Chewing Down My Barn has a passive tone as a title. Of course, I haven’t gone fully passive in recent years, but I’m more aware of the world happening to me, gradually tearing down some of my ego barns. This is not to say that the young shouldn’t actively build their own silos. They should, for their own good and that of others. But a glance now and then at the carpenter bees could give them more perspective going forward.

As a student of religions, I remain very interested in their ups and downs. I would say that about the Catholic Church where I started my spiritual journey. After twenty years in the Order, I stay on top of Jesuit news and Pope Francis’s moves.

Yet spirituality has been widely enlarged for me by Buddhist and Daoist insights/practices as well as by Muslim and Christian mystics.

The carpenter bees of aging are further clearing the field for me, bringing me down to experience the simplicity of God in every molecule of the universe.

This doesn’t mean less connection with the terrible pain and oppression on earth, but an even keener awareness of it. Saints and seers grasped this linkage more fully than I. So I don’t mind being called an agnostic Catholic pantheist. I think I can keep all those balls in the air at once as did Baruch Spinoza, even though it got him kicked out of the synagogue. Such solemn institutions will be chewed down in some sense, even as they develop.

Well, how does all this pertain to my poems? Rather than launching another professorial lecture, I look out my study window at our barn in all its solidity. I invite you to find bigger connections in these small poems. Watch for the hawks, the mockingbird, the red fox, the geese, the owls along the Oconee River and see our garden as well as Siamese Max, master of the reclining zendo, who just finished purring on my chakras.