What absences do you feel?
What do you feel
Is missing from your life?
What presences are you ignoring?
What are you refusing to see
That patiently awaits your attention?
While life must be lived
And its pains and pleasures experienced;
Life’s beauty lies in being read
In being noticed and beheld.
Knowledge is a gain
That comes to those
Who sincerely seek it.
Books hold stories, theories
And philosophies.
On their own
They’re not knowledge.
Experiences too,
Are granted to all
But on their own
They don’t yield knowledge.
Knowledge is an invocation.
For knowledge to enlighten
There must first be
An awareness of darkness.
There must be acceptance
That one does not know.
There must be a question…
There must be wonder…
There must be the recognition
That Existence is the greatest teacher
But to Existence one must go.
She will not come to you
At a scheduled hour.
Have you ever wondered
What the trees know?
Or the wind?
Or waters that travel
Fearlessly across lands
To reach the vastness of the ocean?
What knowledge do they hold?
What knowledge holds them?
And do they ‘know’ about it?
Or is their knowledge of a different type?
Must knowledge be about mastery?
Does its value lie in its saleability?
What value does understanding have?
Must we know how to survive above all?
Or, must we know what it means to give
And how to sacrifice, and how to die
For the sake of something greater?
That is what is worthy of seeking
How the ordinary is so rich
With promise; seemingly simple
Yet so phenomenal.
So self-contained and yet so giving.
So weak, yet so strong.
Knowledge is important
So that you don’t waste your life becoming
That which you never were.
When will wisdom come?
When you have lived a life
Of many detours…and many turns?
Or when unimpressed
With the map of the world
You reach for the stars?
Or when reality makes demands on you
But you leave to live your dream?
When will wisdom come?
When you walk the tried and tested path
Laid down by those who walked before?
Or when you seek recourse in religion
To be saved from a pervasive evil?
Or, as a pledge to the highest in humanity
You stay non-violent…
And hurt no one.
But is wisdom the child of intent?
Or the joy of escape?
Or the reward for resolve?
Or the unleashing of wild passions?
Or, is it a light that beams through you
When you have discovered
Along the way
How to be happy.
Silence is a magnetic field
Created by a repulsion
To noise.
I have lived in city spaces
Where noisy roads
Are neighbours to islands of calm
Found in temples or parks…
Or in the little lane
That makes a quick exit
From a busy street.
Or in the silences held in homes
Where the sound of utensils in the kitchen
Or a pressure cooker whistling
Are the only sounds that tell you
That a family resides there.
The city with its speed and noise
Is ironically the providence you need
To cultivate your own field of silence.
There’s a breeze
That gently moves my curtain
Every afternoon.
The day is slower…
Calmer…
I think to myself–
Grateful for this solitude–
These are the experiences of being
That I wish to carry with me.
Child,
Not everyone you meet
Will do you good
Not everyone you meet
Will be sincere
Not everyone you meet
Will love you as perfection.
Your ideas of love
May not easily be fulfilled.
Love has many different faces
From the ugly to the sublime.
Love resists being contained
Within narrow definitions.
And yet it needs boundaries…
Otherwise, it remains doomed as hate.
Love must be understood
Through the instruments of love
Patience, attention, trust and faith.
Sometimes love is received.
At other times, often more challenging,
It needs to be given.
Sorrow runs deep.
It lies at the bottom of our awareness…
Buried under the many layers
of dress and sparkle that we’ve deemed
imperative to shroud ourselves in…
Just so that we may never
Catch a glimpse of sorrow naked.
But to stand before it
And not run away from its nakedness
is to face a gnawing discomfort and
to question your self-awareness…
It is to finally ask the question:
How can I truly know happiness
If I refuse to learn from my sorrow?
When in sorrow’s grip,
we willingly surrender our ignorance…
that we had childishly dressed up as knowledge.
We know nothing. Our speculations
are not a path to the truth.
They are but a conjuring up
of an alternate reality.
Sorrow is the ultimate portal
To a higher dimension..
It is a call to grow deeper roots…
To stand as we are, where we are…
To be in conversation with God
To seek freedom from desire…
Even from the desire to escape sorrow.
Why is the heart afraid
Of darkness?
Why is the heart afraid
Of the unknown?
Why is the heart afraid
To take chances?
What does it stand to lose
By challenging existence?
Will it lose its gratitude?
Wisdom?
Restraint?
Will it lose a grip on life itself?
But what is life?
Is it the freedom to be?
The freedom to make-believe?
Is it suffering?
An entanglement?
Or an illusion?
How strange it is
That life cannot be known.
It’s a mystery.
It can only be lived.
It can only be experienced.
Sometimes in the light; sometimes in darkness.
Sometimes in action;
Sometimes in passivity.
Sometimes in isolation;
Sometimes in longing.
Sometimes desiring an end;
Sometimes an eternal continuity.
The heart is afraid
Because it must after all,
Venture into life alone and bravely.
Without the cleverness of thought.
It must come to see that it doesn’t need architecture;
That it exists in the realm of surrender and possibility.
Guilt is dark. It entraps you.
It’s a shadow that engulfs you.
You can ignore it
But it follows you everywhere.
The eternal accompaniment
To expectations pinned on you.
But which you?
The one that thinks, feels, senses…
The jeeva.
Forever tormented into making a choice
And then being doomed
For having made it.
To conquer this induced guilt
One must transcend conditional relationships
That no longer nurture.
Isolation then is not a punishment
But a necessary outcome of growth.
Emotionalism must never pretend to be true emotion.
In a world obsessed with fictions
Persist in your search for the real.
Beyond name and form
Seek truth. Seek light.
Walk out of the cave.
Guilt is dark. It entraps you.
The weight of an “I”
is too much
to bear for a lifetime.
An aberration of the self,
the “I” wishes to become everything
it is ignorant of being.
“I” is the first violation
of the principle of the self,
which is that: it is the self
only when it is not for the self.
Yet we live our lives
in perpetual want.
With every purchase
we invest in our poverty.
With every relationship
we extend the misery of our longing.
With every prayer for protection
we chip away our faith.
The “I” is a myth
for what it means
to be human.
A being in search of
what it means to simply be-
Alive. Existing. Discovering.
