The plate we eat from. . .

“Every day she bleeds for us,
and still we continue to wound her.
Every day she feeds us,
and we slap away her hand.”

There’s an ocean of garbage washing up on our streets.  Every day it deposits plastic bags, cigarette packs and candy wrappers into our yards.  We poison our internal rivers with artificial sweeteners and fast foods laden with sugars, fats and salts – touching the three corners only leaves us grasping for the fourth.

Mankind, it seems, has forgotten where it came from. 

Our walls of brick and stone have cloistered us away from more than just our neighbors.  We fear each other, here in the city, where only the rarest of smiles makes its way up through the cracks of the trash-strewn sidewalks like a struggling dandelion. For the most part, we stare at our shoes, or fix our gaze directly forward afraid of locking eyes with one another – afraid our masks will slip and reveal the tired and lonely faces of humanity hidden beneath them.

It’s difficult, sometimes, to walk this path.  To be a part of the cure, one must become acquainted with the disease.  More than that, one must fully come to understand it as such.  It is during this very process of gaining understanding that one can become quite bitter.  It’s easy to rail against the unobservant.  It’s easier still to be overcome with blind rage and anger at the ones who’ve brought this about; an endless list of offenders we’ve all no doubt become familiar with. 

It’s understandable why some will choose that path.  How can someone,  having opened their eyes to the pollution, the exploitation, and the ubiquitous human suffering, not wish to take an axe and cut its source out by the roots?

And yet, with perseverance, the heart begins to open.  There’s an out pouring of love to which no single entity can lay claim.  It pours through us from a higher source of which we are all an extension; filling us with a pure and liquid light we carry into the darker places of this world.

The sea refuses no river.  The smoke carries our prayers to the Great Eagle.  Here in the darkness, a single flame rekindles. . .