Showing posts with label Rabindranath Tagore. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rabindranath Tagore. Show all posts

Sunday, April 28, 2024

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


Wednesday, February 14, 2024

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!



Friday, December 31, 2021

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
 
 
 
 

Sunday, June 28, 2020

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





Friday, December 4, 2015

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



Thursday, October 8, 2009

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



.

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

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



.

Saturday, October 3, 2009

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



Thursday, September 17, 2009

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


.