living in wonder, instead of ...

One of my cousins posted on FB:

Leo:

been messing around with my poetry, so here goes:

Sloan Bashinsky

Have known many men and women of the streets, have been one myself. Unimaginable, unless lived. 

Leo

We are all strangers/

Strangers in a strange land/

Passing through wonder

Sloan Bashinsky

The book by that title, one of my favorites. The human colonist from Mars was so strange, his expanding utopian church too, taking what they need from the collection plate, giving what they can, the people of the strange land killed him, as the stranger had predicted they would. What remained to be learned, would the Martians who had raised him and then observed the strange land through him, conclave and focus their collective thought on the strange land and blow it to bits in self defense, as they had once done to another planet in self defense, which created the asteroid belt.

Leo

I’ve read it twice so far.

Sloan Bashinsky

One of my all-time favorite memes.

Sloan Bashinsky

one of my own all-time favorite poems

Earth,

the sacred prism

though which souls are refracted

into their elemental parts,

purified in Holy Fire,

then one-forged and sent on their way

to not even God knows where,

simply because they are all

unique emanations of God,

evolving ...

SloanBashinsky

One of my all-time favorite parables, which I lived somewhere in space and time, with heaving heart and rivers of tears streaming from my eyes and oceans of snot from my nose: 

 

the gift…
A sleeping man dreams he sees the back of a young yogi meditating in the lotus position. Before the young yogi appear two cobras, raised up, hoods flared. One cobra is pure white, the other pure black. Both beautiful. The white cobra says to the young yogi, “We came to you once before because you were innocent, and you knew we brought a gift and you believed you had to chose one of us and you chose me.” The black cobra says, “We come before you again because you now are wise.” The yogi, now very advanced in years, weeps, chooses them both. The sleeping man, now an old man, awakens, crying.

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com