Jacob's Impressions

Jacob is passionate about ecological stewardship; how humans can collaborate with nature and co-create a resilient and abundant earth.

Expressions: Poetry

The ways in which I see, hear and interact with the world have changed so fundamentally since my time in EOA. Something that I found along the way was the willingness to and the knowing that I can listen deeply to the earth and that what I hear is as real as I am. I've been inspired at times to write and here are a few poems that I feel capture some essence of my journey during and since EOA. "Mother" is from my time during EOA and the others are more recent but are on a continuous thread that began unraveling during my time in the program.

The teaching

1.
Sit as the student to life.
To the unfolding of leaves and flower buds.
Patient but vibrant and bursting.
Unfurling with intensity only when the time is right

2.
Ask questions of yourself that you might ask of a lover, of a friend, of a mountain.
Who are you?
What is the language that your loves speaks in?
When I am on your flanks, how is it that
I may reach your core? The center of you.

3.
Don’t wait until you have found yourself because you already have.
You were never lost
With each brilliant morning and each awful night
You are born a new
Let the robins and the chickadees sing you into existence
Again and again and again

The Truth is a Pathless Land

Come home to your Self dear one
listen for what speaks underneath the voices
listen for the song that exists always,
the hum of the blood as is courses through your veins

and even below that, listen.

Hear the river coming down from the mountains
as it nourishes the plains and listen
for the river beneath that river,
how it carries your soul.
See the way it accepts all things,
without judgment.

See your life as that, accepting all things as they are.
This is not complacency my friend. This is freedom.
Within the space we fill with all our meaning,
there exists all possibilities.

From the emptiness that is always there, waiting.

We may create life anew

Mother

The earth was calling to me
And I wasn’t sure, couldn’t be certain
“Is it from within? Only within?
Is there ‘only within?’
Or does the vastness reflect
from within me like the sky up a still lake?

And Mother was calling
Through lightwaves, through microwaves
gamma rays, sound waves.
Through Tony Rice’s 1932 Martin Guitar
All waves

It broke through, She broke through
Infiltrating satellites down into my car stereo
And I knew. Like that, I knew, She was calling

The cliffs sing to me and lead me
I am beholding, being held
And brought before it

Laying there in a chapel of the sun
Its fur mangled, body resting
In sublime repose

In the grass, in the grass
So fitting, so wild
Cosmically serene

The cat lay dead in the grass
Undisturbed, undisturbing
She brought me here to see

To feel, to hear, to touch, to smell
This is Life. This is Death
This is belonging

I try to call back.

(March 9th 2016, outside of Grand Junction,
driving home from 1st EOA)