When I was growing up, there was something we called sin
And there was someone. Someone we called the devil
The thing you ought to know about the devil
Is that he’s always hungry
And never satisfied
That’s what’s unnatural about the devil
Normal, human, hunger, is satisfied
Human thirst can be quenched
But there is a hunger that is greater than us
An aching void
A hunger that consumes stars and galaxies
A hunger that is infinite
And we call that hunger
Sin
I’m happy report
That rates of sin, here in America at least
Are on an exponential decline
It’s true that depression is rampant
It’s true that violence and oppression lap our doorsteps like a high tide
But sin is found only at the margins
We’ve banished the name
But have we, really, banished the hunger?
Or is it still there
Devouring souls
Extinguishing species
A demon on mythic scale
Grasping this fragile orb
In a hand of iron and steel
And what if, after all, this isn’t natural
What if we’re the deviant ones
The rabid dog
The unhinged generation
People have known for a long time
That if you don’t want to let the devil in
It pays to be righteous, which means upright
Which means, in balance
Balance is infinite in its precision
But bounded in form
Balance is health
Balance is human
Balance is nature
As we feared long ago,
Perhaps our minds have
The ability to lead us out of nature
Out of balance
Out of symmetry
So that
No longer upright
We tilt, and fall, and are
Taken by the great hunger
For what is this hunger
But an unreceptive mind
Craving to receive?
What is this hunger
If not a loss of innocence?
What is the hunger
If not the pride of thought
Saying I know the difference
Between what is good
And what is evil?
Was that not, the first sin?
In nature, all beings exist in balance
A balance of creative and receptive forces
A being is born, then reintegrated
Dust to dust
A word is spoken, then falls into silence
A though arises, the returns into oblivion
Light reveals what darkness cradles
And all these are in balance
But what if a mind could make a thought last forever?
What if a principle could be more real than the universe?
Because the principle is never false
What if a person could separate and never die?
What if we chose not to be in balance?
Chose not to be fragile, unique, cradled in mystery?
What if we could understand
And control, and create our our world?
What if we were gods?
What if, before anything else
Sin was a thought?
If so, perhaps we could un-think that thought.
The undoing of sin is righteousness
The undoing of sin, is balance
Is listening beyond words
Beyond concept
Beyond good or evil
Beyond self or other
To harmony
To nature
To birth and also dying
To finitude
To living at the scale of human creatures
For letting reality be more real
Than the names we put to it
For letting reality be more real
Than the abstractions we deduced from it
Righteousness is the wisdom to die
After living
To forget
After remembering
To let the great mother of darkness
Embrace the father of light
And to be lost
Without needing to be found
To be answered
Without mustering a question
To, having been the artist,
Be content to become art
In this way the great hunger is quieted
And we are satisfied
Walking under familiar skies
In our own lives
In our own places
It is my belief
That the restoration of balance
Is the calling of our time
As it was always
Since ancient times
Calling us to remember
A garden that we did not cultivate
A world that we did not manufacture
A universe that we did not invent
We will weave poem
And story
And myth
And body
And touch
And song
And ritual
And fire
To awaken within us
A righteousness which longs to be revealed
A nature, which begs to be expressed
Beyond good and evil
Beyond true or false
A nature, in balance, already here
Stored in the flesh of this soft human body