wellbeing

Two Men Of The World

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One man

Is an individual,

He walks in the world

As a separate entity – of course,

Carrying his loneliness

Like an ever heavy weight.

There are things in the world,

Things that might draw

Attention from that dark void

In which he must not look.

And so he desires those things

For the momentary peace

He receives in their procurement.

–

Another man

Is joined to the world,

All the things he sees

Arrive to him

And in him,

Endlessly passing

And dying away:

Yet he alone

Never dies away,

For his watching

Is container for the world

And all within.

And if there is loneliness

It is brief as the seasons,

And if there is a void

He does not fear it,

Accepting all within the bounds of himself.

When The Noise Stops

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When the noise stops,

When the machine of thinking thoughts

Slows to a lull

Or is brought silent

In a moment of

Concentration.

When the worker sets down his tools,

Rests a while,

Leaves his ideas alone,

Then,

In this pause,

This relaxation,

The love that was always there

Is seemingly exposed,

And Life,

Beautiful and whole

Is known in fullness.

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.

Where Sanctuary?

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Where sanctuary?

In thought’s fickle materialisation?

In the world of passing things,

Ever dematerialising,

Always dying and slinking away?

In emotion’s slavery

To the fickle thought?

–

Where else is there?

–

Where else

But the nothing,

The dimensionless no-thing,

The substance-less non-realm

Of the self.

Where else but the self’s

Void-less void,

Thing-less thing,

The self’s changeless being,

Un-conceived

And un-manifest.

–

Where sanctuary?

–

Only in nothing:

Foundation found

Only in the

Self’s foundationlessness.

Do Not Fear

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The heart says

Do not fear

Even if the danger seems imminent.

You must act

For the body’s safety

And as the conscience decrees,

Of course and most wisely,

But not from fear,

Not from an idea of future doom.

For the future is unborn,

Made of imaginings

And infinite potential

And all the combined karmas of the world:

And who can know that conundrum?

The now, however, is filled with love

And made of love

And witnessed by love,

And so too are all possible futures

Despite the dark veneers

That might come to pass.

And surely these dark illusions

Will tempt and prod

And precipitate

Any knot of fear held within the body,

Inviting the mind

To follow their bitter prospectuses

To a seemingly pitiful demise.

And perhaps you will be ensnared,

Caught fearful and flapping,

Making up facts

To fit the worry

You’ve whisked into a maelstrom.

Yet, you might pause

When fear offers its seductive hand,

Pause in the precious moment,

A moment with no past

Or combined future,

Just the here

In being and beauty –

A beauty never once touched

By fear’s tarnishing word.

And in this quite,

The heart’s voice

Offers silence

In a hundred multiples of love,

And fills the dawn

And itself in one

As love is unveiled

In its entirety,

Ever unfettered,

Never annulled

And never ever diminished.

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.

Love Breathes

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Love breathes

Its breath

Upon the suffering of man:

A sweat breath

Upon the knots of thought

And tangled emotion;

A fragrant breath

Laced with the ingredients of freedom

And possibilities infinite.

To the prison of locked thought

And tight-chested constriction,

Love melts itself

And all

Into beautiful lubrication,

Absorbs what is not light

Into light’s overwhelming union,

Consumes illusion

And false belief,

Turns mind

To truth,

And flowers in itself

As oneness wholly felt.

The Nectar

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Already by 10 AM the sun is merciless

But the birds are twittering

Under the shade of leaves,

Cool in the undergrowth.

Sounds arrive in the garden

Brought by a breeze:

Cars swishing in the distance,

Workers on scaffolding

Laying tiles,

A child cries out

After its mother:

Just everyday happenings

Of a suburb in a town in the summer.

As I sit, hearing the world,

Brought the waft of honeysuckle

And jasmine flowers

Generous and comforting,

I realise

That I am here

And I am now,

And that life is perfect

As the buddlier flowers’

Drooping purple spires

On which the bees drink thirstily,

And butterflies flit,

Their tongues unfurled

Tasting the world,

Sipping at the nectar of it.