beauty

The Moment Is Fresh

~ distilledvoice ~ 2 Comments

The moment is fresh

As dew-lubricated leaves

New from the womb of the world.

Oh, this sweet, empty moment,

Virgin as the first born thing,

How can I describe your unresistance

With but the clumsy word?

For you are nothing:

An endless, friendly nothing

Holding me in your arms,

Tender as the loving heart

Welcoming all that is.

You, who is no you,

You, who is everything

Seen and unseen,

Everything unformed or dwelling unchanging

In that which is not yet made.

–

The moment is fresh

And alive with infinite spirit,

And while the dogged mists and moods

Of false thoughts,

So seemingly bonded and glued,

Drift upon me from time to time,

Obscuring your brilliance,

They too, are born in you,

They too, arise in the light

Of awareness’s presence,

Taking their life

From the very light that you are.

Who Is The Leaf?

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Leaves drawn of their vigour

Yellow in the chill light

And flutter down

With each stroke of the breeze.

–

Dying is a beautiful thing

When life’s sap is safe,

Eternal

In the trunk and the root,

–

Withdrawn from the world

Like an in-breath

Or tide, or season’s

Planetary oscillation.

–

Who grieves the leaf

Its turning or its loosening

On the branch,

Or its earthward mulch

–

Settling into new form?

No one grieves,

For the life in the leaf

Is not gone

–

But hides behind bark,

Gathers against the darkness

Of the shrinking wintery days,

And awaits the pull of the sun

–

And the soil’s warming

And the osmotic urge

To express itself again,

And again, and yet again.

The Artist’s Way

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Immersed in the landscape

Or fixated on an object,

This artist does not paint

What his eyes see,

Rather, he absorbs the sight,

Places it

In the cauldron of his being

Where life seeps

As the language of the soul.

It is this he paints,

This aliveness

Mirroring landscape or thing:

His spirit

And God’s spirit

Dancing as one

Infinite being,

And reaching out

To his poised fingers,

To transform the inanimate

And deliver magic on the canvas,

Every stroke of his brush imbued

With the inward spirit he feels.

All Things Dissolve

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In love

All things dissolve,

Coming to rest

In the primary nature

Of being.

–

All that is apparent:

The forms in the world

Are melted

In love’s crucible,

Love’s home-bound heart.

–

There is nothing insoluble,

No behaviour

Or state of mind

That can stand

The yolk of the sun.

–

Love is indomitable

Yet gentle as warmth

Passed from father to son.

It encompasses all,

Leaves nothing

–

But tenderness, acceptance

And a wealth of connectedness.

It is the foundation we share,

All of us equally beneficent

And wholly unified.

The Morning Is Crisp

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On the first crisp autumn day

Dazzling light from the low sun

Guilds the forest,

Burnishing every leaf.

In hollows

There is the shadow of frost,

Grasses jacketed stiff,

But in the open

The sky is clean

And the distant rolling hills

Seem magnified.

After coffee sipped

With the sun’s hand on my back,

I amble through the farm shop

Selecting delicious items,

And while paying for my goods

A conversation spontaneously happens.

Like two old friends

Exchanging intimacies,

The shop assistant speaks

And I listen.

We share our truth

And as I look into their eyes

I see wisdom

Deep in their seeing,

As if the autumn light

Came from understanding

As much as from the sun outside,

And I am warmed

And touched by the moment

And brought wholly into the now,

An openness without resistance.

Picture

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In the floor to ceiling window

Opens the picture:

The river

Glassy with the sky,

Smudged with autumn morning,

A pale blue glaze

In which mists cling

And spiral,

Calling back

The chill night

That stilled the dew drops

To a crust

And freed the tattered leaves

To mulch beneath the trees,

Sending out

A sweet and heady breath

Of spores

As life withdraws,

Releasing jealousies,

Indifferent now

To the russet matter

Discarded.

The Blazing Heart

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Perhaps you forgot

The searing light,

Buried it

In low-mood thoughts

And reason

As heavy as chains.

–

Oh, yes, you say,

Give me the nicotine of thought

And worldly misadventure.

Let me overlook my overlooking,

Let me ignore my ignorance

And dwell outside myself

In a swirl of worries,

While the light is left unacknowledged.

–

Instead,

Remember, not the cold intellectual light

And the optics of the brain,

But the warm body of love

Inside yourself.

–

Remember the needless state

Where the heart floats

On ethers,

And worries are nothings,

Neither fears, nor even yours.

–

Remember the you

Before the you

Who carried the weight of living,

The unfettered you

Buoyant and watching,

Alive in the now

From which all springs forth.

–

Remember the sun of love

Blazing in your heart,

Remember remembering,

And the knowing

That the heart has always, always burned,

Is never dulled

And will never ever grow dark.

Never Too Late

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Never too late to acknowledge love:

The love that beats in every heart,

Sustains every self,

Brims ever full

And ever beautiful:

There in ignorance

Or in knowing,

Binding us to the world,

Bringing us the world,

Allowing us to be

As we are,

Free in the conundrum

And wonder of it all.

Untethered

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I hold my opinion

As you hold yours:

A collection of ideas

Raised on the twists and turns of our lives:

Individually accrued

And shaped into a weave

That we wear like coat:

A personality,

An identity,

Who we are, perhaps?

–

Can you be loose

With the luggage of the self,

This weightless stuff

Made of weightless thoughts

And thoughts amalgamated into belief?

–

How real it appears

How solid it seems

As if the weightless thoughts

And invisible ideas

Made something tangible,

A thing, actually there in the world.

–

Better to be loose

With opinion.

Better to see it

As merely a point of view

Among eight billion,

No more or less valid

Than the next,

No more or less serious

Or stupid or laughable.

–

Better it drift off in the wind

Better it evaporate under sunshine

Better it be like a friendly shadow

Whom you love

Despite its ignorance.

–

Be free unimportant opinion

Who I held so close,

Be free

Here in me,

For I see you small

And light and fragrant

And harmless,

A nothing who might alight

My indifference

And flit there unworried,

Restful for being wholly untethered.