When did spirituality change from a place of comfort, to
a place of judgement,
of small details as proof of membership?
Of long stares and ideas of righteous Rightness-
These men, not these men! These men, not these men!
Of clothes you should wear and shouldn’t, things you could read and musn’t?
When did it stop from being an opportunity to expand one’s mind, without needing to bow to one version of the truth alone?
I want to be in a place
where seekers argue with each other over telephone wires,
where women aren’t fooled into thinking their silence is really their hidden superpower.
I want to travel far away
to the land of past lives, past beliefs, and perpetual dreams,
to ingest my own present-day deli-sandwich-truth.
(Why must we humans always be learning everything anew from the moment of birth?)
But then, in the midst of devouring one book on practical knowledge,
an author asks me,
“Where have all the esoteric teachings gone?”
And I remember them,
stuffed in the nooks and crannies behind the Pious Police.
“They are mine, too!” I reflect, having forcefully forgotten them in the crossfire
in the transitional war from comfort to judgement.
To reclaim them,
I trick the Pious-Police to look the other way,
then I run and stick my little fingers into the cubby hole where the spiritual books are stored,
(I throw in a red heifer as a distraction),
and uber-it to a FedEx where I photocopy the living daylights out of them,
before shoving the originals back in the cubby hole,
taking the photocopied spiritual goods home to read.
I sit down, on a comfy couch, and carefully look at the first line.
Not too strong, but not too light.
The author and I smile, across generations, phone lines, and belief systems.
Ah, yes, the goods.
Begin again.
Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash
