Blockades, Boundaries, Bridges
From bans to blessings?
Woeful Walls
Some barriers may be useful, others may be rueful.
Baffling barriers,
foolish fences, wicked walls.
Blockades, dams do harm.
Walls protect from the elements mercifully,
also separate beings mercilessly.
Tall wall is useless,
we are inseparable.
Frail fence is futile.
Noble walls and fences, as public servants,
can fulfill their functions fairly, sensibly, soberly.
Cruel bans and blockades, as creepy bullies,
separate kin, break beings, murder dreams, brutally, callously, heartlessly.
Wanton Gatekeepers
How small, how stuck, how sad.
When closemindedness
keeps us behind shut doors
unable to hear the joyful music
playing right outside our walls.
How small, how stuck, how sad.
When bitterness
keeps us from smelling, savoring
the sweet fig fruit
near our own front yard.
How small, how stuck, how sad.
When entitlement
keeps us from seeing
the open outstretched hands, asking for, and offering,
what we all truly need and want.
How small, how stuck, how sad.
Warmer Welcomes
Why would we share more weird walls than wise warm words?
Hospitality.
Unlocked gates, doors, minds, hearts, lands.
Find kin, not stranger.
When weighed down senseless
by our weeping world’s woes, throes,
witness wild we-web.
Doorway, entrance, gate.
May we find kind openings,
portals to we-world.
Wider Windows
Windows, doors, gates, openings reveal options, opportunities, offerings.
In life’s true matrix,
two thresholds to main matters:
Connection, caring.
To hold doors open,
to choose we, us, our linkage.
To bet on goodness.
Wiser Bridges
Bridges span and link,
reach out to the other sides.
In good faith, trusting.
Kin and conscious cause,
bridges bring together, us.
Can beings be bridges?
Wilder Winks
All connected, linked,
like the marten and the mink.
The rest, a drunk wink.
Wake up from the spell,
wildly connected we are.
All our relations.
Course to Correction?: Contemplation >>> Compassionate Comprehension >>> Connection >>> Communication >>> Cooperation, Collaboration >>> Correction.
Wondering Boundaries
So many marvels and mysteries perplex our person-centered perspectives,
stump our limited human-made limits and boundaries!
How to find what is well-hidden within the limits, between the lines?
And beyond limits and lines?
What if we acted as if we believed that...
as humans/beings we are more alike than we are otherwise?
there are notable similarities and differences among groups of humans/beings?
each and every human/being can be a contributing ‘one of a kind’ part player?
Willing Borders
Are we willing to...
learn to share ‘our’ space, systems, structures, stuff, selves?
draw from our points of convergence and divergence when working in our backyards, needing a back rub, looking for someone to ‘have our back’?
truly try to figure out how to connect in fair, civil ways, cultivating our common ground?
greet each other so that the best aspects of our earthling nature, socio-cultural treasures and trappings, and individual beings meet?
We-World Wishes
May our aspirations be met by intentions, and followed by actions,
principles, practices, and policies which propitiate and promote
the common good, which is the greatest good.
May our losses turn to voices, turn to votes, turn to laws, turn to light.
May we realize,
before it’s too late, that we’re
neighbors, if not kin.
Despite regrets for the past, future bridges may we pass.
Worthy Lifelines
Carrie Newcomer & John McCutcheon wrote an awesome new song titled Lifeline. She will play it at a Substack live stream event this evening April 8th at 8pm PST, and the replay will be available tomorrow on her Substack publication A Gathering of Spirits
The Growing Edge, interesting, inspiring podcast hosted by Carrie Newcomer and Parker J. Palmer
Ecomap, exercise for identifying and illustrating our connections
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Thanks for reading Pausing for Ponderings and participating with your perspectives. All posts are free to share.
Thank you so much, Marisol, for sharing your beautiful, heart-centred reflections on how to break down walls and build those connecting bridges both physical and metaphorical ones. Your verses here remind me of the power of openness, compassion and the love-filled channels we can build to unite and heal our divided, yet shared world. As always, truly inspiring work! I’ll keep an eye and an ear out for Carrie’s new song, Lifeline, later today. Thanks for the heads up!
Wonderful series of haiku and poems, Marisol.
I especially like this one:
"In life’s true matrix,
two thresholds to main matters:
Connection, caring."
Thank you for sharing.