Playground
We are the little children of God
Who decided we want to do things on our own.
So God said, “OK,”
And put us here in this playground.
We’re still learning how to play together nicely.
We’re a bit slow.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
Will
How long is a moment?
To a baby?
To a star?
Our lives are a collection of moments,
Falling through time,
Falling even through death,
All the way into eternity.
This place is a moment,
Even the universe is a moment,
For all that is not permanent will pass,
And all that passes is momentary.
So tell me,
What is permanent?
Everywhere I look,
Everything I learn,
All that I know tells me
The most permanent thing of all,
Will.
Even after our expanding universe is pulled apart,
Stretched into a soupy, cosmic protoplasm,
Some sort of microbe will struggle to exist,
To persist,
Either in this dilapidated universe
Or in some other, younger place.
It’s what pushes a single blade of grass
Out of the ground
Toward the light of our dying star.
It’s what awakens us each morning
And sends us out into this particular world.
It’s the most eternal thing I know,
Will.
~ 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
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
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 those 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
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
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
Each Day
Each day I add to the 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
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
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
Failure And Success
What seems so clearly to be failure
Will turn out to be only part of what happened.
What seems so clearly to be success
Will turn out to be only 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.
Anchored,
Observing,
Vicarious.
A passion to be young again
Stirs.
I pull myself loose.
But the process is irreversible.
The roots will grow,
Sink deeper,
Hold fast,
Until someday,
I am 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
Someday I Will Begin
Always another task at hand,
Superseding vague ambitions of transcendence
With immediacy,
The immediacy of earning money,
Of maintenance demanded by inanimate objects,
Then the hungry pursuit of well-deserved reward,
Focused on the more corporeal aspects of existence.
Yet,
That misty, translucent cloud of angelic eternity still hovers,
Just beyond reach,
Beckoning.
Someday,
(I try to assuage my neglected nobility)
Someday,
(I earnestly promise)
I will begin.
~ 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
Idolatry
They crowd around the dirty window
Where the faintest image of Jesus has appeared,
Standing for hours,
Praying,
Hoping to be blessed,
To be sanctified.
All around the world
The faithful are making pilgrimages,
Pressing their lips to sacred artifacts,
Expecting miraculous transformation,
As if God were in one place
And not another.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
Here, In This Place
When the darkened room is suddenly filled with light,
When the unexpected wave rises and crashes upon you,
When you cannot find the precise metaphor to describe,
To express the overwhelming emotion
Bursting from your heart and spreading to every sinew,
Awakening,
Awakening,
Awakening your body to its purpose,
Awakening your mind to the joy of existence,
To the bliss of knowing,
Knowing you are desired,
Knowing you are loved,
Then,
It’s more than individual passion,
More than momentary infatuation,
It’s a place you have discovered,
A place in the mind,
In the heart,
In the universe,
A place where angels dwell,
Where inspiration is born,
A place permanently imprinted in memory
No matter how circumstances change,
Always and forever a place you’ve inhabited,
A place you know,
A place of joy and pain,
An eternal place,
Always there,
Waiting for your return.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
Something To Do
Memory,
Memory,
Memory.
Reshuffled yet oh so persistent memory,
Steeped in recrimination,
Sanitized with nostalgia,
Somehow suggesting the past is not finished
But full of things left to be done,
If only in that place where memory resides,
As if I cannot ascend to the now of this moment
Until I have fit all the pieces of the past together,
As if this life were a puzzle,
Jigsawed by God,
Just to give us something to do.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
Light
I have grown tired of profound revelations,
Startling insights,
Content now with my first cup of coffee
As this planet tips daintily toward the sun,
Filling the room with light.
~ 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
Birdsong
Even the finest words
Fall away
In early morning birdsong.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
Wearing Thin
Some folks say
They want to live
Forever,
But as for me,
This particular person
I am
Is wearing thin.
I can think of few things
Worse
Than an eternity
Chained to this one particular person
I am,
This soul attached,
Forever beset
By this particular concoction
Of insecurities and doubts,
Addictions, duplicities
And genetic happenstance.
Gotta wipe the slate clean,
Someday.
Be somebody else for a while.
~ 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
Two Resolutions
When this life has worn you weary
And each day is a struggle
To find meaning,
Resolve to be honest,
About everything,
All day long.
Resolve to be kind,
With everyone,
All day long.
Then,
Meaning will return.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
I Would Return
I will be dead
By the time this seedling
Grows into its full majesty,
By the time its limbs grow large enough,
Strong enough to bear the weight of a boy.
I would return someday,
Be that boy and climb this tree.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
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