To think deeply
Is to question
The known.
It is to wonder
About the origins of our faith
And of faith’s true meaning.
It is to learn…
Not so that the learning
Becomes our new way,
But so that
One can recenter
On the path one is already on.
To think deeply
Is to express life’s experiences-
Good or bad- aesthetically.
To think deeply
Is to put thought to work
And action in deference to wisdom.
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.
The New
Is an emergence
An arrival
A change
A release
From the old and the irrelevant
Into the ancient and the eternal.
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.
“I”
-an idea
-an image
-an impostor
-an individual
-an identity
-an idiom
-an illusion
-an imperfection
-intelligence
Life is a design
For sublimating the ‘I’
For losing it in life
So that it is not merely
Concluded by death.
Offer the ‘I’ through work
Dissolve it in devotion.
Learn to become…
But only to discover
Who you never were.
Learn to embrace
All the things that
The other ‘I’s in the world
Are ashamed of-
And run away from:
Failure
Loss
Solitude
Grief
Ordinariness.
Therein lies
The light by which
You will come to see
The darkness in which
The “I” was born.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How marvellous is poetry
Where words with
Definitive meanings
Begin to explore a world
Beyond them.
Words can rise in wonder
They can descend in love.
They can enter abandoned heart spaces
And breathe life
Into feelings that were left to die.
Words can be more
Than just units of meaning…
They are also the pigments
That give color and visibility
To an existence beyond the one you’re living.
Poetry is an educator
Whose lessons get richer
With the accumulation
Of experience and memory.
They become your constitution.
Over time
Poetry that you lived with
Becomes a fragrance
That emanates from you.
Words are no longer needed.
Wit. Wisdom. Wonder... 