For all the gifts
The world would offer,
None is more than passing,
None less transient
Than the clouds
Ever changing face and form.
–
Who and what
Finds immunity
From THIS law?
What in all that slips
And falls apart
And wears out
And degrades
Offers immutability’s
Stable ground?
–
None but formlessness
–
None but nothing’s something
–
None but silence’s empty space.
–
Only here in nowhere
–
Where there is none but one
–
Is peace unnamed,
–
Unmade and unhappening.
We take a stroll
Because of our shared love of truth.
We ask: what is the nature of I?,
Allowing the question
To sit in the tip of our tongues,
The taste of ourself
Percolating silence.
The mind might garble
But the taste is true.
What is the taste? Love?
Warmth and understanding?
Limitless, boundless I?
We stroll deeper still
Speaking our hearts,
Hearing our hearts’ perspective.
Fear seems a long way away,
Not even a problem,
For we ask: what is the nature of I?
And the answer is a recognition,
Our deliverance to it,
In it,
That we are
The truth we seek,
We are
Beautiful being,
Satisfied in the being of it.
True, this life is not perfect.
There are problems and difficulties
In the body,
In relationships,
In the wider world,
Spiralling into
Apparent madness.
–
But as I sit here
On a train
Watching the countryside streaming
Under a overcast Scottish sky,
I spot a tan and autumn fisherman
Wading in peat-brown fury,
His line arcing for trout or salmon
Or just the chill water, pulling,
And I am brought to the wonder
Of a grey morning
In which our fleeting touch,
Half a moment shy of his hook,
Is sweet with life’s meaning,
And for a second
I feel
It was not a silvery fish,
Taught and tugging,
But I
Vibrating on the end of his line.
Truth is sweet upon my tongue
When I speak
From the loving perspective.
It’s as if the world warms
And expands,
Envelopes all in a delightful oneness,
A magic sprung for the heart’s
Open portal to the Word beyond.
And what of ownership?
There is none but God’s silence
Percolating and infusing
First the body,
Then the outer world,
Reaching to all infinity,
His space rightly claimed.
Truth is like honey on the tongue,
Sweeter for sharing,
Sweeter still in the expanding moment,
Wholly overwhelming
Like an encompassing wave,
And bringing all to love’s resonance.
First, I settle
And then
As if drifting
I am dipped in the liquid of being
And go whole
Into that golden sea,
The light sea
Where there are no beginnings.
–
And in those unfathomed waters
All that was
Is indistinguishable,
All that could be
Is likewise nullified,
All things of form
Answer the call,
Returning home to the source
To be free.
–
Yet when I arise,
When I put on my clothes,
My mind and my body,
I feel the warm nakedness of truth,
A drop of that sea
Lubricating all things
With wonder,
A single infinite drop
Baptising all with its light.
I won’t go into the day save to say it was grim as an overcast sky, hungover and car sick. But now, on a beach polished golden by late afternoon light, two cold beers – my companions, refreshment beading bottle-green glass and glugged so thirstily, the whole of reality is changed, altered.
The wind moves constant through the pines, and unseen birds twitter: Vibrating needles hum a single eternal note.
The tide is in, lapping gently in the push of cool waters. Oystercatchers shrill low over the glistening brine, every wavelet capturing the blinding sun.
Moored sailboats jostle anonymous, swayed by tide, current and breeze, their lanyards chink, chink, chinking, tolling a finger-tapping rhythm, a morse code of freshness.
The wind moves constant through the pines, and unseen birds twitter: Vibrating needles hum a single eternal note.
The sun is on my back like a hug from behind. I look up, and the beach is near deserted. My companions are spent and silent, drunk.
The sunbathers have packed up, leaving but a memory’s shape pressed in the sand. Only a lone young woman remains, sitting on the wall, reading. There is a deep silence inside her, a peace made of the ever-flowing wind.
The wind moves constant through the pines, and unseen birds twitter: Vibrating needles hum a single eternal note.
Behind the woman is the row of trees from which the birds twitter. Their trunk-bodies are sculpted by the air; their faces swept clean; their hair creaking; their needles vibrating with the sound of reality.
I can taste the world, the whole world, brought by the wind and the twittering birds, constant in the fronds of the trees, creaking gently.
The wind moves constant through the pines, and unseen birds twitter: Vibrating needles hum a single eternal note.
I can feel the world, the whole world, called by the wind and the bird’s constant twittering, and the oystercatchers cutting the sunlight from the waves, and the chink, chink chinking of lanyards drumming on aluminium masts.
I know the world, the whole world, found in my broadening heart’s cool waters and the sun’s hug from behind. I know the loving world contained in the constance of silence as the wind moves through the pines and unseen birds twitter; Vibrating needles humming a single eternal note.
I dropped into myself
Settling into stillness,
Falling deeper
And ever deeper
Until I touched the reverent moment
And disappeared.
–
And now I rise
Back into the body,
Up, up, up and up
Into the world,
Wet and frictionless as a new born
As if my slick skin
Were a lung
And could drink
The divine osmosis,
Every molecule freely interchanged,
Undone in form,
Beautiful and borderless.
–
Oh, how warm
Have I come clothed in nakedness,
How touched
I am;
Come home
From home
To home,
As if when I drank from myself
The whole universe
Became a vast and comfortable blanket
That I did not drag
Upon my back
But which bore me
As though a wave of lightest medium
Harnessed me to its being
And brought me surging,
And painted gleaming new.
–
And so,
What thing I am,
What movement in which I move
Is bowed
To lowest bended knee,
And from the eyes
Tears stream
In bountiful gladness,
Lubricating the offering
I offer whole and entirely:
My heart held out
In the palm of my hand
As a gift to you,
My love,
A gift for you.
distilledvoice 