Look With Nature's Eyes

Listen to a reading of "Look With Nature's Eyes":

Look with nature's eyes,
with atomic eyes,
with Eden eyes,
with primordial eyes.

Stand on nature's feet,
on terrestrial feet,
on stardust feet,
on Big Bang feet.

Touch with nature's hands,
with sapling hands,
with reverent hands,
with unprecedented hands.

Think with nature's mind,
with undomesticated mind,
with wild mind,
with ineffable mind.

Let trees erupt from your cells.
Release the bats from their cages in your skull.
This is the place where scriptures and doctrines turn to gum leaves
and we can't remember what was written on them
but we marvel at their beauty.

Let the stillness teach us how to move.
Let the spaces between our thoughts teach us how to think.
We are humble students of the great Emptiness
upon which this universe has been scribbled
by a baby god
in crayon.

The baby's laughter echoes through our caverns
and withers our precious minarets
and turns our manifestos into tadpoles,
bouncing innocently and nonjudgmentally off all our houses of cards
and going burbling down the stream
while our empires implode behind it.

And now here we stand
with crumbling egos on a dying planet
surrounded by frogs the size of Volkswagens,
the size of skyscrapers,
the size of moons.
This is a strange, strange place,
and it is only getting stranger,
and none of the tools in our toolbox are fit for the job.

I have buried my old toolbox in the backyard
with a horse's placenta and a box of Time magazines.
A tree now grows there which has leaves that drip oil
and fruit which tastes like the Reagan administration.

Those old tools have no use here.
I walk away from them,
on nature's feet,
into the hatching of this new world.

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Feature image via Katja Schulz (CC BY 2.0)