The truth was once unknowable
One could only know the false.
Now it stands cloaked, clothed, adorned
In a garb of emotion, hue, and trend
A costumed character on stage.
It shames, it names, it cancels.
Branded now, with insiders
Claiming its privilege.
It carries a price tag few can afford.
Truth used to be silent; now it speaks.
It argues. It calls out the false.
It demands an audience.
And in all of this, it becomes the lie.
How Much?
I stood on the deck of the ship
And looked out into the vastness of blue…
Sea and sky merged at a distance
And land was nowhere in sight.
The moment was a teacher.
Qualities and Quantities–
That had mattered in the presence
Of people, and things, and seductions that beckon–
Had vanished into this vast space.
Here I stood by myself
In a vastness that was devoid
Of distraction, of other, of past and future
It was the now, but it seemed disinterested in being time.
In that solitude, I stood empty
Of all the things that we believe, matter.
This brief acquaintance
With myself as a being
Whose identity and plans made no difference to existence
Made me see that titles and accomplishment, having and proving
Matter only in small, confined spaces.
Otherwise, existence is enough
You are enough.
I Can’t Wait, I Can’t Watch, I Won’t Listen
Human intelligence has evolved
Through the mechanism of informed choice.
Our species as it exists today
Has come to believe that humanity
Is a self-sustaining system.
And that together,
It will solve the problems it has created
By virtue of making better choices.
But intelligence is beyond our choices
Intelligence is a property of life itself.
It demands awareness, not knowledge
It functions outside of Ivy League-educated
Plans and strategies. It demands being
Not becoming. Its language is ever-new
In meaning. You learn it by listening.
Life is an emergent reality.
Today, I stayed still and watched…
Light unhurriedly slipped over the horizon.
And an inky blue sky emerged.
You couldn’t command the light to stay.
Or compel it through a legal contract.
Or, shame it for its pace of work.
Or reprimand it because it didn’t produce
The results and fantasies you had imagined.
Life is a pulse, it beats in rhythms
It cooperates through a natural wisdom
It speaks the language of incoherence.
It doesn’t organize itself through politics and wars
Or protests, and promises, and documents.
To understand life, one must step out of the cave
One has mistaken for the entirety of the world.
One must occasionally see light slip over the horizon.
Balance of Payments
There is a story of a man
Who was offered a thousand rubles
And all the land that he could walk around
Between sunrise and sunset.
Running hard and fast to acquire this land
That was seemingly generously offered
And that which he could rightfully claim
On the merit of his sheer grit and tenacity.
He did return to his starting point
Just before the sun set
(As was the condition…)
But exhausted and sapped of all life, he collapsed
Fallen on a piece of land–
Six feet from his head to his heels– a corpse.
That in the end, was the only land
He could claim as his own.
How much ground have you covered
Since the break of dawn?
What desires drive your work?
What do you hope to do
With all the excess you ‘make’?
What sins will it breed?
How much life will it consume?
And how will you fill
The hollow it carves out within you?
What cheap forms of entertainment
Will you inflate by the premiums you pay
Just to escape the nothingness within you?
And when you wake up
What will be that reality
That will stand before you–
A final account of all that you lost
For all that you imagined you would gain.
The Design of Deep Change
What if I don’t speak?
Say nothing of the absurdities
I see around me…
The filth, the corruption,
The lies masquerading as truth;
The blind waxing eloquent about a ‘vision’;
Junk dressed up as rhetoric
Trying to convince us all of its creativity;
The capitalists who try to sell you the myths
That they’ve invested in.
What is there to lose?
A key to my only door?
The voice that can speak to injustice?
My dreams of a better tomorrow?
The ground on which I stand?
The roof above my head?
The answer to a future question?
The courage to exist?
The certainty of continuity?
My faith in the good?
Creativity is the primeval urge for action.
Yet what we call action–
That which is propelled by desire and hope
Or fear, anger, and intolerance
Is but a reaction that brings about effects…
Mere changes on the surface
That we mistake for a revolution.
The actions that matter are those that are deferred.
To witness, to wait, to watch, and to listen
Are the design of deep, transformative change.
When You Build a Home
When you build a home
Is that all you build?
Or, in building it
Do you also build perseverance
And discipline, and character?
Do you finally find your faith
That thing that religion
Tried to unsuccessfully teach you
Through indoctrination…
Books and institutions that deliver knowledge
Are designed to bring forth the past to the present.
So that you may build your future
On the foundations of wisdom.
However, building a home
Teaches you lessons in real time.
You learn to create rhythms instead of systems.
You learn that love is presence
And that presence is work.
When I talk of building a home
Know that I also mean
That whatever you build is a home.
In building it, you come to fully live.
In it, you encounter your fears
In it, you realize your strength
In it, you understand
That identity is what you may gather
But your self is what you will find.
Corruption
When limits are not respected
Knowledge becomes corrupted.
When falsities are not questioned
Beliefs become corrupted.
When intention is not reviewed
Action becomes corrupted.
When words become weapons
Understanding becomes corrupted.
When love becomes selective
Emotions become corrupted.
When the vulnerable are not protected
Power becomes corrupted.
Lost
If one
Gets only half a rupee worth
For every rupee spent
What is being lost
Is a real value in favour of a notional one.
You wonder why
You’re dispensable even where you contribute
Or why your voice gets drowned in echoes
Or why change- once life altering
Has been reduced to the prostitution of trend.
You question why
You should bother with setting high personal standards
When public standards have fallen to an all time low.
Or why the qualifications required to build a life
Make cleverness more important than integrity.
You can see
That all of humanity is now subsumed
Within the logic of the economy.
Value has moved from what you possess
To what you’re able to acquire and gain.
We perversely celebrate
The destruction of human values as progress
The notional as the real
The machine as the master
And enslavement as freedom.
Book of Short Stories
We’re each a book of short stories
Events, encounters, tragedies, and joys…
Disappointments and regrets
Passion and pain…
Gathered with us
As the dust of memories.
Why do we carefully collect this dust?
Why do we sustain its presence?
Perhaps we intuitively know
That the answers we seek
Cannot be found in what happened
They’re realized in witnessing what remains.
Wisdom
There was a storm outside my window this morning.
Furious, raging, threatening and violent!
It came with force and blew its fury
It slammed, it banged…my windows wobbled.
The trees are now swaying to their natural rhythm
The storm has passed as quickly as it arrived
The trees survived. The storm couldn’t destroy them.
They’ve seen many storms over many seasons.
