Below is an amazing poem full of fresh air and light directed at the spiritlessness of our age: brutality, stupidity, greed. Out of a spirit of creative thinking, this poem was written by a woman who was a Fortune 500 consultant but left the corporate world to become a seminarian at a progressive "think-outside-the-box" school. She lost her marriage, then moved back to Nashville (where she grew up) to help her newly divorced son. Helping with the raising of a grandson and working as a sales consultant keeps her in touch with the soulessness of our time. I hope the poem is as inspiring for you as it was for me. What do you think of her poem?
Spirit Stompin' by Martha White
Albert Einstein once said that
"great spirits
have always encountered
violent opposition
from mediocre minds."
And Frank Sinatra still croons
the sad fact
that "some people
get their kicks
stompin' on a dream."
Why is it that we
get so much pleasure
watching the death and dismemberment
of one another's
creative dreams?
We cannot seem to wait
to carve up an idea
that carries eagerness and hope
with our knives of ridicule which are
engraved with the words "crazy," "impractical," and "unrealistic."
We have, somehow, come to believe the lie
that anything that doesn't fit what we have come to accept
as "scientific reality," or "religious truth," or that doesn't conform to some cultural "norm"
is dangerous at worst
and, at best, not worth our time or
consideration.
Perhaps it is because we feel
half-dead ourselves,
having succumbed to the entities
that seek to control us through the suppression
of compassion, energy, enthusiasm, and change.
And since we have allowed ourselves
to be herded into wretched prisons of our own making,
anyone having the temerity to choose a different way,
makes us feel insecure and fearful somehow,
and is surely guilty of something terrible, indeed.
The tragedy is
that when we participate in killing off
someone else's dreams,
we hammer yet another nail
into the coffins containing our own.
At this point in the history of our species,
we are faced with the very real possibility
of our own extinction
unless we learn to use our minds and live our lives
from broader, more inclusive perspectives.
We base our national mystique
on the myth of the supremacy of the individual,
the delusion that we are a free people living in a democracy,
the absurd notion that church-going is indicative of conscious spirituality,
and the belief that "Yankee ingenuity" will solve any problem we encounter.
We fool ourselves in every case.
Paradox reigns supreme.
We desperately need both independence and community,
something akin to interdependence,
in order to experience real freedom and continue to evolve.
As long as we remain psychospiritually split
on the polarized twin horns of
good versus evil,
and individual freedom versus collective beneficence,
we will never discover
the new territory
that is our birthright.
And unless we have a change of heart,
our very real insanity and small-minded meanness
will create an ever-more miserable world
in which the absence of hope
makes for a gray canvas upon which to paint the colors of our lives.
Regardless of how long
we have looked out at Life
from behind the iron black-book bars of righteousness and rigidity,
our spirit-lights still burn,
eternally prepared to remove our chains.
Someday, we will tire
of brutal repression, greed, cruelty, and hate,
drop our stubborn stupidity, send out our prayer-calls
to the All That Is,
and find ourselves immediately transformed.
We will have traded
our grim spirit stompin' shoes
for slippers of Light
and joyfully dance our way
Home.