No matter how the world evolves,
Whether true to life
Or spiralling in madness,
The life principle
Remains pure and untouched.
–
Invest your life
In its sweetness
And disregard the rest,
However seductive and convincing,
For only in love
–
Is sweetness manifest.
And if the world descends
Wholly into madness,
Still, life’s truth
Holds fast.
–
And if all obey the call to anger,
But your mind left last
And abiding in love,
It will not matter
And will surely be enough.
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.
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Withdrawn from the world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.
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.
You are the sun
Lighting the whole universe.
Through your eyes
And in your seeing
Is the illumination of it all.
You stand at its centre
Looking out:
The very self you seek.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
distilledvoice 