A taking away

A taking away

I wanted to find my real Self.  You whispered

that I am You.  Now I am content.

Not that my heart believes such a Truth

but I am content to listen to such whisperings from You.

Content to be Your poor excuse for a slave;

sitting at Your feet – near enough to witness

Your purity and beauty; asking for nothing;

hoping one day to become the dust at Your feet.

That dust is worth more than any of its other forms –

gold, silver, diamonds . . . this body of mine.

I can’t make it through the rigors of the Path

but to become dust – perhaps, I could do that.

A taking away rather than an achieving –

perhaps, its possible.  God only knows.

O child of God, nearness to the Lord requires loss upon loss,

until there is nothing upon which to hang your hat.

                                          (from The Garden of Surrender, 2004)

Your timid heart

Your timid heart                                                                                         

I’ve been headstrong on this path, I know;

refused to follow, refused to lead;

trekking my way alone if I must.

Envisioning my insights as revelation –

sacrosanct and peculiar to me.  Headstrong,

yet all the while, since I fell into Meher’s orbit,

longing to become heartstrong instead –

like Baba motioning to LePage:  Be mighty in My love! 

I have come lately to see I lack the equipment –

not like a rabbit wishing to be a bear,

more like a bear wishing to be a lion –

just as futile perhaps but not as far-fetched.

I am to continue pondering then – calculate,

surmise, question and opine; move nearer

to my Lord through my individual, God-given

relationship, attributes and talents, enough,

more than enough, to see me through

this lifetime and into the next.

O child of God, follow your destiny

and leave your timid heart to Meher.

An obscure remembrance

An obscure remembrance                                                                                     

Comes a point in every sojourn where comparable

is the world to cotton candy laced with razor blades.

Nothing but pain and injury in which to sink our teeth;

our tongues sated but hunger undiminished

by its gossamer, sugary nothingness while every

beautiful and meaningful thing is glimpsed

through the fleeting windows of an outbound train.

On the platform, cherished ones distantly holding

each other in our similarly impotent arms; at the mercy

ever of unassailable flesh, time and schedule.

It’s more than a delicate hope

that counters the dream’s insistence;

draws the sojourner to the eternal; more than fate –

the yearning of the part for the whole.

It is an obscure remembrance deeper than time;

the briefly beheld and faintly tasted lure

of a love beyond our humanity yet which is

the timeless, hinted at essence of our existence.

O child of God, transcendence is possible

once you lose your taste for sweetness.

Traveling incognito

Traveling incognito

Traveling together incognito.  At each checkpoint

You whisper, Let Me do the talking.

As You have taught, I was once stone.

Forgive the continued hardness of my heart.

Some noticed my silence during evening Arti.

I thought to add a drop of mine to the infinity of Yours.

At the threshold of my Beloved’s Tomb –

the madness of the world behind me and the silence within.

Make a tomb of your heart, You whisper to me.

Bow down to that silence.

Another body for the pyre.  Stack the wood precisely.

Pour the ghee!

When this sky wheels around to the proper position,

I will see the face of my Beloved.

O child of God, there’s an angel within, longing for Union.

Let him use your tongue.  Then, listen with all your heart.

                                     (from The Garden of Surrender, 2004)