… your urge toward consciousness and my urge toward consciousness are both expressions of the same energy and intelligence that initiated the creative process with the Big Bang–and is driving us toward our own evolutionary enlightenment right now. Why? So that the universe can become more conscious through us.
–Alan Cohen, “Eros, Buddha & the Spectrum of Love”
Don’t you want to evolve?
he said, and I do, I think
as I look at my two long legs
that know how to run
to the river bank where
the young girl’s fallen in,
and my two opposable
thumbs that pick peaches
from trees and raise
them to my dried up lips.
I think of my lungs that gulp
cold morning air and infuse it
into my warm blood, and my
too solid heart that even
now learns what else
it can do besides stubbornly beat—
how to open wider, wider
than that, to let everything
in, not to hold it the way
the thumbs came to do,
not to analyze it as
that blooming white mass
of a lobe has learned,
but to praise the world just as it is.