What matters?  The car  The job  The house  The shoes and bag  The HD TV  The latest smart phone  The pc, the GPS  And everything to absurdity that is attached to them

None of it matters  But wait  Wait a minute, a mere sixty ticks on the clock  I will tell you what matters

Life itself  The preciousness of life  The often overlooked wonder of existence  For everyone, everywhere  And Earth  The big aliveness, the carnival dynamic of this home place, this living space: Earth

Everything here that grows  The trees  The flowers  The water - rain, seas, rivers, lakes  The stones  The birds and bees and the clouds in the sky

Beauty, yes beauty  Beauty matters  Learning too  And music  Painting, dancing, singing  Hugging children  And love  Love matters  Human love  Love of and love within humanity  And love, as the grounded say, love for all relations

The simplest, bravest presence that did not come from our aggressive, invasive hands  The simplest, natural miracles, the touchstones
of sanity and ecosophy, universally shared foundations these that were never and never will be cooked in the metal buckets and plastic bubbles of our brains

But this... the here and the now, the just prosperity of appreciation  And being here and becoming now  Having eyes and having ears and bodies charged with sex and having hands

But you, lost shallowly in vapid sentimentality, you think that the stuff, the temporal landfills of competitive throw-aways, you chase shopping for these holidays - that the things matter  You stressful and in the processes of dying buy into the dead dogma that what you own, these possessive-possessions and your guilt, things are what you are  And what your call your own, that mere having, extravagant consumption, defines and matters

Well, it is good of course to have food and drink and friendship.  A roof and a bed  Some place to keep warm and somebody to hold, trust, and who recognizes your name.  It is good... Some privacy  Some breathing space

But what matters profoundly - at the recurring inception, in the germinal core, inside the wealthy fertility of living seed - is waking up.  Looking magically at dreamscape and the horizon.  Going up the solid mountain with measured and amorous vigor  Going down to the flowing sea freely  Walking in surf-light  Playing in the seafoam sand

And sunset matters  And the moon and the stars  Wind and deep silence  And dreaming  Being part of the dream  The dream that God is dreaming  That the Earth and the sun and the cosmos are dreaming us into becoming  As into prayer  A yet to be narrated amazement, an archangel, of cosmic prayer

Grateful in honoring each morning too and knowing, with sensitive, sensual knowledge, the returned enchantment of sunrise, power
The poem of a new dawn  The poetry of continuing creation

Stopping peacefully too  Being alert as well  Holding still  Ever palmed in this mystical spell  Barefoot  Courageous  With wild wind caressing hair  With solar light kissing faces  Old faces  Young ones  Wet or dry  Of rose bud tenderness or parched sandstone and sand  Time weighed, winged, spiraling,  and ponderous

So what matters?  What honestly, transparently, truthfully matters?  Wait  Wait but one minute more  Wait and I will tell you the story once again

Being a person  A full generous flower  A fresh round fruit  A tenacious rainbow  The personhood of experience, of ripe existence, discovering self in the circus cornucopia of anguish and agony and longing, ecstasy and otherness  The "ah" and the awe in a moment

And a person wants to say something beautiful and with dignity, before departing  And to do something in the world spontaneous and joyous and heroic, breaking from the underground of darkness, liberating by the purity of a soul

To be cathartic tears  To be euphoric laughter To stand in a healing circle  To dance in a sacred hoop  To be a  revelation, in this bundle of here and now, in the middle of life's revelation  To be a yes in the great scheme of affirmation - this...  This is what matters.

David Sparenberg
24 December 2014