How to Know What you Need to Know

I ran across this beautiful poem and had to share. I was reminded today of how important my meditation practice has been for me over the past 15 years ... my morning time is what kept me grounded all these years. Every morning ... I breathe, I acknowledge my thoughts (and often they come in massive flurries!) and I let it go ... over and over again ...

May we have happiness and joy in simplicity.
May we find contentment and peace in what is.
May we love, simply and truly love, no expectations ... no strings attached ... simply,

just because.

Thank you Sandra for so eloquently writing a poem that reminds me ... that in the stillness, in the simplicity, in the now ... I will know what I need to know.

How To Know What You Need To Know
- by Sandra Turner

First, forget everything you have learned,
that the American Dream is a worthy cause,
that you need a couch and a dishwasher,
another opinion, pair of jeans, or
that complicated relationship.

Go alone to an empty, quiet place and stay
there until you don’t want to leave. Take a deep
breath and feel it swirl up your spine, wash your
mind and descend. Notice the ecstatic jitterbug going
on between your cells and then ask who you really are,

beyond appearance and accomplishment, thought and
feeling, history and hope. You know you’re there,
under all that you’ve learned as disguise, to
protect and adapt. To survive.
You are there.

Let go of fear and need. What matters will remain.
You don’t have to analyze or predict, and nobody’s
buying explanations anyway. Turn off the news, mongers of
artificial importance, of deep insecurity. Whose reality are
they reporting, anyway? Turn off the blathering
shows and tunes, and begin your own walk.

Notice your muscles stretch and sigh in relief, your organs
find their rightful places. Feel the excitement of your blood as
it tag-teams through the intricacy of your vessels.
Hear the music of the wind as it blows right through
the semblance of your solidity.

And feel how bits of you leave with that wind, carried off
like tiny mice to hawks, nourishment for another.
Let this go — it happens without your consent — and notice instead
what rushes in to replace the loss, and that
the loss was necessary for the new to arrive.

When you no longer know your name or what your kitchen looks like,
when the other lives you see are glowing orbs floating toward you,
and you feel a pull toward them, as to a beloved,
such intense joy you could explode into the billions of atoms you are,
you will know what you need to know. Remember your name and
close this manual.

Sandra Turner, 11/2009
(The first and last lines from Pamela Spiro Wagner’s “How to Read a Poem: Beginner’s Manual”.)

©2009 Sandra Turner