Sent in Poem(s)

Yin & Yang

He crashes

She relents

He rages

She in yielding consent

Following the outer river events

From their inner potentiality seas

We see in, in conscience

Their weakness commonality

One river to vitally rage

Pounds it path into a straighter way

The other to coyly acquiesce

Dictated by the paths stay

And in her nascent insecurity womb

A boy to vitally rage

And in his rage a seed to sprout

Her withering say

And if he so good

Wouldn’t his fall?

If she so great

Be just as far.

For if one only appears to quietly run

Is it fair to say they did not tumble over the falls

Does it not take the full content?

Of all rivers perfectly flowing

Coming together to fill our destinies

In God’s Oneness-Greatness-Soul-Immortality.

Aren’t we after all the uncorrupt able water of life!

And our father the infinite sea!

By Jeremy Garrett

pain

Yesterday, with about 15 minutes remaining in a “What about the kids” class a woman outburst her pain about her divorce. All I could think about was sharing a beautiful and pictorial quote by Mark Twain with her. Yet, as we were receiving our certificates of attending the class, I had let my attention drift. And just then this woman walked in front of me and I just couldn’t stop myself from sharing that I had been in her shoes and felt that pain. She was a lady that looked to have had a pretty hard life.  When I told her that when I chose to forgive she quickly replied “I just can’t and won’t.” I told her when I decided to forgive it was an unbeknownst gift to myself. I feel lighter and I believe my body’s cells are benefitting from it. By this point she had calmed down a little from where she was in the class.  But again she repeated that she can’t forgive because her husband cheated while her mom was dyeing. I reminded her it’s a choice and that we can all chose to live with pain or with peace regardless of whose fault or reason for blame. As we broke from our quick conversation she cracked the kindest little smile from her tough countenance. These little encounters seem to make life so enjoyable.

get a grip

Have you ever had situations that takes away your power?  I have found myself in confrontational disputes that should have been over in dissipating within minutes last over 24 hours.   I keep wondering why I can’t be like the duck that flaps its wings after an altercation with another duck and glides another direction across the pond.  During these long hours I can put myself to sleep and then wake up to the same feeling of a hallow heart gripped by fear.  The belief I can’t handle something is what gets me every time.  So even though I have had this fear and believed I can’t handle something  thousands of times in my life I know it’s not true. I have managed to handle every situation that’s come my way regardless of the beliefs that I can’t.  So from now on I choose to believe I have a grip on all things.

Sitisa

Finding forgiveness in compassion

It was a December day just like any other here in my Washington hometown. I was leaving my grade school teachers house after spending the night like I have many times over the past 6 months. She has been a friend to me like no one has in the most troubling year of my life. She and her husband opened their house to me like it was mine. I will always be grateful for that. So that late morning I got in my car and left not very sure if I wanted to go home or finish writing what I was working on over the weekend. I decided to stop at a coffee shop that I had somehow managed to always overlook. Driving past it a thousand times over the past 13 plus years wasn’t enough until that day.
I walked in and quickly noticed it was a quaint place filled with people who seemed familiar with one another and instantly felt like a stranger in my hometown of 28 or so years. I ordered my usual soy latte with vanilla and the barista replied by asking me if I was Sitisa. I was barely able to ask if she was who I thought she was.  There were three sisters who were a possibility and I wasn’t positive which one I was looking at. We went to school together from the time we were 5 to about 15 and we hadn’t seen each other for over 20 years. She handed me my latte and unleashed anguished memories about the whacked out cult church we had attended as if it was her only and last chance.
With a crowd of bystanders we talked openly about the exorcisms and taboo things that we had seen. She spoke of things that I’ve never once heard from any of my friends that I had kept in contact with. She asked me if I had witnessed levitation and face changing that was more surreal than Hollywood studio magic. I had always been a little too uneasy to ask anyone about this because of the implications of the question. A “yes” or a “no” answer could only convince me that I was deranged. If it was “yes” than I had indeed seen these things and my entire perception of reality was now suspect. If they were to say, “No” then why did I have such vivid memories of these events?  The conclusion could only be that I am insane. To my surprise the confirmation of these memories was fulfilling. Even better I had someone bring it up to me before I could bring it up first. That meant more to me than telling someone what I saw just to have him or her say, “Yes, I saw that too.”
That was only the beginning of the conversation. She brought up my parents and asked how they were doing. I told her that they live in the Southwest and that with the exception of a brief encounter at a wedding, I hadn’t seen them for over 2 years. Out of nowhere she dropped some bombs. She said she hated my parents. “Why?” I said, “I don’t even hate them”. That is when she told me that my dad had frequented her house to pray with her dad about the things my father was doing to me. His frequency and inability to change had made her disdain grow for him and because my mom had not put a stop to it she had hated her too. Again I reiterated that I was the one that went through all this and I did not hate them. I had even reached to my inner jut to try to find forgiveness. She told me that her dad would often invite her to come with him over to my house and she refused because she hated them. The air in the coffee shop hung thick with ancient feelings of animosity. Here I was in shock that someone confirmed the things I observed in my youth and now I was getting insight on my dad from an outside source that I never knew existed.
What she didn’t know was that shortly after she shared her story with me, I had a shift. For a few minutes I saw life through my dad’s eyes and it was horrifying. I was a man fearful and without love, as if I was living in his steel toed shoes. I was able to see a nine-year-old boy standing in front of me, a child innocent and fragile without visible arm hair or any of the markings of the man I grew into. A child, not a man, being hurt over and over. I experienced what it would have been like to live with this guilt.  A child’s face as a reminder of the sins I felt powerless to avoid. It started to make sense why every time I saw my dad even in my adult years I felt like an orphan or an unwanted stepchild. It would be natural to want to live free of me as a reminder. I thought what if I had to live with that when I looked at my son. I could not bear to think of it. When Lisa told me that her dad used to pray with my dad I started to think how humiliating it must have been to repeatedly ask for prayer for the same thing. Knowing that my dad put all his trust in Jesus, what else could he do but pray? He did the best he could and that is all any of us can do. I never saw that before. It was then I felt a blanket of compassion for him and wanted to warm his heart with forgiveness.  I never experienced anything like this before but knew I wanted to templet this new found forgiveness to all in my life. This last year I am slowly but surely learning something, seeing through the eyes of another is more advantageous than walking in their shoes.  All these years the missing ingredient for me to forgive was to have compassion. Oddly enough in all of this came relief and compassion for myself. The emptiness and incomplete understanding of it all that has been plaguing me until now has been reduced to thankfulness.  My dad is and was perfect in all of this all along. In a love that is real there is no condemnation nor judgement. And in that we are both free.
That day in December ’08 was a miracle and a start to an understanding of compassion I have never known. I am now committed to try to see all people through the eyes of compassion and I feel it is a huge gift I want to share with all.

…..I hope you enjoy this little sliver of my life!…

Sitisa

“Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.” Mark Twain

Drama

Sometimes what seems like seemingly good advice to those that don’t want to really change, only enables, because it is helping them calibrate exactly what not to do to keep their chaos and drama up.

Sitisa

Meditation

Quite possibly the spaces between our thoughts are the only brief moments of meditation throughout the day.

It’s becoming easier and easier to believe thought and the objects we see are not real because they are only seemingly real for the second we subjectively see them or hear them. Every instant in the past and the future is even more easy to believe to be unreal because there is no tangibility to either.

Contained Time
By Sitisa

Golden Grandfather clock solicits respect
Loaning air to every oblivious galoot

Left behind are cores of apples in the dirt
While continents and seas pivot the sun

Moons dance quietly around dark worlds

Pregnant constellations animate essences
Like a cityscape of glimmering lights at night

Time is a mirage in our cosmos

It all fits on a trophy size spherical eight
Next to a Tesseract Cube on God’s shelf