The Tree = ENLIGHTENMENT “My Beautiful Twin Sister”
“You can if you think you can”
Trees knit a garden together. Thy hover over us the way we remember helpful adults from childhood. They are the elders of our loving garden family.
To be “awakened” is to experience life as it really is. Lots of people are repelled by this notion. Why bother to wake up when the news is so bad? Remain in the happy dream state brought to you by the Sackler family or some other pharmaceutical conglomerate, or by your favorite source of baseless propaganda.
That lasts as long as you can afford their product. As every rube discovers, Happy Dreamland’s price keeps getting steeper until one day, you can’t pay it at all. Then you are awake and desperately uncomfortable, whether you like it or not, and the life around you has gone to shit. And not the helpful, fertilizing kind.
A common approach to Soulmate-seeking is to try to find someone to join you in Dreamland, or to aggressively shop for a Dreamland you want to join. What these people don’t know is that Soulmates create their own world together; and this is a process that can’t be rushed. Seeing yourself and life as it really is begins by being very uncomfortable, but enlightenment comes eventually, and it promises real peace.
The first improvement is to stop complaining about other people and all the things you can’t fix. Look at and into each other. And then it hits you – that simple thing we always “knew” because we’ve been told over and over: Love is the answer. (“Why Live?” is the question.) Take a walk… together. Look at the stars…together.
Stroll through an art gallery…together. Every joy is multiplied and magnified and now the question is, Aren’t we lucky? Well, aren’t you? And the gratitude for the chance to live for even a moment in this spectacular universe comes pouring out.
MY BEAUTIFUL TWIN SISTER
Twenty months
Made you the boss
But my twin just the same
I gazed adoringly
Into your dark power.
You braved everything
Always being first;
Parting airspace with your muscle
To improve my flight – you
Schooled boyfriends
Husbands, children
Teachers
Bent whole administrations to your will.
For my benefit you
Deconstructed history,
Logic, told me
Who to read and what to think;
Volunteering for a better world.
Protester, Marcher, you
Learned Amslan
Just to empathize;
Conquered mountains
Just for fun;
Shifting derailleurs, snowshoeing
Surefooted through so many
Frosty seasons. Inside
You were just like me;
Scared, hesitant, fragile
Pushing yourself out there;
A revelation of
Impossible courage
Giving me a lifelong template
To admire.
Alysse Aallyn 