That eternal composition
Get quiet, say the Mystics, quiet as dust,
to hear the music of the spheres.
Always there, always near, get past
the inward chatter and the outward traffic
enough to hear that eternal composition,
sans comparisons, conception and imagination.
Without a thought, return to the elemental serenity
from which you’ve taken leave.
Surrender to the peace that surpasses –
to Original form, to that pool of love within
and find there the goal and the cure obtainable,
amenable to all now and forevermore.
O child of God, get your lonely self quiet enough
to be lulled back into Oneness.
Mischief maker
I found You
and began to lose myself.
The wine in my cellar has turned to vinegar.
I plucked a blood-tinged rose from a bed of thorns.
I’m bleeding now myself;
nothing seems to staunch the flow.
I took You for the Avatar.
I didn’t suspect
You were such a mischief maker. Now I know.
I found You and can’t shake You.
You’re everywhere I turn; in the turning, also.
O child of God, you found your way to His Samadhi;
leave enough of yourself there to remain forever at His
feet.
(from
A Jewel in the Dust, 2011)
Death and resurrection
Each moment, teaches the Bhagavad Gita,
we start from scratch. Made up on the spot.
Arise, flare and vanish along with the whole
shimmering universe that surrounds us
while clinging desperately
to the illusion of continuity.
Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva in turn –
ageless existence, perpetually generated,
in which we emerge every moment
as immaculate new creatures, nonexistent and eternal.
Why fear annihilation? ask the Mystics.
Why harbor shame and dread?
When you own not a whit of autonomy.
When existence itself is impermanence –
made up on the spot, an effulgence
of ceaseless death and resurrection.
O child of God, only your dream-self
is less substantial than the dream of creation.
A finely wrought perfection
The night is not imperfect
because there is no sun in the sky.
Darkness bears its own virtue and the breaking day
offers merely a different aspect of the same perfection.
Our lives are perfect, yours and mine, for God’s purpose.
Every thought, word and deed just as God wills it.
On the mortal level of time-and-space duality,
we might speak of ignorance and sin,
self and other, good and evil, love and fear
but there is a finely wrought perfection
in this long night and the breaking day will bring us
merely a different aspect of that same perfection.
O child, if God is non-dual,
how could anything be less than perfect?
Of quiet fealty
On the riverbank, by your passivity
mitigate the compulsive spending of the old
and the frantic accumulation of the new.
Your mind will flow per usual
but give your thoughts little heed,
like a radio left on in the next room.
There’s no waiting here; no hope for the future;
not a speck of ambition – all yields of duality,
abandoned as you enter where the mind cannot go.
Miss not the briefest chance to thoughtlessly observe, release,
absorb and be absorbed.
Surrender to and participate in,
as best you might, the eternal, original Oneness
which appears (we are told)
ever before you and has forever been
(as you sit in your seeming isolation
and stillness) the sum total of your existence.
O child of God, what a river of words you use
to describe routine, recurring moments of quiet fealty.
Like Margaret in the courtyard
One lover at a time allowed at Arti
bowing down in the Tomb, darshan
an intimate coupling – Meher Baba privately
inviting each lover: May
I have this dance?
And each receptive soul, focused and participatory,
taken up in His arms for a timeless while,
a whirling embrace, a precisely accomplished series of steps
(like Margaret in the courtyard of Villa Fiorenza)
then turned out beyond His door again
to stumble down the Hill and into the world
of separation, thought and evaluation
but left with yet another heartening interlude
and memory of the Master’s unparalleled
concern, command, agility and flow.
O child of God, darshan is not so much
about petition as it is about participation.
Blue-skinned Avatar
He played His flute for me –
Krishna at my window.
I listened enrapt, note for note,
slipping into a reverie, wondering
about this Hindu, blue-skinned Avatar.
Tried to remember what I’d learned
over the years of His various escapades
and the teaching stories, His methods and purpose.
How might this Piper and His melody
effect my own liberation and escape?
The music ceased. Krishna
turned away,
over the rise and gone from sight –
leaving me in a silent, wistful solitude,
the memory fading of Love’s sweet lilt,
I, not yet ripe, having failed to respond
wholeheartedly to His numinous invitation.
O child of God, mind is the culprit, say the Mystics –
the self-involved, misapplication of thought.
An improbable faith
Go through life, per the zen maxim,
like a bird through the sky – fearless;
no path ahead; not a trace left behind;
its sufficient little birdbrain
never quite perceiving itself
as distinct from the vast emptiness
through which it flies,
upheld and guided by nothing
but an improbable faith in the adequacy
of its own intuitive, hollow-boned,
feather-clad construction
and the incessant informing and instruction
it receives from the Mystery that it is
and is ever moving through.
O child of God, don’t let these collected images
become dead weight and pin you to the ground.
A clockwork arrangement
Silent seem the stars in their vigil,
no ear near enough to hear their roaring.
The sentinel moon shows its face,
a clockwork arrangement of shadow and light –
mute testimony of our estrangement
and God’s abiding faithfulness.
It is He Who has sent Himself
on this terrestrial journey;
He Who chooses the path beneath His feet
as He gathers and guides Himself toward home.
Infinite and solitary by nature and definition,
there’s no room anywhere for anyone else.
No self means no other.
No child but the Father.
O child of God, sometimes
all you can do is hold the pen.
