The sea will be the sea, whatever the drop's philosophy...
Your tears spill a river
connecting all of the oceans of woe
so that they may together wash clean this blood soiled earth.
Your tears are the Divine within humanity
crying for ItSelf, mourning what we have forgotten
and reminding us of who we are.
Will you let yourself drown in these tears,
or will you sail on them towards greater wholeness?
My home has no address; my tracks leave no trace.
I am neither body nor soul--What can I say?
I belong to the Soul of the Beloved.
I have laid all "twos" aside:
this world and that world are one.
I search for One, I recognize One,
I see One clearly, and I call the name of the One.
That unnameable One, the breath of the breath,
is the first and last, the outside and the inside.
I identify no one except by "O That... O This!"
I am drunk on the cup of Love:
here-now and everywhere-all-time have vanished.
I can't handle any business except celebration.
If I spend an instant without you,
that instant makes my whole life seem worthless.
If I can win one moment with you,
I will crush both worlds under my feet
as I dance in joy forever.
My Beloved O Shams of Tabrizi
I am living permanently intoxicated:
I have no more tales to tell
except ones about drunkness and revelry.
Who is this king
that forms another king out of the ground,
who for the sake of two beggars
makes himself a beggar?
Who is this with his hand out
saying,
Please, give just a little,
so I can give you a kingdom.
He heals. He enlivens.
He tells the water to boil
and the steam to fade into air.
He makes this dying world eternal.
His greatest alchemy
is how he undoes the binding
that keeps love from breathing deep.
He loosens the chest.
With no tool he fashions where we live.
Do not grieve for your rusty, iron heart.
He will polish it to a steel mirror.
And as you are being lowered into the ground,
closed away from friends, don’t cry.
He turns the ants and the snakes
into beautiful new companions.
Every second he changes cruelty
to loyal friendship.
Remember the proverb, Eat the grapes.
Do not keep talking about the garden.
Eat the grapes.
From a rough stone ledge
come a hundred marble fountains.
Out of unconditioned emptiness
comes this planet with all its qualities.
Lakewater over there.
Out of one huge NO
comes a chorus of yeses.
Rivers of light flow from human eyes,
and consider your ears, where language
alchemizes into amber.
He gives the soul a house,
then another and another.
He descends into dirt
and makes it majesty.
Be silent now.
Say fewer and fewer praise poems.
Let yourself become living poetry
Blossoms blowing past my windows all day covering the walkway with white petals. Rushing water in the creek, dancing light rippling and swirling. Two mourning doves walking in single file across the roof, bobbing as they go. An ant traversing a rusty pipe. A wave of sadness passing through the bodymind. Little green leaves beginning to appear on the first bushes and trees. A single finger poking the computer keys, words spilling out onto the liquid screen. All of it one whole unfathomable happening—ownerless, borderless, seamless.
Wars being fought, Gregorian chants being sung, the joy and the sorrow and the way it all goes together and can’t be pulled apart—all of it a fluid momentary creation, undeniably real and yet completely unpindownable, unresolvable, ungraspable.
Is it possible to wake up NOW to the immediacy, the aliveness, the wonder of this ever-changing moment, just as it is, without needing to label and categorize and explain it in any way at all? Or maybe just to SEE how this labeling, categorizing and explaining happens by itself, and maybe to see it without being pulled in and hypnotized by it, and maybe even to notice that this conceptualizing and storytelling is itself an unresolvable, ungraspable waving of the shoreless ocean, like the ant traversing the rusty pipe and the blossoms blowing past the windows like snow and the single finger tapping the keys and the little black shapes called words spilling out and opening up in you.
Where is the boundary between inside and outside, between me and you, between joy and sorrow, between one moment and the next?
I lost interest in truth long ago.
All dreams of enlightenment
and its absence
Have crumbled into birdsong
Morning walks down untrodden paths
And the poetry of silence.
Truth can only be lived,
Never grasped.
Be miraculous, each day.
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