The perilous voyage home

The perilous voyage home                                                                               
 
Bound to the mast by his crew,
their ears with beeswax plugged,
 
Odysseus endured the full import
and sweet torture of the Sirens’ song
 
until his ship had sailed beyond
the reach of their enticements.
 
These days I pray likewise, my Lord –
lash me to a sturdy spar,
 
the allurements of my karmic impulses
and the self’s deceptive schemes surveyed,
 
fully noted, yet ignored and survived,
as their honeyed songs sweep ineffectually over me,
 
fading at last, wind-tossed and enfeebled,
in the ship’s wake upon a vast and silent sea.
 
O child, let God’s strength and wisdom will out
on the long and perilous voyage home.

 

A timeless while

A timeless while                                                                                              
 
Soon another adventure to brave and endure,
a fresh human milieu to explore – reincarnating,
 
to learn (so they say) certain lessons
when the only real lesson
 
is that we are not our selves but God.
‘God on a Whim’, said Meher, ‘asked Who am I?’
 
And our existence is the tentative answer
by the gradual revelation of who we are not.
 
And since God is everything
(even that which He is not),
 
it seems we are in for a rather lengthy,
painful, convoluted and circular journey
 
of constant failures, until and only
by God’s grace and Whim
 
we complete our individual destinies and rest
for a timeless while in Him as the One.
 
O child of God, calm your peripatetic soul
by immersing it in the pacificity of the moment.

The One You say we are

The One You say we are                                                                                 
 
Some apparently find You just by sitting –
fading away cross-legged into nothingness.
 
I’m a bit too rambunctious for that.
Or maybe it’s just too early in the game.
 
When I consider the stress of eternity
and my capacity for pain, I note
 
from this prayer rug on which I teeter
that I possess neither the courage
 
nor strength to shoulder the burden. 
If we are ever to become
 
the One You say we are, it will not
happen from my coming to You
 
but from You gracefully encompassing me.
And so with great relief and trepidation
 
I endeavor to still and settle myself,
release this fist of nothingness
 
I less and less consider myself to be
and hand it all so lovingly over to You.
 
Sitting quietly (o child!), doing nothing,
(wrote Basho), Spring comes . . . .

A foot in the door

A foot in the door                                                                                            
 
My windows are barred, doors bolted.
It’s a bad neighborhood.
 
No one gets in; I seldom venture out. 
But something recently has happened – 
 
after a long spell of determined
knocking and melodious patter,
 
some persuasive salesman
with all his wondrous wares
 
has gotten His foot in the door,
allowing for a budding companionship
 
and a dazzling shaft of the Spring day beyond.
I suspect now that this mortal world, inside and out,
 
is not what I have known and feared;
my ages-old imprisonment and estrangement
 
being (quite possibly) a meaningful, essential,
temporary prelude to an expansive and glorious destiny.
 
O child of God, sample His heartening wares.
It’s not hope He’s selling, but truth and faith.

I come to You still

I come to You still                                                                                          
 
Ask for nothing You say and ashamedly,
after all these years, I come to You still,
 
out of suffering and fear, my Lord,
with a brazen request –
 
let me know that Saint Francis moment
when with one quaking embrace,
 
the leper becomes the Christ –
shame becomes triumph, fear becomes love.
 
Let the falsity who is me, through Your fire,
turn to dust rather than suffer the usual putridity.
 
I commit the sin of hope (I know),
wishing relief from Your onslaught
 
not by abeyance, Lord, but by
the ultimate culmination of Your task.

O child of God, your words reveal a lack of faith. 
Love doesn’t ask, Meher said.  Love doesn’t ask.

 

Taking Your Word for it

Taking Your Word for it                                                                                 
 
Here I am engaged again in proving
the poverty of myself; the paucity of my faith.
 
Issued from a cramped hand
and the fist of a heart, these poems
 
shaped by contrariness and preference, habit and fear.
Audacious references, ignorant and wistful,
 
are made to love, taking Your Word for it.    
Taking Your Word for it, finding no real proof
 
among the worldly shadow-shapes
nor the chronic aridity of my own domain.
 
O child, throw down your walking cane
that you might grip more tightly the Godman’s hand.
  

A silent stillness

A silent stillness                                                                                               
 
Shoot ‘til you run out of arrows, He said.
Then, we can have a heart to heart.
 
Fill your dance card
but don’t forget who ‘brung ya’.
 
Stop tugging at your end of the rope.
Your obsessions no longer have any fire.
 
Your villains have fled by the light of day
or become the shadows of a moonstruck elm.
 
Turn to Me for your midnight solace or else
mount a fresh horse and ride farther into oblivion.
 
O child of God, once you let go the rope,
the bell will come to a sheer, silent stillness.

Sweet freefall

Sweet freefall                                                                                                   
 
Per usual, I float in the wild blue yonder,
upholding myself by sheer imagination,
 
a kite in the grip of a childish hand.
I keep myself collected;
 
imitate normality enough
to pass casual inspection;
 
maintain tentatively my lonely,
exhausting and fearsome vigil,
 
all the while (lately) being encouraged
to let go, unhand – experience the ultimate,
 
(promised) sweet freefall into somewhere
beyond imagination and conception.
 
O child of God, find the truth of your predicament
by the ending of it (and yourself) once and for all.

Papier-mâché

Papier-mâché                                                                                                   
 
One day you might find the truth
you have consistently failed to live up to
 
is not the truth at all; the paradigm
allotted to you, your world and self view,
 
the bringer of such recurring misery,
is merely a construct of sticks and stems,
 
water-based glue and papier-mâché.
One day you might find that the celebrated elite 
 
have led you so far from the mark,
so determinedly trekking in the wrong direction,
 
that the only heart-fitting course remaining for you
is to stop where you are; to be irrevocably left behind.
 
O child of God, get lost enough to find that Meher
has long ago taken you by the hand.

Along the way

Along the way                                                                                                 
 
I joined a caravan headed for the Promised Land;
walked a time with the remaining witnesses;
 
learned from its elders; absorbed the satsang
of fellow wanderers and seekers, and then
 
was surprisingly led (by Whom I can’t say)
onto a barely discernible footpath
 
somewhat at odds with the direction
of that earnest, determinedly joyful band.
 
I find myself now (not quite) alone,
the destination a less-than-vital culmination.
 
My lone Companion is providing me with rudiments
along the way of that which I hope to find
 
in abundance at journey’s end; intermittently
revealing to me, immediate and essential,
 
the sanctity and rightness of my soul and self
on this seemingly tangential way.
 
O child of God, the paths to God (say the Mystics)
are as numerous as the souls of men.

 

Strewn with roses

Strewn with roses                                                                                           
 
You and I are not we but One.
O what a sweet promise from my Lord
 
until I hear Him pledge
the same to my nemeses –
 
those of whom I rant and rail
and oppose most virtuously;
 
Not we but One.  Not ourselves but Self. 
Not you and I but Him.  Make it your mantra
 
(He advises) until you are able to love and embrace
those who in your sanctimony you now cannot.
 
O child of God, did you think the path
to Meher is strewn with roses?

The vast everything

The vast everything                                                                                         
 
I’m a sparrow in one realm
pecking at the leaf-covered ground.
 
In another, I’ve never left the nest.
In one, dutifully securing my connection
 
to seed, leaf, worm, crumb,
blue sky and green tree
 
in our mutual migration
from here to there.
 
In another, I peek over the rough edges
while yet embraced
 
by the endless solitude and stillness
of an unimaginable, perpetual nowhere.
 
O child of God, hatchlings scatter in flight 
while in the vast everything nothing moves. 

Guru in a book

Guru in a book                                                                                               
 
When first I came upon You
(another guru in a book),
 
I wondered what sort of wisdom,
what secret knowledge had You to share?
 
Don’t worry, You said, be happy.
I must admit I was a bit disappointed.
 
Yet, that phrase with a bit of courage, born of faith,
has become instructive – how to slice through this realm
 
with the least amount of attachment and binding,
in full faith, blindly, a continuous
 
and unexpectant surrender
into the hands of the Creator.
 
O child of God, when will you abandon conjecture,
forsake worry and joyfully live your faith?

God's torch

God’s torch                                                                                                     
 
You may think you’re stuck
waiting for Someone’s whimsical touch,
 
the reward or culmination
of some sort of heartfelt endeavor
 
to secure your ultimate liberation.
But in truth there is no waiting –
 
no fixed point from which to hope;
no time to stop in the ceaseless sweep,
 
not one stationary atom of you
to hold back and hold forth.
 
Existence is God’s torch burning itself out.
Its constant flux is the great Illusion
 
(per Meher) for in God there is no change,
no journey nor destination, no bonds to break,
 
no height to attain as from first to last,
the universal everything is the unimaginable zero.
 
O child, all of existence is God’s whimsy.
Eternal grace is ever there within you.