Forgiveness

Forgiveness 

Soft and soothing,

like a cool  hand on a fevered brow, 

it offers comfort.

Sweet and musical,

like an August breeze 

blowing through a humid day

it offers reprieve.

Bountiful and pure,

like drops of precious water

rippling in a mountain lake,

it quenches the thirst of the dying.

Still and spacious,

like all that is real

and cannot be named,

it offers salvation to

a tortured mind.

Forgiveness...

is the sweet elixer of Life

bringing

life saving fluid 

 where there is thirst,

light where there is darkness,

relief where there is pain,

love where there is hate

and peace where there is anguish.

Forgiveness...

is God's Love

breathed through

human action.

Forgiveness....

is what the world needs.

One precious drop in every mind, 

in the One Mind,

is all it will take

to save us from our selves. 

 

                                                                   © Dale-Lyn, 2010

Hmmm! I wrote that eleven years ago.  I had just finished  A Course in Miracles, I think.  

At the time, I could feel the  world just beginning to shift beneath my feet... I was feeling quite ill for a number of years with some unexplained issue and because of the stress I was feeling the symptoms became very intense. I knew I couldn't handle it on my own so I sought help but there was so much shaming and frustration in my health  seeking it made it all so much worse. It knocked me off my feet. I was also struggling as a single parent after a difficult divorce. Working, keeping an income and maintaining a home for my children  was becoming so challenging. Most sadly ...my kids were beginning to lose their way and it was like watching it all as if in a dream...I could see me yelling  at them to be careful, to watch out ...seeing what they couldn't see but it was like no sound was coming from my mouth...I tried to reach them and pull them back into the safety of  my arms but they were always just far enough away I couldn't grab them. I couldn't stop them from walking into those dark forests no matter how much I tried.  I couldn't stop it from happening. I could just see it all so clearly. 

I was forseeing it all in 2010 and though I did a lot to try to prevent it from happening( talking to or dragging them into counselling, guidance counsellor's at school, mental health visits down town, called in social workers from social services,  church, discipline, curfews, rules, checks, tests...the whole nine yards) part of me knew I could do nothing that would make a difference. I felt like such a failure as a parent, as a person.  

Things in the following years would prove to be even more challenging but when I wrote this poem....and there were so many poems that just poured out of me back then with messages that made absolutely no sense to me at the time...things were just beginning to get difficult. Though the poems were far from perfect...there was some beautiful wisdom in each of them (that did not come from "little me"). Something happened after reading A Course even though I barely understood a word of it the first time through. (It would take about three readings and some deep reflective study before I would get it) .  Even when I didn't understand it...it seemed to come through me in poetry and in other forms of writing.  I actually wrote a book about my health seeking experience in less than four months, a year or two later. It came through in my blogging even though I never intended on starting a blog for that reason. But the poetry was the real medium that my awakening was coming through.  

As I look back now on the poetry that was written then...it is like..."Oh man...I get it now. " I didn't get it then...I felt it as it came through but I couldn't conceptualize it like I can now.  I think the poetry was offering a gentle reminder from that place/space  we cannot see...that things were going to be okay; that there was so much more to Life, to me than the external challenges I was facing.  I like to think that is the case.

So in my quest to forgive, as I wrote about yetserday...I serendiptiously opened up to this above poem from that time period...and it makes much more sense to me than it did then.  All forgiveness is...is a letting go of resistance...an opening up to the flow of Life. An open heart quenches the thirst of a Soul for too long hidden behind the turmoil of the mind. 

Hmmm! All is well in my world.