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
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
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
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.
