The Author
Margaret Mary Stender
Margaret (Peg) Mary Stender retired from the position of Community Development Director for the City of Kalamazoo, Michigan, in September 2000. Community Development managed the federal grants directed to assisting people in need. During this period, she was privileged to be able to interact with numerous housing, human service, and neighborhood organizations, and was extremely fortunate to come to know the integrity of each individual. Peg retired to devote her time to promoting the Good which she believes to be contained in the books: Behold the Daybreak and The Greening Springing: the peace; the joy; the love and the laughter; the Eternal; the just and worthwhile.
A Journey Toward Enlightenment
What made you begin to write poetry, I am often asked. This is a tale worth telling! In my early teens, as near as I can recall, I began to search for a, call it what you will, superior power, superior being, God, a greater purpose or meaning. As a young woman, I expressly remember walking to the bookstore from City Hall to purchase a book which would satisfy the spiritual yearning which continually enveloped me. Once in the bookstore, while staring at titles and pondering, a book suddenly dropped from a shelf above my head and landed on the floor at my feet. Ye Are Gods presented itself to me.
A few years after that book landed at my feet, I found the works of Jacob Behmen and, such were the times, I ordered a Xeroxed copy of the entire works — four volumes! Throughout the next several decades, these books were my intermittent companions. In the beginning, they were completely beyond my comprehension and would occasionally put me right to sleep because they required so much concentration.
I read Richard Maurice Bucke’s book Cosmic Consciousness and, due to time constraints, decided to concentrate only on reading the writings and biographies of the people named in Bucke’s book.
In early 1991, I began to re-read Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass now having discerned that it contained significantly more insight and depth than I had been able to relate to on previous readings. In this reading, I found correlations between segments of Whitman’s writings and those of Behman and others cited by Bucke as having been enlightened. This is where the story and the question “What made you write poetry?” truly begins.
The Evening - Recognition of Something Soon to Occur
On a particular night in July 1991, for a reason that was not fully knowable at the time, I knew to vow not to go to sleep that night until, presumptively, naively, and nearly incomprehensible to my mind now, I “found” God. Jacob wrestled with the Lord. Cosmic Consciousness recounted numerous people who had been enlightened. The potential for a spiritual experience, a spiritual awakening, was there, was true. I knew it could happen. Perhaps not to me and yet, I was determined. I had also read enough over the years to be vaguely familiar with a few modes of its kindling into existence and of the recipient’s resulting experience and subsequent knowledge. Now, as I write this with the perspective that the years will bring, I believe I was being led, that July night in 1991, by a higher power.
I was determined to “wrestle with the Lord” by staying awake — reading and perpetuating the increasingly pronounced feeling which engendered itself while reading Leaves of Grass —at the brink of wakefulness or sleepiness until “something” happened. To my mind, at the time, this was akin to Jacob’s wrestling with the Angel of the Lord.
I went to bed early, read to the point of sleepiness, kept reading, dozed off, roused myself immediately, read, dozed, read, dozed, and read and read. At a certain point, I fell asleep altogether but awakened with the memory of words which came to me in sleep. I immediately wrote them down and years later titled it Love the World Doth “Own”. After capturing the words, I felt compelled to stand and was surprised to find my equilibrium was gone. I walked into the bed, the walls, and a doorway. “Something” had actually occurred while I slept. Being very tired, and truly not fully awake, I determined it was time for me to go to sleep.
The Moment - An Espousal of Above and Below
In short order, I was abruptly awakened, in the deepest sense, to an intense and loud rushing of winds. Then, I experienced a sudden burst, an enkindling, in the middle of my head, and an extraordinary eruption, literally ignited or burst within me. The ignition with its pulsation, spread up, then down throughout my head toward my shoulders, down and out through my arms into my hands and fingers, then proceeded slowly down my chest to just below my arms. At that point, I clearly and vividly recall thinking, “When it reaches my heart, it will burst into flame.” — the flame which precedes or accompanies enlightenment. That errant thought jarred my mind and the traveling of the physical sensation stopped — just stopped.
The enkindling lasted a full 15-20 seconds, during which time, my awareness was acute. I understood that a glorious, unprecedented interlude was occurring and I was able to analyze the sounds traveling through my body. Enthralled, the conscientiousness followed as the Gift was engifted.
New Life Living Within
For one solid week, I existed in a lull — a sea of perpetual calm. I walked through daily necessities as if by rote or just sat at my desk and accomplished nothing. My work soon fell way behind. Knowing there was no choice but to work, little by little, I brought myself back into accomplishing, on the material plane, what absolutely had to be done. Though, for this one extraordinary week, there was an ultimate peace and a perpetual calm that surpasses expression. It knew no rush. It knew no necessity. It knew no boundary. It abided with me as a light dew. It knew eternity. It knew no death. It knew, and consisted of peace, of love, of understanding. It knew of a knowledge generally unsought and generally unknown. It knew, and now I knew.
For three months, something that could only be described as a presence, lived actively with me. Then, I was handed a tremendous task at work and I instinctively knew that to fulfill my responsibilities, I must set this gift, this awareness, this love, this compassion, this composed peacefulness, this presence, the Calm — how to express it — aside. I tackled this task with the vigor and intensity that was needed and immediately lost the majority of the gift’s peace and calm.
Though greatly reduced, I was left with sufficient inspiration to engender the poetry, to write, to maintain my occupation, my family, and my home. My gift was diminished and I realized, after the fact, that was the most irresponsible decision of my life. While I believed the gift would return, it never did — not with the intensity, inspiration, or anything close to the same manner or degree.
Visions came and I faithfully recorded them. The writing seemed to flow without thought from me — as if through me — but infrequently, until June of 1994 when the actual poetry began. This was, I now know, the fullest expression of the gift of gifts and the books that would come from the experience.