This Place
The fear comes from knowing how the brain works
And how it can be injured,
How the personality can so dramatically change
Or disappear.
O eternal life!
O embodied spirit!
Is not the brain a repository for our souls?
Is the soul so ethereal,
Sewn so tightly into the fabric of God
That we are not in essence what we appear?
Is this life,
This brain,
A suit of clothing for the soul?
Will the time ever come when we say:
“Oh yes, human beings,
I was one for a while.”
Or perhaps this life is the only place,
The only place of
I,
One,
And place.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
Not One
In this large world,
Everything,
All at once,
All possible eventualities,
Over and over again,
Yet,
None of us can walk on water,
Not one.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
The Word
For some writers,
Immortality comes with one great novel,
A few immutable poems,
An eternally anthologized story,
Or you might be Shakespeare.
I am old,
Started late,
No great novel fluttering within,
Eager to take wing and soar.
My most productive days
All squandered.
My poetry is stale,
My stories all the same story
Told over and over again
In flimsy disguise:
Life is,
Disappointment,
Ad nauseam.
I never wrote a play,
Too lost to suggest any course of behavior,
Even to an actor.
All my ambitions have come to this,
The search for a word,
A word that cries out the anguish of existence,
The bliss of realization,
The inner peace of infinity,
A fiery crucifix blinding the eyes of evil,
Raising the dead,
Ceasing confusion and argument,
A word that will place a single seed of knowing
Within the mind of all who hear,
A seed that will grow into a mighty oak of being,
An impenetrable fortress of being,
A universe of being,
Being without boundaries.
Scholars, close your books.
Suburbanites, turn off your televisions.
Cast off all entertainments and listen.
Quiet now.
Can you hear it?
Listen.
O word that is no word,
No idea,
No sound,
O word that is no word,
I summon you forth.
Quiet.
Listen.
The word is here.
It has always been here.
Listen.
The word is here.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
Seeing
Take everything you know,
Write it down on a blank sheet of paper,
Then fold the paper and put it in an envelope.
Say out loud:
Here is all I know, all I have learned,
As you light the envelope on fire,
Watching it burn to ashes.
Now walk freely into the world and see everything,
No longer masked by certainty.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
The Afterlife
The afterlife will not be unfamiliar.
It will look very much like today,
A place with mornings and evenings,
Just a few small changes,
Change continuing at its usual pace
With all the occasional upheavals,
Depending on where we are,
Who we are.
For those of us who believe in heaven,
Heaven will slowly appear.
For those who refuse contrition,
Hell will remain.
The possibility of change and growth will remain,
For all of us,
Change and growth,
Confusion and revelation.
We will share where we live with others,
With friends,
Strangers,
With those who are kind
And those who are not.
We will help or hurt them,
Or ignore them,
And they will help or hurt,
Or ignore us in turn.
We will witness the working of change upon our lives
Without certainty about the future,
For the future will be malleable.
There will be times when the old fear returns,
When we contemplate that our existences, however new,
May be extinguished.
Yet joy and hope will temper the anxiety of unknowing,
Reassurance that we need not fear eternity.
The afterlife will not be unfamiliar.
It will start tomorrow morning,
As usual.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
Merry Christmas
Whose birth do we celebrate on this day?
The living embodiment of God?
The only one?
What about you?
What about me?
Awaken!
Even the tiniest blade of grass struggles toward the light.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
Inevitability
How deep your search for the profound,
How detailed your analysis,
How proud you are of the synthesis of theories
Rolling off the tip of your tongue.
At last you have mastered the subject matter
And everywhere you look there is clarity and form.
But big black death is still an inevitability
And you will need more than clever ideas
To sustain your soul during the last indeterminate years.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
Human Beings
Oh such comfort we draw
From the old religions,
The old words,
So divinely inspired,
We forget they were written down
By human beings,
So divinely inspired,
Doing their best to reveal
The mind of God,
The will of God,
The judgments of God,
Written down by human beings
Who are not and never will be,
Perfect.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
Go Gently
Go gently into that good night
For it is no darkened sleep
That comes in the passing there,
No closing of the day,
No dying of the light.
Go gently into that good night
For you have received the gift
And have no need to complain.
Life goes on
In ways we cannot imagine.
Life goes on
In ways we cannot explain.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
Peace And Quiet
I had almost reached some eternal state of bliss
When my reverie was rudely interrupted
By my birth.
I need not tell you of the emotional quagmire
That is life.
I have suffered less than many.
Yet just when things began to settle down
My reverie was rudely interrupted
By my death.
Perhaps now I can finally get some peace and quiet.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
Very Busy
God sent an angel to speak to you
But you’ve been very busy lately,
Even on Sundays,
Hurrying off to church,
Reading and reciting,
Praising the Lord
And all that.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
Each Day
Each day I add to this prayer
That began with my life.
I will not say amen.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
What It Is
This is,
What it is.
Now we know.
We thought it was something else,
Way back then,
When we were ignorant
And thought we knew.
This is,
What it is.
Now we know.
And I have decided
It’s up to me
To tell you so.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
Cracked
Thought I’d finally found myself
When the self I thought I was
Cracked,
Shattered into a thousand jagged pieces.
Now I know why Humpty had to fall.
He had to free himself
From his own illusion.
There was no Humpty left
To be put back together again,
His pieces now scattered
Among the pieces of the world.
He was larger.
Multitudes contained him.
Shattered as I am,
I cannot put my pieces back together again.
It was only an illusion
That made them seem whole.
More than the sum of my parts
I am the sum of all parts
And the space between.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
Filled With Light
When I was younger
It was just me alone,
Staring into the abyss,
Waiting,
Without knowing what I was waiting for,
Falling into the deepest part of night,
So dark.
I am kinder now
And wait until sunny birdsong morning
To enter the place of no place.
Old fears still come and go
But now I face them with a warm cup of coffee
In a pleasant room,
Filled with light.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
Failure And Success
What seems so clearly to be failure
Will turn out to be part of what happened.
What seems so clearly to be success
Will turn out to be part of what happened.
The story of your life is so much more complex
Than the simple words:
Failure,
Success.
Leave this shorthand to the obituary writers
Who are compelled to sum up a life
In cold, calculating column inches.
Do not dwell on failure.
Do not dwell on success.
Live in the heart of each moment
And behold the terrible majesty of it all.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
Holding On
What can we hold onto?
When everything changes,
When everything passes,
When the years recreate who we are,
Sometimes lifting us,
Sometimes tearing us apart.
O love,
The clichéd word so easily pronounced,
The greeting card verse
Spoken without feeling,
O love,
If kept alive and breathing . . .
There is so much to love in this world.
Even when you are old and confined
You can love a memory.
Even when memories fall away
You can love an idea.
Even when cognition falters,
When fear invades,
When the dark idea of godless death threatens,
Believe!
Hold onto love,
However untranslatable it may seem.
Love will persist.
You will be saved.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
The Marrow
The stillness,
Spreading,
Slowing me down.
Fixed in singular spaces,
Observing,
Sending out tenuous roots.
A passion to be young again
Stirs,
I pull myself loose.
But the process is irreversible
And I know,
Someday,
Lost in reverie,
The roots will sink deeper,
Holding fast,
And I will be absorbed into the marrow.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
Sharing The Light
Every time I shared my light with him,
His insincere heart extinguished the flame.
He could not keep the candle lit,
And I finally learned
I could not give him
What was not already his.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
Eternity
I can hear eternity
In the happy cries of playing children,
Hours left before the sun goes down.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
The Candles All Blown Out
There is much regret in death,
Regret for what I did not say,
Did not do,
Regret for not being there
On the day,
At the moment.
Death happens in a single day,
I tell myself.
The life,
All the days of the life are what’s important,
I tell myself.
But logic cannot reason away
The wounds of the heart.
If only death were like one last birthday,
We’d have a big party,
Everyone would sing,
Then,
The candles all blown out.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
Anatomy
Inside,
There is light and dark,
Without reason,
For reason follows intuition,
And intuition follows
Something I cannot name,
Something light,
Something dark,
A place in the heart
Which is not really the heart,
Which is not really a place.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
Parallel Lives
I’ve always been here
And so have you.
We’ve always been here,
Skipping through parallel lives,
Endless variations where every alternative plays out,
Even though the “I”
As in,
“Here I am,”
Perceives a singular path.
This “I” is observed,
Inhabited by the one who says:
“Here I am.”
We’ve always been here,
On the edge of memory,
For no matter how many have died,
Here we are,
Still living.
Our parallel lives are like television channels
And we are the watchers,
The observers and the participants.
I change the channel
And sometimes find myself in a life too unfamiliar.
I change the channel again,
Leave the other participant behind,
Find a more familiar episode
And continue in the same house,
The same things in my desk drawers.
But some of my problems are resolved,
Left behind on another channel,
Nothing more to learn.
New problems appear,
Problems not new in this life,
In this particular history I’ve adopted.
No existence is without consequence,
I have learned.
I pick and choose,
Exchanging parallel lives,
Sometimes choosing badly,
So badly that in some lives I forget I can choose.
Do you sometimes forget too?
It took me a long time to remember
In this life where most of us have forgotten,
Sleepwalking our way through the day.
Then something leaks through
And we remember,
We awaken,
Having finally learned certain things
The universe insists we learn,
No matter how many lives we leave behind.
We’ve always been here,
Skipping through parallel lives,
Endless variations where every alternative plays out,
But the watcher remains the same,
Accumulating experience,
Nothing is lost.
We are the watcher,
That which contains.
Perhaps someday we will gather all these lives together
And go home.
Perhaps we are already home.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
The Pearl
Having found a pearl of great value,
He declared:
“This is the only true pearl,”
And he worshipped it,
For it was his
And he was blinded by the sight of it.
He put it away in a safe place,
Kept it hidden,
And never returned to the great open sea
Where there are so many pearls of great value,
Still.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
The Way Of This World
It was a tall tree,
Not majestic,
But many years old,
Having managed somehow to be planted,
To grow in a clear space,
Clear enough for sunlight,
Far enough from other, taller trees,
A space where humans found it desirable
And so left it alone to grow
All these years.
Singed by the occasional fire,
Parched by the occasional drought,
It grew.
After ferocious winds that would not let me sleep
I walked along this familiar path,
Strewn with leaves, branches and limbs,
And there in the clearing was the tree,
Lying on its side,
Uprooted,
Most of its branches torn away
Except for a line of long, leafless branches still attached,
Now pointing toward the clear, quiet, cloudless sky,
A last gesture.
This had nothing to do with sin,
With punishment
Or even destiny.
Every big wind blows a few trees down,
It is the way of this world.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
When?
When you start praying
When do you say:
Now I can put
All my praying away.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
We Come From The Sun
We come from the sun,
Shine from the sun
As individual rays of light.
We are the stuff and essence of the sun,
Cast and extended into individuality,
Single lives,
Still connected,
Fueled by the sun.
The barriers we place
Between ourselves and the sun
Dim our light,
Weaken the connection,
And we lose our way.
When we let go of the illusion
Of single, separate lives,
Apart from one another,
Apart from this planet,
When we let go,
Barriers fall away
And darkness is illuminated.
When our individuality ends,
When our physical selves fall away,
Our light will return to the sun,
But the light cast by each life
While dwelling in this place of time
Will remain.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
Gravity
When it comes right down to it,
I know little more about
God
Than a duck knows about
Newtonian physics.
Try as he might,
The duck cannot explain,
Or defy,
Gravity.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
Rehab
Honesty,
Pure honesty,
Every waking moment.
See the past,
Change the future,
No matter what you’ve done,
No matter how long it takes,
No matter how many times you fail
And fall,
Start again,
This day,
This moment.
Honesty is the first step,
Pure honesty,
Every waking moment.
From this all blessings come.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
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