Wednesday, March 24, 2021

From Rock to Water (A Pesach Poem)

ההפכי הצור אגם מים


O, You who turn rock into water (Ps 114:8)


What we want is flow

To feel we can gli -i - i - de

Like an eagle, wings out

Flapping, then relaxing

Into the soaring wind,

Like a raft floating downriver,

Or a drop of water falling over the edge

Of a waterfall -- 

Just like that, no anticipation, no worries, 

No resistance -- 

Falling, then joining 

our droplet cousins down below

For an impromptu jamboree.


Instead we lift our leaden feet

Our backs laden with bricks millenia old

And try to make things just right 

With our schedules and dead lines 

And workouts and work force --  

We force the work to happen --

Moving a rock from here to there

The wind isn’t blowing it anywhere.


Nor do rocks ever integrate.

Their cousins can’t hear them

And aren’t very near them

They party alone

If at all.


So You who turn rock into water --


Come now and enter our hearts 

They are stone, make them flesh  

(as Ezekiel suggests)

Help us dissolve our separateness.  

To soften and thaw the ice of fear

Rejoin the river current, right now, here.  


This is hard for us --

The first act of flow 

Is to let go 

of trying as hard as rock 

to make it so.


The dissolving begins with surrender of self

I am nothing

No matter

No self no ego no boundaries

No effort

Only the effort of no effort

Relaxing into the ground

Melting into a puddle

Like butter in the sun

(Or Olaf in the summer)

Dissolving, Dissolving

Diss

olv

In

g

Seeping into the earth

And finally belonging


To You who turn rock into a pool of water

And flint into a fountain

That is ever flowing.  


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