Poem: Mediocrity

Mediocrity

Do not sit in mediocrity.
It is like a clear blue day,
heavy with humidity.

Where the sun shines yellow;
like a second hand street peddler.

Copyright Gary Pilarchik 6/27/2011

Poem: Marginal Insight

Marginal Insight

I know that I may drown

Beneath the addict’s gown

The kind I wear

It warms despair

Descent, decline: sun-down

A needle fills the gape

A most peculiar shape

Of flesh and bones

And memory moans

To hang or stretch: I drape

What is this shapeless storm

The gape?  My human form

But still I fill

My void with swill

A choice, a right: my norm

Copyright February 2009 Gary Pilarchik

Poem: 38 Obsessive Coins

38 Obsessive Coins

I am not obsessive. I do not obssess.

I can see 38 coins on the table.

All coins nothing more.

But I also see 12 copper coins and 26 silver coins.

Unless you take into account the shine or level of tarnish.

Both descriptions work the same for the sake of organizing the coins.

If I were to go on…

There are 3 tarnished copper coins and 9 copper coins with a good luster.

I would say there are 15 tarnished silver coins, more lack-luster in shine.

That would leave 11 silver coins with a nice shine, a freshly minted look.

Copyright February 2009 Gary Pilarchik

Poem: Death

Death

Death is not clairvoyant

He knows that you will come

And death does not exist

He is a life-long sum

Death has no direction

He knows we will arrive

And death is not a traveler

We simply can’t survive

Death, he has no will

But he knows he must impose

And death may be door

That simply comes to close

Copyright September 2009 Gary Pilarchik

Poem: The Forest, The Tree, The Sapling and Seed

The Forest, The Tree, The Sapling and Seed

A gift, renowned.

We fail to see, religion is the end.

It is God as one, that unifies...

And it is we that must transcend.

No faith shall rise when religion kills,

it is the act of man.

From God , the gift, of conscious thought,

that is where we all began.

To hide behind - institution and ritual,

and cast a heavier stone.

God gave us the choice, to rise above,

yet we side and say – “they’ve thrown.”

When blame is just and indifference is kind,

we huddle beneath a symbol.

When masses agree and truth does flee,

we find our conscience to be - quite nimble.

Copyright April 2010 Gary Pilarchik

Poem: Pawn and Practice

Pawn and Practice

We are cowards that hide,

behind the being of God.

And we are the axe that Satan wields,

across the human fields.

In truth - a ploy, to simply watch,

to draw a line – choose sides.

We are the death and pain of all,

for history never hides.

Be it man that marches with swatch and color,

or Countries that turn upon each other,

God does know the truth, he sees.

To kill in name and hold religion,

above the Being of life?

We fail to see - that humanity,

is the cause of world strife.

Copyright April 2010 Gary Pilarchik

Poem: Four Things That I lost

Four Things That I Lost

Each night I must slip to fully forget
Quaint justification of a mind I regret

In accordance with all - these things I suppose
Unless you count twice - the opinions of those

Ones that do mumble with whispering fear
Diabolical voices no one else seems to hear

Toss in a salad with dancing like dreams
Bring in the bitters with color like streams

Images of movements that sleep on a cot
Ones that wake up when I’m late on my shot

Give me my memories from when I was sane
I’m sick of this world that brittles my brain

Give me a moment to relax and define
Time for a medicine to reclaim what is mine

Things that I own and the space which I walk
The tone of my tenor and the manner I talk

All these odd words I babble and speak
Bring me a cure for this discomfort I leak

A comfort that comes from a sensible life
Like a house and a job and a child and wife

Copyright October 2010 Gary Pilarchik

Poem: The Trouble with Keys

The Trouble with Keys

I used to have a bunch of keys,
the kind that would clang with purposeful indifference.

A collection of colors: steel, bronze and copper.
Keeper of locks and old abandon slots: some would just clang.
And others just rang - with good intent.

Some keys were cold, tortured when told: out living purpose.
Their metal was scraped, worn out and raped - of meaning.

They hung with some sense of solidarity.
Both young and old, the newly acquired and sold…
Linked and speared by a once unbreakable circle.

Weighing too heavily of forgotten use,
those keys clanged most annoyingly with others.
Their sound would grate and irritate: at most peculiar times.

All locks don’t need keys…
And the circle broke, when someone spoke,
releasing them to the ground.

The collected contained, though fewer remained,
linked once again, for a new generation to carry…

Clanging the sounds of good will and purposeful intent.

Copyright January 2012 Gary Pilarchik

KNOL: Did God Create Life?

The Creation of Awareness versus The Creation of life

Understanding the existence of God is muddled by our need to attribute human qualities to God. A construct of ourselves often blurs the existence of God and God's creation of humankind. I view the creation of "humankind" as the creation of our consciousness or our ability to be aware of self and others. We are literal beings and often fail to challenge simplistic interpretations. The act of God creating the world is interpreted, one way, as a six day event with a seventh day of rest. It is a simple description of the creation of the earth and life on earth and it is a literal interpretation of passages.

Did God Create Life?

by Gary Pilarchik LCSW-C

 

 

Cogito Ergo Sum

 

Rene Descartes gave us cogito ergo sum. A French philosopher captured in Latin. The accepted translation is "I think, therefore I am". The simplified translation may have dimmed Descartes greater point that it is not the act of thinking but our ability to recognize we are thinking that allows us to know we exist. This is the foundation of my premise that God did not create life as directly and literally as described in the Bible and other religious texts.  God created life by giving us our ability to be self aware. Our consciousness, our awareness of self, our ability to have remorse and our ability to use hindsight and foresight is what God gave us. We were given the ability to recognize we think and that our thoughts are our own. Our conscience and our awareness of self was created.

 

Our evolved form is not God's form. It is commonly accepted that we physically reflect God as a being. I would argue this belief comes from our own conceit and vanity. God gave us our awareness as a gift and this gift gave us the ability to bring greater purpose to our lives.  Our form, our natural evolution is a product of God creating the universe and allowing the universe to evolve. Our planet and our form came from that process.  This may sound like a contradiction. My argument is that God didn't create the earth and life in the literally and simplistic manner defined in religious texts. Over a great span of time, greater then we can imagine, we evolved into our current form. God created the universe and set it in motion to evolve. God, then gave us the ability to be self aware. It is this ability of self awareness that is life. That is his gift.

 

 

The Imprint of God's Hand: The Gift of Awareness

 

God gave us the gift of awareness or conscious life. Within the gift and literal touch of his hand, God gave us the ability to recognize what is good and what is evil or bad. Did his hand actually touch us? I don't think so but this is how we often document our understanding of God and it is also how we miss the bigger picture of his gift. What is good? What is evil? What is bad? It is relatively simple to define.  However, it is currently beyond our capacity to accept the definitions. We go well out of our way to justify killing in the name of God and our religions.

 

God left us with our original nature or our naturally evolved state when we were given the gift of self awareness. We are still trying to reconcile this disparity within our being. Our original nature, is a self serving innate capacity that fails to recognize we and other exist. This nature does not provide us with a method of understanding how we impact others.

 

Our original nature is more like:

 

We eat when hungry.

We harm and strike out when angry.

We take when wanting.

 

It is a reactive state versus a reflective state. It is in becoming aware that we exist, we are able to recognize others exist. Our gift of self awareness allows us to understand, like ourselves, others hunger and feel. That harm is something we can inflict and harm can be done to us by others. That wanting doesn't mean we need it or should take it.  We were given the ability to thoughtfully delay gratification or delay our actions. Our God given gift is still being reconciled with our original nature. This reconciliation is an ongoing conflict for humanity as a whole. The process of reconciliation is the human race's true battle. It is our destiny to complete it. We are young and to fully understand God's gift we must reconcile the conflict on both an individual level and on a universal level.

 

 

God Created the Universe

 

God's ability is not limited nor is it focused on a single place. God created the universe and gave it the capacity to evolve. This universe is forever evolving and expanding. It is endless. God's power to create is beyond our limited and narrow understanding of life and the universe. It is our God given ability to be aware that has allowed us to develop beyond our innate capacity. That is God's gift. We have become more then our original form. We still view existence or the creation of life from the point when we first became self aware as a race of beings. It is at this point that spoken and written language began to evolve and slowly take form. Every century our ability to communicate and record our history progresses. Our awareness of each other, our evolution as cultures and nations move us closer and closer to similarity. Hopefully, we move closer to reconciling our original nature and God's gift of self awareness. Could our failure to reconcile be our End of Days or Apocalypse?

 

We continue to struggle with understanding ourselves and the world we live in. It is this struggle that often defines and thus limits the way we understand God's power. We mistakenly take the path of understanding God through simplistic and literal interpretations of religious text. In some cases we even create religions, rituals and other mechanisms to support our beliefs. We need to look beyond our created religions to understand God's full power and abilities and to truly appreciate and embrace the gift of self awareness that was given to us. Yes, God created life and God gave us the ability to be self aware as a way to live our lives.