Everywhere I Look

Everywhere I look
I see people living
with borrowed faces,
their lives borrowed
and their souls,
speaking borrowed words
and craving feelings
that are not their own.
Everywhere I look
I see pettiness
and people dying
for an hour’s fame;
everywhere I look
I see addicts
and people enslaved
to their little phones.
I look around and I see
that the zombie apocalypse
so much prophesied
has already happened,
it is nothing more
than the regular individual
filled to saturation
with a content
that is not his own.

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Wandering Thought # 111

The person who is spiritually inclined will find himself drifting away from every day practical matters and the concerns and aspirations of normal society. Thus, in time, the language he uses will no long be sufficient to form a common understanding. He will drift on, as though in a cloud of solitude, but he will be connected to something else, something more inward and less tangible, and also something that cannot be shown to others who would demand a justification for his way of existence. This basic rift has since eternal times marked the existence of the artist, poet, philosopher, shaman and saint separating them from the practical and society oriented folks. This is still at work today in such kind of people, but not without a feeling of guilt more acute than before. When in previous ages this spiritual bent and way of life may have been justified, or even seen as a privilege, today, and under the guise of psychology and capitalism, it is looked upon with a wary eye, and the person labeled as psychologically and economically unsound.

Flowers of Eternity

A fertile soil your heart does hold
For a flower inside to blossom and glow,
Nurture it and water it with special care
For the scent of such purity heightens my soul.

Once intoxicated new awareness I gain,
From here on in life a new taste I crave,
A seed from your heart to plant in mine
And find out now what colours it will show.

Strange, a brief moment before the morning sun
Might light your life for the rest of your days,
A little taste of immortality our flowers do hold
For here we remain, even when we are no more.

January 2008.

Wandering Thought # 62

The nice guy, so desperate to give, chases all the women away. His giving, in fact, is a weakness and a selfishness — through it he seeks to validate himself. But the validation will not come to him who is weak in his heart. And the less the validation comes the more neurotic the need to give becomes. His giving seeks to manipulate the woman into giving him back the validation he seeks. But no woman will have this because he is not a man who can stand on his own. The nice guy, however, should not revert back to the bad boy type, so craved by the feminine; he must reach into his instinct and come to his strength through his weakness. He ought to become himself, create his boundaries, and become able to stand on his own.

Letter, August 13, 2017

Tell them I spent my life banished amid the pages of books, reading, feverishly, fluttering like a firefly amid words of darkness and light. Tell them that in the pages of books I found myself entangled like a bee stuck in honey, like a lover’s fingers in his beloved’s hair. Tell them that, contrary to what they think, it is no wasted life, it is a life of solitary abundance, a life of living at the source of what makes humanity great, and what makes life worth striving for, worth living. Tell them that I have been blessed, to read, to be able to read a fragment of that which is truly, spiritually great. Tell them that in an age of anxiety, of spiritual crisis, I have dared, through books, to gaze at the future, to imagine a different future, and that through these visions I strived to birth and live my life, my present, my spirit and state of mind. Tell them, beloved, that amid the pages of books I have loved and been loved, made friendships the likes of which are so rare on earth, shed tears, oh so bitter tears, rejoiced and found a joy that is simple like flowers and grass growing in a fallow field. Tell them, beloved.

Haiku # 228

From my lone grave
I’ll ask the wind and trees
to play a song for me

David Whyte – What to Remember When Waking

In that first
hardly noticed
moment
in which you wake,
coming back
to this life
from the other
more secret,
moveable
and frighteningly
honest
world
where everything
began,
there is a small
opening
into the new day
that closes
the moment
you begin your plans.

What you can plan
is too small
for you to live.

What you can live
wholeheartedly
will make plans
enough
for the vitality
hidden in your sleep.

To be human
is to become visible
while carrying
what is hidden
as a gift to others.

To remember
the other world
in this world
is to live in your
true inheritance.

You are not
a troubled guest
on this earth,
you are not
an accident
amidst other accidents
you were invited
from another and greater
night
than the one
from which
you have just emerged.

Now, looking through
the slanting light
of the morning
window toward
the mountain
presence
of everything
that can be,
what urgency
calls you
to your
one love?

What shape waits
in the seed of you
to grow and spread
its branches
against a future sky?

Is it waiting
in the fertile sea?
In the trees
beyond the house?
In the life
you can imagine
for yourself?

In the open
and lovely
white page
on the waiting desk?

Wandering Thought # 26

The circle is vicious when, in the relationship between man and woman, the focal point remains power—the dominance and submission of one side or the other. Feminism drew on patriarchal energy when, in a shoot for equality, it asserted women’s right to power too, to dominance. The paradigm shift happens with the shift in the focal point—not power, but a form of relatedness centered along spiritual and soulful lines. The turn out is that dominance and submission lose their holds as needs and outlooks upon the spirit in whom the shift takes place. Here are the all too tender beginnings of love. Ludicrous, when you come to think of it, the things we have to overcome in order to reach the threshold where love on intrapersonal and societal lines becomes a possibility.

She –

Her petrichor skin
a primal soil,
Her watery curves,
hills, fields, gardens,
hidden groves and sunlit openings,
Her eyes,
pristine ponds and clear skies dewing,
Her lips,
sickle moons shaping mists and dreams,
Her collarbones,
mountain ridges honing winds and clouds,
Her dark hair
a birthing womb of stars,
jasmine flowers, basil leaves,
lavender seeds, and rosemary needles –
She –
a transcendent being,
a limitless forest
where the poet, wandering,
goes deeper and deeper
and is forever lost,
vanishing, with no hope of return,
in the immensity of Her mystery.

The Offering

I knew what it meant
the apple she offered me,
and still I bit;
I bit, looking her in the eyes,
and I will bite, again and again.
I bit and the shared sin laced us,
in the infinite well of knowing bound us,
one flesh, one soul, one longing,
together, in time’s eternal grasp.

And then came the wings of God
blanketing us with a laughter so white,
with a warmth so deep
that all awareness from our minds was shed
and what remained was a single heart
in His Heart, throbbing.

Wandering Thought # 19

To live under the sway of capitalism and have our inner lives accordingly patterned means exactly this—that we experience our life as a sum of energy that ought to be invested in the market; if the result is successful and the investment pays off then we are happy, self-content, the esteemed holders of a capital (our own self and the sum of what it owns, including personal and character traits) that must be used to generate more and more; if the result is unsuccessful, if we and our efforts are not bought and sold at a convenient price then we simply become failures, forever haunted with a sense of inferiority.

The above is a system of alienation—totally cutting man off from his inner life and from the products of his hands. The above makes a farce of human values and laughs in the face of love and spirituality.

Senryu # 54

What is a poem?
A clear dewdrop reflecting
The light of the sun.

~

We, too, as individuals, are poems. We are as good as we are clear, transparent, pure, for, the clearer, purer, and more transparent, the more radiant the light of the divine in us is reflected, the greater the effulgence of our heart in the embrace of the light of God. To become pure—let that be your striving. To become poems worthy of the light.