Now is the time to open your heart ...

"FIRST OF ALL, ABANDON ANY NOTION that anything you humans do will ultimately destroy me. That is because I am your mother. It is impossible to kill one's mother. You may shoot her a hundred times, but alas, she has already given birth to you. She is your forever. What you are destroying is your own happiness. Your comfort, which I put so much playful effort into creating. Your peace of mind. Your joy.

There is no potion, no poison you can create, that will do anything but rearrange the pattern I have made. And, let me add, you were created in such a way that you can do this. So destruction too is part of the overall design.

The biggest problem is thinking the fate of the world rests on you. It does, and it doesn't. The 'saving' of the planet, as you humans think of it, can be done really easily. All that is required is that everyone becomes as one mind. The mind, actually, of clay, she said, and laughed. Television creates this global mind to some extent, but the programming is so bad.

Then there are the languages people have which have become a completely unnecessary division. There is no need to talk, really. It is something humans started a long time ago - I don't even remember why - and they've clung to it. Clinging to speech they've lost the ability to read one another, to feel one another, to know one another at a glance. Or with a sniff. It is entirely within human capacity to do this.

When you witness the various peace talks that occur on a daily basis somewhere on earth and you see how far everyone is from peace, and how they get no nearer the longer they talk, well, this gives an indication of the problem."

- Alice Walker -

Sometimes ...

Sometimes you don't know you've crossed the line,
until you're already on the other side.

The First Elegy

If I cried out, who
in the hierarchies of angels
would hear me?

And if one of them should suddenly
take me to his heart,
I would perish in the power of his being.
For beauty is but the beginning of terror.
We can barely endure it
and are awed
when it declines to destroy us.

Every angel is terrifying in that way.
So I hold myself back,
and let my scream for help
be swallowed by sobbing.

Oh, to what, then, can we turn
in our need?
Not to an angel. Not to a person.
Animals, perceptive as they are,
notice that we are not really at home
in this world of ours. Perhaps there is
a particular tree we see everyday on the hillside,
or a street we have walked,
or the warped loyalty of a habit
that does not abandon us.

Oh, and night, the night, when wind
hurls the universe at our faces.
For whom is night not there?
Longed for and softly disappointing,
it envelopes each solitary heart.
Is night easier for lovers, who
can hide from their fate in each other?

Do you still not know how little endures?
Fling the nothing you are grasping
out into the spaces we breathe.
Maybe the birds
will feel in their flight
how the air has expanded.

Can you see? Springtimes have needed you.
And there are stars expecting you to notice them.
From out of the past, a wave rises to meet you
the way the strains of a violin
come through an open window
just as you walk by.

As if it were all by design.
But are you the one designing it?
Were you not always distracted by yearning,
as though some lover were about to appear?

Let yourself feel it, that yearning.
It connects you with those
who have sung it through the ages,
sung especially of love unrequited.
Shouldn't this oldest of sufferings
finally bear fruit for us?

Is it not time
to free ourselves from the beloved
even as we, trembling, endure the loving?
As the arrow endures the bowstring's tension
so that, released, it travels farther.

For there is nowhere to remain.

- Rainer Maria Rilke -

The Missing

The bells chime
in their silent tones
Heard by those
who know the missing
Echoing the future
of dreams lost
And recalling memories
unbeknown
Slipping from view
the missing return
Through the veil
to the invisible world
Only to reappear
to the few again when
The bells chime
in their silent tones.

Where Three Roads Meet

- When Creon took over the rule of Thebes I sank back into thankful obscurity and retired to keep company at last with the birds. It was a bird, if you like, who told me the end of the story.
-Tell me, please.
- Do you really want to know?
- You know, I feel it is all I want to know.
- It might go against your grain, Dr Freud.
- Almost everything I have learned has gone against my grain, my friend.
- His end was marvellous. Now there's the thing you didn't grasp.
- Where are you off to? Don't go!
- I'm trying to find the corner of your room, Doctor.
- Why?
- Take me to a corner and I'll show you. Are we there?
- We're facing the French window where you enter.
- And the corner?
- It's here to our right. The other corner is all bookshelves.
- Very well, describe it to me please.
-The corner of my room?
- How many lines meet there?
- How many lines? Three.
- Good. Now describe the directions.
- Two meet at right angles on the horizontal plane and the third makes a right-angled vertical.
- Exactly so.
- Well?
- Well what?
- Aren't you going to explain?
- I would have thought it obvious. It was the third road, the vertical. He took it at last.
- Where to?
- Ah, that's not for me to say. We call it the gods; you may, if you like, Dr Freud, call it 'reality'. The sanction of the gods, the sanction of reality - what's in a name? In any case, it's what you come up against when cornered, and that is when you may begin to know what you are made of and who, really, you are.

- Salley Vickers - p.180-182

Gitanjali 41

"Where does thou stand behind them all, my lover, hiding behind the shadows? They push thee and pass thee by on the dusty road, taking thee for naught. I wait here weary hours spreading my offerings for thee, while passers by come and take my flowers, one by one, and my basket is nearly empty.

The morning time is passed, and the noon. In the shade of evening my eyes are drowsy with sleep. Men going home glance at me and smile and fill me with shame. I sit like a beggar maid, drawing my shirt over my face, and when they ask me, what is it I want, I drop my eyes and answer them not.

Oh, how, indeed, should I answer them that for thee I wait, and that thou have promised to come. How should I utter for shame that for thee I keep my dowry this poverty. Ah, I hug this pride in the secret of my heart.

I sit upon the grass and gaze upon the sky and dream of the sudden splendour of thy coming - all the lights ablaze, golden pennons flying over thy car, and they at the roadside standing agape, when they see thee come down from thy seat to raise me from the dust, and set at thy side this ragged beggar girl a-tremble with shame and pride, like a creeper in a summer breeze.

But time glides on and still no sound of the wheels of thy chariot. Many a procession passes by with noise and shouts and clamour of glory. It is only thou who wouldst stand in the shadow silent and behind them all? And only I who would wait and weep and wear out my heart in vain longing?"

- Rabindranath Tagore -

The Dalai Lama is like a doctor ...

"Many of the great doctors in history have distinguished themselves and come to inspired diagnoses in part by seeing the connectedness of things, the way a problem in the head may effect the performance of the body, or how what you put in your mouth can alter the acid in the stomach. The body is a single organism in which one push here may have a strong effect there. So it is, too, the Dalai Lama says, with the world - and our very concerns about it all are intertwined, impossible to solve separately. It's no good offering people peace, he suggests, if those same people lack food and water; and it's no good offering them food and water if our forests and rivers are polluted. It's no good, even, to clean up our environment if we're still polluted within. In short the solution to all our problems, economic, environmental, political, spiritual, can only be addressed by going back to fundamentals, the change of attitude that can create a change in everything the attitude inspects. Reforms on the surface make no difference whatsoever."

- Pico Iyer - The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama - p.93