Straw Dogs Poem by Suzanne Hayasaki

Are we really merely straw dogs,
Destined to feed the sacrificial fire,
To go up in flames,
Our remains nothing more than reminders
That to ashes we all-too-soon return?

Yes and no.
Lau Tzu explains that our inevitable death and the dust we become
Are evidence of the duality of our temporary and eternal nature.
Like the matter we arise from,
Our origin is the formless,
We spring from something
As seemingly insignificant
As a handful of sand
Taken from the endless dunes of the Gobi Desert.
But the secret to our deeper nature
Is in the space between the grains.
It is the emptiness that permeates each of us that
Echoes through eternity the vibrancy of our being.
It is the nothingness that holds us together
In a loose, shifting fluidity of form
That allows for endless experimentation
As well as communication with our fellow souls.

It is this that allows us to express ourselves
In body after body
Lifetime after lifetime.
It is our higher selves that shape our earthly shells,
As if we were making our very own voodoo dolls
Into which we inflict pain and sorrow
In order to learn about love.

It is as if we are our own puppeteers,
Our lives are but a shadow play,
We put on for each other,
To teach each other the tenets of the Truth
Which we have managed to master.

It is in this sharing of creativity
That we come to see
Eternity.