Henry Costen Vaugn

Time and time again
Has Ego
Pulled the phantasmic nightmare
In creeping shadows
Over the windows of our souls
And obscured our vision

We come here tonight
Among brothers
To pull back this curtain
And stand naked
Before the ancient mirror

Even when we are low,
Our branches reach high
Into aethers incalculable,
As organic
We grow onward,
Immersed in all
That we see or seem.

Conflict is our friend and teacher.
We fear not its sacred wrath.
Our hearts are indestructible
Effigies to process,
To imminent knowledge
That love instantiates all
And laughs behind the folly
Of our suffering.

Witnessing,
We vibrate always
The variformed Song 
Whose center is nowhere
And whose circumference is everywhere.

Night is the coming of the light.
Light is the coming of the night.
Between, stands the gnarled
Tail of the snake,
Who eats on and on,
And knows our minds
Are not binding.

We were once timid children,
Quaking with compassion,
Unlimited.
We come tonight
In offering to this:
That we are alive
And in love with life,
Despite our protestations.

Should we commune
With our source,
Nature is our mother.
Our roots grow where needed.
We love her always,
Even when blind and broken
And lost,
Convinced we are alone.
Always, we return.

We ingest here tonight
To recover what we have forgotten
That as a great and loving mind
Once wrote:
"...that (we) were once the carrier of a life contained between the poles of an unimaginable future and an unimaginably remote past. Millions of years and untold millions of ancestors have worked up to this moment, and (we) are the fulfillment of this moment. Anything that is past is no longer reality, anything that will be is not yet reality, reality is now."