A Recovery Blog

This blog is about my continuing recovery from severe mental illness and addiction. I celebrate this recovery by continuing to write, by sharing my music and artwork and by exploring Buddhist and 12 Step ideas and concepts. I claim that the yin/yang symbol is representative of all of us because I have found that even in the midst of acute psychosis there is still sense, method and even a kind of balance. We are more resilient than we think. We can cross beyond the edge of the sane world and return to tell the tale. A deeper kind of balance takes hold when we get honest, when we reach out for help, when we tell our stories.

Monday, August 8, 2016

Poem - "True Love"

True Love

Fiction embraces it with a passion.
We read of it, see it in films and listen to the songs of it.
Billions of dollars have been spent on it.
Audiences shell out even more hard won dollars
To preserve the illusion of the stories
Of True Love.

Do we buy all of these confections
Because our lives are not so sweet?
Do we yearn for a soul mate
Because we feel so incomplete?
Why is the answer to our dreams
Always out there in a new frontier?

In our for profit country
Where advertising reigns the supreme force
That oils the machinery of our culture,
We are addicted to the instant gratification
Of the easy solution, the quick fix.
This business is neither true, nor about love.

Love is a process, not a product.
You cannot buy it or sell it.
In can only grow through tenderness
And attention to the many details
Of human endurance
That is willing to remove the mask
To reveal the essence of an individual self.

True love is work,
You have to get your hands dirty
To plant the seeds and harvest the fruit.
Your beloved can be seen in many faces
Because we all share the same humanity
And our human spirit
Is spread across the globe.

The first place you must look to find it
Is in the life’s blood that pumps daily
Through your heart.
No one can know you
As well as you know yourself.
You cannot teach a lover
How to love you
If you have not first taught yourself.

True love begins with self love
And if you don’t approach yourself
With the same intuitive tenderness
You will be left with only the fiction
That is bought and sold,
Confections that cannot feed your soul.


Listen To The Audio

No comments: