All work is about facilitating…
Making easy…
Making possible…
Making a difference…
I look at myself…
Small…limited…
And confined
Within myself.
I wonder…
How do I make easy,
Make possible
My own freedom?
By what means will I make a difference to me?
Unpacking
It’s not about you
There is no ‘you’
There are only circumstances
So that desires may act
And through action
Be liberated from binding thought
But who do these desires belong to?
…They belong to me
‘Me’ is only a thought
A rather persistent one
It’s actually a misnomer…
There is no ‘me;’ but there is ‘am-ness.’
Sound, space and light
In their tireless play create
A world of forms, words and meanings
And become the experiences
That ‘am-ness’
Describes as ‘mine’
In repeatedly describing experiences as ‘mine’
It condenses into an identity
A limited being
Perpetually longing
For an abundance
That pretentious language has hidden away.
You and I
Can trace our ancestry to thought
The remnants of an inaccurate language
That didn’t have the words
To describe
The indescribable.
The Destiny of Thought
Another day in the life of thought
Sieving
Separating
What is
What is not
And as thought thinks
That INTELLIGENCE must have a form, a purpose, a design
Its own purpose
Is to structure my mind
Thought knows not what it can’t apprehend
It understands the finite
And not things that have no end
Discontent with accepting things just as they are
It looks over the near, in search of the far
And so as thought must
So thought does
Structuring my life with lofty bricks of beliefs and values
It fates its own end
By empowering my acumen to choose
And finally
When all that is something
Will eventually wither away
Infinite INTELLIGENCE will come my way.
A Person of Few Words
Screaming silences
The thoughts in my mind
I can feel their angst
But words are hard to find
I struggle with words
They forever evade me
Messiahs of my thoughts
They forever fail me
Them thoughts pound my head
Demanding release
“We need to be said
Let us out, please!”
Their expression, their release
Is my reason to be
For if not my thoughts
What is my legacy?
So don’t dismiss me in a hurry
As someone with little to say
It’s a matter of time
Before my thoughts have their day
For now they stay imprisoned
A lack of choice
Locked in my mind
For want of a voice
That’s all they need
Just the wealth of words
But till they are freed
I am as you know me
A person of few words.
No Mean Feat
I woke up with a sigh
To meet today
Today is what
Today has always been…
Unpredictable and moody.
It’s a child of the seasons
A fickle temper is coded
Into its DNA.
And so, it will provoke me
(Like it always does)
With something or the other…
With the memory of a lover
Who it swallowed up
Insidiously on one such today
That I can’t recall having seen or lived
It must have slipped by me…
And who now remains with me
Partly because he’s a committed man
Who’s met and lived through
Many todays
And like me
Has endured the weight of every today
With its accompanying aches and pains.
We’re here now
Still together
Because we saw through
It’s whimsical ways
And chose to ignore its treachery
This today is no longer mine or yours
It belongs to Us.
This gift of a conquered Today
This gift of familiarity,
Friendship and forgiveness
Is really the gift of having met
And survived
Without escape, without excuse
Every Today
Everyday.
A Good Night
When the lights go out
So do all differentiations
Everything gets absorbed
In a rich velvety darkness
The night is a great leveler
It swallows up all distinctions
The day’s convictions dissolve in the night’s cabernet
And everything that was something loses its grip
The expectation of the night is total surrender
It claims from you your all
All the sparkling acquisitions of your day
Stand shrouded by an austere night
And it doesn’t seem to care
About all the things that decorate your existence
As it falls like an ink blot
On the script of your life
So while the day adds to your life
Things for the mind and things that matter
The night subtracts
Reducing your prized possessions to mere amusements.
I stand in the darkness of the night
Strangely redeemed…
As light exits and things lose their ‘edge’
I find that ‘I’- am still there…
In and through the absences, I prevail…
My only gain… my total loss
My only strength… my vulnerability
My only society… my solitude
So much effort
To possess requires so much effort
To enjoy all that there is-
none.
To become rich requires so much effort
To be enriched-
none.
To solve a problem requires so much effort
To watch its passing-
None.
Unanswered
You asked me why I ask
So many questions
When the answers are so few
What purpose could it serve
Asking so many questions
And will new answers
Stop me from asking
The same old questions?!?!
Why can’t I accept
The answers already given (or perhaps hidden)
For centuries…for eons…since eternity…
Aren’t willful ignorance
and elusive enlightenment
riding on the same adventure?
I don’t know…
I guess I find no silence, no repose
In the posers
you call answers
For the same twisted reason
You get so disturbed, so diverted
By the posers
that are my questions.
So there we are
All gesture paused
By an exasperated silence
Thought defeated, we now just are…
Sitting vis-à-vis
Sailing together, I realize,
In the same clichéd boat
To a destination known only to silent destiny.
Unintended
Pen, book and intention
A haiku seems like a good idea
I need to know even though I know
Is this temporary, fleeting?
How must I apprehend it
This totality in existence?
How do I classify it
For the sake of memory?
‘Contemplation?’
‘Boredom?’
‘Living out my purpose?’
‘Existence?’
‘Being?’
‘Becoming?’
‘….none of the above…?’
And now I know
Acceptance is active and creative
And now I am
Excited, happy, alive!
Free of all lofty intention…
Lost Property
How dear is my present to me!
Even as it stands imperfect
And flawed
I know it. It’s familiar.
I’m drawn to it because it so effortlessly
Becomes mine
My present is the culmination
Of the hours, days and years I’ve devoted to
Become me.
If I lose it, I will lose all the vanities
That I had with great complexity interwoven with
My being
I will stand a ridiculous lie unto myself!
My heart will weep not so much
For the loss of people, places, property
Or poetry
But for standing disrobed and diminished
Before all that I dressed up
And decorated.
The present is rich in the meanings of thoughts
Whose enslavement I have come
To enjoy.
Who am I without them?
WHERE am I without them? They’re all
I’ve known.
My tormentors have been my only love…
And even though I know
That life is a habitually
Late messiah
A sleeping savior in a dream state
I can see now that I’m nothing more than
Its dream.
