The dark heavens
To view the stars in all their glory,
abandon the bright city for the dark hills.
Step off the world-worn path
and lie bewildered in the fresh greenery,
your back to the rotating earth.
Don’t waste your vision grouping the stars
into constellations and reciting
their schoolbook, man-given names.
View them freshly as you did
on your first glimpse of their atavistic beauty –
a scattering of pearls against the dark heavens,
an everpresent gift from God to His children,
the very elements and evidence of God’s
brilliance, might, vigilance and mercy.
O child of God, to search for the Light,
blow out your candle.
(photo by Petra Fischer)
God’s vibrant fluidity
Circling the sun, our revolving earth,
even as we speak ceaselessly hurtling through space.
The star of our sun in motion also
through the great universal expansion.
Why then imagine your meditative body
folded into a static posture,
anchored to one spot on the earth’s crust?
Meditation is not for keeping still but for dissolving,
deliberately and purposefully, into the eternal flow,
moving with, instead of contrary to, God’s vibrant fluidity.
O child of God, the ego pictures itself as an immutable island
in a constant stream of time and space.
A refuge similar
The practice of non-attachment, said Master Dogen,
is not different from full enlightenment
and in its devoted practice, the unenlightened
find a refuge similar and prior to the attainment of Truth.
Just so, the one who becomes a willing slave
of the Avatar exists as an enlightened one –
takes it as it comes; leaves it where it lays.
Not a worry to take root in the fetid soil
of individual fantasy and conjecture.
Anticipation, regret cloud not the view,
accepting the outcome of each moment
as being not a creation of the individual self,
but of the infinite-eternal workings
of the great autonomous Mystery.
O child of God, become a flagstone in His courtyard.
Become a palm leaf under the donkey hooves.
The secret richness
It’s an errant quest, o seeker, the desire for
Knowledge.
The peace of God, wrote Paul, surpasses all understanding.
I’ve fumbled around on this stage for the last 40 years
trying to pull a rabbit out of an empty hat.
Now I want to become (another desire)
a single mote, o Lord, of the dust
collecting on the bottles in Your cellar.
Dust doesn’t want; doesn’t understand.
Divested of any strength or authority,
neither accedes nor rejects, resists nor accepts,
only to discover in its utter desiccation the secret
richness
and the promised treasure of its true nature.
Whether into the wilderness, o child, or up to
the threshold of the Darbar, dust goes where it is bidden.
