Poetry

The deeper the cut, the redder the blood. The deeper the experience, the richer the wisdom. It has always taken more time to reach the deep than the surface. And…

we may never know
how we hold
all we can
or how the light catches us
when we are out of breath

Poet Michael Dale awakens our warrior spirit in his latest work The Raging Fires…

What are your patterns in life? Poet Michael Dale gives us a poetic glimpse into his…

How would you define joy and how it presents itself, to a child?

The greatest threshold to an awakened life is the courage to say yes to the authority of your own being… this poem explores our current culture

We live in an age that is obsessed with the new; so much that we have been called the disposable society. While it’s often easier to throw something out rather than repair it, we lose our depth of relationship to the things we touch. We lose the human history of objects and tools and the presence they accumulate for moving through many lives. This poem helped me recover a deeper sense of how presence passes itself through all that we touch.

Once we are blessed to have a sense of what it means to be fully awake and alive, we are challenged to return there, when we stray. And we will all stray, because we’re human and this is what humans do. Often, the smallest moment will catch our heart’s eye, like a small angel calling us to return to what matters. How? By simply lingering long enough to have the moment enter us. This poem speaks to moments that have opened me.

My new book of poems, Reduced to Joy, has just been published. The book contains seventy-three poems, retrieved and shaped over the last thirteen years, about the nature of working with what we’re given till it wears us through to joy. For the next few months, I’d like to share poems from the new book with you.

What are some of the ways that I can deal with suffering and then start taking it to a place of Grace?

What is this strange reunion, this homecoming to someone I did not know I had left?

In our largely secular culture you don’t hear words like heaven or hell or sin very often. For as long as I can remember I’ve thought of heaven and hell as inner states, not literal places. When I was seventeen I wrote in my diary that I thought sin was that which came between me and my sense of a living loving presence (God) that was larger than but always with(in) me. I could pretty much stand by this today. I didn’t know then that the origin of the word sin meant “to miss the mark” but I think I was intuiting a meaning that was in alignment with this etymology.

You know the things that you hide so that I will like you, approve of you or think you are spiritual – let’s just put them on the table. I will show you mine if you will show me yours…

A beautiful poem by Michael Dale reflecting on the cost of disconnection…

A heart opening poem on finding ones self by Michael Dale

This week’s poem is also about rest, the deeper sense of what we rest in. The way a cup rests in a saucer, how does each soul find the point of rest it fits in? How do we discover the sense of safety and faith in life that allows each of us to find our way with more peace than fear?

A beautiful poem from Judy Martene. Healing Love… you have what it takes for healing love to rise again…

Rumi – “your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” Tony Samara shares a practical way to deal with your minds games