Choose your battles well

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Choose your battles well, since battle on you must

There are battles built on strife and battles built on trust

Will you battle to conform to social expectations

To find significance in ideas and systems that promise validation

To carefully behave in ways that you think will protect you from

the wounds and judgments that remain buried in your subconscious

Will you fight to conceal the parts of your humanity that invite scorn and disapproval from yourself, if not others?

Will you struggle to be nice, offering your silent smile as a poor excuse for compassion

Putting away truth and honesty as if they were sharp knives too dangerous to be handled

Assuming we know what others can handle. Reinforcing the paternalism around us keeping us bound and restrained like infants in a playpen who need to be protected for our own sakes.

Is this, is this what you will fight for.

Or…

Will you battle to find your center, your true self

Will you courageously embrace your humanity and divinity

Will you cease stuffing and hiding, blame shifting and escaping

Will you boldly go where no one has gone before into the terrifying silence of your unprotected self

Will you be a player in someone else’s game or a co-creator of a better reality in a real living, breathing universe

Will you defy empire and champion community, measuring success by the least and the weakest

Will you battle from the ground up rather than the top down, toes planted in moist rich earth, soiled hand joined to soiled hand, cheered on, energized by all our relatives of creation seen and unseen

Choose your battles well, since battle on you must

There are battles built on strife and battles built on trust

My garden...

My garden this year may be small in size but it is pregnant with meaning. 

It is political in it's stance against against systems of dependence that sustain poison products.

It is Spiritual connecting me with the land I am made of that sustains every molecule of my being.

It is economic a living protest against chemistry set foods and products of addictive enslavement.

It is artistic a living aesthetic sensory delight to see, smell, feel and taste in reflective bliss.

As my garden reaches to the sun, screaming it's fruitfulness in ecstatic bliss my soul joins in divine celebration.

Beloved Rose

Are you put off by my thorns?

Does my blossom appeal to your hunger for beauty

and ambivalence spring from the threatening frame that surrounds my heart?

Does the fragrant olfactory summons, turn your head in my direction

even as signals of caution engage your mind?

Wild thoughts of embracing me with abandon,

burying your face in my bloom

drinking in the nectar

with no thought for the torn flesh of your arms and face.

Can you ignore the markers of past dark encounters

broken heart beating

torn flesh bleeding

Trusting the cry for more

More than safety

More than certainty

More than can be contained without changing things familiar

More than present realities can support

I am longing

Desire unchained

Seeking my beloved

Yearning to know as I am known

Deep calling unto deep

Resurrection

Christ is risen! In a physical body, a touch me, put your hands in the wounds, sit down and let's eat breakfast body. Not the same body, but a body 2.0 the next generation, a glorified, walk through the wall, ascend into heaven resurrection body. This is no pie in the sky, by and by escapist salvation this is first fruits of the restoration of all things the transformation of heaven and earth into something more real and free from corruption.

A resurrection Jesus shows me that my world is not an illusion, that my body is not a prison, but a seed. This teaches me to love the earth, to love myself and my body for what they are and what they are to become. The resurrection is a declaration against self-loathing and dualism that separates who I am and the world I live in as if heaven is someplace else. The kingdom is here among us and within us as Jesus leads us in the procession of his victory over sin and death, into that age where all things are reconciled into the shalom of God's reign of unending life, world without end!