Creed of Integrity

Note: I have had this sitting around a while in my email. I wrote it many months back when someone was having trouble understanding "where I was coming from." After lengthy discourse, I came to realize that perhaps I think and feel differently that others. Here I attempt to capture who I choose to be and who I hope I am.


Creed of Integrity

I am happy with who I am.
I try to bring joy to everyone I encounter.
I strive to extend myself and grow personally.
I learn from my failures and my successes.
I learn from the failure and the success of others.
I do not berate nor am I self-defacing when I fail.
I am moderately humble.
I keep my self-pride within.
I make appropriate distinctions about life and act accordingly.
I choose how I feel.
I am responsible for how I choose to feel.
I acknowledge my feelings but choose how I respond.
I do not accept responsibility for how others choose to feel.
I do be responsible for my actions.
I do not accept responsibility for the past actions of others.
I am responsible for interrupting the actions of others only if they
are doing harm to my being or doing unconscious and irreparable harm to their being.
I consciously decide to do no harm.
I leave all things in existence as I found them, or better.
I love and respect family as I love and respect myself, or better.
I love and respect my neighbors as I love and respect myself, or
better.
I love and respect strangers as I love and respect myself, or better.
I love and respect my enemies as I love and respect myself, or
better.
I will not recognize divisions of people.
I honor my creator without end.
I honor my creator without requiring others to do so.
I experience life.

Poem: Music

She sings to me.
Lite and bouncy
or sullen and moody.
I am happy to hear her in my ears.

He just screams or speaks at me.
Anger, fear or love,
Urgency in every syllable,
I am happy to hear him in my ears.

They create dimensions in sound for me.
I see the ribbons of interlacing vibrations,
Twisting in a dance of motion and sound.
I am happy to hear them in my ears.

Poem: Sometimes

Sometimes I want to cry, to weep.
It comes when I am quiet and alone, not in turmoil.
I remember those I loved and those who choose not to stay.
I remember those that loved me and I could not choose to stay.
I remember those I loved and I destroyed the possibilities by mis-step or ignorance.
I remember those I loves that didn't get the chance to be.
And I remember who I thought I wanted to be.

But I don't cry any more.
Scarcely a tear.
Denial or acceptance, I don't know which.
And then the feeling passes,
Filled in with the “now of things”.
The past returns to a place beyond consideration
And I return to being who am I.

Poem: A Shudder of Shadows

In my youth, in my lucid dreams of self,
I was a piercing white light,
Scarcely outlined in human form.
In this way I overcame the anger and the fear.

I have traveled into dark gray shadow,
The soul faintly lite by the echoes of myself.
I have traveled darkly
And then returned to shades of gray.

I am a shudder of shadows now,
The piercing white light flares over the dim gray,
A remembrance of unworkable absolutes,
A recognition of the realities and reconciliations
And, thus far, the eternal transitions between.

Poem: Awareness

I am not nearly as smart as I think I am
And I know more than I think I do.
It is not that I'm unaware
But that I am not aware enough.