Unglued

broken eggshell

I wrote:

No use to the world broken.

I was right.

No use to the world.

Broken.

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9 Responses to Unglued

  1. Dave Pollard says:

    Play on The Work

    No use to the world unbroken. Nope.
    Of use to the world broken. Nope.
    Of use to the world unbroken. Nope.

  2. Dave Pollard says:

    Public Service Announcement: Advance Warning:

    If you reply to this poem with an excerpt from a certain Leonard Cohen song, I will have no option but to track you down and kill you. For the good of the world.

  3. Dave Pollard says:

    Just to be clear: This is a joyful poem. “It’s already too late.”

  4. sue says:

    this struck a chord for me, today…but I was especially moved by the linked piece for the fall of 2010…I’m hoping my husband who suffers from similar demons will read it and feel a little less different and alone….

  5. Beth Patterson says:

    Did something hatch?
    I hate it when for fear of never sleeping again
    I miss tectonic plates
    doing the mashpit.

  6. Dave Pollard says:

    Sue: Thank you!

    Beth: Nice reply! We should invent a new poetic language that luxuriates in ambiguities. What hatched was a diabolical idea, a self-realization, inspired by Robert Bly’s poetry and this interview. Letting go, one cold white-knuckled, grasping finger at a time. Ironically today I just got an invitation to a workshop in The Work.

  7. Nick Smith says:

    Hi Dave.. What about, ‘Of use to the world on the other side of broken’?

    Another word for broken is ‘surrender’, or, ‘letting all things be exactly as they are’. Either way, it is the condition where the mind naturally falls still and open. The upside of this willingness to quit looking for anything in thought, is that silence now has the space to reveal everything – not least, the essence of our own Being.

    This cracking is fundamental. The breaking of the shell is the waking up to the recognition our Self – not as self-perception (a thought form), but as the quiet centre and source of insight, clarity and love that is our natural expression – the ‘Flow’ of our being. To be unaware of this is to remain asleep to what we are, and therefore asleep to what everything is.
    Of use to the world after this?

    Of course. The essence of who we are, now unresisted, flows naturally through our life. Our openness offers a sanctuary for the exiled parts in all those we meet, and an opportunity to taste this same freedom. Wordlessly, we extend a new source of trust. Not a trust in anything phenomenal, but in knowing that what extends from this quiet centre can only reflect it’s source. What precedes now is a kind of grace, where my own will is not at odds with the movement of Life itself.

    Seen from beyond the shell, life is not purposeless. As Rumi put it, we begin to see that, “everything is rigged in our favour”. From the ego’s perspective our life becomes a continued disillusionment, and cause for despair. But from the waking perspective, this disillusionment is the undoing of our determination to continue looking for external solutions, and is perfect in every way. Life has brought us — as gently and directly as our resistance would allow — to this still, open place where we let go of all concepts, everything we believed to be true, valuable or sacrosanct, to finally be empty and ‘not know’ anything.

    From here, what the caterpillar see as the end of its world, the butterfly sees only a wonderful new beginning. And it was only my resistance that prevented me from seeing this, reflected in my experience of ‘life as struggle’.

    I make no apologies for the obvious (non-Cohen) quote. ;)
    “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”…. Anais Nin

  8. beth patterson says:

    Invitation to The Work with Byron Katie? Or?
    I have been watching from the sidelines as The Work with its damned questions has turned some of my curmudgeon, crafty, cranky friends into more happy souls. Beware :)

    Yes to the Ambiguity Luxuriate format.

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