making it our own

 

The question is asked, if life’s journey be endless where is its goal? 

The answer is, it is everywhere. 

We are in a palace which has no end, 

but which we have reached. 

By exploring it and extending 

our relationship with it

 we are ever making it more

 and more our own. 

The infant is born in the same universe where lives the adult of ripe mind.

 But its position is not like a schoolboy who has yet to learn his alphabet,

 finding himself in a college class. 

The infant has its own joy of life

 because the world is not a mere road, but a home,

of which it will have more and more as it grows up in wisdom. 

With our road the gain is at the end, 

but with this world of ours the gain is at every step;

 for it is the road and the home in one; 

it leads us on yet gives us shelter.

~ Rabindranath Tagore

 from The Essential Tagore

photo: termite mounds in Australia

by Brian W. Schaller

close your eyes

 

Close your eyes.

Fall in love.

Stay there.

~ Rumi

Image: NASA/Chandra X-Ray Center

Once we dreamt that

we were strangers,

We wake up to find that

we were dear to

each other.

~ Tabindranath Tagore

This story began many years ago as two planets

journeyed from far distant regions to circle 

each other in the light and warmth of the sun.

In such company, 

fears fell away,

protective barriers disolved in the light.

Their essences were revealed in 

the flow of their magma. 

Each saw themselves within the living

core of the other.

What joy!

unending love

I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times…
In life after life, in age after age, forever.
My spellbound heart has made and remade the necklace of songs,
That you take as a gift, wear round your neck in your many forms,
In life after life, in age after age, forever.

Whenever I hear old chronicles of love, its age-old pain,
Its ancient tale of being apart or together.
As I stare on and on into the past, in the end you emerge,
Clad in the light of a pole-star piercing the darkness of time:
You become an image of what is remembered forever.

You and I have floated here on the stream that brings from the fount.
At the heart of time, love of one for another.
We have played along side millions of lovers, shared in the same
Shy sweetness of meeting, the same distressful tears of farewell-
Old love but in shapes that renew and renew forever.

Today it is heaped at your feet, it has found its end in you
The love of all man’s days both past and forever:
Universal joy, universal sorrow, universal life.
The memories of all loves merging with this one love of ours –
And the songs of every poet past and forever.

 

 

 

~  Rabindranath Tagore

from Selected Poems

 

 

 

 

not yet discouraged

By plucking her petals, you do not

gather the beauty of the flower.

Clouds come floating into my life,

no longer to carry rain or usher storm,

but to add colour to my sunset sky.

Death is not extinguishing the light;

it is only putting out the lamp

because the dawn has come.

Do not say, ‘It is morning,’

and dismiss it with a name of yesterday.

See it for the first time

as a newborn child that has no name.

Don’t limit a child to your own learning,

for he was born in another time.

Emancipation from the bondage of the soil

is no freedom for the tree.

Every child comes with the message

that God is not yet discouraged of man.

Every difficulty slurred over

will be a ghost to disturb your repose later on.

Everything comes to us that belongs to us

if we create the capacity to receive it.

Faith is the bird that feels the light

when the dawn is still dark.

From the solemn gloom of the temple

children run out to sit in the dust,

God watches them play and forgets the priest.

I have become my own version of an optimist.

If I can’t make it through one door,

I’ll go through another door - or I’ll make a door.

Something terrific will come

no matter how dark the present.

~ Rabindranath Tagore

a star on the horizon of my heart

Ever in my life have I sought thee with my songs. 

It was they who led me from door to door, 

and with them have I felt about me, 

searching and touching my world.

It was my songs that taught me all the lessons I ever learnt; 

they showed me secret paths, 

they brought before my sight many a star on the horizon of my heart.

They guided me all the day long to the mysteries of the country of pleasure and pain, 

and, at last, 

to what palace gate have they brought me in the evening at the end of my journey?

~ Rabindranath Tagore

art by van gogh

The Gardener

...
No, my friends, I shall never be an
ascetic, whatever you may say.
I shall never be an ascetic if she
does not take the vow with me.
It is my firm resolve that if I
cannot find a shady shelter and a
companion for my penance, I shall
never become an ascetic.
...
No, my friends, I shall never leave
my hearth and home, and retire into
the forest's solitude, if rings no merry
laughter in its echoing shade and if
the end of no saffron mantle flutters
in the wind; if its silence is not
deepened by soft whispers.
I shall never be an ascetic.
...
~ Rabindranath Tagore


.

On the Nature of Love

...

The night is black and the forest has no end;
a million people thread it in a million ways.

We have trysts to keep in the darkness, but where

or with whom -- of that we are unaware.

But we have this faith -- that a lifetime's bliss

will appear any minute, with a smile upon its lips.

Scents, touches, sounds, snatches of songs

brush us, pass us, give us delightful shocks.

Then peradventure there's a flash of lightning:

whomever I see that instant I fall in love with.

I call that person and cry: 'This life is blest!

For your sake such miles have I traversed!'

All those others who came close and moved off

in the darkness -- I don't know if they exist or not.

...

~ Rabindranath Tagore

.

I seem to have loved you…In life after life, in age after age, forever.

.
I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times…
In life after life, in age after age, forever.
My spellbound heart has made and remade the necklace of songs,
That you take as a gift, wear round your neck in your many forms,
In life after life, in age after age, forever.

Whenever I hear old chronicles of love, it's age-old pain,
It's ancient tale of being apart or together.
As I stare on and on into the past, in the end you emerge,
Clad in the light of a pole-star piercing the darkness of time:
You become an image of what is remembered forever.

You and I have floated here on the stream that brings from the fount.
At the heart of time, love of one for another.
We have played along side millions of lovers, shared in the same
Shy sweetness of meeting, the same distressful tears of farewell-
Old love but in shapes that renew and renew forever.

Today it is heaped at your feet, it has found its end in you
The love of all man’s days both past and forever:
Universal joy, universal sorrow, universal life.
The memories of all loves merging with this one love of ours – 

And the songs of every poet past and forever. 

~ Rabindranath Tagore


. 

Come to my garden walk, my love

...

Come to my garden walk, my love. Pass by the fervid flowers that

press themselves on your sight. Pass them by, stopping at some

chance joy, which like a sudden wonder of sunset illumines, yet

eludes.

...

For a lover's gift is shy, it never tells its name, it flits

across the shade, spreading a shiver of joy along the dust.

Overtake it or miss it forever. But a gift that can be

grasped is merely a frail flower, or a lamp with a flame that will

flicker.

...

Rabindranath Tagore

.