Category: poetry

My personal journey has led me into communion with the Divine within myself. My poetry is connected directly to that source in me. I have been enjoying many new poems and poets, but few, honestly, no one can touch the enlightened and aware poetry of Rumi for me at this time. I suppose that speaks of the journey itself. There is a progression. Things progress nicely. I wanted to share it with you. This poem cuts to the heart of the journey for me. I love this teaching because it is a conjunction of many such teachings in Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism and Hinduism. This is a nexus point of truth. You pay attention to those in a world with so many voices. You have to trust your heart, your only true guide. This is about living a non-dual life, merging the Divine into your conscious awareness. This is possible. It’s real.

The idea of the “No Self” is powerful and universal. There are extreme definitions of this concept. But you can learn for yourself by stopping your thinking and fretting and learning to BE where you are. Your Light is a precious gift. The way to embrace it is to let it Shine and just BE! Don’t hide your Light, you have found as I have, that is impossible. Let your vessels be broken and let the Divine swirling all around you lift you out and up into the highest Heaven.

Two Friends

A certain person came to the Friend’s door
and knocked.
“Who’s there?”
“It’s me.”
The Friend answered, “Go away. There’s no place
for raw meat at this table.”

The individual went wandering for a year.
Nothing but the fire of separation
can change hypocrisy and ego. The person returned
completely cooked,
walked up and down in front of the Friend’s house,
gently knocked.
“Who is it?”
“You.”
“Please come in, my self,
there’s no place in this house for two.
The doubled end of the thread is not what goes through
the eye of the needle.
It’s a single-pointed, fined-down, thread end,
not a big ego-beast with baggage.”

But how can a camel be thinned to a thread?
With the sheers of practices, with doing things.

And with help from the one who brings impossibilities to pass,
who quiets willfullness,
who gives sight to one blind from birth.

Every day that one does something.
Take that as your text.
Every day God sends forth three powerful energies:
One, from the sperm of the father into the mother,
So growth may begin.
Two, a birth from the womb of the ground,
so male and female may spring into existence.
Three, there’s a surge up from the surface
into what’s beyond dying, that the the real beauty
of creating can be recognized.

There’s no way to every say this.

Let’s return to the two friends whose thread became single,
Who spell with their two letters
The original word,
BE.

B and E tighten around subjects and objects
that one knot may hold them. Two scissor blades
make one cut.
And watch two men washing clothes.
One makes dry clothes wet. The other makes
wet clothes dry. They seem to be thwarting each other,
but their work is a perfect harmony.

Every holy person seems to have a different doctrine
and practice, but there’s really only one work.

Someone listening to a millstone falls asleep.
No matter. The stone keeps turning.

Water from the mountain
far above the mill keeps following down.
The sleepers will get their bread.

Underground it moves, without sound, and without repetition.
Show us where that source of speech is that has no alphabet. That spaciousness.

Where we are now is a narrow fantasy that comes from there,
and the actual, outside world is even narrower.
Narrowness is pain, and the cause of narrowness is manyness.

Creation was spoken with one sound, BE.
The two letters, B and E,
to record it, came after.
The meaning of the sound
And its resonance
Are one.

There’s no way to ever say this,
In so many words! And no place to stop saying it.

…Meanwhile, a lion and a wolf were fighting…

You are one!