What Is My Assignment Today? A Poem by Felicia Miracle Cipolla

July 31, 2020

Take away

Break away

From a man so great

From a man now late

From peanuts to potions

He was so much more

With his surrender to spirit

He was able to open doors

To those who looked like him

To dedicate their lives to explore

For me one phrase stands out, like a jagged nail coming up from the floor

“What is my assignment today?”

These 5 sacred words, the secret to perpetual joy

They will remain with me, until the end of me

And probably through my next life to be!

How powerful to ask not what God can do for you ?

But rather what you can do for thee!

I imagine Mr. Carver kneeled down on the forest floor

4am, cool dirt, plants, trees, flowers, George and nothing more

Communing with the Divine that we call God, the Universe, Spirit

Complete silence & stillness so the voice of God, he could hear it

I imagine the intuition coming to him as clearly as a bird’s song

I feel as though I’ve known his soul all along

I aspire to be the kind of being

Who’s knowledge that is beyond what is seen

Dr. Carver’s life has shown me

The value of sitting silent in nature to just be

Beyond all of his miraculous scientific achievements

I see the life of a man who’s soul’s purpose was simple to be in it

Dr. George Washington Carver was one of the masters of the here and now

To continue his work as a New Thought Leader I certainly shall

I do not regularly write or read poetry. I wrote this poem for an assignment for a spiritual course I took earlier this year. We were assigned to do a final project on one of the "New Thought" leaders, who we learned about during the course. As soon as I read his biography, I knew I would do my project on Dr. George Washington Carver. Thanks to the limited vantage point of white-centric history that we are taught in American schools, most of us know him as the guy who invented peanut butter. He was so much more. The most remarkable thing that I learned about him, aside from his more than 100 different inventions, uses and by-products that he created from the peanut & sweet potato, was the fact that he did not rely on books for knowledge. He woke up at 4am every morning, walked out into the solitude of the forest to meditate, and listen to God for his insights. He simply asked God every morning “what’s my assignment for today?"; I have integrated this question into my morning meditation practice. Learning about his life inspired and reminded me that all of the knowledge of the universe is available to me, and to us all, through spirit. We just have to be silent and earnestly ask the right questions.

For more on Dr. Carver, I recommend the brief biography that I read about him, written in anecdotal form called “The Man Who Talks With the Flowers”, by Glenn Clark.