I AM

By Sky

Oscar Wilde wrote, “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”

Yeats wrote:

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

North Star of wonder, Star of winter’s darkest night,

The Star with royal beauty bright,

Lead me to a state that Troubles my sight;

A mystic message, ripped and frayed,

A secret note slipped through Herod’s prideful gait.

The Celtic shaman, his roots steeped in Gaelic lore,

The first poet to wake my teenage bore.

Twenty decades, maybe more,

The Second Coming sought me out; 

All boxed in, under a cardboard steep,

Half awake from some stony sleep.

Six years bound in my mind’s labyrinth, my ego grasping for any comfort, any lie to keep it alive. Physically it was a desert of the material. Transformed (or deformed?) into a slouching beast heading to some filth-stenched, graffiti-stained hole in the wall — the last place on earth — to bed. The son of hope and promise was now the homeless man stranded in the county of wealth. With only the haunting memories of a life that was nothing more than a dream awoken. In Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, my fingers were slipping off their foundation, to whatever fate had below.

The Great Pyramid of life built with the bricks of time, housed my treasures of love and hope. A stranger in a strange land, one I once called home. Shaking off history’s dusty ideals and promises, the Sphinx with a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun would come to judge, emotionless, duty bound, the executioner of all wronged. The winter solstice would hold the darkest and deepest tomb: the apocalypse of the Second Coming, foretold by the ancient scribes of Yucatan, Potmos, and Dublin. Diminishing was the flame of faith in a Christmas miracle. Would the Divine plunge into the material one more time? So weak was the idea and greater the fear of no redemption, my thoughts numbed to my final destruction.

The streets are no home. No sane soul can endure, so the insane have their way. I had stood on the other side of that road before. I knew and had tasted the American Dream. The loss of “things” and thoughts of who you are drive the ego up the proverbial wall of your mind. It wants nothing more than to find some way out, and it’s not about to behave tamely. Strip yourself down and let it stick for a while, and see what is born. I endured that path of the cross for much longer than I thought. The ego likes to think, and the concept of a martyr’s punishment could possibly satisfy the mind. The battle begins again: the real and the unreal, the eternal and temporal, iron mixed with clay. with neither having their day.

So what brought me from there to here? Was it the Divine revealed so all who doubted stood in awe of my redemption? The Mayans were not dead-on, and I’m obviously writing from somewhere, alive. Nothing happened, no salvation or hell to pay. I’m actually still homeless, living day to day. The only real change was that of my mind’s premise. I changed my thoughts and changed my perception. The fundamental correction of mind is the lesson begun in a rocking cradle where the Incandescent Word manifested in the tender Incarnation of Love personified. The Atonement is the recognition that separation never occurred. Our only “action” is to realign our mind’s perception to the equality of both having love and being love.

The disciples of duality’s desire is to take the world and control it, but they will not succeed. It is a sacred instrument. No one can control it! If one were to try for a moment they would soon surely fail. To believe it can be grasped, is to already lose it. All things either lead or follow, blow hot or cold. . . . Either have strength or weakness, ownership or are taken by force. The sage of the spirit eliminates the extremes, shuns the excess, and rebuffs arrogance. This is the spiritual state for me of Yeats’s Second Coming, his “Spiritus Mundi”! The vast wisdom of the ages manifest in the many, the All bound to the One. The only separation being the one we falsely perceive as created by the ego’s mind.

Nobility has lowliness as its root/ The High has the Low as it’s base./Thus kings call themselves “the orphan, the lowly, the unworthy.

~Lao Tzu the Tao te Ching verse 39