Nice Neighbors

My second "son" arrived after work yesterday;
This time I asked that while I cook, he'd stay.
Richard had purchased new technology
For watching his favorites on TV.
I knew I was in for a tense night,
If Richard was left alone with this fight.

He wants to navigate technology,
But this a gift from which he's free.
I had made a deal with my second "son,"
We'd, for technology help, to him run.
In exchange, I will cook meals for him;
I don't know that we'll ever be real friends.

A student on one side, a "son" on the other,
I'm feeling again like a den mother.
I'm determined to make this equal exchange,
But, for me, this is a big change.
If friendship grows, it's baggage free,
With no primary responsibility.

This may only be the way of neighbors,
With the giving and the taking of favors.
I don't need any more kids or friends,
But a good neighbor can be a godsend.
Small crises can be, by neighbors, greeted,
A cup of sugar or band-aid is needed.

If we have a mission that is true,
We should focus on what we can do.
It is important to check ourselves
Before opening wide to someone else.
Neighbors quite often move away,
True family and friends, in the soul, stay.

The Sacred Spirit at Death

When I was afraid of losing you, I became greedy for your spirit,
And that your gentle voice, I'd never again be able to hear it.
I wanted to soak up enough of you that I wouldn't feel the pain
When your sight, sound, touch was taken away from me again.

I spent years shunning new friendships because I was drained,
Worrying that the depths of my emotions couldn't be restrained.
I prayed for death so that the terrible anxiety would finally cease;
There were no relationships that could bring me lasting peace.

Over the years of your renewed health, it became plain to see
That so much of your Sacred Spirit will always live on in me,
That I no longer feel anxious that I will lose your presence
My heavenly communion with you lives in our present tense.

I believe The Eternal Sacred Spirit that lives in us
Opened up in me the thoughts of death issues to discuss.
I have come to see The Sacred Spirit of life as a continuum
We don't know, at our physical deaths, what new life it becomes.

I believe that, with fear, Sacred Spiritual Energy is snuffed;
Fear becomes anger and hatred in those who have been rebuffed.
When we're led by fear of the unknown, instead of embracing it,
We create an environment where only a few spirits can fit.

When my physical spirit begins to wane and create negative energy,
I hope that only my Sacred Spirit lives on in those who've loved me.
If I, in any way, have caused another's Sacred Spirit to be diminished,
I hope that, with my death, their Sacred Spirit is replenished.

I wish we had a dying farewell ritual of final forgiveness,
Where, we with our loved ones, and possibly a loving witness,
Could come together and confess our sins against each other,
Husband to wife, neighbor to neighbor, and sister to brother.

We have been to taught to eternally hide our sins in shame,
Fearing the eternal punishment taught in "God's" name.
The ones who are punished when we deny our sins
Are the new lives that, with those we touched, begins.

Even in war, would it be healing for combatants to apologize
To the dying father of a family, before he closes his eyes?
Fear turned into anger and hatred kills a part of the soul;
The passing of pieces to another may, once again, make it whole.

We must begin to see death as only our breathing will cease,
The Sacred Spirit passed into the breath of another, may increase.
Will we ever, with peaceful, loving arms hold each other while we die,
And wash away all our sins against each other as we, together, cry?

Pronunciation and Peace

I'm supposed to be helping my neighbor learn to pronounce English;
For universal pronunciations of any language, we can only wish.
I have a workbook of everyday polite, conversations that are boring,
But our sharing of bawdy stories has sent her understanding soaring.

We both share grandma wisdom, in which our lives are full.
We laugh as much as we converse; earthy stories are universal.
She took English at several churches and was usually quite bored;
Apparently they didn't know how new memories are truly stored.

When I tutored a child of seven, my teacher-daughter said to me,
"Teach this child familiar words that he can plainly see."
This second-grade child resonated to his own family's names;
So, for my new student, I'm doing the adult version of the same.

She came over full of sadness and worry for her country;
The president had died, leaving her people leader free.
I spent the first half hour commiserating in her pain;
By the time she went home, she was laughing again.

She's a respected doctor of law in her homeland;
Here, only her husband, can she talk to as a friend.
Though she is younger than I am by thirteen years,
Naughty Catholic girl stories bring us both to tears.

She talks of her many experiences in her international world;
During these rowdy exercises, her English sentences unfurl.
We are now at the point where I want her to teach dancing
To my friends who will, her culture, enjoy understanding.

Multicultural communication can be accomplished in ways
That, through universal language of laughter, has all of us engaged.
Is there any one of us without a old naughty relation's stories
That will cross over any race, religion, or language boundaries?

Dance, sing, laugh, cry, touch; there is always a way
To get across, with emotion, what we really want to say.
And, if we are willing to be mutually vulnerable,
We'll create a world that is, in peace on earth, full.

Fight to Make It Right

Things we can't talk about are things "polite" society rejects;
This is the reason we have been forbidden to speak of sex.
But in all the history of the animal kingdom, including humans,
Sex has been the strongest force in The Sacred Spirit's plans.

What a travesty of The Spirit's source to deny spiritual sex
By taking the power of the physical out of the sacred's context.
By being taught to be ashamed and afraid of our animal natures,
We have become less noble than other living creatures.

We were given free will in order to make responsible decisions,
But the religious leaders have treated individuals with derision.
Couples were robbed of authority in defining limits of their broods
Based on what, for their union, were considered, by them, good.

There should be no more sacred bonds upon the earth
Than the unions of man and woman in order to give birth.
Because our religions have long-since become civil institutions,
They have perverted the privileges of family solutions.

The house divided against itself has always been doomed to fail,
Like that of religion and government, against which we should rail.
Domestic partnerships, designed only to protect property,
Should never have been accepted as sacred marital unity.

The churches wielded such influence over government,
We forgot the reasons for our ancestors commitment.
We must insist on actual division of state and church motives;
One seeks to take and the other is created to give.

Religions set parameters on behaviors they will support;
The "charity" of government is evil's power resort.
Religious charity is a system of personal accountability,
From which our country's enforced giving is free.

In days of old, charity was the responsibility of community,
Not something handed out with complete anonymity.
When a small group knows and vouches for an individual
The whole community, on the recipient's action, has some pull.

We must stop funding individual "charity" with anonymous taxes;
With this system in place, all justice and conscience relaxes.
Even Jesus, our guiding Jew, said, between Caesar and our religions,
We should always recognize distinctly moral divisions.

Did he not preach limits to the amounts workers should give
To the poor and downtrodden to help them to live?
He did not say, "Plant, harvest, and cook it for them."
This, in truth, takes away the dignity of the human.

And when he died upon the cross, as an innocent human,
He didn't take off their crosses those who'd sinned against man.
He recognized that there were two steps to true repentance
The first was to satisfy the human wrong, in the present tense.

Their are so many who want to deny responsibility to humans
As part of our inclusion in The Sacred Spirit's redemption plan.
Only those who accept The Sacred Spirit and live accordingly
Can recognize and honor all  life's appointed sacred dignity.

Their are laws deemed by humanity seeking earthly peace;
These have been instruments for some worldly wars to cease.
If warring nations agree to honor cease fires and truces,
Don't we see that humanity, to pawns in games, this reduces?

I, as a mother, put my body and my soul at great risk
So that my husband's spirit and mine could, in new life, exist.
There is no power on earth that could make me send my son
To save the greedy values that my nation and religion have become.

Neither sex nor war should be inflicted on the innocent,
But this is how the energies of the supremely powerful are spent.
Domination is the game for which they set the rules;
All creation is simply treated as their power game tools.

In my lifetime, there has never been a war to protect our land;
The definition of "just war" has been in corporations' hands.
I will not only not send my sons, daughters, and granddaughters;
I will also fight to defend any innocent person's slaughter.

Until the leaders of our nation are prepared to be just and brave,
Instead of living by the rules of power that protect the depraved,
I will continue to promote the destruction of their power bases,
Hoping that their fall, eventually, corporate power erases.

I have very little hope that, in my lifetime, religions will lose power
Or that our less-privileged will, at their commands, fail to cower,
But, my great hope for the future of all humanity
Is that the generations coming after us are Divine Right of Kings free.

Neighbors, Friends, "Family"

What fun I had yesterday; our next-door neighbors dropped in.
One came to practice her English; she has become a friend.
She came in to learn; we began with coffee and a few laughs
About something that, in the day before's lesson, had come to pass.

She had been sharing a recipe that she called "blasted potatoes;"
I struggled with her over pronunciation, but this is what she chose.
She finally, in frustration, spelled the words on a pad for me,
Hoping I would understand if only I could hear and see.

In the dead of night after this lesson, I woke up with a start;
Her words, during my sleep, had taken themselves apart.
Because she had explained the recipe's preparation process,
My subconscious realized what her procedure suggests.

"She was saying basted!" my subconscious screamed.
Perhaps this came together in something I'd just dreamed.
"You were saying basted," I sang out, and we celebrated.
The tiny victories in communication can't be overrated.

Then my most pious Jewish friends came for lunch.
We had pork and potatoes; they're not an orthodox bunch.
I always love our meetings; we discuss much theology;
Our talks are about our shared Judeo-Christian history.

Our religions' foolish territorial natures cause our laughter,
But we know, among others, these religions cause disaster.
Would that all with differences could be fascinated by others,
And honor each other's ways, like sisters and brothers.

When these friends had taken their leave, with much hesitation,
I thought I was finished with that day's community relations.
My student and her husband dropped by to consult with Richard,
Concerning a family medical problem about which they'd just heard.

They left after a nice visit; surely it was time for our privacy.
Here came our other next-door neighbor, with a request of me.
A three-time veteran of Iraq, and college student who can't cook;
He had a stir-fry kit that he brought over for me to take a look.

I had offered to be his pretend mom and cook for him
If he would be willing to be Richard's techno-savvy friend.
Neighbors, friends, "family" -- what better way to spend the day?
These are the blessings of life for which I always did pray.

Shared Spirit

There's a video going around the internet of a father "giving away" his daughter. As is common for my reactions to things, what makes many smile sweetly, puts my teeth on edge. The daughter in the video is a nurse who has traveled the world with the missions. She is obviously fully adult, and her obviously southern, bible-belt believing father is "giving his girl away" to her husband. "How sweet," many say. "How sad," I say,  because we have not moved on from this archaic scripture-sanctioned salute to slavery.

As our children are growing, it is wonderful to begin forming friendships with them as they come of adult age. This is a tentative task, at first, as boundaries must continually be reevaluated and moved closer and closer to equal status. When our children are grown, what I pray for is inclusion in the partnerships that they form in their adult lives. It is barbaric, in my opinion, to continue acting as if our daughters are chattel to be owned and traded.

In functional families, the older parents should make themselves available to assist and guide the less experienced family, at the request of the younger couple. In this way, community is expanded; there is no joking about "Now she's your problem," when the couple is wed. There is no "gaining a daughter" or "losing a son" involved. There is simply growth of sacred community.

It is not easy to accept that our children will make their own decisions, without our input being their primary guide. Healthy marriage partners focus on the values that they share to create a new nucleus of family. It is also not easy to sit on the sidelines, with our hearts ever open to a call from our closest community members. The most difficult part for me has been in areas where my values and those of the new couples don't agree. All I can do is state my boundaries and refuse to take part in any activity that too severely challenges my boundaries.

It is our duty as community members, in any form of friendship, to refuse to participate in destruction of our own values. It is sad that often protection of our boundaries means ejection from the communities closest to us. It is the nature of life that all physical things, including friends, come to a physical ending, but a great consolation to know that spirit shared lives on in us forever.

Lively Lessons

Preaching is not what converts a soul;
It's practice with guidance that makes us whole.
When we bond with another, child or man,
Only then can we help them understand.

Why is "no" an adult's favorite word?
We're correcting before the child is heard.
The color-blind child sees a brown tree;
Is he wrong when green is what I see?

Who put certain colors in our heads
Where the color-blind child dreads
Any attempts at coloring or art,
And eventually thinks he's not smart?

What of penmanship class to show
Writing styles that went out long ago?
If we want the child to communicate
Don't use it for chances to, him, berate.

It takes much time to form a thought;
Many children feel overwrought
When faced with impatient adults,
Who, then, their intellects insult.

The days of shoving children into a mold
Should have gone out in days of old.
By labeling everything unique a disease,
It is only the despots that are pleased.

We all may learn through what we hear,
But putting in practice makes lessons clear.
While some learn by what they see,
Others learn with kinetic energy.

We are given five senses for learning
Why to only two do we keep returning?
The more of them that teachers utilize
The less our children are minimized.

America is meant to be multi-cultural;
Only Anglo culture is nurtured in schools.
Sitting down for hours and listening
Is not the way that all children can win.

What others say turning what we can do,
Seems to apply to only a few.
If someone stands beside a child while learning
The lessons taught, may continue burning.

Everything we do with a child's rhythm
Is a way to impart our values to him
If we fit ourselves into a child's mold
It seems that we may never feel old.


Tasks that work a child's growing limbs
Make their lessons parts of them.
Here's a new and quite radical notion:
Let's have all our lessons while in motion.