Monday, October 28, 2013

beloved


The real beloved is your beginning and end.
When you find that one, 
You'll no longer expect anything else.

Rumi










Photo:  Peter Bowers











Thursday, October 24, 2013

Stand Firm



I said to the wanting-creature inside me:
What is this river you want to cross?
There are no travelers on the river-road, and no road.
Do you see anyone moving about on that bank, or nesting?

There is no river at all, and no boat, and no boatman.
There is no tow rope either, and no one to pull it.
There is no ground, no sky, no time, no bank, no ford!

And there is no body, and no mind!
Do you believe there is some place that will make the
soul less thirsty?
In that great absence you will find nothing.

Be strong then, and enter into your own body;
there you have a solid place for your feet.
Think about it carefully!
Don't go off somewhere else!

Kabir says this:  just throw away all thoughts of 
imaginary things, 
and stand firm in that which you are.  





Kabir
Photo:  Peter Bowers












Where we began



Though we are often driven by sorrow,
To seek the end of sorrows,
It is the desire for Love and Love Itself,
That in the end brings us to Freedom.

For when all  hope is lost,
And only Despair remains.
When all paths have failed,
And all efforts proven vain.

Then we sit alone, defeated, with nothing left.
Nothing, that is...
Except what moved us at the onset.
Our Own Shining Heart, our Own Inherent Love.  

We wander for countless ages.
In the heartbreak of giving and receiving,
Until, when grasping is exhausted,
We simply rest as the Love we Are.

The Kingdom of Heaven is Within.
Not in perfection or attainment, 
Not in doing thusly, or understanding profoundly.
Simply Here, where we began.

As we are.
Here.
Now.
Right where we began.





Photo:  Peter Bowers











Wednesday, October 23, 2013

Lying beside my wife




Once when I was awake and lying beside
my wife, she whispered in her sleep, "Hafiz, 
I love you."

I don't think I would trade having heard her
soul speak that way, even for all of heaven
saying the same thing.

But is there a difference?  I think loving is
always God, showing us It is here, as much
as the formless can reach into our world. 





Hafiz
Photo:  Peter Bowers







Go Deeper



Go deeper
Past thoughts into silence.
Past silence into stillness.
Past stillness into the heart.
Let love consume all that is left of you.





Kabir
image via:







Tuesday, October 15, 2013

waiting



I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope,
for hope would be hope for the wrong thing.
And wait without love.  For love would be love, 
of the wrong thing. 
Yet there is faith.
But the faith and the hope and the love, are all in the waiting.
And the darkness shall be the light
and the stillness the dancing.





T.S.Eliot
 Photo:  Peter Bowers








  

Wednesday, October 2, 2013

Anyone Can Sing



Anyone can sing.  You just open your mouth,
and give shape to a sound.  Anyone can sing.

What is harder, is to proclaim the soul,
to initiate a wild and necessary deepening: 

to give the voice broad, sonorous wings
of solitude, grief, and celebration, 

to fill the body with the echoes of voices
lost long ago to bravery, and silence,

to prise the reluctant heart wide open, 
to witness defeat, to suffer contempt, 

to shrink, lose face, go down in ignominy,
to retreat to the last dark hiding-space

where the tattered remnants of your pride
still gather themselves around your nakedness, 

to know these rags as your only protection
and yet still open -  to face the possibility
that your innermost core may hold nothing at all, 

and to sing from that - to fill the void
with every hurt, every harm, every hard-won joy
that staves off death yet honours its coming, 

to sing both full and utterly empty, 
alone and conjoined, exiled and at home, 

to sing what people feel most keenly
yet never acknowledge until you sing it. 

Anyone can sing.  Yes.  Anyone can sing.    





William Ayot
Photo:  Peter Bowers