Poem: Heartstar Home Called YOU

Spinning here
your faith is in a heartstar
seen so clear
through the window of a speeding car.

Home held in doubt
as the tires tread dust
from the drought
of life without lust.

Headlights feel and reach ahead…

Where is it?
Where is love,
if it isn’t where we’ve looked?

Brake lights punch the black
there is no going back
promise yourself to hate no more
and leave the rearview mirror on the forest floor.

Rest in the woods of uncertain abundance
look to the sky out of habit
but know this…
a heartstar shines
in the home
called YOU.

When we do not have a home that was safe to refer to, we carry what we normalized as home with us.  In a way it is a means to hold on to what small amount of comfort we did have in those early lean years.  The whole system responded by locking in a way of being that allowed us to survive it intact.  We long for “home” because what we inherently know as “home” isn’t here….love and harmony that we are part of, is not what we naturally experience everyday.  In that sense…HOME isn’t here.  Not yet.  But it is being made each time we act from love.  The foundation has been poured.  The way others have always felt and thought that “this is just the way things are”…those voices are wavering….more than slightly.  And the way that there is this multitude of yearning souls wondering “yes, but is it safe to live differently yet?”…that is the other side of it.  For me, it is about Home Here Now.  Home inside of ourselves.  Not just accepting ourselves.  Not just thinking we are infinite or neat or evolved.  It is about really planting ourselves in the full naked reality of what we have been through.  It is about occupying US.  It is an internal movement to create a sanctuary.  When that happens, the Home we are looking for appears.  It doesn’t show up without us.  We can’t experience the truth of it without all of us working on sanctuary.

It is also about the outer Home.  It is about being this Sanctuary Self in the outer world.  Take your heart with you into every meeting.  Occupy the space not in a loud way…but in a way that honors the space of the other,giving them room to have their sanctuary self with you.  You won’t always be able to do this.  You will stumble.  You will turn back many times.  And for that, you need a place to turn back to…you need the inner sanctuary first.  Inside first, outside second.  For without that home inside first, spinning out will be common.

In this poem the metaphor of the car is about the speed of life and of finally slowing down and stopping.  The body of the car and tires smacks of separation from the natural and of how it feels dry to live like that.  The rearview mirror is representative of looking only into the past…but also of looking only at our own reflection, the surface of things.  Because a powerful flip side of spiritual growth happens when we stop looking into the past at all, deem ourselves free of it…and the most intense spiritual narcissism blossoms.  A new identity pleased with itself declares itself free, while staring longingly into the mirror.  To get inside of ourselves, we must get outside of ourselves…nature.  The forest.  And the heartstar represents our hope for awakening.  But awakening is a misdirection.    Because when we dream of awakening what we really are hoping for is to finally have Love have a home in our hearts.   Plucked from the sky only when we slow down long enough…we find the heartstar right there in us, but only when we have returned home long enough to realize that it isn’t out there…but in here.