“Throughout our lives we long to love ourselves more deeply and to feel connected with others. Instead, we often contract, fear intimacy, and suffer a bewildering sense of separation. We crave love, and yet we are lonely. Our delusion of being separate from one another, of being apart from all that is around us, gives rise to all of this pain”.
~ Sharon Salzberg 


When asking folks about love
they divulge their heartaches;
raising questions of belonging,
they purge painful anecdotes of exclusion.
Inquiring about their life circles,
they wade into murky waters of dis-connection;
a vortex of myopic self absorption
muddied by paralysing fear;
black holes of poverty;
“I am not enough”. 

It is not wealth we seek, but transformation
 Profoundly flawed view
of me against the world,
competitive individualism,
greed is good,
more is better,
money rules,
legitimate
and otherwise,
ego driven status writhes in a 
world of smoke and mirrors.  

You can’t be a have without have nots.

Created perceptions of
separate ness, isolation,
illusionary manifestations
of black and white duality,
polarized existence of
all or nothing,
win or lose,
decisive and divisive
pass or fail,
vulnerability rendered
as weakness.  

Vulnerability is unimaginable potential for change.
Dancing through doorways 
awakening beyond  
allegories of solitary life
within perimeters of this old skin,
allowing gratitude to replenish,
humble us,
crystallize comprehension,
hearing our authentic voice,
integrating making us whole,  

Connected. 


Copyright © Henri Ferguson 2013 All Rights Reserved

Author Notes 
We live in a market/consumer driven society that is predicated on accumulation of material possessions, having the perfect body and as a reduction of that, our self worth is determined by how well we do at this. A cursory look at the advertising world will quickly show you how we are bombarded with messages about how we can “improve” by looking younger with these products; clearly aging is something to be resisted and dreaded. Ironically yoga magazines have jumped on this marketing bandwagon to flog everything under the sun to “enhance our lives”. At some point those who have the financial wealth to get stuff, the revolutionary this, the new improved that, and find that there is still something missing. And then many in this world spend significant and precious time on social media in a vain attempt to sublimate the desire for genuine and meaningful human contact. 
There are many examples of societies in this world who by comparison could be considered poor and relatively deprived in the material sense yet still they exude an incomprehensible sense of contentment with their meagre existence. Hopefully there comes a moment where we realize that they already have what we are searching for in all the wrong places; the heartfelt knowing that we are connected.