Seen or Unseen

On finding and defining our own sense of Spirit

Photo by Aditya Sethia on Unsplash

Seen or Unseen

Over these many years
I have stripped you of staff and beard.
Boxed up all your punishments,
loved away your wrath.
Gone the gilded robes, banished
any notion of a body like mine.
I have unseated you.
Thrown open the doors and led us both
into sun.

When I look for you now, I find you
in the simple play of light through leaves,
the kindness of birds, benevolence of bees.
I have kneaded the depth of soft moss in grief,
found wonder in worm-churned soil,
considered the seedpod as a nest
for my death. 

And then, seen or unseen,
there is the dragonfly’s silent scissoring,
the monarch’s sudden lift,
circling of hawk’s fine hunger.
It has taken me a lifetime
to know your wingspan.

Originally published in Braided Way Magazine, November 2023

I was raised Catholic, and like many of us, it never occurred to me as a child to question the beliefs that had been imposed on me—religious, political, social, or educational. It wasn't until I reached young adulthood that I began to question many things that were deeply embedded in my way of thinking and acting in the world. The permission I gave to myself was a freedom based on curiosity, on exploration, and on looking closely at how I felt about what I had been told to believe. And about releasing any sense of fear or shame in the actual questioning.

When it came to God, it wasn't about rejection of a belief in a higher spirit, it was about a very long process of redefining where and how I felt that presence, digging deep to understand not what that spirit looked like, but how it took shape, how it appeared in my life as the smallest of miracles, as the largeness of love. It was about getting rid of the image of "God" as having a specific gender, even a human body. 

The spirit that came to live in my heart was not a punishing god and certainly not a god who discriminated, shamed, or persecuted anyone for their sexuality, their skin color or any form of "otherness." I found a sense of spirit closely tied to the glories of Nature, to loving kindness, to tending closely to who and what nourished me and releasing what didn't. Embracing an authentic alignment between belief and practice is to me the essence of spirit. 

I tried to capture my journey in this poem—a journey that it is always evolving and often tested, a journey that continually asks me to trust in what is seldom visible.

Thank you for reading.

With Gratitude,