the most important things i am learning right now (classic)

I first wrote and posted this poem in June 2010 and have edited it a bit here.
(Some learning lasts a lifetime.)

i’m learning that i’m not learning anything new –
only choosing to remember a vast universe
that I heretofore chose to forget
(whether it was some intergalactic, ancient conspiracy
or the fact that my slightly agoraphobic father kept us home if there was
any possible chance of a thunderstorm within a 200-mile radius,
doesn’t really matter)

i’m learning that in more than fifty years of existence
i perhaps have learned nothing whatsoever about love,
except that it carries the power to elevate above all else
and will run helter-skelter through any tidy emotional framework
we believe we have fabricated
(i’m learning to want it in a way that I have never known
and, of course, I’m learning that I haven’t the slightest idea
what that might be)

i am gaining a deep wisdom about contentment right now
how it rises out of simple soil
how utterly enough it is to live each day with a roof over my head and earth under my feet
and to feel the electrifying ease of being at home in my own skin
(for reasons of no import, this gentle concept eluded my understanding until now,
arousing a succulent irony at the very moment I recognized its arrival
astride the back of a great white tiger)

every inspiration that is pure of heart
weaves me into the warp of life’s sacred tapestry

every moment to which I bring my undiluted presence
is a moment sublime in its lack of adornment

each prayer I choose not to utter
births itself with a hope and promise for which there is no measure

in every imaginable aspect that alights within my circumference
i take the hand of creation in a pas de deux divine

what i am learning now is holy reconstitution
a way to sequester myself from that which seeks to encumber my rewiring,
a practice that brings a godlike order to man’s chaos of fragmentation
and returns me to the garden naked and alive

how great the satisfaction
watching the sunmooncloudsstars
sweep across an endless western sky