This is a prayer for young writers, poets and artists

You creatives!

May you find the wrecking ball

of whatever addiction you are currently captured by

and land at a spectacular bottom

where everything you thought you knew was

wrong

wrong

oh, so stunningly wrong…

Rather like America is doing as I write this

to you, for you, to me, for me

Rather like much of the world is in post-Pandemic madness

possessed by shadow, by religiosity, drunk on money they call god

May you find yourself at the bottom of the well of self-hatred

and see the hater

May you breathe in and out and in again… breathe in even more deeply

until something new cracks your chest

shows your heart a chasm so vast you cannot close it back up

when you hear all the bad news about the end of the world

May we, together, lean into the madness without our defenses

May we drop our martyrdom and get naked on the page

on the canvas

with our tuned or untuned instruments

and play

and play

and play

May we together enter the portal of our imaginations

reclaim the energy the ego has used to hide us from ourselves

hide us from one another

come out from behind the curtains and … what?

sit empty-handed in the unknown until you hear the calling

May The Calling appear impossible

as impossible as my third horse I am grooming in another dimension

the sun hot on my shoulders

and I don’t care

May I lift her hooves and feel her belly in my hand

hope she’s pregnant with the foal of my dreams

May I find every rock packed hard into the California dirt

and scrape it out of her hooves

May I love her enough to see impossible stars in a naked and black sky

May I invite you to dance?

Shall we dance like idiots in whatever way the music calls

may we hear it in our marrow and say yes

May the koan within the koan say yes

May NO contain a juicy YES that I can believe in,

that I will convince you is here NOW

if only

if only

if only

you allow the grace of the words, the paint, the song to emerge

into sweet energy

may you place your nose atop a baby’s head

or snuggle some kittens

tickle some puppies

mount our imaginal horses, blue and green and ride them into

the impossibly pink sky

where the trees smile as we ride by

and medicine rains down dreamlike and we drink it

till our wings grow wide

and we find we are condors