Keeping the Dream

The world needs dreamers, and the world needs doers, but most of all the world needs dreamers who do.

~Sarah Ban Breathnach

The other night, my little girl wanted to light the incense and send prayers. So she went to the little altar I have of a meditating Buddha, a gift from my oldest daughter, and childhood pictures of my children, my nephew, my sister and brother and I. On the wall hangs a painting of Jesus, the father of my oldest two had given me.

She arranged the candles, placed the incense on its holder in the Buddha’s hands, and placed a small bowl of food and wine glass of water to honor the ancestors. Then she stepped into an Asian dress of mine, put on the Japanese earrings and necklace of my youth. Taking my hand to stand beside her, she asked I light the candles and incense. I did so.

I said an opening line or two, addressing the Spirit of God and Brother Buddha. But Brhiannon wanted to speak the words of prayer and so I became silent.

She started by addressing “Mother Buddha”. I was touched by how free she was from constraint, those neat little boxes we place ourselves and our beliefs in. Just as Jesus taught, she worshiped in spirit, being confined not by gender or outwardly appearance, she went straight to the heart of what religion is about.

She prayed her beautiful child prayer, which made it the most powerful prayer of all. But what really moved me, touched me so that I knew in this moment I really was standing on sacred ground, was when she blessed her family and said, “We sacredly love all the people in the pictures.”

“We sacredly love…”

How many of us selfishly love, longingly love, hopelessly love, desperately love, controllingly love, jealously love, fearfully love, obligingly love, demandingly love, hopefully love, narcissistically love, delusionally love?

Even to motherly love or fatherly love or brotherly/sisterly love does not go to that place of pure holiness when we sacredly love.

To sacredly love honors the whole being, both yours and the beloved. It is a beautiful understanding of the opening of the Lord’s Prayer, “Our Father”, a beholding of its meaning in what we see in another. It becomes a pure act of worship, giving praise to life in all its wonderful manifestations, which in this moment is manifesting as the one you love…and as the one who is doing the loving.

To sacredly love…

It almost sounds like a prayer in itself, something that should be spoken with reverence on a breath of a whisper.

Everything shifted for me in that moment. I no longer saw the altar as a cabinet top with candles and incense, the pictures or statue or painting that hung on the wall. I looked at my little girl and saw a living altar, that temple within where God dwells.

In this little body next to mine, with eyes closed and a look of serene peace upon her face, I got a glimpse of heaven, and knew without a doubt that angels exist. I turned toward her and with hands together in prayer, bowed.

Until every heart is filled with peace
and every life touched with grace,
I hold a candle of remembrance
for you and for everyone involved in any way.

May God send compassion on us all.

I was at the post office earlier today, cleaning out my post office box. I never get there are often as I should. As usual, I was throwing small town newspaper after small town newspaper into the trash bin they have for that purpose. Just as a matter of course, I asked the post office employee did they recycle these. I had always assumed they did.

She said, “Oh, no.”

“You just take them to the landfill?”

“Yeah, they just get thrown out…they burn them there, don’t they?” Like that was an environmentally friendly alternative.

“Well, yeah, but the carbon emissions aren’t good for the atmosphere.”

“Oh, well, there’s too much damage. There’s nothing that can be done to turn things around until Jesus comes and creates a new world, right?”

I was stunned, “Well…yeah…” - religion wasn’t the issue here, I just wanted to follow her line of thinking - “But that still doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be responsible while we’re waiting.”

“Well, we don’t have recycling here…am I supposed to take them?”

Thinking of the recycles I take to dispose of, I said, “I do, I take mine.”

“We only work eight hours here…”

I kept the papers I would have thrown out, and took them with me.

She is the nicest lady ever. I really like her. She wasn’t being mean. That’s what scared me.

This isn’t about whether I think employees should go the extra mile to recycle if their township or place of employment doesn’t care to address recycling. It was her reliance of her religion to take care of everything as a justification for doing nothing, as a reason to keep on polluting the environment and mindlessly using up our resources that really amazed me and sent a chill down my spine.

Didn’t Jesus say something about stewardship? Aren’t we supposed to mind the store while the master is out? Is there anywhere in the Bible that says we can just trash the earth, because God is going to clean up after us when he gets here?

So what is he? Some Divine Janitor?

There’s too much damage…maybe. But that doesn’t mean we stop trying or give us leave to contribute more to the waste and toxins that have already caused damage. God help us that we never have that attitude toward our fellow human beings who are dying from what we would call an incurable disease.

“Well, you’re already in the last stages of lung cancer, so I’ll just sit here and blow cigarette smoke in your face, because Jesus will give you a new body anyway, after you pass away.”

That’s outrageous. No one with any decency would do that, and the first person who would be loving and giving to this one, would be that sweet postal worker.

But how important, also, is it to give that same compassion and responsibility to the Earth? And how sad and frightening to use the sad state of the Earth’s environmental health to continue making it sick, because we believe a Great Physician will fill the right prescription for our irresponsibility.

So what will we do until Jesus comes? And what will we do if we believe he never will? The bottom line is how responsible do we choose to be, right here, right now in this moment? Because no matter who you believe you will be accountable to, we all are going to have to face the music, sooner or later, for how we treat the Earth.

Just because I like to write songs of hope and inspiration, doesn’t mean that’s how all my days are. Like many people, and like most survivors of abuse, I deal with depression. Not that I just get depressed, but *depression*.

Some things occur in my life that can trigger those cavernous feelings of pain, and blanket it with a paralyzing numbness. When it does these are moments that seem to stand still. I think that can be a kind of hell, when the pain you feel engulfs you completely and there’s no sense of time moving forward and you truly feel cut off from everyone and everything.

These are the moments when it’s best to have family or friends, even one will do, that you can reach out to…or who will reach in to you, when you are rendered totally still. An in-the-flesh person is best, but I have found that even cyber friends can be incredible blessings. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, someone on the other side of the world or in another time zone or even a friend who likes to be up at all hours of the night, can touch you and in that touching, pull you through.

It’s like weight lifting. When you have a spotter, often all they have to do is lift a fraction of a pound of all the weight you are trying to bench press and you can push the weight all the way up to the top. But without that tiny shift, you may find yourself stuck in mid air, not up and not down, until your arms give out and the weight comes down hard and you lie there pinned.

I don’t know how universal deep depression is. I know it’s human to get depressed and discouraged, and there’s times, I’m sure everyone feels like giving up. But the depression I’m talking about goes further than that. It’s the kind where you could just not exist, where that possibility is the only thing in what could be called your life that would look appealing, if appealing is even the correct word.

I’m not talking about suicide or attempting suicide. That’s active. It’s taking some kind of step, albeit destructive. It’s some kind of control. I’m talking about being okay with just not existing.

Perhaps it’s the stagnant aspect of the situation that’s the most toxic.

Any kind of movement is a savior. Putting words to paper. Reading a MySpace blog of a friend or of someone you don’t know, but who has written something that touches you. A long distance CPR.

Here’s a poem I wrote one night, when I was in such a place. It didn’t start out as a poem, but as it took shape it took a hold of me, too, and after the last word, I found myself sleepy. That, too, is movement. And in the morning, it was a new day.

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Some Nights
© 2007 Demian Yumei

Some nights are filled with despair,
when the sorrow in your heart keeps you awake
so that sleep can offer no respite.

Some nights I’m left with wondering
how I will make it,
when I second guess words spoken.

Some nights clash with anger and remorse
and I find myself standing
among no winners.

I wonder why I always seem to end up in the same place,
wonder if I am ever meant to be at home anywhere.

Perhaps some hearts are meant to be hermits,
searching endlessly
for a cave to take refuge,
even as they long
for the very touch they succeed in avoiding.

Some nights,
no matter how many songs I write or sing,
I am left mute.