Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Wiser on Wednesday - Onyx and Ebony

by Toby D. Sanders

This morning I am a beautiful black block of wood or stone "under the care" of an "artist" reshaping me into the image, the likeness within the "Artist's" mind and inside me, this is to say, I am in severe pain.

The pain of becoming...what is intended...this IS what is really meant by the words, "living sacrifice." I am both numb and in excruciating awareness of every cut, stroke, brush burn, pull, scrape. The cuts of becoming: the serrated force of seeing, facing what is to come, the trauma of deciding is mine.

For I bear the consequences of my choices (and the choices of others) I am shaped, cut, chiseled, refined, changed. I am no accident of fate, no mere animal or inanimate thing, not a cloud shaped by a wind. I am an intention with the gift/curse of intentions, an artist myself, a maker of worlds, a destroyer, a villain, a betrayer, a hero-saint: a soul. This is my witness.

This is what it is to be a soul. Shaped both by pressures from without, without remorse or intention, and designed from within, endowed with dusty life. September 15, 2012
A Note:
This is a prayer, I guess an affirmation from beneath juniper. It is the raw stuff as prayers often are of a poem.

My love is real therefore my pain is real therefore my life is real and the truth is the only tool I will allow to shape me. I am a living sacrifice and will remove myself from any altar of lies.

My witness, my pain, honestly shared, that is, double-edged with serrated-irony is my prophesy and my counsel. We become what we hurt. We become what we love. We become what we too violently despise. We fail to become that which we desire, even passionately, but reject the pain of creation.

facebook - September 26, 2012

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