By Roger Desmarais:
When we are alone in our senior-hood moment of pain and frustrated at its intrusion, we can sometimes, in meditation, find places in between the heartbeats that bring a quiet and peace from the pain without the distraction from the pain itself. The focus is clear, and the results are silence in the body, mind, and spirit. However, the single focus can be broken by the indelible pain leaving its mark on the tabula rasa of quiet peace. At that moment, we are most vulnerable to an in-compassionate reactivity toward our bodies and the pain—a knee jerk reaction that is visual and verbal, automatic and unconscious in its manifestation. It takes some moments of refocused quiet to find that place of relief. Sometimes it is gone seemingly forever.
Pain creates its own carbon footprint on our hearts and souls
Sometimes with its own ragged edges and open wounds
Pain creates its own language of words and syntax
Words pregnant with new meaning and experiences
Pain has its own message about what is the new normal
A normalcy crying for vengeance in the throes of the struggle
Pain has its own vehicle of proliferated manifestation
A felt kinesthetic reality of sharpe edges and infected parts
Pain knows its vocation beneath the presentation of hurt
A reality of something wrong needing healing power now.
Solace is found in the staccato between the beats and breaths
A cessation of seemingly random points of pain and hurt
Held at bay through the miracle of mind over matter at times
At other times held in place by the power of visualization
The refocus of healing searching for something hurting
requesting an invite into the quarrel between feeling good or bad
Hoping for a moment in the in between to bring balm and quiet
Deeply hurting in the taught tendons and compressed nerves
Waiting for a drop of kindness to cure the hurt and relieve the pain.
Pain is an incessant knocking at the door of the body
Not advertising a new drug or remedy for this or that illness
But broadcasting in blistering pain bytes that something is wrong
Something is terribly wrong demanding attention and healing
Healing requiring an opportunity to create the blessed miracle
Healing hoping to gain an entrance into the healing time
Which is the dominant pain time demanding gentle forgiveness
A pain almost admitting the truth of its trajectory into being
Driving out the sense of living life outside the pain drain
Wishing for the magic of the healing touch to soften the heart
Bring solace to the soul and the repair to the body in anguish.
Dr. Roger Desmarais has written poetry on his experiences as a consultant to executives and their executive teams as a way to more easily connect with the Emotional Intelligent part of the total leader. This has also opened the opportunity to write poetry to define the Spiritual Intelligence that is the foundation for Ethical and Responsible Leadership—which is a growing request. His recently published book of corporate poetry taps the three intelligences: Intellectual, Spiritual, and Emotional: “Disruptive Poetry: Upsetting the Perfect Corporate Status Quo.”