Moondust
I can make out the lunar mares –
the Sea of Tranquility just there, composed
of moondust rather than saltwater,
human bootprints now in the blue-gray tint
of its basaltic soil.
There’s a sea also inside of me
made of the bitter, accumulated dust
of my past lives, which Maya may arouse
at any possible moment into a blinding storm,
dust borne on its almost irresistible winds –
the cause of my straying off course
from His (and even my own) will.
But with faith and His grace
of patience and insight, I might instead
let it gather and lie at the bottom of my heart,
tranquilly undisturbed, enough for my bootprints
to spell out legibly my Redeemer’s holy name.
O child of God, seek the mighty hand
of the One who hung the moon.
Desultory search
I’ve discovered the pilgrim’s path
offers a more-than-adequate opportunity
for running away from God.
Sufficient license
and elbow room out on that open road.
The pilgrim might settle unobtrusively
into a rhythm which affords some semblance
of diligence, some identity, some tattered ideal
of love and devotion in which to wrap oneself
but it rarely includes bowing down
in that oft-neglected, deeply-buried heart-shrine
with no room for anyone else but the Beloved –
a tomb where the pilgrim comes to a dead halt,
forsaking the hypocrisy and faux freedom
of his lifelong, rambling, desultory search.
O child of God, how studiously you avoid that tomb,
that cloister, that intimacy that would lead you to God.
This field of dust
People are solidifying their positions.
I’m being broken up like ground for planting.
The smell of seeds on the breeze, rust, roots
and soil; the song of yin and yang, gee and haw.
I’m no longer able to live with myself
yet here I am still breathing. Such is my dilemma.
Others are getting brittle over their little plots of truth,
taking up arms to preserve their sovereignty.
I’m walking the narrow lane between two furrows,
heading for that shade tree at the far end of the fence
line.
We are all less than the wind that buffets us,
blusters and dies, shifts to a new tack.
We’ve no abiding substance.
There is no me
to live with or die for, no life to surrender to my Lord;
nothing in this whirlwind to hold onto,
nothing to fight over in this field of dust.
O child of God, to enter the new life, first
note the improbability of your own existence.
The Sun of God
I had a revelation on the path to God;
standing transfixed at the crest of a hill –
I don’t know where I am, where I’m going
or how I might get there.
Now, perhaps, the real journey might begin
with my clutching blindly the hem of my Lord’s skirt.
Though I’m ashamed of being late to the party,
He (apparently) hasn’t been waiting for me.
There’s no sooner or later in Oneness,
no unexpected delays from His end of the game.
There is only the Whim, only the Whim
playing Itself out the way It must
and we are swept along with It –
bits of semi-consciousness –
for what seems like forever
(from our mortal, moment-to-moment perspectives),
until we flower, burst into flames and merge
into the awakened, eternal Sun of God.
O child of God, let your heart-truth overwhelm
the mind’s quibbling need for security.
God-given
The mind fades – I’m learning to put forth
the heart, a small warmth, a candle
flickering in the dark of my cell,
not flame enough yet to burn away the dross
but a relief to my chronic solitude –
a glow sufficiently humble to draw my Beloved.
He absorbs our tormenting sins to the exact extent
we open our wounds to His mercy,
His benevolence annulling
our every clinging indulgence,
allowing expansiveness to bloom –
an assured and expressive love setting up a house
of which we seem inherently unfamiliar,
a peace from which we’ve been too long estranged
but which is apparently our Self, our essence –
the seeds, pith and components of our true being.
O child of God, the flame within is the dhuni
burning away all your imagined deficiencies.
Kneel and marvel
At times in the ashram Baba would clean
the harijans’ latrine (much to the mandali’s agony).
My Beloved provides.
His grace is sufficient.
He serves lifelong; His hand always clutching ours;
His abode within our hearts.
Nothing He gives
has ever fallen short, has ever been late,
every sin, guilt, suffering a perfect necessity
with nothing for us to do but kneel and marvel,
praise as He labors, His intricacy and intimacy
on exhibit, astir within us
and surrender to Him that ignoble shame
and self-indulgence we identify as ourselves.
Our Lord having descended and assented
to be our Servant, the Slave of the love of His lovers,
His majesty infinite in His mastery as He serves
and services the awakening of our latent divinity.
O child of God, trust His silent grace
to compensate for the inadequacy of your words.
Somehow by love
My prayers have dwindled
into a tongue-tied silence,
knowing nothing of this world’s
(or my own soul’s) needs
while all praise of the Perfect One
seems a risible blandishment.
And what good is professing my love,
when I suffer it not nor can I discern what it is
and not knowing (with any intimacy or accuracy)
to Whom my love is directed?
There is a cloud of unknowing
(a mystic once wrote)
between the contemplative and God
which might only be pierced by love –
somehow by an effortless love, radiating
wordlessly from the human heart.
At some point, a hopeless effrontery it is
to approach Him in any other way.
O child of God, word upon word you pile up
to describe what you do not know.
This handful of words
One day I’ll forfeit these numberless lifetimes
(You say) for an abrupt end to my human adventure,
obliterate myself and all of Creation as I have known it,
but today I cling (instead) to this sad world,
this handful of words,
head teeming with worthless ideas,
a heart empty of courage and will,
the authority and sincerity
to shape the one-syllabled cry that would
awaken within me the sleeping God –
exchange this timeworn, familiar realm
for the glory-promised, new Unknown.
O child of God, your obsessive talk of liberation
is part of God’s readying you to receive it.
The shard of a mirror
It’s not God you’ve been chasing all these years
but, one by one, your own hallucinatory thoughts.
Time to quit the path where you stand.
Not another step.
Enter a cave, a closet,
a monk’s cell and find there an intimacy
you never knew out on that lost highway.
Time to cold-shoulder the multifarious
and concentrate upon the One;
eschew the flitting and elusive for the changeless eternal;
spaciousness for the cramped quarters of just God and you.
A thick darkness is settling in now, so you might see
only God shining – not at the far end of a tunnel
but in the shard of a mirror
tacked to the back wall of your cell.
O child of God, so many years go by before
the significance of His everyday words begin to emerge.
A relationship of One
If there is an every moment Companion
(and my information comes from the highest Source),
with us prior to the body and after, and countless
other bodies before and beyond, by what criteria
might you in any real or imagined way separate
that Companion from your very own soul and Self?
What could ever cleave a bond of that fidelity
and duration; break the eternal One into two?
The truth requires you to realize
the reality of that Companion
Who you have imagined in your private communion
to have always been with you but not of you.
It’s a relationship of One, o lover, to be fostered,
as best you might, to the exclusion of every other
until all seeming disparities are dispelled,
melding into God’s eternal, non-dual truth.
O child of God, it is the non-comprehension
of Oneness that creates all the mischief in the world.
The quandary of life itself
You must move on from regret
for the life you’ve lived
(wrote an medieval mystic)
to regret that you were ever born
(while conceding it to be God’s will).
Feel deeply the sorrow not just for what you are,
but that you are
(and so many lifetimes have been) –
a creature incapable of Love. You must feel
and know sorrow for the quandary of life itself,
not merely for the role you play in it,
not because you question God’s game
but to fix in your heart all the more
the wish never to be born again;
to allow the light of grace and favor
to remove forever this shadow which is you
and in which you have been for ages dwelling.
O child of God, illusion is a realm
where not one thing is good and true.
The adventure of being human
A young Arangaon boy, years ago,
would come for morning Arti,
feet bare, dressed each time
in the same ragged clothes,
waiting patiently in the queue,
taking darshan, receiving prasad.
Befriended by a few Western pilgrims
who would joke and jostle, teach him
bits of English; occasionally offering him
fruit, laddoos, a trinket or a rupee.
But it was not what they gave him unwittingly
but what was taken from him inevitably –
for he no longer came up the Hill
solely for the Godman’s darshan and prasad
but for the adventure of being human,
introduced outside the glow of the Tomb
to the enticements of pleasure, self and world,
their irresistible seduction and subversion.
O child of God, to witness worldly corruption
look no farther than your own heart.
The Real Word
When the word of My love (said Meher)
speaks in your heart, you will know
it is the Real Word you have been
forever longing to hear.
I can’t remember such a Word, such a Reality,
such a distant Love ever having been
whispered into my heart; yet I must have
heard it somewhere before –
to have ever since longed for it;
certain to know it when I hear it once more.
Perhaps, not the import of it but the intimacy –
faintly, the intimacy – in numberless ages past,
to which yet I cling, longing for the return
of its liberating, whispered, love-drenched eloquence.
O child of God, your innate loneliness
is the evidence of your original attachment to God.
The path of your soul
Catholic mystics through the centuries
wrote of past life sanskaras and karmic law,
of soul-evolutionary tendencies and impressions
that clamor in the present life to be spent.
They did not use Hindu/Buddhist terminology.
They spoke scripturally of Original Sin
as the primordial source of ungodly impulses,
manifesting fresh desires and temptations.
The Sufis refer to these latent impulses as the nafs.
Taoists use yet another sociolect.
Numerous descriptions of the same quandary
and endeavor down the various paths
leading to the one Goal,
as many as there are the souls of men.
O child of God, cling tightly to Baba’s damaan.
You are treading the path of your soul.
Suspect death
When you begin to suspect
death
is not an exit but a
roundabout
and you feel your ribs as
bars of a cage;
your loneliness ghostly –
chronic and eternal,
then the God within you
begins
to elbow His way to the
surface.
You think it’s a quest but
it’s a dismantling.
It’s not life eternal you’re
after, but permanent death,
finding out later it must
come to you
(like deaths of the body) of
its own accord,
a predestined step toward
resurrection;
the last one-and-only-true
death to undergo
before (by Meher’s promise)
you cease to exist entirely
within His everlasting
Oneness.
O child of God, let your
imagination soar
but only to aid you in the
matters at hand.
The world turned off
Pare down, my intuition tells
me;
beardless, short hair, plain
clothes, simple fare;
the world turned off; a
narrow agenda –
the exterior reflecting the
interior.
Reading and writing,
contemplation,
prayer and meditation – the
gift of a life
chosen for me, suitable for
no one else.
I keep saying – to worries, disappointments,
regrets
and other odd things (God knows
how and why)
brought to mind – it doesn’t
matter,
it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t
matter.
Unspoken, yet heartening,
within that mantra
is the assurance of
Meher: Nothing matters,
o pilgrim, but love for God.
O child, pray that Thank You,
Lord, becomes
Yes, my Lord – everything
His, nothing yours.
