Awake

Let’s teach our children how to be awake

Alive

Let their natural essence be cultivated,

Acceptable.

Let’s not put them in cardboard boxes,

Cookie cutter templates

Of appropriate living.

Let’s teach them to live by their

Hearts longing, their dreams

To explore their hunger,

Their natural gifts.

We who are older and wiser know

That if they are constrained they

Will be left wanting if they

Are not free.

Please let’s turn the page to a new

Era of consciousness,

Even if we ourselves do not understand it

Or could not allow it to manifest

As we lived in our boxes.

Should we not want more for our children

Than we have had for ourselves,

More in the realm of being awake and alive.

Support them, encourage them to

Blaze the trail of consciousness.

                ~Lori Ellis-McKinney (2013)