them to grow something Good.

My anger, fear, and judgement are the dirt —

And yes, I recognize that dirt can make things grow,

But what I choose to do with the dirt matters;

what I choose to plant in that dirt is what matters.

I can plant weeds or flowers; I can plant food or golden towers.

My emotions are not me, any more than my thoughts are me.

My emotions and thoughts can be the trash that fill me up

like an overflowing dump, like a landfill.

Or I can let my emotions and thoughts be the mud,

the decaying compost

that lets the lotus grow

that nourishes Abundant Life.

I am sad for those who choose to stay so small.

Next to the little ripple that I make,

they appear as huge waves — as tsunamis, some of them —

it sometimes still makes me angry at their destructive paths,

it sometimes still makes me afraid,

afraid for the children who must one day

try to clean-up the mess on the shores

we leave behind in our time.

And yet, those who make big waves do not realize

that we are all just small, temporary appearances

on Life’s surface.

We are none of us any more than

small ripples on One Big Endless Ocean.

How sad to look for large-ness in one’s small self,

when if one only looked around, and looked inside,

one would see the Vastness of The Ocean she is

One With.

Oh!

What peace I find!

What joy I embrace!

Passing understanding, peace settles in,

when in this single, only moment that I have

I AM –

I am that one, small ripple at One with your one, small ripple.

In that Being,

my spirit enlarges

and together we grow and grow and grow

to Be

One Huge Ocean.

The Wise One said,

“This too shall pass — as every time does,

as every moment does”.

All names go down in someone’s history,

and then that history passes out of all remembrance.

The Wisdom of the One Spirit

can not be contained in old wine skins:

Always new and renewing, it bursts forth from the old,

renewing and renewing into Eternal I-AM-ness.

And seeing the finger pointing at the moon,

is the signpost not the Truth.

And empathy is only an open door,

to learn to love my enemy as I love myself.

For my enemy IS my Self.

And peeking through the door of empathy,

I see the Light of Love.

And only Love remains.

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.

Morning Promises

Morning Promises

By Jane Tawel, July 28, 2024

****

Gorgeous delight,

this Morning, fresh and new.

I put up a good fight against Your hopeful face,

But why did I ever doubt You?

You have come, not on soft, pitter-patter feet

as once you did when youth was cleanly cleaved

along the lines of good and bad

along the fenceposts of win or fail

when all the dreams we ever had were moored

along the shores of youth’s grim holy grails.

No, your arrival seems to come without my choosing.

And I fight your crashing cymbals waking me from

restless, aching sleep.

The morning light begins to seep like opening wounds

and stirs the ancient fears that all must keep

as close as terminal denial could ever be.

And yet — perhaps to dream — ah, there’s the rub! —

to sleep is but to die a small, white-noise-ed death.

But — Ah, Good Grief! Dear Morning!

With Your quickening breath,

I wake, perhaps to dream,

perhaps to simply welcome one more cup

of coffee, tea, or toasted bread with honey.

Oh, Gorgeous Delight!

Another day is welcome, I’ll admit

And as I sit, I sip anew this life,

this breath,

this dawn lovely.

I wake to dreams that circle round

The Past, The Present, Perhaps… Infinity…

Ah, Dearest Daybreak, Welcome here!

My soul awakes to deeply drink

and dream with open eyes

the peace, the hope, the joy of

All.

With Love embracing,

I face this glorious day,

And forward-backward, onward facing

I open heart and mind

to Be

at One

with You and me

and just, perhaps, a little bit

to glimpse this Morning’s hinting promises

of Genesis Eternity.

The Prophets and the Poets

By Jane Tawel, July 19, 2024

The prophets and the poets,

don’t make much money.

Living not by their wits,

but desperately by what they hope is their wisdom,

they often are fasting

to lose the weight of the world,

to be thin enough that all becomes transparent.

If only they could share the truth,

with words that lighten and light.

Eating one’s words

starves one of daily bread.

And the vines of divine revelation

produce only vinegar and thirst.

The prophets cry, “We Thirst.”

And the poets mourn,

“Why use bread for war and not peace?”

Eventually, the prophets and the poets,

have no alternative,

but to leave the bone-dry banks,

and float downstream.

Unmoored

Unleashed

Unmourned

Adrift.

And there are those days

(and some dark, lonely nights)

when they are desperate to paddle to the shores,

where the solid people stand,

counting profits and not prophecies,

gathering praises and not poems.

Oh, the prophets and the poets have been too long starved.

They have no sensibility

of what others call sense

And at last, as they float,

yearning words fail the poets

and the prophets can only mumble —

their rage, silenced into grumbling.

The crowds have been against them

throwing stones, covering them

in their rubble of words.

They have been censored

by the ennui of the poor

and the materialism of the mercenary

by the loud and the proud,

by the honey-ed and the money-ed,

by the fountain of youth

that all seek who fear old souls.

Silence for the prophets is not golden tongued,

but a still, small whisper.

And the poets are gathered,

at the still point of the turning world,

but yet to join The Dance.

They await their chance.

Leaden-footed verses pull them down

in their clumsy hopes.

And the poets and the prophets

raise hushed voices to the Sky.

“Deliver us”, they cry.

But their words float up

as the Streams of consciousness

carry them away.

Will the gods some day find

at the end of the World’s Waterways,

a happy band of sufferers,

of seers, and seekers,

and all the least listened to —

Find them at the End,

playing weightlessly in the waves,

splashing each other with imagery and symbols,

fishing for food for thought?

Will the mighty someday look down from their rocky peaks,

and find that they have climbed too high

and the dive down now would kill them?

Will we who ignored the song-writers,

the soothsayers,

the children and the very old,

will we left behind

find that we stopped up our ears

and we hardened our hearts

as we hardened our flesh?

Will we discover that we heard only noise

and spoke only words of deaf prose?

Will we find that we have dried-up all the waters

that would have carried us along

buoyed up with the words of the poets and the seers?

Will we some day see

that our stony hearts,

and our craggy consciousness,

did not bring our statues to life,

but made our idols into dead gods?

Oh, My people!

Will we turn out our pockets and know at last

that the pebbles we kept

and refused to toss in to The Stream,

were only great weights on our souls,

holding us down, down, down, as we rose,

drowning us in our own dry deserts as we drank,

and in our refusal to listen

bursting our ears with the beat of our drums?

Oh, we should have listened

to the old,

to the wise,

to the poets

and prophets,

to the cries of the children,

and the messages of the myth-makers.

And now the

poets and prophets float free.

Finally,

their Truth

and The Way of The Words,

have released them

restored them

rebirthed them.

They have been moved

as they never moved others

into The Deep Watery Way.

Now continually composing

in Never-ending New Creation,

They rise.

Dancing waves suspended

in Eternity’s Ocean,

At last…

As One…

As One…..

Instead of Thinking, Create a New Heart

Non-Thoughts by Jane Tawel

“The Earth Delights to Feel Your Bare Feet” by Chiot’s Run is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

Instead of Thinking, Create a New Heart

By Jane Tawel

June 25, 2023

I am an overthinker. Perhaps you can relate. Every moment of every day I find myself in a battle of wits, (or is it witlessness?). The battle is “to think or not to think, that is the question”.

I am also a seeker. And like many people, I have spent a life time, seeking answers to questions big and small. I have found many good and helpful teachers along a blessedly long life-line and I have used their teachings, I hope, to change and grow and better myself, because I believe at the heart of every true teacher, religion, spiritual-consciousness, philosophy, and science is the quest to be the best one can be in this life and perhaps even in some life-beyond. And so, some of us, like I, seek and we find. And then, we doubt. And the doubt for some, like I, takes the form of overthinking. Over thinking the past, which is no more; overthinking the future which is not yet; overthinking other people, both significant and rather insignificant to the reality of my reality right now; and beyond all overthinking, is the overthinking of self.

And I think, (although I may be overthinking this), that what I have realized today in a tiny little section of my overthoughtful brain, is that what I need to do, is go back to the very childlike idea that the happiest moments of thinking are when one is asking questions.

As adults, we sort of stop asking questions, maybe because we are still carrying the hurt of questions that have or had answers that hurt; questions that had answers that were rejections, or made us angry or fearful; questions that often lead to a feeling of powerlessness or depression or despair. And so, we begin to fear questions, of ourselves and questions of others, because we fear the answers or we fear we don’t know the answers, or we want to insist that everyone answer our questions in the same way we do (this last one is especially a problem of our supposed answers to questions in our religions and politics, both of which are temporal and always have been incredibly flawed in any one’s idea of logic.) And yet, being adult gets to be all about knowing answers to things. Rather sad, when you think about it, isn’t it? and there we go again — we think about the answer-less-ness of life so much and it pretty much makes us miserable or numb or facile.

But imagine for a moment, you are a child of about three or four. And imagine that instead of being surrounded by adults who get tired of your endless questions of “how?” or “why?” or “when?”; that you are surrounded by a host of imaginary playmates and other questioning children, all content and happy to live in the questions. And so, as this little child, you are living each moment with curiosity and exploration and awe and wonder. Imagine the freedom. Imagine the joy. Imagine you as someone who needs to know or think about very little at all right now, except what you are doing in this very moment.

And so, this morning, I began with a few little toddling steps. (I am after all not yet old and wise enough to be a three- or four-year-old. I am crawling.) I stopped what I was thinking about (that thing that might happen tomorrow, and that thing that she said yesterday, and that scary thing that might happen to me, and that hurt that I refuse to scab over…) and I stopped myself, and I asked myself:

1. What do you see? (Answer: the interesting pattern of my right sock.)

2. What do you hear? (Answer: a moth flying repeatedly into and bashing against the window, trying to go forward. (Stop overthinking the metaphor in that, Ms. Jane, you are three.)

3. What do you taste? (Answer: milky sweet coffee and a ceramic cup-lip against my lips)

4. What do you smell? (Answer: not much, my nose is a little allergy-stuffy)

5. What do you feel? (Answer: cold hands, rub them against each other, better.)

And life was very, very pleasant just to be. I was aware. And my awareness came from asking questions, and answering them. My mind became childlike and it was very, very good. I liked myself. I wasn’t worried. I liked my life. I enjoyed just being alive.

When thoughts force their way in to the sanctuary that should be my mind, heart, soul and will (I happen to believe they are all inter-related); and when I can’t stop thinking about immediately irrelevant things, or things I have already answered about what I need to do, or want to do, or why I did do; when any thoughts come crowding in like parasites, hoping to feed off of the only sustaining food I have right now (this moment); when they do, I have started saying this simple prayer, “Create in me a new (child-like) mind/heart, Oh, God.” Create. Inside me. New. Heart. God.

I have also written down a list of questions to ask my over-Thinking Brain:

1. Is there anything you can do about this right now, in this very minute? (If so, do it. If not, stop thinking about it. (Example: Are you so worried about that pain, you should google its possible cause? If not, breathe in and out and stop worrying.)

2. Is there any action you can take about this situation right now? (Example: Do you need to text someone to ask forgiveness? Something I have done. Or Do you need to call your manager right now on a Sunday and tell her your thoughts? Something I would not do, so I should stop thinking about what I am going to say to her tomorrow on Monday.)

3. Is there any one you need to communicate with right now about your feelings? (This involves understanding how I think about my feelings and my relationships. This is a llloooonnngggg discussion for the experts, but in short-hand, I must ask myself: Is this feeling anything any one, other than I, myself, can and should do something about? Is this feeling something that I should act on, or do I need to analyze it more, live with it more even if it is painful, and try to find out why I am feeling it? Is this feeling true-True? And if so, who needs to help me with it or share it with me?)

4. Are these feelings productive right now? (And I mean right now. If so, just feel them. Even something that hurts can be very productive. Just like in the body, in the emotions, a pain leads to an awareness leads to a diagnosis leads to a choice leads to an action or inaction leads to a resolution. Don’t think about anything, just feel. Hard in our Western, worshipping-of -one -kind -of -logic kind of world, but again — be a child. Feel and in feeling, find a new emotional intelligence and a wisdom that may be quite a surprise.)

5. What can I create with the feelings I have right now? (And negative feelings can create insight into new directions, while positive feelings can create a whole new way of knowing what it is to be, and to be content, and to be content with being content, and to know that I don’t have to think anything at all to be of value, and to be worthy, and to be enough. This moment, and myself, are enough.)

6. And finally, what would I prefer to be thinking about right now? What can I think about that is happening right now that will make me feel the way I want to feel, right now, and the way I deserve to feel about myself, and others, and the world. Right now.

We have relegated feelings to back burners of thinking, rather than letting them be the matches that light the flame of our creativity in living in this moment. We have given feelings a poor second-place to what we call “logic” and in doing so, our logic has become inflamed with the pus of our overthinking everything that should be excised with the precision of the soul’s surgeon-like release of all that would infect our joy in living.

We have excused our negativity by claiming we need to think about something in order to understand. And we refuse to accept, that most of everything that makes us uniquely human, is in some small or huge way, impossible for us to ever completely understand. Knowledge, to be true, is always flowing forward, and we can never step in the same part of Truth twice. We are, as the sage said, not nearly as afraid of death (absolutely unknowable), as we are afraid of living (over-rated as knowable, and not accepted as wondrously full of mystery and momentary awe).

“Create in me, Dear Self, Oh, God, this moment, a new heart.” This is the only progress, and it is a progression of what seems for a while like regression. As the wisest of the wise said, “you must become as a little child to enter the Kingdom of Heaven”. And the Kingdom of Heaven is nothing more that choosing to live fully, freely, joyfully in the here and now, as all heavenly creations choose to do.

To live fully and freely and faithfully and lovingly and joyfully, is to be “reborn” in each moment. I awake to true life, when I wake to a new moment –“Aha! I was just born. What a discovery! I am alive! How fun! Let me explore. Let me create.”

Sweep out the dust and trash and overflowing “stuff” in the house of your mind. Allow space for moments that are eternal only because they are completely new. New wine will not tolerate an old wineskin, as the wise sage also reminded us, and so, imbibe and drink deeply in this very new wine of this very new minute.

Look. Listen. Smell. Feel. Touch. Taste, eat; for it is all to nourish the very you that is uniquely you.

Stop thinking and question. Let go of all that has no purpose in moving you along the narrow path of this very and only guaranteed moment of time. Do not fear, for your very own holy spirit waits to play with you, as all children of God love play. You were created to create. So, all you need to ask yourself is this:

What do I feel like making and creating in myself and my little corner of this world, right now?

Oh, this feels good, and I created this; and it is very good.

Then? When? Now? It’s Just a Matter of Time

“Grass ii” by satakieli is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Then? When? Now? It’s Just a Matter of Time

By Jane Tawel

March 9, 2023

No one knows what happens.

Don’t believe them when they say they do.

They tell you there’s a Heaven out there

and so, we stop focusing;

our eyes grow bleary with the hopelessness,

of bringing Heaven to earth now.

There can be no fear if we admit

we simply never know enough.

Never enough —

not then, not now, not whenever.

I hope to hope

mostly from now on,

to hope in what I can not know.

Let’s live in hope,

that all who seek might find,

and all might have and be at home,

here and now.

And no one knows the Truth

of what once happened

long ago or yesterday.

Your truth can never be mine,

nor mine yours,

but therein lies peace.

We all have inner-inter-interpretations;

and the impressions left on hearts and minds

run deeper than a chasm of doubt,

run deeper than any one can dig us out of,

run deeper than a mother’s love,

run deeper than a child’s dreams,

run deeper than a hope unborn.

The ruts are deep

and mine are mine to mine

and yours are yours to rest in if you choose.

All of us should stand ready,

above the ruts we’ve worn,

and hold out hands

to lift another up,

or perhaps just to see

if arms are really wings

and we can fly.

I tried to write a final verse

about living in the moment,

but instead I went out to lie in the green field,

and there I played with a blade of grass.

And I thought no more of yesterday.

And I thought no more of tomorrow.

And I thought no more of you or me.

And I thought no more,

but rested there,

and played a little with a blade of grass,

and hummed a small and meaningless tune.

Then? When? Now?

It’s just a matter of Time.

I have so much to un-accomplish,

and so little else to say.

Time is short, contracting in upon itself.

Only what we love will last.

Come be with me,

until our time has passed.

And of yesterday,

we will remember only love.

And as for tomorrow,

we will need know nothing,

only Love.

And as for now —

Come, let us laugh,

and play with blades of grass.

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by Jane Tawel

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Non-Thoughts by Jane Tawel

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