Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Imagine the distance 
back to your suffering:
travel as an opportunity
to love back into 
the community of your heart 
those tender aspects 
of your own world 
that 
in their fragile essence 
felt 
the piercing sting 
of 
innumerable sensitivities 
perpetrated by those 
who abandoned themselves.

"You are too sensitive,"
 the chorus resounds--
as if being insensitive were somehow
more fitting and functional
in a world were the threads
connecting our senses to our
sensitivities and ultimately 
our capacity to be sentient
have been forsaken.

They might as well say
"You are too aware,"
Or
"You are affected by what
you need to numb yourself to."

The subtle pressure to be insentient
in this world is not always so subtle
Sensitivity can be pummeled and beat into
submission like it were hot iron ore and not 
the radiant flower it once was in our youth.

We learn how to be tough and hardened---
as if this were learning and not the cruel adaptation
whose price is a vital loss of that foundation 
upon which valid insight forever rests.

This is when I hear that other chorus 
beginning to rise, the one that takes us deep 
into what we know is truer, that,
"You are too insensitive."

We are not sensitive enough. 
We need to become more sensitive,
otherwise we are destined to be the 
pawns and puppets of our own
self-reinforcing ignorance and stupidity.

Feel.... 
Feel everything and let it fill
your raw nerves with the news of the 
day and the secrets of the night.

Feel and let those sensitivities
carry you to your destiny
as one of the ones who knows
they are too sensitive and yet
not sensitive enough. 

Feel your way to 
understanding the consequences
of history's misunderstandings
and trust that those feelings
will foster us a future where 
sensitivity is fully realized 
as the essential basis for
knowledge that has a heart.

1 Comments:

At 3:16 PM , Blogger Sha said...

I love you, David Jon Peckinpaugh....

Though you write almost always incognito....

There is no w here for the energy to hide in all the universe.

xo

 

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