Endgame:Fall Cleaning and Seeding the Mind

I hope you all have had fun with the poetry game! This is what was hoped:

* the poems would sow many seeds of peace this fall and become little meditations

* bring fresh, new insights from multiple sources–Nobel laureates, poets, saints and mytics, sacred texts, regular people, and children

* no matter what the source, the message is fundamentally the same

* when the poet name is gone, the unconscious baggage that comes with it is also gone; the words are perhaps read with greater clarity without the veil of internal baggage and the attention is on the poem instead

* perhaps the game allows us to see the extent of rigidity and conditioning of our thinking mind; would we normally attribute certain words, expressions to a particular culture because of our conditioned preconceptions

* finally, perhaps try to hear, listen to what the other is saying instead of hearing what we want to hear, and hearing our own internal chatter

The game has been enjoyed in our home–my husband loves poetry, loves games and puzzles, and matched everything perfectly. He enthusiastically suggested poets I had never heard of, for which I am grateful. My boys loved the poems, what they conveyed, and found it impossible to match the poets to the poems. Their younger minds are open and relatively unconditioned.

Any winners and losers? I don’t think so. The point was to learn about ourselves, bring new insights, cultivate peace. The source was irrelevant, the message was not.