- Felicia Miracle Cipolla
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.