Your Other Name
By Tara Sophia Mohr
If your life doesn’t often make you feel
like a cauldron of swirling light –
If you are not often enough a woman standing
above a mysterious fire,
lifting her head to the sky –
You are doing too much, and listening too little.
Read poems. Walk in the woods. Make slow art.
Tie a rope around your heart, be led by it off the plank,
happy prisoner.
You are no animal. You are galaxy with skin.
Home to blue and yellow lightshots,
making speed-of-light curves and racecar turns,
bouncing in ricochet -
Don’t slow down the light and turn it into matter
with feeble preoccupations.
Don’t forget your true name:
Presiding one. Home for the gleaming.
Strong cauldron for the feast of light.
Strong cauldron for the feast of light:
I am speaking to you.
I beg you not to forget.
From: "Teaching With Heart: Poetry That Speaks to the Courage to Teach", page 75
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"Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible." ~Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama
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"If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion." ~Dalai Lama
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Truly, this book is not just for teachers...a beautiful, inspiring anthology of amazing poems.
2 comments:
i like the poem but i want to say to Tara (and i think it is important) that we are animals too and that animals too are light, it all is, and perhaps she already knows this, just playfully separates us. regardless, the message is strong and right, we only need to make sure to put the sustainability of the planet first, not ourselves. (harumph. forgive me a little. the neighbour's huskies had me up most of the night. why have dogs and chain them to trees, i wonder.)
love)))
xo
erin
Of course, we're animal, too. (I think in saying what she did, she's asking us to forget for a moment that we're flesh & bone and to remember our souls before we entered the body).
I am 150% cat, all the way. And I get it about the dogs. I, too, have a neighbor with a dog that he often chains and the poor dog barks constantly...and one of my new neighbors (I loathe to even give them that kind word) killed my beloved 8 year old black cat, Gir, and every other black cat in the neighborhood...I don't understand cruel people, I just don't. Sorry for the rant. LOL! xo
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