In Every Moment

Being here all the time,
Here knowing everything,
In every moment;
Yet most of the time not knowing,
Not feeling, not living it all.

When I was born I lost a world
In which I had lived an eternity.
Can you imagine that?
Imagine losing so much?
Feel what it’s like, to have everything
You knew taken away?

Of course it’s as if you have been
Hollowed out from inside.
But at the same time,
There is an entire new universe to experience.
The losing, the gaining, all at once.

Then there’s what follows the gaining.
My grandmother succoured me.
She lifted me out of my loss,
Out of feeling I was dying.
It was she who gave me the gift of love.
I remember her holding me.
I remember crying in her arms,
Feeling her courage,
Feeling her strength.

She was the resurrection from the darkness
Of what had been taken,
From what I had never had.
Then she died before I was two,
And I lost another world.
I lost my love.
I ached enough to last me sixty years.

Gaining is losing in the instant we gain.
But sometimes we lose before we have gained.
Such loses may be hiding in the darkness of our heart.
Such was the passion I had never spent.
Such was the love I had never given,
Or received.

Then she came.
My woman – and I tried to spend that love on her,
But failed.
My God – the pain,
Trying to climb the cliff face of despair,
Trying to stand up while I was falling down,
Until the words were torn out of my mouth –
‘I am inadequate!’
Inadequate as a man.
Knowing my own inadequacy
I even offered her another man.
And she thought I was trying to hurt her;
That I didn’t want her.

How could I not want my woman?
How could I live with my inadequacy?
Then slowly,
Building the muscle,
Facing the despair,
Turning inside out to become new,
To become me,
And succeeding, in losing again.
For she had gone.

No – she never left me.
But she was gone.
Gone while still next to me in bed, in our home.
Gone when I had surfaced over the cliff
With the gift of myself.
Gained myself and lost her, then lost myself
For more years.
And we were still together!

Better if she were dead.
Then I would have known she was gone.
And that loss ripped me.
It tore pieces out of me.
It burnt, it stabbed, it rotted me inside.
But there was gain.
I learned to meet the dread of my own failure.
I discovered how to exist in the midst of things,
Of pain, of isolation, of my own past.
I learned to stand again.

Only then could I see love, death, birth,
Touching me on all sides.
They dance with me daily, every moment.
The sweetness and torment come each day.
I am loved and I love, to lose love again,
Falling and rising.

Sweet Lord, is this the passion?
To have and lose in the same instant?
To know and feel it every day?
To know that each small event holds every possibility?
Being here all the time,
Here knowing everything,
In every moment!

Tony Crisp

Copyright ©2001 Tony Crisp