WillSpirit!

Where Will meets Spirit
∞ Love, Clarity, Balance, Peace, & Bliss ∞

A science, mental health and spirituality blog written by a physician.








  • Red_Exclamation_DotDisclaimer
    • Dear Visitors:
      Although I trained and practiced as a physician, my background does not include formal instruction in psychiatry beyond basic medical education. This journal presents ideas about treatment philosophy, but must not be considered therapeutic advice. Abrupt changes in one's psychiatric medications can trigger profound cognitive, emotional, and physical symptoms, including suicidal thoughts and actions. Consequently, pharmaceutical agents should not be increased or decreased without supervision by a mental health clinician.

    • ON THE OTHER HAND, your brain belongs to you, and your opinion counts. If you decide that changing your medication regimen will serve your best interest, then I believe your providers have an obligation to help you try to achieve your goals. I want everyone to be educated about their options, and do what will be most helpful for themselves. No one should feel pushed around by dogmatic and/or limited viewpoints, whether those of psychiatrists, anti-psychiatry advocates, or myself.


The Body Didactic

Too many of us grew up in families wracked with pain. Emotional wounds accumulate in settings of neglect, abuse, bereavement, molestation, violence, and misery. As adults, these ancient injuries undermine our happiness. We often choose poorly in relationships, careers, and pastimes. Even if we don’t make gross mistakes, we lack the confidence to endorse our own choices. We feel uneasy in good times and overwhelmed in bad. This is the legacy of childhood trauma.

At times we shut down emotionally, closing ourselves off from the affection we crave. Other times we act out and hurt the ones we love or destroy our own reputations.

Still, healing can happen after even the worst of upbringings. It takes time, and backslides are unavoidable, but eventually we stabilize in greater maturity and emotional openness than we ever imagined.

In the last post we highlighted the body’s gentle wisdom and how often we ignore it. As I move further along the path to peace of mind, the importance of befriending physical nature becomes ever more obvious. The injuries of the past are stored in our biology, where they affect every aspect of our lives.

For instance, upon remembering painful events from our past, our minds recoil in shame, anger, or sorrow. In equal measure, our bodies respond with corresponding feelings of hollowness, tension, or exhaustion. Just as emotional surges reflect the state of mind that accompanied past trauma, somatic symptoms recreate the physical feelings recorded at the time of the original hardship. Often, such emotional and somatic reactions arise without any conscious memory of the childhood injury that caused them. For example, when a spouse criticizes us, we may feel ashamed and small, or furious and explosive, without overtly connecting these responses to the parental harshness that first established the pattern.

Before we learn healthier strategies, our habitual response to distressing sensations is avoidance. We turn our mental spotlight away from our body’s messages. We may lose ourselves in thought and analysis, ignoring the cramp in our gut, the ache in our shoulders, or the shallowness of our breath. We may evade direct, felt experience by focusing on the actions and misdeeds of others. We may use the distraction of intoxicants, food, sex, or television as shields against painful emotional and sensual turmoil. We become skilled escape artists.

The solution can be found in the body. In fact, we cannot fully transcend our pain until we face its somatic legacy. At first, this feels excruciating. When we begin to tune into our bodily responses, we become aware of a sensory universe populated by knots, soreness, burning, blockage, agitation, and numbness. These discomforts are the physical counterpart to the emotional uproar that also arises. We discover how underneath our superficial and obsessional thought, our core system buzzes with anxiety, grief, anger, and fear. It all seems so noisy and confusing that we may find ourselves pouring a bowl of cereal with little memory of rising from meditation and heading to the kitchen.

The good news is that as we reacquaint ourselves with our bodies, the sensations become less intense. We relax into nonjudgmental awareness, which lessens the stimulation of tension and pain. It can seem like our systems shout less loudly when they have our attention.

Furthermore, we can learn to enter even the most unpleasant symptoms with an attitude of openness, acceptance, and love. In my own case, I experience deep, burning pain in my neck and upper back that worsens during times of stress. It is easy to hate this discomfort and resist it, but doing so only increases the misery. A better strategy is to move toward the soreness with focused attention and gentle affection. I apologize to my neck for all the times my activities harmed it. I feel compassion for its burden of muscle spasm, arthritis, poor posture, and neglect. I honor the hard work it performs in service of supporting my head every day.

By treating my body with the same care I would treat any beloved animal, I send a message of acceptance and affection to my entire being. The self-compassion resonates on the somatic, psychological, and spiritual levels. It feels profoundly healing. Often, the pain seems to abate with this practice, but the goal isn’t to alter my experience in any way. I seek only to honor my body and whatever it communicates.

All painful experiences can be approached in similar fashion. Crushing sorrow, vertiginous loneliness, shattering fear, and even livid rage can all be embraced with this attitude of loving, wise embrace. One finds that life is full of pain, but that this does not mean it is going badly. For as we open to our discomfort and terror, as we accept uncertainty and loss, we automatically increase our ability to feel joy, love, and spacious bliss.

The body will teach us the inexhaustible majesty of life when we surrender to both its wounds and its strengths.

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The Body Didactic was published on January 10th, 2012 .






Let Your Body Seduce You

Imagine someone asks you this question: “What are you?”

We seldom get queried in this way, since the more typical questions are: “Who are you?” or “What do you do?”

So take a moment to answer the question of what you consider yourself to be, first and foremost. Some of us will answer with our careers: “I’m a physician.” or “I’m a writer.” Others will state an important social connection: “I’m a mother.” or “I’m an American.” A few will refer to religion: “I’m a Muslim (or Atheist, Christian, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist, etc).”

But few of us will reply, without forethought: “I am a warm-blooded animal that walks upright on its hind limbs and possesses an enlarged brain.” And yet, that is probably the most central and accurate description we could provide.

Look back in time some five-thousand generations, or one-hundred-thousand years. Anatomically modern humans walked the earth, but most contemporary roles didn’t exist. Concepts about personality and social function, if articulated at all, must have been of more limited scope. We have no way of determining the language environment of these beings. No doubt people back then related to others as parents, children, and tribal members. Some may have been Shamans; some may have been leaders. So as individuals they may have had feelings about basic categories of identity and perhaps even words for them. But my guess is that they were far more aware than we are of their kinship with other animals and nature at large. The biological urgency of nutritive, protective, and reproductive drives may well have dominated their consciousness in place of the concerns about money, time, and networking that occupy our lives in the information age. They probably understood much more intuitively than we do how similar humans are to bears, monkeys, wolves, and antelope.

Humans were living, breathing, eating, defecating, copulating, and nurturing as animals long before they were writing, analyzing, conceptualizing, and philosophizing as citizens. Despite this, today we give far more attention to our concepts, and our feelings about our concepts, than we do to the basic biology that keeps us in the game. How many of us read a newspaper at breakfast or a magazine while sitting on the toilet? How many of us listen to our iPods while running or watch TV while digesting dinner? All these practices act to divorce us from our bodies. However, unlike unions between lovers, matrimony between mind and body is always “’till death do us part!” There is no chance of divorce, only alienation.

The powers of silence that I touted in a recent post may offer a return to our native state of mind. Before we learned to escape into the constructed realm of symbols and society, we remained grounded in the given world of bodies and biology. Make no mistake, I believe that language can help people heal, as evidenced by my efforts in writing these essays. But even more healing is learning to live beyond words, to dwell as organic beings embedded in the biosphere and related to all other life forms through an elaborate, eternal interchange. The material of our bodies came from the earth and constantly exchanges with it. Every calorie that keeps us alive is owed to some other organism that preceded us. Once death meets us at the end of our days, our physical forms will be released so their elements can again enter the timeless cycles of carbon, calcium, and creation.

In the meantime, we can find simple, lovely contentment by embracing, in silence, our bodies with their constant throbbing, gurgling, aching, hungering, and aging. Rather than feeling beleaguered by our organismic limits and imperatives, we can learn to honor them. Rather than hating how time drains the bloom from our faces and erases the potency from our contours, we can honor the natural, inevitable, and majestic seasons of every life.

Whenever the opportunity arises, I like to watch insects and other small creatures. The delicacy of their movements, the purposefulness of their travels, and the incredible intricacy of their bodies all impress me. A warm feeling of affection for these little beings often follows. If even a gnat displays this miracle of life, imagine how impressive you are as an organism. Think of the formidable truth of your brain, with its thousand-trillion synapses mediating a torrential flow of information. Remember the marvelous fact that you grew from a single cell inside the body of another organism much like you in every way.

With the stillness of meditation one begins to feel the ticking of the body, the flow of consciousness in the brain, and the exchange of air in the lungs. These activities are never-ending while we live, and through them our bodies are continually inviting our affection. Our living processes can be seen as somatic seductions that can help us reconnect with our true forms and escape the complicated tangle of words. They reach out to us every moment, beckoning us back into the sublime experience of living as warm-blooded bipeds on this ancient and bounteous earth.

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Let Your Body Seduce You was published on January 9th, 2012 . 7 comments






Escaping the Whirlpool of Words

Even though I like to think of myself as a writer, my relationship with words feels conflicted. On the one hand, they’re fun to work with and they communicate ideas, but on the other they lead to big conflicts in society, relationships, and the human mind.

One problem is that language is unconstrained; you can say or think almost anything, whether it is helpful or not. Furthermore, a single object or event can be described in a multitude of ways, which invites disagreement. This leads to intense discord because we are programmed (either by evolution, society, or both) to take words very seriously. As people we attack our neighbors for saying ‘forbidden’ things, and we attack ourselves for thinking them.

Two essays back we discussed silence, which is key to resolving this language dilemma. The topic grew out of a quote a relative sent me, but it also tapped into concepts that I read recently in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (2011) by Steven Hayes, Kirk Strosahl and Kelly Wilson. My understanding of that book, in turn, was aided by an older text about language evolution called The Symbolic Species by Terrence W. Deacon. And no doubt the influence of Eastern meditative traditions on the ‘Silence’ essay is obvious.

Citing these sources is my way of emphasizing that none of what I wrote was particularly original. In fact, it is quite likely that almost anything anyone writes about mental life has been presented before but with different phrasing. Go to any bookstore and in the self-help/psychology section you’ll find vast numbers of tomes that cover more or less the same material.

Granted, neuroscience reveals new mechanisms in the brain almost every day. But despite all the impressive research into brain physiology, we know little more about how to thrive as a thinking organism than was understood in the Buddha’s day. As I’ve argued in an earlier essay, when it comes to coping with the felt experience of being human, the sophisticated models of modern neuropsychology seldom improve on ancient wisdom. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, as articulated by Hayes, Strosahl, and Wilson, basically retools the timeless truth that the best way to grow as a person is to gain the skill of silencing, or at least doubting, the verbal mind.

On the other hand, it can be very fruitful to look at established wisdom in novel ways. Doing so solidifies knowledge as information gets reinforced by repetition and nuanced by the alternate viewpoints offered by different authors. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, or ACT (pronounced as one word) elaborates a clinical method that guides people to the realm beyond words, where we can find greater stability and less ambiguity. The endpoint may be the same as the Buddha’s, but the path has been modernized.

My post about silence outlined the three consecutive benefits that I believe accrue as one works to achieve mental quiet. The ultimate goal for many meditators is the spacious emptiness that consciousness finds within stillness. But although this is certainly a powerful incentive for learning to dampen thought, the earlier stages offer important insight into the inadequacies of language.

Both ACT and Eastern philosophies teach that words are arbitrary and unsubstantial. Meditation can make this truth experientially obvious, but in fact it is easy to demonstrate with examples.

Imagine you’re at a party and you inform someone that you’ve had a headache for a couple of days. Your companion looks at you with brows furrowed and says, “that’s just what my sister said before they found the brain tumor!” If you’re a neurologist and fairly confident, this statement won’t trouble you much; you know that most headaches are not ominous. But if you tend to worry and your knowledge of medicine comes from online reading about the myriad illnesses that can kill, the string of words ending in “brain tumor” might spark a panicked obsession. And yet, even a hypochondriac could brush off the remark if the person speaking was known to be a habitual and mean-spirited liar. However, if a close friend confirmed that the liar’s sister actually did die of brain cancer, the potent sentence could propel you into your local clinic with demands for an MR scan.

See how the sentence shifts in meaning and import depending on who hears it, who utters it, what others say about the speaker, and so on? Context is decisive.

As another example consider this sentence: “Your dog looks dead.” If it’s spoken after your beloved pet gets struck by a minivan, the remark will sound devastating. If you hear it while your sweet, elderly dog rests on the hearth rug, you will likely feel annoyed. And if the comment follows your dropping a hot dog into the sand at a beach picnic, you’ll probably laugh. Yet even in these situations the speaker’s status will affect your interpretation. If a child pronounces your dog dead after the car accident you’ll be somewhat less alarmed than if a veterinarian does. And if your elderly neighbor with Alzheimer’s insults your pet sleeping by the fireplace, you’ll be more forgiving than if your sharp-tongued brother says the same words.

Today in a support group one of the members explained why she was feeling out of sorts. She spoke quite insightfully about how a painful situation affected her. Afterwards, she asked, “did that make any sense?” My reply was that yes, what she said sounded very reasonable. But I also added that she could have spoken in very different terms about the same situation, and she might still have sounded articulate and convincing.

Words are like this. Contradicting verbal statements can sound equally true in isolation. Meanings shift and change depending on context, speaker, listener, mood, history, prejudice, motivation, etc. Word strings cannot be relied upon as fixed determinants of reality (and yet they often are!). Two people can describe a single conversation in completely different ways, especially if they were arguing while it played out. What’s more, today’s “hell” can become tomorrow’s “heaven.” In fact, it happens all the time.

If language is this unconstrained and arbitrary during conversation, imagine how unreliable it is during mental self-talk, when words are generated continuously without any feedback or objective evaluation by others. No wonder we can drive ourselves insane.

Earlier, this essay highlighted the benefit of using different words to say the same thing. But I’ll end it by emphasizing the even greater value of not employing words at all. Just as re-phrasing helps learning, de-phrasing promotes wisdom.

That was the point of writing about silence. As long as we remain submerged in the murky swimming hole of words, we miss the fact that human life is meant to be lived on dry land. While lost in our fascinating but confining verbal turbulence, we miss the warm sunshine, the birds in the trees, and the children playing on the shore. We mistake both the medium and the message for reality. Most of all, we remain baffled by the unstable meaning, ominous implications, and contradictory concepts that come from words.

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Escaping the Whirlpool of Words was published on January 5th, 2012 .






The Advantage of Disadvantage

Life promises us nothing but the experience of living until we die. We cannot expect our dreams to be fulfilled. We cannot avoid hardship and loss. These principles apply to all.

But even though no one can squeeze guarantees out of fate, there is great unevenness in our fortunes. Some people simply seem luckier than others. They enjoy families that provide more resources of love and support. As a consequence, or maybe because of inborn personality factors, they grow into confident, resourceful, and resilient adults. They suffer little self-doubt and have no sense of self-loathing. Their lives unfold relatively smoothly, and as they enter the later stages of adulthood they can look back with pride at how they built success. They may have achieved career acclaim, raised happy children, and/or simply radiated good cheer as they walked upright through the world.

Unfortunately, life doesn’t work that way for everyone, and we all know of human situations that fall short of such comfort and success. First, there are the large populations across the globe that suffer under extreme poverty, chronic warfare, and oppression. We see the images of shantytowns and war-torn cities in which stunned and dusty children wander wide-eyed and alone. We observe their innocent, wounded faces and wonder: what can these orphans possibly hope for in the future? And yet, they seem far away and unconnected to our affluent societies. We try to reassure ourselves that these kids don’t suffer like we would in the same situation, because they don’t know what they’re missing. It’s a vain and selfish hope, of course, but sometimes it’s our only defense against feeling overwhelmed by the unfairness in the world.

We naturally think in terms of this culture’s material advantages, but unless poverty and turmoil are so severe that food, clothing, and shelter are compromised, we cannot assume that wealthier populations are happier. I haven’t been to Mexico since the recent outbreaks of violence, but in earlier years the joy among the country’s populace was impressive. Despite much lower living standards than enjoyed in the North, the Mexicans seemed far more contented and jolly than Americans. Why? I suspect because they lived in more stable communities, where friends and family didn’t regularly move away. They knew their neighbors their entire lives, and lived embedded in rich relational webs.

In contrast, many of us in the USA and other Western countries were raised in isolated nuclear families. Relocations were so common that we often didn’t feel close to many neighbors and developed few longterm friendships. If we were unlucky enough to have alcoholic, depressed, and/or violent parents, we had nowhere to turn. We may have suffered severe traumas or bereavements in relative isolation.

We may then have grown up to face the same demons that tormented those who raised us. We may have had to battle addictions, chronic sorrow, and/or festering rage ourselves.

Those of us who endured abusive, bereaved, or neglected upbringings entered adulthood with few useful tools for dealing with life. Many of us require decades to sort out the injuries, the humiliations, the recriminations, and the grief. Sadly, many who come from such homes simply deteriorate and die early, tragically, or alone.

But if we survive, then what? Before long we find ourselves in middle age with lives that look less than idyllic. We often have fewer friends, less stable families, and more fatigue. Childhood trauma translates into adult difficulty, and many of us end up with lives littered by broken relationships and abandoned dreams.

And then what? Ultimately, if we hope to find peace, we learn how to cope. We mature. We forgive the damaged parents who hurt us. We forgive the entire cosmos for failing to meet our childhood needs. We find meaning in all the hardship, setbacks, and breakdowns. We become wiser and more spiritual. We begin to find beauty in every nook and cranny of creation.

But still, we can easily see that our lives could have been better. It is all too obvious that we have not thrived like the more fortunate. We may feel isolated; many of us suffer health problems that resulted from the massive stress and poorly chosen coping strategies of earlier years. We feel damaged and aged in a culture that worships youth, wealth, success, and beauty.

Is there any upside to this realization? Perhaps only this: we are also the ones who are forced to enlarge our hearts the most. Our pain, isolation, grief, and remorse all compel us to learn unconditional acceptance and radical forgiveness. Despite all the mistakes and brokenness, we lovingly embrace ourselves, our families, our communities, and whatever divine forces might be witnessing this mysterious passion play.

There are other paths to growth, but loss, injury, and failure can be potent stimuli to spiritual practice and mystical awakening. Humble but exalted realization becomes the consolation prize for the brokenhearted who persist. At first such gentle wisdom barely tips the scales as we judge our lives, but as cosmic love and insight grow, we begin to feel less and less unfortunate. Until, finally, the day comes when we look back on our fractured histories and see their value, their majesty, and what in retrospect seems like Grace.

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The Advantage of Disadvantage was published on January 3rd, 2012 . 6 comments






The Triple Powers of Silence

At some point in every human life, pain threatens to unravel everything that matters. For some of us the day comes in childhood. We may suffer the death of a parent, unspeakable trauma, or simple grinding neglect. For others life feels fairly comfortable until adulthood, but sooner or later fate steers us off our desired road into threatening territory. Perhaps a child gets sick, or a marriage ends, or a career fails. Maybe illness strikes and the end of life comes into view. Grief, failure, and injury shatter our peace, so we begin to seek answers.

At first, we search in all the usual places. We ask our close friends and trusted relatives for advice. Some of us consult therapists or psychiatrists who guide us back into our past or write us prescriptions. Some of us enter houses of worship or meditation in hope of enlisting the help of profound mystical or mental forces. We pray and meditate, desperate for answers.

Even with all this exploration, solutions seldom come. All too often, life deals ever more hardship as we scramble to find a lifeline that will help us endure the escalating pain. We may begin to waver in our resolve to continue; we begin to question whether life offers enough enrichment to make its difficulties worthwhile. We wonder why, as we try so hard to solve our dilemma, we feel no better.

These despairing moments are fertile. They mark the ego’s looming defeat and the foundational collapse that allows deep wisdom to develop organically. Because the problem is exactly that we are trying so hard to find answers, but we do not need answers.

What we need is to break free from all seeking, all efforts to understand, and all analysis. What we need is to quell the mind’s ceaseless efforts to make sense of life, its endless construction of models, and its doomed dream of figuring out how to extinguish the inevitable pain of existence.

What we need is silence.

The first layer of silence is a respite from constant mental toil. We enjoy a break from churning our complicated facts, important memories, and worrisome predictions. We open to peace of mind. This is the introductory gift of learning to quiet the mind’s chatter: a chance to rest. In a spacious moment of stillness, we begin to appreciate how struggling to solve life never leads to solutions, only to confusion and exhaustion. A boundless relief comes with abandoning, even for a moment, all our strenuous, futile striving.

The second layer of silence is the recognition that verbal reasoning is only a shadow of life, not life itself. Before we get to this stage, we believe the stories we tell ourselves. For instance if we think, “I can’t continue in the face of such pain,” we believe our mind’s dire prediction and become paralyzed. As we wait for the sorrow to lift, or the fear to abate, the stasis that results simply worsens our mental anguish. But as we learn the value of quieting inner dialogue, we begin to see that these strings of words have no solidity. They are tokens of interpretations of models of our lives. Neither the tokens, nor the interpretations, nor the models are life itself. As we begin to quiet the inner verbiage, we recognize it to be arbitrary and unhelpful. Instead of thinking about what’s going on, we experience life as it is in this moment. Nearly always, life as it is entails far less pain than life as we think it is.

The third layer of silence is beyond description. It is simple and unalloyed bliss. This essay I’m now writing was inspired by a quote my aunt sent, taken from Listening to Your Life, by Frederick Buechner. The theologian provides a good description of this final gift of inner quiet:

I have been conscious but not conscious of anything, not even of myself. I have been surrounded by the whiteness of snow. I have heard a stillness that encloses all sounds stilled the way whiteness encloses all colors stilled, the way wordlessness encloses all words stilled. I have sensed the presence of a presence. I have felt a promise promised.

Buechner’s words come as close as words can to capturing the ultimate fruit of stilling the inner dialogue.

It is important to recognize that quieting the mind’s verbal stream yields benefits at every stage. Early on, we are granted rest. A little later, we gain insight into the emptiness of words. And finally, we discover what we were hoping for all along: an unshakeable foundation for peace of mind.


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The Triple Powers of Silence was published on January 1st, 2012 . 9 comments






Snotchklopp!

This is the last poem of WillSpirit poetry month, thank goodness. Getting back to essays is looking pretty attractive. This final poem was actually the first one I wrote in 2011, in response to a prompt to use nonsense words in a piece. Happy New Year to all!

Notice the two Gobrukups in the unkertow.

SNOTCHING GOBRUKUPS SPOTTED IN CALIFORNIA!

Not every day do you spot gobrukups snotching,
And no one has ever seen them klopp.

Gobrukups only klopp under bockups
And prefer to snotch in the dark,
After the plockats retire to their kippets.

So I was thrilled to see two gobrukups snotching outside my kitchen,
A little after noon,
With their kloppers and their snotchers exposed!
But they skotted into the unkertow and prockled away
Before I could capture them or take a picture.

Still, I could document my spotting because they left behind a snotchklopp,
Until my wife cleaned that up with a mop.

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Snotchklopp! was published on December 31st, 2011 .






Two Vernal Pieces

Only two more days left in WillSpirit poetry month! As mentioned last time, the sequence will conclude in an upbeat way. Today I’m posting two short poems along with the writing group prompts that stimulated them. Both are meant to be sensual and lighthearted; my hope is to inject a hint of springtime into this shadowy and transitional time of year…

Prompt: Use seduce, river and balloon in a 12-line poem.


THE FRIENDLY SKIES

She:
You are so trying to seduce me!

He:
Not at all, my near-virginal dewdrop. I stand beside you,
Shirtless and glistening, to proclaim my intentions
Innocent. Yes we ride together, in private, closely
Confined, moist shoulders jostling, gliding above a writhing
Colorado River that undulates through the hot, rusty pink mounds
Of the Mojave as we are upheld by my crimson, expansive, and bulbous
Hot air balloon rising above us. We are joined, intimately, gently,
In a journey romantic only by accident, I assure you. Your hunger and ache
For beauty are all I aim to assuage.
The wine and roses are only for show.

She:
Quit stalling, you liar, and take me in the sky!


Prompt: Write a 10-15 line poem that uses only one image and otherwise is comprised of abstract or philosophical language/idea.

A Venn Diagram

BREATHTAKING FIGURES

Mmmm, my lovely
teacher of
abstract algebra.
I so adored the way you curled your
braces, your round and fulsome
Venn diagrams, the way you closed and opened your
sets, your enthusiastic unions, and the intensity
of your intersections.
(I remember those especially.)
How you stretched out your
formulae and voiced your
proofs. I loved the way you
lectured, you passionate
mathematician, with your blouse
wrinkled as you stood close
to the blackboard.

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Two Vernal Pieces was published on December 30th, 2011 .






The Road to Hell

WillSpirit poetry month is nearly over. In celebration, I’m going to post some poems that are more about fun than philosophy. The online poetry suggestion that led to today’s piece was to write about how “the road to hell is paved with good intentions…“

Le’me tell ya ’bout my road ta hell:
The tale ain’t pretty and it sure ain’t swell.
But this dang notion’s runnin’ thru my head:
Just one good deed gonna get me dead.

I been drivin’ South in my pickup truck,
Hit a real hard bump and my rig gets stuck.
I jump on down to see what’s what:
See my two front wheels in a nasty rut.

My truck hangs winches front and back,
So pullin’ out id’n but a snap.
But I pull ta rear, don’t think it right,
So agin’ that hole’s yawnin’ in my lights.

I been haulin’ stones for some guy name’ Jack.
They’s big as plates and twice as flat.
So I go ta lay ‘em in ‘at big pot’ole,
‘Till the road look good an’ my rig can roll.

And it rolls just right down the street real straight,
‘Till the speed-o-meter’s pushin’ forty-eight.
Them tires keep turnin’ an’ my motor roars.
That truck’s a haulin’ with ‘er pedal floored.

Darn thing is I forgot to check
What parts ‘at big bump mighta wrecked.
I hadna looked so I hadna seen:
‘Neath my truck dripped a puddly sheen.

When ‘er front end fell a brake line snapped.
Now I pump the pedal but it don’t do crap.
This rig keeps rollin’, goin’ sixty now,
When up ahead stands a big ol’ cow.

An’ I start thinkin’ ’bout them stones in back,
How I ‘greed ta haul ‘em for a guy name’ Jack.
It wudn’t him what I meant to please:
I been real sweet on his sis Louise.

Louise an’ me, we ain’t but necked,
An’ now I’m drivin’ down a road ta Heck.
Think might as well ‘void that Jersey,
So I spin my wheel an’ go topsy-turvy.

If the bed been lighter the truck been fine,
We coulda gone out had a real nice time.
I hauled them stone’s for Louise’s smile,
‘Cept I lose my lights in a smokin’ pile.

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The Road to Hell was published on December 29th, 2011 .






Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride

December is poetry month here at WillSpirit. Please forgive the digression as I take a needed break from essay writing. Just scroll back to November to get to the real substance.

Dear Mr. Toad,

Did you know you can teach a new tomorrow with your two-faceted tale of life
In transformation? On an earth of trials, turmoil, and timeless
But hypo-animated tree lines, its soil tilled by ages, evolution taking
Slow, tentative turns on a tortuous road to eternity,
Your ancestors took one tremendous step toward today
By tapping out of the watery egg, telling tails to atrophy,
Then tiptoeing onto that touchstone of teleozoic life: dry turf.
They traveled away from the trammels of tired old teleosts,
Thus initiating our ten-toed trip toward telephones and touch screens,
Teleporting us into the treachery of technology and timepieces,
Climatic catastrophe, titanic battles, and terrible trashiness.
We’re not touting teleology here, but it’s terrific that you, a tiny toadie,
Were created to train us to transmute. We humans needs to be told:
We can take a different tack, and tread the world lightly, but
Time is ticking away, and it is nearly too late to turn the tide.

We entreat you: tell us how to truncate our wild ride toward termination.

Yours truly and trying to transcend,
Tragic Humanity

(This piece grew out of an assignment in a poetry group. We were charged to choose a letter of the alphabet and use it three to five times in each line, and to write the poem in the form of a letter to someone.)
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Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride was published on December 27th, 2011 .






The Points of Life

December is poetry month here at WillSpirit. Please forgive the digression as I take a needed break from essay writing. Just scroll back to November to get to the real substance.

I love to live though often it’s not fun,
And enjoy my loves despite their ending pain.
I love to race though seldom have I won,
And rush to work though little have I gained.

I earn my keep but not to buy and spend.
I eat my meals though hunger comes again.
I will embrace though loving always ends.
I will breathe out so I can breathe back in.

Our days aren’t meant for us but to enjoy,
And living well means more than peace and ease.
Life bestows its sorrow, hurt and toil.
And death we share with thousand-year-old trees.

Life’s a hellish heaven, experienced and lived
To leaf and flower, fruit, decline and give.

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The Points of Life was published on December 26th, 2011 . 2 comments






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