This Well has not gone Dry

This well has not gone dry

LIVE REALITY

A teary eye,

A teary I,

Tells me this well has not gone dry.

How do you see

Or want to see

Reality

Inside your head

Alive or dead?

A fleeting moment

Framed in me,

Stiffened picture,

Frozen reality.

Hang on, let go

Get stuck or grow

A dead-end branch on

Tree, in river?

Return to springs

Of Life the giver.

Release your squeezing tightly skin

Like wooly worm,

Like shedding snake.

Life wants to move,

Succeed in you.

Remake, retake

Your inner view,

The live reality

In you.

R.W.Thiessen 2015 Mar 30

Background thoughts to “Live Reality”.

While travelling to work on the Budapest rail system, my friend (the author of this poem/prayer) said he was suddenly emotionally aware of his deep appreciation for his wife and daughter:

“And then the tears began to flow down my cheeks. A couple of people looked quizzically at me.  Suddenly this thought occurred to me: tears are a sign that the well has not gone dry; there’s water inside of me and water is life-giving. My tears are coming from an overwhelming sense of gratitude for the gift that [my wife and daughter] are to me, not from any sense of remorse or sadness. So these must be “good” tears, healthy drops of water flowing from a deeper spring inside of me.  They came from a place of life, not death.

The connections of these springs with reality come from my readings in Mustó Péter’s book “Csendben Születik Az Élet” (roughly translated “Life is born in Silence”). Mustó is an 80-year-old Jesuit priest who [writes] about reality in the context of meditation… it is in our nature to grasp reality in terms of pictures, just like a photograph is a captured moment in reality, but one that remains stiff and unbending. This moment caught in picture is real to me, because it actually happened, but it does not contain the whole of reality since it happened only in one moment. And it contains only my reality, not yours. If I am unwilling to let go of that moment, of “my reality”, I will experience a “dead” reality, not a living one which consists of whatever is happening around me and in me in the moment, whether good or bad.  

I can frame my own life (now at 60) and even that of others in terms of an inner picture that I have of myself or of you, and in doing so, hold on tightly to a stiffened version of reality that is in fact not real anymore. Instead, I need to shed my formed pictures much like a snake or a wooly worm caterpillar when the casing around them grows too tight and keeps them from growing out and moving beyond their current reality, encased in the snake’s inflexible skin or in the confinement of the caterpillar’s chrysalis. I do this shedding whenever I return to the source of life, of being, which is always flowing with new life in me. I can allow this new life in me to form a new picture in me, but one that is constantly being renewed. As I turn my attention to the source of life I then clothe that life with a new picture, over and over again. This for me is living in reality.”