the last watch

At the high-tide of night, when the first breath of dawn came upon the wind, the Forerunner, he who calls himself echo to a voice yet unheard, left his bed-chamber and ascended to the roof of his house.  Long he stood and looked down upon the slumbering city.  Then he raised his head, and even as if the sleepless spirits of all those asleep had gathered around him, he opened his lips and spoke, and he said:

“My friends and my neighbors and you who daily pass my gate, I would speak to you in your sleep, and in the valley of your dreams I would walk naked and unrestrained;  far heedless are your waking hours and deaf are your sound-burdened ears.

“Long did I love you and overmuch.

“I love the one among you as though he were all, and all as if you were one.  And in the spring of my heart I sang in your gardens, and in the summer of my heart I watched at your threshing-floors.

“Yea, I loved you all, the giant and the pygmy, the leper and the anointed, and him who gropes in the dark even as him who dances his days upon the mountains.

“You, the strong, have I loved, though the marks of your iron hoofs are yet upon my flesh; and you the weak, though you have drained my faith and wasted my patience.

“You, the rich have I loved, while bitter was your honey to my mouth; and you the poor, though you knew my empty-handed shame.

“You the poet with the borrowed lute and blind fingers, you have I loved in self indulgence; and you the scholar, ever gathering rotted shrouds in potters’ fields.

“You the priest I have loved, who sit in the silences of yesterday questioning the fate of my tomorrow; and you the worshipers of gods the images of your own desires.

“You the thirsting woman whose cup is ever full, I have loved you in understanding; and you the woman of restless nights, you too I have loved in pity.

“You the talkative have I loved, saying, ‘Life hath much to say’; and you the dumb have I loved, whispering to myself, ‘Says he not in silence that which I fain would hear in words?’

“And you the judge and the critic, I have loved also; yet when you have seen me crucified, you said, ‘He bleeds rhythmically, and the pattern his blood makes upon his white skin is beautiful to behold.’

“Yea, I have loved you all, the young and the old, the trembling reed and the oak.

“But alas! It was the over-abundance of my heart that turned you from me.  You would drink love from a cup, but not from a surging river.  You would hear love’s faint murmur, but when love shouts you would muffle your ears.

“And because I have loved you all you have said, ‘Too soft and yielding is his heart, and too undiscerning is his path.  It is the love of a needy one, who picks crumbs even as he sits at kingly feasts.  And it is the love of a weakling, for the strong loves only the strong.’

“And because I have loved you overmuch you have said, ‘It is but the love of a blind man who knows not the beauty of one nor the ugliness of another.  And it is the love of the tasteless who drinks vinegar even as wine. And it is the love of the impertinent and the overweening, for what stranger could be our mother and father and sister and brother?

“This you have said, and more.  For often in the marketplace you pointed your fingers at me and said mockingly, ‘There goes the ageless one, the man without season, who at the moon hour plays games with our children and at eventide sits with our elders and assumes wisdom and understanding.’

“And I said ‘I will love them more.  Aye, even more.  I will hide my love with seeming to hate, and disguise my tenderness as bitterness. I will wear an iron mask, and only when armed and mailed shall I seek them.’

“Then I laid a heavy hand upon your bruises, and like a tempest in the night I thundered in your ears.

“From the housetop I proclaimed you hypocrites, Pharisees, tricksters, false and empty earth-bubbles.

“The short-sighted among you I cursed for blind bats, and those too near the earth I likened to soulless moles.

“The eloquent I pronounced fork-tongued, the silent, stone-lipped, and the simple and artless I called the dead never weary of death.

“The seekers after world knowledge I condemned as offenders of the holy spirit and those who would naught but the spirit I branded as hunters of shadows who cast their nets in flat waters and catch but their own images.

“Thus with my lips have I denounced you, while my heart, bleeding within me, called you tender names.

“It was love lashed by its own self that spoke.  It was pride half slain that fluttered in the dust.  It was my hunger for your love that raged from the housetop, while my own love, kneeling in silence, prayed your forgiveness.

“But behold a miracle!

“It was my disguise that opened your eyes, and my seeming to hate that woke your hearts.

“And now you love me.

“You love the swords that stride you and the arrows that crave your breast.  For it comforts you to be wounded and only when you drink of your own blood can you be intoxicated.

“Like moths that seek destruction in the flame you gather daily in my garden: and with faces uplifted and eyes enchanted you watch me tear the fabric of your days.  And in whispers you say the one to the other, ‘He sees with the light of God.  He speaks like the prophets of old.  He unveils our souls and unlocks our hearts, and like the eagle that knows the way of foxes he knows our ways.’

“Aye, in truth, I know your ways, but only as an eagle knows the ways of his fledglings.  And I fain would disclose my secret.  Yet in my need for your nearness I feign remoteness, and in fear of the ebb-tide of your love I guard the floodgates of my love.”

After saying these things the Forerunner covered his face with his hands and wept bitterly.  For he know in his heart that love humiliated in its nakedness is greater that love that seeks triumph in disguise; and he was ashamed.

But suddenly he raised his head, and like one waking from sleep he outstretched his arms and said, “Night is over, and we children of the night must die when dawn comes leaping upon the hills; and out of our ashes a mightier love shall rise.  And it shall laugh in the sun, and it shall be deathless.”

~ Kahlil Gibran

from Poems, Parables and Drawings

like two negative numbers multiplied by rain

Lie down, you are horizontal.

Stand up, you are not.

I wanted my fate to be human.

Like a perfume

that does not choose the direction it travels,

that cannot be straight or crooked, kept out or kept.

Yes, No, Or

—a day, a life, slips through them,

taking off the third skin,

taking off the fourth.

And the logic of shoes becomes at last simple,

an animal question, scuffing.

Old shoes, old roads—

the questions keep being new ones.

Like two negative numbers multiplied by rain

into oranges and olives.

~ Jane Hirshfield

from Poetry Magazine

unlabeled

Like the small hole by the path-side something lives in,

in me are lives I do not know the names of,

nor the fates of,

nor the hungers of or what they eat.

They eat of me.

Of small and blemished apples in low fields of me

whose rocky streams and droughts I do not drink.

And in my streets—the narrow ones,

unlabeled on the self-map—

they follow stairs down music ears can’t follow,

and in my tongue borrowed by darkness,

in hours uncounted by the self-clock,

they speak in restless syllables of other losses, other loves.

There too have been the hard extinctions,

missing birds once feasted on and feasting.

There too must be machines

like loud ideas with tungsten bits that grind the day.

A few escape. A mercy.

They leave behind

small holes that something unweighed by the self-scale lives in.

~ Jane Hirshfield

found at poetry foundation

illness or invitation

~ Jeff Foster

meditation on death

Nothing retains its form; new shapes from old.

Nature, the great inventor, ceaselessly

contrives. In all creation, be assured,

there is no death—no death, but only change

and innovation; what we people call birth

is but a different new beginning; death

is but to cease to be the same. Perhaps

this may have moved to that and that to this,

yet still the sum of things remains the same.

~Pythagoras

Ovid, Metamorphoses

translation by A.D. Melville

interval

Instantaneous architectures

hanging over a pause,

apparitions neither named

nor thought, wind-forms,

insubstantial as time

and, like time, dissolved.

Made of time, they are not time;

they are the cleft, the interstice,

the brief vertigo of between

where the diaphanous flower opens:

high on its stalk of a reflection

it vanishes as it turns.

Never touched, the clarities

seen with the eyes closed:

transparent birth

and the crystalline fall

in the instant of this instant

that forever is still here.

Outside the window, the desolate

rooftops and the hurrying clouds.

The day goes out, the city

lights up, remote and near.

Weightless hour. I breathe

the moment, empty and eternal.

~ Octavio Paz

translation by Eliot Weinberger

with thanks again to growing-orbits

the ant

The ant moves on his tiny Sephardic feet.

The flute is always glad to repeat the same note.

The ocean rejoices in its dusky mansion.

Often bears are piled up close to each other.

In their world it’s just one hump after another.

It’s like looking at piles of many melons.

You and I have spent so many hours working.

We have paid dearly for the life we have.

It’s all right if we do nothing tonight.

I am so much in love with mournful music

That I don’t bother to look for violinists.

The aging peepers satisfy me for hours.

I love to see the fiddlers tuning up their old fiddles,

And the singer urging the low notes to come.

I saw her trying to keep the dawn from breaking.

You and I have worked hard for the life we have.

But we love to remember the way the soul leaps

Over and over into the lonely heavens.

~ Robert Bly

Salk and Krishnamurti

~ J. Krishnamurti and Jonas Salk

a blessing

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,

Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.

And the eyes of those two Indian ponies

Darken with kindness.

They have come gladly out of the willows

To welcome my friend and me.

We step over the barbed wire into the pasture

Where they have been grazing all day, alone.

They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness 

That we have come.

They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.

There is no loneliness like theirs. 

At home once more,

They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness. 

I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,

For she has walked over to me 

And nuzzled my left hand. 

She is black and white,

Her mane falls wild on her forehead,

And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear

That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.

Suddenly I realize

That if I stepped out of my body I would break

Into blossom.

~ James Wright

from Above the River: The Complete Poems and selected Prose

death of the pretense

I was speaking recently with a woman who was planning her own suicide. She had spent the past few weeks sorting out her finances, paying off her debts, and trying to find foster parents for her young daughter, who would be left motherless after she killed herself. So many people had tried to intervene, but her mind was made up. She was definitely going to die. She had been threatening it for years, but finally it was coming true.

Her friends and family were starting to panic. I agreed to speak with her.

"That's it. I'm done here. My time on earth is over", she told me, point blank, at the start of our one-to-one session. Everything had become such a burden to her - her job, her so-called-friends, her failed relationships, her own brilliant but overactive mind, even her beloved daughter. It was all just too much. She was in so much pain, totally drained, fed up and exhausted from trying to help everybody all the time, and never getting anything back. She was the one who gave everything to everyone, but who ever gave anything to her? Where was gratitude? Where was love? Even her young daughter was just "take-take-take" - her demands were incessant. The only way out of this hell was death. Suicide was the logical solution to the problem of living. Her life insurance policy would be generous to her bereaved family.

I let her talk and talk. She had a lot to say, and I said very little. I simply got on her side, saw and felt things the way she did, allowed her to experience what she was experiencing, and allowed her experience to become mine, intimately so. It was easy, since I have known well that place of total exhaustion, that place where "I've been trying so hard to save others and have received nothing back", that desperation to die (or at least to end the burden of living), and also the sense of guilt and terrible sadness that arises from imagining loved ones trying to go on without me.

I stayed close. I did not try to play 'spiritual teacher', 'expert on suicide prevention' or even 'therapist'. I certainly did not lecture her about nonduality, the absence of the self, the perfect perfection of perfect awareness, or the non-existence of the 'I'. We did not get into intellectual discussions about the Absolute and the Relative, the illusion of free will or the ins and outs of Oneness. I did not try to fix her, to mend her, or even to 'save' her. I simply listened to her. I wanted to learn from her, not teach her or feed her new beliefs. What was it like, exactly where she was, right now?

I joined the 'Our Lives Are Exhausting And We Want To Be Free From It All' Club. We were the exhausted ones, the unloved ones, the ones who nobody appreciated, the ugly ones, the overweight ones, the ones on the verge of collapse, the ones who wanted to die. The ones who nobody understood. I wonder if anyone had ever truly met her there before? I wondered if everyone she had talked to over the years about her desire to die - therapists, friends, family - had just been trying to save her, to fix her, to get her to stay alive and live in the old way, rather than meeting her in her pain and desperation and validating her present-moment experience. Had anyone ever truly met her? Or had they been driven away by her self-pity and anger, or perhaps their own discomfort and frustrated desires to help?

We talked for about three hours. The more we talked, the more I simply stood in her shoes, listening and seeing things from her perspective, being with her without trying to fix her or make her wrong or even right, the more she relaxed and opened up about her true longings and hidden dreams and desires. What became clear was this: Secretly, she did not want to die at all. She knew, deep down, that who she truly is - consciousness itself - cannot die. She knew that only the false can die. Only an image of herself can die. Only dreams can die.

What she really longed for was not physical death, not the death of the body, not the end of breathing, not the cessation of the heartbeat, but the death of the false self, the death of the pretense, the death of falseness and inauthenticity. The second-hand, limited 'self' she was pretending to be - the Real Estate queen, the selfless giver, the one who 'fit in' with others, the brilliant one with the "16 track mind" as she put it - was utterly false. Her life as it was playing itself out was suffocating her, and until this point, she had only seen death, and foster homes, and life insurance policies, and psychological escape, as the solution.

It soon became clear that this woman, although 'dying' on the outside, had a rich, creative inner life that had simply never been given expression. On the inside, she was so very alive, so open to life, so sensitive to everything around her, so "wide angle" as she put it, so "connected to everything and everyone". She was a force of nature, a wild and free spirit that had totally limited itself over the years, constrained itself to 'fit in' to some second-hand idea of what is normal, or right, or proper, or true. She had been living "the wrong life", so to speak, a dead and deadening life, a life of money and numbers and predictability, and it was crushing this inner explorer, this adventurer, this poet, this visionary, this seer, this spiritual seeker, this big-hearted pilgrim that she was.

The limited self longed to die, and the "Big Self" as she put it, longed to break free. And although this is not my language (I rarely talk about Big Self or Being Aligned With The Universe), I knew that to truly meet her, I had to get into her world, into her language, and stay there, and not flinch for one moment.

The more she felt heard and understood, the more she was met without judgement, the more she relaxed, and the more she started to talk openly about her secret longing to travel, to explore, to ride out into the unknown without a map. She talked with increasing passion about those times in the past where she had felt free and alive and unburdened. There was a longing to return to that simplicity. There was a fire in her, a raging furnace of love that had been suffocated all those years in her attempts to 'fit in'.

Her suicidal depression had really been a signpost to life! The pain of life-suffocation had appeared to her as the raging desire for death. But it was not really the desire for death, was it? It was the desire for life! For more life! She longed to live, to really live, to no longer suffocate under the weight of the false image. Only one who longed to live could experience such an overwhelming urge to die. She longed with every cell of her body to end the pretense and the falseness and half-lived dreams and to open up to life in all its rawness and beauty - not to die, not to die, but to live in a real way.

What would real, fearless living look like? She had a brilliant mind, and a wide-open heart, all of which had been suffocated and wasted in the business of Real Estate. We started to explore the very realistic possibility of her selling her house and setting off into the unknown with her beloved daughter ("my angel, sent from heaven"). She had always longed to travel to New Zealand, to work there, to build a life there, to live a more simple and truthful existence there, and to expose her daughter to soul-enriching people and landscapes and possibilities. Could her dream become a reality? Was that possible?

She loved her little daughter so much, that was clear. She wanted her daughter to live and flourish and learn truth, that was clear. If she were to put her daughter into a foster home and then kill herself - which had been her plan for years, up until now - she would be teaching limitation to the one she loved more than anything. She would teach something false, something untrue. She would teach closing-off to possibility rather opening up. She would teach death, not life. She would not be teaching the deep truth of herself.

Suicide would be a false teaching, a false way of living and not living, and she knew this in the very depths of her being.

If she did not kill herself, if she let the body live, if instead she killed this inauthentic self, and stopped pretending to be the one she was not, and left this job and this life that was crushing her spirit, and set off into the unknown, and open up to the mysteries of the universe, she may finally become the mother (and sister, and daughter, and friend, and lover) she always longed to be - the one who taught and lived fearlessness, and realness, and life, and never-giving-up, even when exhausted. She would no longer be the 'exhausted one longing for freedom from all responsibility'. She would be totally, completely, unbelievably responsible in the full sense of the word - able to respond authentically to life, to herself, to her daughter. Able to answer the call that she had been denying for so long.

It was disregarding life's call that had hurt so much over the years. Life will not be silenced. The longing for death, the certainty of suicide, was really life screaming at her one last time. "LIVE! LIVE!"

Would she listen to its scream, now, at the point where everything was nearly lost?

Suddenly, everything became so clear. There was no longer any choice. She knew what to do. She knew what life was telling her. She had always known. Yes, she was going to kill herself... but not in the way the mind had imagined. She was going to kill her old self, her limited self, her false self. That was the real suicide! That was the call of life! She was going to break up with a life that had become meaningless, empty, and most importantly not right for her and her loved ones - a life that had turned her into something she couldn't bear - and set out into the unknown, with her beloved daughter, their hearts wide open to possibility. This was not a mental decision. This was not a conclusion based on fear. This was total relief. This was sinking into the deep truth of herself. This was a deep honoring of life. This was deep rest.

Her brilliant 'mind' had only been able to conclude 'death'. It had thought there was a choice between 'life' and 'death', and it had chosen 'death'. But what did it know? The truth of her being was saying only one thing: LIVE. The mind would never understand this.

There was no choice but to live.

**

The following morning, I learnt that her adventure had already begun. She was already finding herself boxing things away, making arrangements, selling unwanted possessions, preparing for a new life, a life of freedom and possibility and newness. She was no longer preparing for death, but for more life. It was still suicide, but a divine kind of suicide - the suicide of the false, by the false. She, however, had so much to do, so many plans to make, so much to sort out - much like before - but now she was no longer exhausted, no longer depressed by it all, since finally all of her 'doing' was truthful - she was doing what she loved, and she was no longer waiting for others to 'give back' to her.

Her relationship with her daughter had shifted overnight. It had become clear: her daughter was not - and had never been - an annoying "block" to her freedom, a drain on her energies, a reason for her suicide. Her daughter was her companion, her fellow traveler, part of this divine suicide! Her daughter was no longer "getting in the way" of the life she longed for - she was now part of that very life. It was no longer "my life" versus "her life" - there was simply life. This life. Our life.

I had not taught this woman anything. I had not really 'done' anything at all. I have no clever psychological theories. I had simply listened deeply to her, reminding her of what she had always known, reflecting her own deep truth back at her, so she could actually hear it for once. Out of devastation, out of total breakdown, her truth had been given the space to emerge.

It's interesting that the word "depressed" is spoken phonetically as "deep rest". We can view depression not as a mental illness, but on a deeper level, as a profound (and very misunderstood) state of deep rest, entered into when we are completely exhausted by the weight of our own (false) story of ourselves. It is an unconscious loss of interest in the second-hand - a longing to 'die' to the false. This longing needs to be honored, not medicated, meditated or analysed away.

It's amazing what can evolve naturally when depression and the desire for suicide (which is the desire for the deep rest of yourself) are truly honored, met, embraced, held, and you do not flinch from pain or turn away from it. It's amazing what can happen when you actively listen to the one in front of you from a loving place of non-judgmental acceptance, trusting the intelligence of life itself, and allowing the divine and loving suicide of awakening to weave its mysterious magic.

~ Jeff Foster

life without a centre

art by van gogh

no distance between

All things in this creation exist within you, 

and all things in you exist in creation; 

there is no border between you and the closest things, 

and there is no distance between you and the farthest things, and all things, 

from the lowest to the loftiest, 

from the smallest to the greatest, 

are within you as equal things. 

In one atom are found all the elements of the earth; 

in one motion of the mind are found the motions of all the laws of existence; 

in one drop of water are found the secrets of all the endless oceans; 

in one aspect of you are found all the aspects of existence.

 ~ Kahlil Gibran

art by the author

All that spirits desire, spirits attain. 

~ Kahlil Gibran

treasury of the true dharma-eye

In the heart of the night,

The moonlight framing

A small boat drifting,

Tossed not by the waves

Nor swayed by the breeze.

~ Dogen

This is one of a series of verse composed for delivery to the shogun in Kamakura in 1247

from Zen Poetry of Dogen by Steven Heine

who says words with my mouth

~ Rumi

translated and spoken by Coleman Barks

eternity

We're always thinking of eternity as 

an idea that cannot be understood, 

something immense. 

But why must it be? 

What if, instead of all this, 

you suddenly find just a little room there, 

something like a village bath house, 

grimy, and spiders in every corner, 

and that's all eternity is. 

Sometimes, you know, 

I can't help feeling that that's what it is.

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

from The Brothers Karamazov

with thanks to whiskeyriver

buddha in glory

Center of all centers, core of cores,

almond self-enclosed, and growing sweet–

all this universe, to the furthest stars

all beyond them, is your flesh, your fruit.

Now you feel how nothing clings to you;

your vast shell reaches into endless space,

and there the rich, thick fluids rise and flow.

Illuminated in your infinite peace,

a billion stars go spinning through the night,

blazing high above your head.

But in you is the presence that

will be, when all the stars are dead.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

translation by Stephen Mitchell

from "Ahead of All Parting: 

The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke"