cultural repair - a poem

I want to write a poem that might be medicine for our time.

A place to cradle life

Curl into words deep truth

That pull us to our stars and into futures uncompromised and wild

And help us wrap arms and hearts round long held hurts

so we can tend our sadness, integrate our wounds and thrive

And hear and learn from those who’ve gone before us

Weathered storms that came before these days

Open to the songs and rhythms of our future and children who are get to come

Longing us forward towards fertile living

Not separating the now from past or future

But settled wisely and with wholeness in the conduit of time

Where every choice and steady movement nourishes land and heart and soul connection.

And we live from now in ways gorgeous with collaboration and creation

That arc through ages

Renewal and regeneration

Culture

a medium that sustains us

warm embryonic fluids

Environments kind to life and living

Ways of being that support us connect ourselves to ourselves, to one another, to nature and to Spirit however you perceive the unseen to be.

Territory of belonging that carries infant through to elder hood in safety

With recognition of thresholds and witnessing

Where each ones promise has room to breath and is invited

As the gifts they are

and we discover them to enrich ourselves

But also to serve life

feed the holy

Help the lovely dance unfold

Entwined with land fecund with birthing and with decaying

Never separate

So each ones orientation is proper activation

Heads turned towards regeneration and working with creation

We need our culture to be juicy and nutritious

Vital fluid

Whole

Delicious

Wise

Based around sustaining balance

Helping life to keep on living

For there to be elders there must be a culture that can draw them forwards

For the young ones to galvanise and flourish

A place that can truly hold them

Allow their gifts to anchor and refine

We cannot do this alone

An embryo

Doesn’t grow an arm

A space opens

And the limb moves in.

The protoplasm it is bathed in

It is true culture

Diffuse intelligence

Guided by some greater force

That knows perfect organisation and symmetry

To create the vessel for life to be

And then we come

And grow some more

Into spaces we inhabit

Each tiny movement that we make

touches countless threads

Creates momentum

Shimmering into neural networks that blow minds with mystery

We have potency and agency

Even the seeming humble baking of a loaf

Tending of a hearth

Expressing a deep truth

Crying long held grief

Holding and being held

Awakening ancestral thread

Reframing an old story

Makes magic

We can be responsible

Responding

Able

Committed

And Say deeply yes. To tend this life.

It is a bold but necessary move

So energy for life can fly electric through the circuit

Touching and being touched by all that’s helpful

If we waver and wander uncertain in our direction

Our systems can be used by other visions

That do not have our best at heart

If we’re not home, who is?

What vessel do you want to be?

Commit to life or death… its pretty binary

The choices we have made are bleak

Colonisations prayer of greed and deep confusion

hungry ghosts consuming

And so we live from narratives that have shaped our world

Distort us as we lie on sediments of sadness, layers upon layers of separation

Believing in false gods of acquisition as we die from loneliness

Believing the false story we cannot escape this

or take the titans on

But they are stories that we live from nothing more.

We can change them

Let’s choose which story we will nourish

Feel for our star and even if we are not sure of it, ask for it

Plug ourselves in

Fire our filaments

Unique alignment

Tendons

Relationships to all of it.

Post script

There’s challenge in the yes it is part of the design

We claim our life in fullness and set towards our North

Then fall repeatedly, face in mud into our smallness and restriction

in everything that limits our creation

and shows to us our traumas

Ground zero part of the soul crafting

Each messy fall, each gouging crash

Can refine our purpose and alignment

(and is meant to)

If we take the painful limits as a balm to teach us

Garner strength and fuel from failure

Don t lose sight of tending Life

The San call this the rope to God

Each cycle down and effort up teaches what we need to know

And in weathered by the journey skin

We can transmit the route we ve walked by simply breathing

Holding out our hand or speaking

emanate what’s needed for the times we’re in

Radiate a new set point that’s finely crafted

Out of chaos become coherence

A place of regulation

That new ones coming in can open into

Stretching wide

Safe and welcomed for what they bring.