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

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.

Chuck Surface

Photo:  Peter Bowers

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:

http://anateresabarboza.blogspot.ca

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

  

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

I Write of That Journey

I remember how my mother would hold me.

I would look up at her sometimes and see her weep.

I understand now what was happening.

Love so strong a force

it broke the cage, 

and she disappeared from everything

for a blessed

moment.

All actions have evolved 

from the taste of flight; 

the hope of freedom

moves our cells

and limbs.

Unable to live on the earth, Mira ventured out alone in the sky - 

I write of that journey

of becoming as 

free as

God.

Don't forget love; 

it will bring all the madness you need

to unfurl yourself across

the universe.

Mira 

From:  Love Poems from God

Daniel Ladinsky 

Photo:  Peter Bowers

dew light

Now in the blessed days of more and less

when the news about time is that each day

there is less of it I know none of that 

as I walk out through the early garden

only the day and I are here with no

before or after and the dew looks up

without a number or a present age.  

W.S. Merwin 

Photo:  Peter Bowers

No Path

There is No Path that Goes all the Way 

Han Shan

Not that it stops us looking

for the full continuation.

The one line in the poem

we can start and follow

straight to the end.  The fixed belief

we can hold, facing a stranger

that saves us the trouble 

of a real conversation.

But one day you are not

just imagining an empty chair

where your loved one sat.

You are not just telling a story

where the bridge is down

and there's nowhere to cross.

You are not just trying to pray

to a God you imagined

would keep you safe.

No, you've come to the place

where nothing you've done

will impress and nothing you 

can promise will avert

the silent confrontation.

The place where

your body already seems to know

the way, having kept

to the last, its own secret

reconnaissance.

But still, there is no path

that goes all the way,

one conversation leads 

to another, 

one breath to the next

until

there's no breath at all, 

just

the inevitable 

final release

of the  burden.

And then, 

wouldn't your life

have to start 

all over again

for you to know

even a little 

of who you had been? 

David Whyte

Sweet Darkness

When your eyes are tired

the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone, 

no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark 

where the night has eyes

to recognize its own.

There you can be sure

you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your home

tonight.

The night will give you a horizon

further than you can see.

You must learn one thing.

The  world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds

except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet

confinement of your aloneness

to learn

anything or anyone 

that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

David Whyte

Photo:  Peter Bowers

Love After Love

The time will come 

when, with elation

 you will greet yourself arriving

at your own door, in your own mirror

and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here.  Eat.

You will love again the stranger who was your self.

Give wine.  Give bread.  Give back your heart

to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored

for another, who knows you by heart.

Take down the love letters from  the bookshelf, 

the photographs, the desperate notes, 

peel your own image from the mirror.

Sit.  Feast on your life.

Derek Walcott

Photo:  Peter Bowers