Posted on by solangesuri2015

Indescribable

I am most uneasy
With others’ descriptions of me.
I feel limited…constrained…
Flattened to two dimensions;
Defined and imprisoned…
My space to be
Taken away from me.
My gaucheness will now
Become a slip.
Or, take for example, my forgetting things
This will be seen as something uncharacteristic…
-A change of heart?
-A change in the chemical balance of my brain?
-A sign of self-neglect?

Descriptions-
As generous as they are (if they are good),
Diminish your essence
And leave you instead
With a grand idea
That which, can perhaps survive
But never really live.
That which can grip you
But never become as easy
As your breath.
The inability to see oneself
Is the design of freedom.
You’re free to be
The unknowable and the indescribable.

Posted on by solangesuri2015

What Matters

When the minute
Inspires the hour;
And the hour
Builds the day;
And the days
Deliver the week;
And the weeks
Accomplish the month;
And the months
Grow the years;
And the years
Create a lifetime…

You realize-
It’s the little things
That matter.

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Work

Your work is an expression
Of your vitality, your sensitivity
And your intelligence.
These are all invested
And then enriched through work.

To see work as enslavement
Is debasing and depressing.
If you see yourself as exploited
You will resist work
It will become distasteful.

If it incites greed and ambition
It becomes corrupted.
You lose perspective
And begin to believe that work is a means
To acquiring place and privilege.

Work is incomplete
If it doesn’t involve inner work-
An understanding of our limitations,
Courageously facing our fears
And conversing with our insecurities.

Work in essence,
Is a means of self-discovery.
Your work itself lays the path
That you must walk on
To experience true fulfilment.

And in and through the journey
Leave behind the illusions
Of need and inadequacy…
And also,
Of eminence and accomplishment.

Posted on by solangesuri2015

The Aesthetics of Education

Ugliness is an hour
In the perception of beauty.
The ugliness of darkness,
Pride, arrogance and dishonesty
Will pass…

All facades will fall
And you will find yourself
Standing exposed…
Your ignorance, you will come to see,
Was faking it as knowledge.

While you were busy learning
How to do, how to act
How to think and how to be
Those lessons were futile and
Meaningless…till you learned how to see.

But learning how to see
Is a becoming…
It is arriving to a point
Where you’re able to tell the difference
Between reality and concept.

It involves a return
To a no-man’s land
Where all the knowledge
That you have acquired
Stands in vain.

When your satisfactions
Have become your discontent
Your truth is now false
And the certainty of your ideas
Have become an ideological noose.

You wish to be liberated
From fashionable ideas
And to look at
What you don’t know
For recourse…

Your ignorance then transforms…
From being the nakedness
That you were ashamed of-
It becomes the very means
By which you will learn.

When false knowledge is dropped
A superficial ignorance too breaks…
You come to see that
True knowledge lies in understanding
What you’re ignorant about.

It’s our ignorance
That teaches us what
We must know.
It introduces us to our human-ness
And thereafter our promise.

A good education
Will free you of conclusion
You will learn how to learn
And therefore, learn how to be
And therein, learn how to see.

Posted on by solangesuri2015

What Did You Do When You Got Upset?

What did you do
When you got upset?
Did you cuss and swear
Complain and fret?

Did those thieves of thought
Your prejudices stack up?
Did you think in frustration
“I should give up!”

Did you take what was
Merely an event in time
And for all eternity-
Did you fix it as a paradigm?

Did you feel attacked
And now with broken cadence
Did you give up on hope
And befriend indifference?

Did you conclude that
For now, it’s best to disconnect
That it’s that someone’s fault
That you are upset.

Or did you learn from it
Something new about you?
Your disappointment made it clear
What you value.

And then did you let
That value steer you ahead?
Or did the event stay on
As a bitter memory in your head?

Awareness doesn’t always
Come to the hour
You arrive to it
When you see things as they are.

So, when you get upset
Don’t remain angry and curt
Gather the feeling
And see where you hurt.

Don’t lose the opportunity
To grow in wisdom
Be grateful for being chiseled
To a form free of your egoism.

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Humility

Appearances are not the Truth
And the Truth is evident, not apparent.

Know the difference.

Courage may not always look grand
It often keeps its distance from the grandiosity of gesture.

Let it remain invisible.

Your real achievements often go unnoticed.
Awards are intended to legitimise the awarder.

Their place is on a shelf; yours, in life.

You’re educated to acquire special skills
Yet all real work happens through surrender and prayer.

Give up all ideas of yourself.

Posted on by solangesuri2015

Pornography

Pornography isn’t confined
To the sexual.
In fact, it has become more pervasive
Than we care to admit.
It’s apparent in the way
We intercourse with life in general.

In man’s world
Everything must be
On a perpetual high-
Growth, profit, success
Romance, attention, appearance-
All must be managed, promised and pursued.

Effect is packaged as impact.
Titillation is now a form of power.
Popularity is an achievement.
Self-gratification is the road to happiness
Seduction is success
And attention is capital.

Pornography in essence
Is a redrawing
Of gaze and glimpse.
It’s a perversion
Of desire and touch.
And a degradation and decimation
Of what makes us human.

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The Creative Process

In passing time
Observe an occurrence:
A curve…a refraction…
A twist…an aberration…
A connection…a concealment…

Stretch its dimensions
Towards the observer.
Perceive it in pure light
Without an ambience of knowledge.

Learn about it
By learning from it.

Trust it to take you
Where it must now live…
In the form of a new thing;
In the marketplace;
As an idea;
As a suggestion;
As a question;
As a voice

Or, as pure courage.

Posted on by solangesuri2015

Pause

Pause…
Because a pause creates beauty
And this creation of beauty
Is not designed action
It is a reflection in stillness.

What a paradox it is
That in order
To apprehend life’s complexity
The simplest act of cessation is sufficient
Just as much as it is necessary.

A pause
Is a way to pay respect
To the doer, the doing and the done
It’s a constraint you put
On the excessive and the unnecessary.

A pause
Is a form of acknowledgement
That conveyance
Is an action of many forces
And that intention is one such force.

A pause is power
The ultimate form of self-control
A recognition of
What fails in success
And what succeeds in failure.