You’ve Been to the Mountain And Now You Have to Go Home

A feral poem collected on Sunday 14 July 2019 at the Spiritfire Festival, 5:32 am, New Lebanon Mountain, New York, at the Mountain Camp of the Abode of the Message, from a maple tree.

Now you know why you came to the mountain,
and now — now you have got to go home.
There’s this joy that has sprung to your eyes and your face:
you’re translucent with love and on fire with grace
And you’ve found in four days that this coal deep within
has willed the whole world into your next-of-kin.

You’ve drummed and you’ve danced and you’ve sung through the night,
and your weary eyes have beheld such delight!
The rules of what’s normal have loosened their grip,
and your terror of change has started to slip.
It’s trite to declaim of the power you hold,
or the poisonous lead that you’ve spun into gold,
but down in the gloom of the valley below 
are people who won’t understand this new glow
so it’s there in your house that this journey can end:
tending the hearth that you normally tend.

A few days from now, you will walk through your town,
to find that your neighbors have noticed your crown
or they’ll catch some strange sign of a pale golden glow,
where bits of your halo have started to show…
and it’s not your fine costumes, your glitter or paint;
but rather the flower that fruits to a saint
(which is, after all, what a human is for:
a being through whom divine Love starts to pour).
There’s no place on earth but it longs and desires
to be singed by these embers and warmed by these fires
(Not this bed of ashes that sits on this ground,
but the fires we see in these hearts all around)!

The top of the mountain can amaze and astound,
but wait til your feet return to your home ground!
Once you sit in a place with what’s old and what’s new, 
the tasks of the future will start to shine through,
and vast secret changes will rumble inside,
until all the seeds in your heart open wide…
Then you’ll find that the mountain is there in your head,
while drinking your coffee or snoozing in bed,
and friends all around you will kindle their fires,
and your burning coals will alight their desires,

’til the Love that you feel in this moment of birth
shall carry that heat to the corners of Earth…
The seeds that you planted shall root and then bloom,
and their scattered seedlings will shout for more room.
There’s a house and a hometown that waits for your hand,
where strangers will see in your eyes a new friend…
The mountain remains where it stands, as it will,
but the world needs your heart, and your talent, and skill—

That’s why you have to go home. 

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