The beginning of the end

The beginning of the end                                                                        

He came not to teach but to awaken.

What He knew could not be taught.

What He possessed could not be transmitted.

What He was could not be imitated.

He was (by His own claim) a cognizant cipher

in the great Unconscious, a needle’s eye portal

to the realm beyond.  He awakens (even now)

slumbering souls by entering the dream itself,

turning dream-enchanted eyes toward Reality,

not with a shake and a shout

but by pointing to the breach He embodies;

by pointing silently, directly to Himself.

O child of God, catching sight of Meher  

is the beginning of the end.

Holy umbrage

Holy umbrage                                                                                         

A sanyasi seeking realization was told

to await Your call under a certain tree. 

After a while he wandered away.

End of story but not the end of his story.

Down the road a piece, did he look back

woefully knowing, then and lifelong,

that he could never honestly take up

his position in its shade again?

I await impatiently (perhaps, for millenniums)

under my designated tree,

trusting no higher authority exists,

no better path might be taken

and if ever I wander from its holy umbrage

I can return – not to its shadows –

but, to the open, merciful arms of my Beloved,

seeking His forgiveness and awaiting instructions anew.

O child of God, such are the workings

of karma, grace, obedience and faith.

Where the day will take us

Where the day will take us                                                                         

Harder each year, becomes the routine –

folding and unfolding myself;

reach, stretch, bend and arch. Harder still

to flex that not-the-body pertaining to me –

to keep it vital, generous and receptive.

Jesus said, become as a little child –

when I went about where the day would take me,

shedding a life in time of hierarchical impositions;

exploring the outposts and wild purlieus

nameless and unruly; heroic and detached.

It’s not that unmarked tablet (lost on the way to school)

we must recover but, our flexibility, our susceptibility,

slipping out of our tendencies,

our utterly crushing contexts,

young and vigorous, lithesome and nimble,

adventuresome deep in our bones,

as we go about exploring the vast,

Godly paths of where the day will take us.

O child of God, are your own arrangements

superior to your Father’s intentions?   

The valley of the shadow

The valley of the shadow

Could be a lightning strike - a life,
intense, elemental, erratic and brief.

We seem to inch along the path,
aeons in each direction but,

outside of time, perhaps each descent -
charged with purpose, rife with destruction -

is pinpoint accurate
and, in each case, ultimately effective.

After all, we're near the apex,
the culmination of a journey.

Might we not walk now
through the valley of the shadow (of Reality),

eschewing fear and evil,
our earthly forays

lighting up the atmosphere with ecstatic energy
to change forever the stolid landscape below?

O child of God, you don't know truth
enough to be forlorn and disheartened.

                   

Just God

Just God

God roused Himself from slumber
and wondered Who He is.

God is the Word (the scriptures tell us).
One extended metaphor is all of existence.

We give God our qualities -
human emotions and motives,

exploits and purposes to avoid the terrible truth
that we, also, do not know Who He is.

God is the Word
but the Word has no meaning.

Just a whimsical utterance.  Just That.  Just God.
And the resulting (to the ego, unbearable)

truth is that our brief, aspiring lives,
beyond God, have no meaning.

We likewise are just an utterance.
Just That.  Just God.

O child of God, everything is zero.
No room for triumph or defeat.

               

At heaven's gate

At heaven's gate

Two souls stood at heaven's gate,
the first ordered by an angel

to descend immediately and reincarnate.
I know that man, said the remaining soul.

The most devout man I've ever known.
Why was he turned away?

Attachment, the angel replied.
He lived on the street, said the man,

his days spent in prayer.
Begged for his food.  Owned little

more than the clothes on his back.
Filth and rags, replied the angel.

Bewildered, the man said nothing.
His attachment was to filth and rags,

to his empty belly, his image
in the eyes of others, to his ideas

of what is worthy and what is worthless.
And you, sir, continued the angel,

have reached this same critical height.
What have you done to earn God's grace?

The man lowered his eyes and did not speak.
Enter paradise, said the angel, swinging wide the gate.

O child of God, when you think you've got it figured out,
be sure you do not have it figured out.

                           (Unpublished)

The first crease

The first crease                                                                                          

Like the first crease in the batting distance

on the cricket field, bowler to batter

or the line of a footrace to evenly curb each toe –

such is the scratch we must get back to.

Eruch said to begin by earnestly kidding ourselves

that He’s in the chair until His grace opens our eyes

to the presumed Reality and then it’s suddenly

kidding ourselves to believe the chair is empty.

O child of God, return to that edgeless, quiet

unknown before the first pitch is thrown.

Emptiness poised

Emptiness poised

Adam, they say, was made of clay
but, suppose it was sand

processed into glass upon each arrival -
the body a lens, a window, a peephole

through which God might perceive
the world He has created

from every possible angle
until the doomed glass shatters,

rejoins an endless stream
of innumerable, new configurations.

Suffering comes (the Enlightened Ones say)
when we see ourselves

as the unique, fragile glass lens
rather than the emptiness

upon which it is poised
between God

on the one hand
and existence on the other.

O child of God, earnestly search for your Father
through the eye which cannot see itself.