eat dust

Long Term


by Stephen Dunn

On this they were in agreement

:
everything that can happen between two people


happens after a while

or has been thought about so hard


there’s almost no difference


between desire and deed.

Each day they stayed together, therefore,


was a day of forgiveness, tacit,


no reason to say the words.

It was easy to forgive, so much harder


to be forgiven. The forgiven had to agree
t

o eat dust in the house of the noble

and both knew this couldn’t go on for long.


The forgiven would need to rise;


the forgiver need to remember the cruelty

in being correct.


Which is why, except in crises,


they spoke about the garden,

what happened at work,


the little ailments and aches


their familiar bodies separately felt.
 
“Long Term” from New and Selected Poems 1974-1994 by Stephen Dunn. Copyright © 1994 by Stephen Dunn. Used with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. Al

fire

calligraphy by Jeanne

from Caroline Myss

We have embraced the idea of self-empowerment, but loved it when it just applied to us in our individual lives. Weaving ourselves back into the whole, and using the empowerment of ourselves collectively and realizing the power we have to co-create is a profound mystical truth. It’s not a small time mental acuity we use to get stuff – it’s not an ego-driven concept.

When we look at what’s happening, one way to approach it is through that truth that these predicaments, these crises we are in are somehow going to require all of us to navigate through, one way or another. Everything that is facing us requires all of us to transform within us. To see the world differently, to approach the world differently, individually within our lives, within ourselves, as an incredible act of personal and thus global transformation. This is what we’re going through.

It is a challenge – make no mistake about it. Especially as we see the world on fire – whether it’s on the streets or in the forests. Everything is engaging with that one message – we cannot not see it. We cannot avoid the messages around us any more that we are intimately connected to everyone, that we are each other’s caretakers.