Ruach (The Holy Breath of Spirit)

Okay--I give up. I surrender.
Powerful currents are capsizing me.
I dip my toe in the water
and the riptide pulls me under.
I'm not going to struggle--I'll become a merman.
Tidal waves wash over the blinking lights of Disneyland
and I'm surfing the crest.
The spell is broken--
my Mickey Mouse ears are blown into the gutter.
These puny windshield wipers
can't hold back the downpour any longer.

What is expected of me?
Nothing that requires any more effort
than allowing a seed to become a flowering tree.
Remember the spark? The original plan?
The holy letter scratched into your forehead
long before you were born?

You are a catalyst, an enzyme,
the sand in the oyster,
the bee that pollinates the flower,
the man who sweeps up the ashes of the Phoenix
and from them builds a new nest.
You're the fire that turns the water into the steam
that drives the engine that takes you to another country,
and you can no longer indulge in the illusion of insignificance.
You can no longer ignore the fact
that your existence makes an impact.
You speak, you touch, you love,
and the entire web starts to quiver.
It's time to acknowledge your sticky-sweet immersion
in the cluster-fuck of humanity.

Here's your top hat and your wand;
people are waiting for the lightning bolt
that knocks the lids off their towers.
They squawk and squeal,
but their hearts secretly hunger
for the moist dark alchemy of the cocoon,
and it's merely frippery that they relinquish.
Donald Duck is drowning
along with his indignation
and his victimization--let him go.
The ocean of you has tributaries
that encircle the globe.

Alright--I acquiesce--
there is freedom in surrender.
I've had my face to the wall for way too long,
like a punished child sitting in the corner, forgotten,
and left to split the seams of his clothing as he grows.
I won't be a bird on his death bed
despairing for never having flown.
I'll be the goldfish that leaps
from his imaginary bowl,
the vine that grows through cracking stone.

What is asked of me requires no sacrifice;
I desire it the way a salmon yearns to swim upstream.
The only thing I need to renounce
is the inevitable accumulation of crust and debris,
the fallout from living in the material world.

The tide rolls in,
scrubbing and rinsing with it's foamy suds,
and the afterbirth falls from my eyes
which water and blink
as they let in the morning light,
momentarily blinding me,
the same as on the day that I was born.

David Aronson
December 2006