Why look for the cause
When the cause is the whole universe
At this very moment,
Karma’s unnumbered strands
Fast in a knot
The shape of reality
Right now!
–
To look for the cause is madness,
When love stands by
Neutral and beneficent,
Allowing the knot
It’s imperfect-perfect life,
Accepting the conundrum
And shining through the unreality of it.
My eyes are closed,
And in that seeing
Waves wash the beach clean.
I can hear them
Arriving,
Surging and falling away.
A salt laden breeze caresses my skin,
My T-shirt flapping gently;
The air is warm as a polished stone
Rounded to a pebble over eons.
Who am I
Who perceives the beach flies,
The waves disintegrating,
The claiming shadow
Beneath the outcrop
Of crumbling strata.
Who am I
On the other end of the world,
Sensing through the body’s
Fine and tangible medium?
Perhaps sensing is a sea-ragged rope,
One end anchored
In the matter
Of things so various,
The multitude names
By which the whole us spliced.
But the other end
Where the mind cannot go,
Where it peters out,
What is that?
If I tug upon that rope,
Draw myself
In the directionless direction
To the seabed of my self,
Who will I find
Dwelling deeper than depth?
Who sees from the ocean of being?
Who is
Where silence is?
Who knows
The creation,
Blessed to my ears,
Broken as wavelets
Rolling over stones,
And saltiness powdery on my skin?
Who is
In this,
Who is?
Instead the ever outward looking
For love
Turn inside yourself
To that which was always there;
Deepest well of formless infinity,
For there dwells life,
A heart-full of life
In abandonment to love,
Beautiful being of love.
–
There seem to be two options:
A movement into mind
And the stories we tell,
That swirl around
As so much fear.
Or the other way,
In the direction of self,
Detached from the fictions
And free
In the formless realms
So easily overlooked.
–
Instead the ever outward looking
For love
Turn inside yourself
To that which was always there;
Deepest well of formless infinity,
For there dwells life,
A heart-full of life
In abandonment to love,
Beautiful being of love.
A breeze strums
The feathers of the Scot’s pine
Towering above my garden,
And a wind chime
Gently interprets
Each gust.
There is a magic in the creak
Of the flexing branch
And the twisting sinews
Of fibrous bark;
An instrument
For the wind’s fulfilment.
Always, a dove coos
When I find the wind-full tree
Of my life
Existing in the silence
Of a tangible happening,
Drawing out the now
From its hiding
Until I am like a finely tuned
Sensing apparatus,
Filled with the sticky movement of sap
And vibrating
With the sweet resonance
Of life’s thrill
Through fronds of waxy needles.
What other life
Could I live
But yours,
The life in you:
Sweetest infinite being.
Is this praise,
To fall into your arms,
To release
Every objectified form
Of its obligation
To fulfil?
For it is surely madness
To look for love
Outside the source of self,
Overlooking the sweetness
For a wearisome search.
Only in you
Is gentle salve,
Only in you
Is satisfaction,
Only in you
Is happiness.
To this, I am devotional
For this great love for you
Is love in me:
There are not two loves,
Not me and not you,
Not two,
For in love
We are one infinite being.
Here in the glistening, twittering light
Of a dewdrop and bird-call morn,
I think back to our meeting
And find I have not left you
Nor feel one increment apart
From the all I found
Inside my heart
And the camaraderie
Of friendship
Couched in being.
I breathe the life
In fresh air,
Close my eyes
And feel the space inside
As I feel the space without.
–
I smile at nothing
Feeling vibrant space,
Feeling being
Feeling the nothing of my self,
And tasting sweetness.
–
Who am I in this
With every idea cast
And separate from my being?
Who am I
In this?
–
I am space
And fresh air
And sweetness.
I am nothing
But being’s spaciousness.
Chittering wrens
Pick from the larder of cones
Clutched in the pine-brush
And absorb the awakening light.
Beneath, I sit and ponder
On the nature of being.
Some would speak of mankind
Separate from reality,
Somehow living above it all.
Yet, I am moved
Upon the turning of the world
In season’s gentle shift
Of early beginnings
And day pushed into night.
Surely this body,
As all walking free,
Feels the thrust of life
In the burst of the bud,
Unopened but profoundly expectant.
Surely all are moved
By the first warm breeze
Tickling the pine needles above.
Who is really alone
When life thrums
Through the body’s instrument,
When the very moon
Sways the water of our moods
And the constitution of our minds,
And new light shines,
Drawing us out
To sit absorbing
Like the first insect
Roused from hibernation’s
Torpid sleep?
I look into your eyes
And find my joy brimming,
For I could fall inside
The clarity of your seeing
And swim free
In nothing,
Buoyant in the being we share.
You told me of a Tuscan life
Picking olives,
A world where obstacles
Had dissolved
And all that evolved
Was the beautifully self
Looking at the same time
Both inward and out.
I tasted the olive of happiness
And lived your life
As my life
Dwelling in kinship
With you,
Where you were nothing but myself
Looking kindly from another perspective.
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.
