Real spiritual growth begins with an act of betrayal.You drop the assumptions that govern the world around you.Watching the world collapse, you see beauty where others see a gaping hole.To the rest of the world, this is a betrayal of the highest order.

Mystic Chat-Hakim Sanai

My dear!

You haven’t the feet

for this path –

why struggle?

You’ve no idea where

the idol’s to be found –

what’s all this mystic chat?

What can be done with quarrelsome fellow travelers,

boastful marketplace morons?

If you were really a lover

you’d see that faith and infidelity are one…

Oh, what’s the use?

nit-picking about such things

is a hobby for numb brains.

You are pure spirit but imagine yourself a corpse!

pure water which thinks it’s the pot!

Everything you want must be searched for –

except the Friend.

If you don’t find Him

you’ll never be able to start to even look.

Yes,you can be sure:

You are not Him –

unless you can remove yourself

from between yourself and Him –

in which case

you are

Him.

The Man With the Blue Guitar-Wallace Stevens

The Man With the Blue Guitar

I
The man bent over his guitar,

A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.
They said, "You have a blue guitar,

You do not play things as they are."
The man replied, "Things as they are

Are changed upon the blue guitar."
And they said then, "But play, you must,

A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar

Of things exactly as they are."

II
I cannot bring a world quite round,

Although I patch it as I can.
I sing a hero's head, large eye

And bearded bronze, but not a man,
Although I patch him as I can

And reach through him almost to man.
If to serenade almost to man

Is to miss, by that, things as they are,
Say that it is the serenade

Of a man that plays a blue guitar.

III
Ah, but to play man number one,

To drive the dagger in his heart,
To lay his brain upon the board

And pick the acrid colors out,
To nail his thought across the door,

Its wings spread wide to rain and snow,
To strike his living hi and ho,

To tick it, tock it, turn it true,
To bang it from a savage blue,

Jangling the metal of the strings...

IV
So that's life, then: things are they are?

It picks its way on the blue guitar.
A million people on one string?

And all their manner in the thing,
And all their manner, right and wrong,

And all their manner, weak and strong?
And that's life, then: things as they are,

This buzzing of the blue guitar.

V
Do not speak to us of the greatness of poetry,

Of the torches wisping in the underground,
Of the structure of vaults upon a point of light.

There are no shadows in our sun,
Day is desire and night is sleep.

There are no shadows anywhere.
The earth, for us, is flat and bare.

There are no shadows. Poetry
Exceeding music must take the place

Of empty heaven and its hymns,
Ourselves in poetry must take their place,

Even in the chattering of your guitar.

VI
A tune beyond us as we are,

Yet nothing changed by the blue guitar;
Ourselves in the tune as if in space,

Yet nothing changed, except the place
Of things as they are and only the place

As you play them, on the blue guitar,
Placed so, beyond the compass of change,

Perceived in a final atmosphere;
For a moment final, in the way

The thinking of art seems final when
The thinking of god is smoky dew.

The tune is space. The blue guitar
Becomes the place of things as they are,

A composing of senses of the guitar.

VII
It is the sun that shares our works.

The moon shares nothing. It is a sea.
When shall I come to say of the sun,

It is a sea; it shares nothing;
The sun no longer shares our works

And the earth is alive with creeping men,
Mechanical beetles never quite warm?

And shall I then stand in the sun, as now
I stand in the moon, and call it good,

The immaculate, the merciful good,
Detached from us, from things as they are?

Not to be part of the sun? To stand
Remote and call it merciful?

The strings are cold on the blue guitar.

VIII
The vivid, florid, turgid sky,

The drenching thunder rolling by,
The morning deluged still by night,

The clouds tumultuously bright
And the feeling heavy in cold chords

Struggling toward impassioned choirs,
Crying among the clouds, enraged

By gold antagonists in air--
I know my lazy, leaden twang

Is like the reason in a storm;
And yet it brings the storm to bear.

I twang it out and leave it there.

IX
And the color, the overcast blue

Of the air, in which the blue guitar
Is a form, described but difficult,

And I am merely a shadow hunched
Above the arrowy, still string,

The maker of a thing yet to be made;
The color like a thought that grows

Out of a mood, the tragic robe
Of the actor, half his gesture, half His speech,

the dress of his meaning, silk
Sodden with his melancholy words,

The weather of his stage, himself.

X
Raise reddest columns. Toll a bell

And clap the hollows full of tin.
Throw papers in the streets, the wills

Of the dead, majestic in their seals.
And the beautiful trombones -- behold

The approach of him whom none believes,
Whom all believe that all believe,

A pagan in a varnished car.
Roll a drum upon the blue guitar.

Lean from the steeple. Cry aloud,
"Here am I, my adversary, that

Confront you, hoo-ing the slick trombones,
Yet with a petty misery

At heart, a petty misery,
Ever the prelude to your end,

The touch that topples men and rock."

XI
Slowly the ivy on the stones

Becomes the stones. Women become
The cities, children become the fields

And men in waves become the sea.
It is the chord that falsifies.

The sea returns upon the men,
The fields entrap the children, brick

Is a weed and all the flies are caught,
Wingless and withered, but living alive.

The discord merely magnified.
Deeper within the belly's dark Of time,

time grows upon the rock.

XII
Tom-tom, c'est moi. The blue guitar

And I are one. The orchestra
Fills the high hall with shuffling men

High as the hall. The whirling noise
Of a multitude dwindles, all said,

To his breath that lies awake at night.
I know that timid breathing.

Where Do I begin and end? And where,
As I strum the thing, do I pick up

That which momentously declares
Itself not to be I and yet Must be.

It could be nothing else.

XIII
The pale intrusions into blue

Are corrupting pallors...ay di mi,
Blue buds of pitchy blooms. Be content -

- Expansions, diffusions -- content to be
The unspotted imbecile revery,

The heraldic center of the world
Of blue, blue sleek with a hundred chins,

The amorist Adjective aflame...

XIV
First one beam, then another, then

A thousand are radiant in the sky.
Each is both star and orb; and day

Is the riches of their atmosphere.
The sea appends its tattery hues.

The shores are banks of muffling mist.
One says a German chandelier -

- A candle is enough to light the world.
It makes it clear. Even at noon

It glistens in essential dark.
At night, it lights the fruit and wine,

The book and bread, things as they are,
In a chiaroscuro where One

sits and plays the blue guitar.

XV
Is this picture of Picasso's,

this "hoard Of destructions," a picture of ourselves,
Now, an image of our society?

Do I sit, deformed, a naked egg,
Catching at Good-bye, harvest moon,

Without seeing the harvest or the moon?
Things as they are have been destroyed.

Have I? Am I a man that is dead
At a table on which the food is cold?

Is my thought a memory, not alive?
Is the spot on the floor, there, wine or blood

And whichever it may be, is it mine?

XVI
The earth is not earth but a stone,

Not the mother that held men as they fell
But stone, but like a stone, no: not

The mother, but an oppressor, but like
An oppressor that grudges them their death,

As it grudges the living that they live.
To live in war, to live at war,

To chop the sullen psaltery,
To improve the sewers in Jerusalem,

To electrify the nimbuses--
Place honey on the altars and die,

You lovers that are bitter at heart.

XVII
The person has a mould. But not

Its animal. The angelic ones
Speak of the soul, the mind.

It is An animal. The blue guitar--
On that its claws propound, its fangs

Articulate its desert days.
The blue guitar a mould? That shell?

Well, after all, the north wind blows
A horn, on which its victory

Is a worm composing on a straw.

XVIII
A dream (to call it a dream) in which I can believe,

in face of the object,
A dream no longer a dream, a thing,

Of things as they are, as the blue guitar
After long strumming on certain nights

Gives the touch of the senses, not of the hand,
But the very senses as they touch

The wind-gloss. Or as daylight comes,
Like light in a mirroring of cliffs,

Rising upward from a sea of ex.

XIX
That I may reduce the monster to Myself,

and then may be myself
In face of the monster, be more than part Of it,

more than the monstrous player of
One of its monstrous lutes, not be Alone,

but reduce the monster and be,
Two things, the two together as one,

And play of the monster and of myself,
Or better not of myself at all,

But of that as its intelligence,
Being the lion in the lute

Before the lion locked in stone.

XX
What is there in life except one's ideas.

Good air, good friend, what is there in life?
Is it ideas that I believe?

Good air, my only friend, believe,
Believe would be a brother full Of love,

believe would be a friend
Friendlier than my only friend,

Good air. Poor pale, poor pale guitar...

XXI
A substitute for all the gods:

This self, not that gold self aloft,
Alone, one's shadow magnified,

Lord of the body, looking down,
As now and called most high,

The shadow of Chocorua
In an immenser heaven, aloft,

Alone, lord of the land and lord
Of the men that live in the land, high lord.

One's self and the mountains of one's land,
Without shadows, without magnificence,

The flesh, the bone, the dirt, the stone.

XXII
Poetry is the subject of the poem,

From this the poem issues and
To this returns. Between the two,

Between issue and return, there is
An absence in reality,

Things as they are. Or so we say.
But are these separate? Is it

An absence for the poem, which acquires
Its true appearances there, sun's green,

Cloud's red, earth feeling, sky that thinks?
From these it takes. Perhaps it gives,

In the universal intercourse.

XXIII
A few final solutions, like a duet

With the undertaker: a voice in the clouds,
Another on earth, the one a voice

Of ether, the other smelling of drink.
The voice of ether prevailing, the swell

Of the undertaker's song in the snow
Apostrophizing wreaths, the voice

In the clouds serene and final, next
The grunted breath serene and final,

The imagined and the real, thought
And the truth, Dichtung und Wahrheit,

all Confusion solved, as in a refrain
One keeps on playing year by year,

Concerning the nature of things as they are.

XXIV
A poem like a missal found

In the mud, a missal for that young man,
That scholar hungriest for that book,

The very book, or, less, a page
Or, at the least, a phrase, that phrase,

A hawk of life, that latined phrase:
To know; a missal for brooding-sight.

To meet that hawk's eye and to flinch
Not a the eye but at the joy of it.

I play. But this is what I think.

XXV
He held the world upon his nose

And this-a-way he gave a fling.
His robes and symbols, ai-yi-yi -

- And that-a-way he twirled the thing.
Sombre as fir-trees, liquid cats

Moved in the grass without a sound.
They did not know the grass went round.

The cats had cats and the grass turned gray
And the world had worlds, ai, this-a-way:

The grass turned green and the grass turned gray.
And the nose is eternal, that-a-way.

Things as they were, things as they are,
Things as they will be by and by...

A fat thumb beats out ai-yi-yi.

XXVI
The world washed in his imagination,

The world was a shore, whether sound or form
Or light, the relic of farewells,

Rock, of valedictory echoings,
To which his imagination returned,

From which it sped, a bar in space,
Sand heaped in the clouds, giant that fought

Against the murderous alphabet:
The swarm of thoughts, the swarm of dreams

Of inaccessible Utopia.
A mountainous music always seemed

To be falling and to be passing away.

XXVII
It is the sea that whitens the roof.

The sea drifts through the winter air.
It is the sea that the north wind makes.

The sea is in the falling snow.
This gloom is the darkness of the sea.

Geographers and philosophers,
Regard. But for that salty cup,

But for the icicles on the eaves --
The sea is a form of ridicule.

The iceberg settings satirize
The demon that cannot be himself,

That tours to shift the shifting scene.

XXVIII
I am a native in this world

And think in it as a native thinks,
Gesu, not native of a mind

Thinking the thoughts I call my own,
Native, a native in the world

And like a native think in it.
It could not be a mind, the wave

In which the watery grasses flow
And yet are fixed as a photograph,

The wind in which the dead leaves blow.
Here I inhale profounder strength

And as I am, I speak and move
And things are as I think they are

And say they are on the blue guitar.

XXIX
In the cathedral, I sat there, and read,

Alone, a lean Review and said,
"These degustations in the vaults

Oppose the past and the festival.
What is beyond the cathedral, outside,

Balances with nuptial song.
So it is to sit and to balance things

To and to and to the point of still,
To say of one mask it is like,

To say of another it is like,
To know that the balance does not quite rest,

That the mask is strange, however like."
The shapes are wrong and the sounds are false.

The bells are the bellowing of bulls.
Yet Franciscan don was never more

Himself than in this fertile glass.

XXX
From this I shall evolve a man.

This is his essence: the old fantoche
Hanging his shawl upon the wind,

Like something on the stage, puffed out,
His strutting studied through centuries.

At last, in spite of his manner, his eye
A-cock at the cross-piece on a pole

Supporting heavy cables, slung
Through Oxidia, banal suburb,

One-half of all its installments paid.
Dew-dapper clapper-traps, blazing

From crusty stacks above machines.
Ecce, Oxidia is the seed

Dropped out of this amber-ember pod,
Oxidia is the soot of fire,

Oxidia is Olympia.

XXXI
How long and late the pheasant sleeps...

The employer and employee contend,
Combat, compose their droll affair.

The bubbling sun will bubble up,
Spring sparkle and the cock-bird shriek.

The employer and employee will hear
And continue their affair. The shriek

Will rack the thickets. There is no place,
Here, for the lark fixed in the mind,

In the museum of the sky. The cock
Will claw sleep. Mourning is not sun,

It is this posture of the nerves,
As if a blunted player clutched

The nuances of the blue guitar.
It must be this rhapsody or none,

The rhapsody of things as they are.

XXXII
Throw away the lights, the definitions,

And say of what you see in the dark
That it is this or that it is that,

But do not use the rotted names.
How should you walk in that space and know

Nothing of the madness of space,
Nothing of its jocular procreations?

Throw the lights away. Nothing must stand
Between you and the shapes you take

When the crust of shape has been destroyed.
You as you are? You are yourself.

The blue guitar surprises you.

XXXIII
That generation's dream, aviled

In the mud, in Monday's dirty light,
That's it, the only dream they knew,

Time in its final block, not time
To come, a wrangling of two dreams.

Here is the bread of time to come,
Here is its actual stone. The bread

Will be our bread, the stone will be
Our bed and we shall sleep by night.

We shall forget by day, except
The moments when we choose to play

The imagined pine, the imagined jay.

David Whyte

It is not enough to know.

It is not enough to follow

the inward road conversing in secret.
It is not enough to see straight ahead,

to gaze at the unborn

thinking the silence belongs to you.
It is not enough to hear

even the tiniest edge of rain.
You must go to the place

where everything waits,

there, when you finally rest,

even one word will do,

one word or the palm of your hand

turning outward in the gesture of gift.
And now we are truly afraid

to find the great silence

asking so little.
One word,

one word only.

Jorge Luis Borges

What can I hold you with?
I offer you lean streets, desperate sunsets,
the moon of the ragged suburbs.
I offer you the bitterness of a man who has looked
long and long at the lonely moon.
I offer you my ancestors, my dead men,
the ghost that living men have honoured in marble:
my father’s father killed in the frontier of Buenos Aires,
two bullets through his lungs, bearded and dead,
wrapped by his soldiers in the hide of a cow;
my mother’s grandfather –just twentyfour-
heading a charge of three hundred men in Perú,
now ghosts on vanished horses.
I offer you whatever insight my books may hold,
whatever manliness humour my life.
I offer you the loyalty of a man who has never been loyal.
I offer her that kernel of myself that I have saved,
somehow – the central heart that deals not in words,
traffics not with dreams and is untouched
by time, by joy, by adversities.
I offer you the memory of a yellow rose seen at sunset,
years before you were born.
I offer you explanations of yourself, theories about yourself,
authentic and surprising news of yourself.
I can give you my loneliness, my darkness,
the hunger of my heart;
I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.

Farid ud-Din Attar

Moths gathered in a fluttering throng one night

To learn the truth about the candle light,

And they decided one of them should go

To gather news of the elusive glow.

One flew till in the distance he discerned

A palace window where a candle burned -

-And went no nearer: back again he flew

To tell the others what he thought he knew.

The mentor of the moths dismissed his claim,

Remarking: "He knows nothing of the flame."

A moth more eager than the one before

Set out and passed beyond the palace door.

He hovered in the aura of the fire,

A trembling blur of timorous desire,

Then headed back to say how far he'd been,

And how much he had undergone and seen.

The mentor said: "You do not bear the signs

Of one who's fathomed how the candle shines."

Another moth flew out -- his dizzy flight

Turned to an ardent wooing of the light;

He dipped and soared, and in his frenzied trance

Both self and fire were mingled by his dance -

-The flame engulfed his wing-tips, body, head,

His being glowed a fierce translucent red;

And when the mentor saw that sudden blaze,

The moth's form lost within the glowing rays,

He said: "He knows, he knows the truth we seek,

That hidden truth of which we cannot speak."

To go beyond all knowledge is to find

That comprehension which eludes the mind,

And you can never gain the longed-for goal

Until you first outsoar both flesh and soul;

But should one part remain, a single hair

Will drag you back and plunge you in despair -

-No creature's self can be admitted here,

Where all identity must disappear.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

...Finally, what is Reason ?

You have often asked me ;

and this is my answer :-

- Whene'er the mist, that stands 'twixt God and thee,

Sublimates to a pure transparency,

That intercepts no light and adds no stain-

- There Reason is, and then begins her reign !

But alas ! -

-`tu stesso, ti fai grosso Col falso immaginar,

sì che non vedi Ciò che vedresti, se l'avessi scosso.

[You yourself blind yourself With delusion's dream,

so you do not see What you'd see if you had shaken it off.]

Rabia al Basri

~
Your hope in my heart is the rarest treasure
Your Name on my tongue is the sweetest word
My choicest hoursAre the hours I spend with You -
-O Allah, I can't live in this worldWithout remembering You-
-How can I endure the next worldWithout seeing Your face?
I am a stranger in Your country
And lonely among Your worshippers:
This is the substance of my complaint.

Gabriela Mistral

The Stranger (La Extranjera)

She speaks in her way of her savage seas
With unknown algae and unknown sands;
She prays to a formless, weightless God,
Aged, as if dying.
In our garden now so strange,
She has planted cactus and alien grass.
The desert zephyr fills her with its breath
And she has loved with a fierce, white passion
She never speaks of, for if she were to tell
It would be like the face of unknown stars.
Among us she may live for eighty years,
Yet always as if newly come,
Speaking a tongue that plants and whines
Only by tiny creatures understood.
And she will die here in our midst
One night of utmost suffering,
With only her fate as a pillow,
And death, silent and strange.

Kate Clanchy

Patagonia
I said perhaps Patagonia, and pictured

a peninsula, wide enough

for a couple of ladderback chairs

to wobble on at high tide. I thought
of us in breathless cold, facing

a horizon round as a coin, looped

in a cat's cradle strung by gulls

from sea to sun.

I planned to wait
till the waves had bored themselves to sleep,

till the last clinging barnacles,

growing worried in the hush,

had paddled off in tiny coracles,

till those restless birds,

your actor's hands,

had dropped slack into your lap,

until you'd turned, at last, to me.

When I spoke of Patagonia,

I meant
skies all empty aching blue.

I meant years.

I meant all of them

with you.

Gary Snyder

For the Children

The rising hills, the slopes,

of statistics

lie before us.

The steep climb

of everything, going up,

up, as we all

go down.
In the next century

or the one beyond that,

they say,are valleys, pastures,

we can meet there in peace

if we make it.
To climb these coming crests

one word to you, to

you and your children:
stay together

learn the flowers

go light

Gao Xingjian

You no longer live in other people's shadows nor treat other people's shadows as imaginary enemies. You just walked out of their shadows, stopped making up absurdities and fantasies, and are now in a vast emptiness and tranquillity. You originally came into the world naked and without cares and there is no need to take anything away with you, and if you wanted to you wouldn't be able to. Your only fear is unknowable death. You recall that your fear of death began in childhood and that your fear of death was much worse then than it is now. The slightest ailment made you worry that it was an incurable disease and when you fell ill you would think up all sorts of nonsense and be stricken with terror. Your having survived so many illnesses and even disasters is purely a matter of luck. Life in itself is an inexplicable miracle and to be alive is a manifestation of this miracle. Is it not enough that a conscious physical body is able to perceive the pains and joys of life? What else is there to be sought? Your fear of death arises when you are mentally and physically frail. There is the feeling of not being able to breathe and you are anxious that you will not be able to last until you can take your next breath. It is as if you are falling in an abyss, this sensation of falling was often present in dreams during childhood and you would wake in fright drenched in perspiration. In those days there was nothing wrong and your mother took you for many hospital examinations, nowadays even under the doctor's instruction to have an examination, you repeatedly procrastinate. It is absolutely clear to you that life naturally ends and when the end comes the fear vanishes, for this fear is itself a manifestation of life. On losing awareness and consciousness life suddenly ends, allowing no further thought and no further meaning. Your affliction had been your search for meaning. When you began discussing the ultimate meaning of human life with friends of your youth you had hardly lived, it seems that now you have savoured virtually all of the sensations to be experienced in life you simply laugh at the futility of searching for meaning. It is best just to experience this existence and to take care of this existence. You seem to see him in a vast emptiness, faint light comes from an unidentified source. He is not standing on some specific or defined patch of ground and he is like the trunk of a tree but has no shadow, and the horizon between the sky and the earth has vanished. Or, he is like a bird in some snow-covered place and is looking from one side to the other. Occasionally, he stares right ahead as if deep in thought, although it's not clear what it is that he is pondering. It's simply a gesture, a gesture of aesthetic beauty. Existence is actually a gesture, a striving for comfort, stretching the arms, bending the knees, turning around, to look back upon his consciousness. Or, it may be said that the gesture actually is his consciousness, that it is you in his consciousness, and from this he is able to gain some ephemeral happiness. Tragedy, comedy and farce do not exist but are aesthetic judgements of human life that differ according to person, time and place. Feelings too are probably like this and the emotions of the present at some other time can fluctuate between the sentimental and the ludicrous. And there is no longer the need for mockery as self-ridicule or self-purification seem already to be enough. It is only in the gesture of tranquilly prolonging this life and striving to comprehend the mystery of this moment in time that freedom of existence is achieved, for in solitarily scrutinizing the self the perceptions of the self by others loses all relevance. You don't know what other things you will do or what else there is to do but this is of no concern. If you want to do something you proceed to do it, it's fine if it is done but if it is not it doesn't matter. And you do not have to persist in doing something for if at a particular moment you feel hungry and thirsty you simply go and have something to eat and drink. Of course you continue to have your own opinions, interpretations, tendencies and can even get angry as you haven't got to the age when you no longer have the energy for anger. Naturally, you still become indignant but it is without a great deal of passion. Your capacity for feelings and sensory pleasures remains intact but as this is so then so be it. However there is no longer remorse, remorse is futile and, needless to say, damaging to the self. For you only life is of value, you have a lingering attachment to it and it continues to be interesting as there are still things to discover and to amaze you, and it is only life that can excite you. That's exactly how it is with you, isn't it?

Excerpt from One Man's Bible

Zbigniew Herbert

I Would Like to Describe

I would like to describe

the simplest emotion

joy or sadness

but not as others do

reaching for shafts of rain or sun

I would like to describe

a light which is being born in me

but I know it does not resemble

any star for it is

not so bright not so pure

and is uncertain

I would like to describe courage

without dragging behind me

a dusty lion and also anxiety

without shaking a glass full of water

to put it another way

I would give all metaphors

in return for one word

drawn out of my breast

like a rib

for one word contained

within the boundaries of my skin

but apparently this is not possible

and just to say -- I love

I run around like mad

picking up handfuls of birds

and my tenderness

which after all is not made of water

asks the water for a face

and anger different from fire

borrows from it a loquacious tongue

so is blurred

so is blurred in me

what white-haired gentleman

separated once and for all and said

this in the subject

this is the object

we fall asleep with one hand

under our head

and with the other

in a mound of planets

our feet abandon us

and taste the earth

with their tiny roots

which next morning

we tear out painfully

Harold Pinter

I was dead and now I live

You took my hand

I blindly died

You took my hand

You watched me die

And found my life

You were my life

When I was dead

You are my life

And so I live!

Excerpt "The Famished Road" - Ben Okri

In the beginning there was a river. The river became a road and the road branched out to the whole world. And because the road was once a river it was always hungry.

In that land of beginnings spirits mingled with the unborn. We could assume numerous forms. Many of us were birds. We knew no boundaries. There was much feasting, playing and sorrowing. We feasted much because of the beautiful terrors of eternity. We played much because we were free. And we borrowed much because there were always those amongst us who had just returned from the world of the living. They had returned inconsolable for all the love they had left behind, all the suffering they hadn't redeemed, all that they hadn't understood, and for all that they had barely begun to learn before they were drawn back to the land of origins.
There were not one amongst us who looked forward to being born. We disliked the rigours of existence, the unfulfilled longings, the enshrined injustices of the world, the labyrinths of love, the ignorance of parents, the fact of dying, and the amazing indifference of the Living in the midst of simple beauties of the universe. We feared the heartlessness of human beings, all of whom are born blind, few of whom ever learn to see. Our king was a wonderful personage who sometimes appeared in the form of a great cat. He had a red beard and eyes of greenish sapphire. He had been born uncountable times and was a legend in all worlds, known by a hundred different names.
It never mattered into what circumstances he was born. He always lived the most extraordinary of lives. One could pore over the great invisible books of lifetimes and recognize his genius through the recorded and unrecorded ages. Sometimes a man, sometimes a woman, he wrought incomparable achievements from every life. If there is anything in common to all his lives, the essence of his genius, it might be the love of transformation, and the transformation of love into higher realities.
With our spirit companions, the ones with whom we had a special affinity, we were happy most of the time because we floated on the aquamarine of love. We played with the fauns, the fairies, and the beautiful beings. Tender Sibyls, benign sprits, and the serene presences of our ancestors were always with us ,bathing us in the radiance of their diverse rainbows.There are many reasons why babies cry when they are born, and one of them is the sudden separation from the world of pure dreams, where all things are made of enchantment, and where there is no suffering. The happier we were, the closer was our birth. As we approached another incarnation we made pacts that we would return to the spirit world at first opportunity. We made these vows in fields of intense flowers and in the sweet-tasting moonlight of that world. Those of us who made these vows were known among the living as abiku, spirit-children. Not all people recognized us. We were the ones who kept coming and going, unwilling to terms with life. We had the ability to will our deaths. Our pacts were binding.Those who broke their pacts were assailed by hallucinations and haunted by their companions. They would only find consolation when they returned to the world of the unborn, the place of fountains, where their loved ones would be waiting for them silently. Those of us who lingered in the world, seduced by the annunciation of wonderful events, went through life with beautiful and fated eyes, carrying within us the music of a lovely and tragic mythology. Our mouths utter obscure prophecies.
Our minds are invaded by images of the future. We are the strange ones, with half of our beings always in the spirit world. We were often recognized and our flesh marked with razor incisions. When we were born again to the same parents the marks, lingering on our new flesh, branded our souls in advance. Then the world would spin a web of fate around our lives. Those of us who died while still children tried to erase these marks, by making beautiful spots or interesting discolorations of them. If we didn't succeed, and were recognized, we were greeted with howls of dread, and the weeping of mothers.In not wanting to stay, we caused much pain to mothers. Their pain grew heavier with each return. Their anguish became for us an added spiritual weight which quickens the cycle of rebirth. Each new birth was agony for us too, each shock of the raw world. Our cyclical rebellion made us resented by other spirits and ancestors. Disliked in the spirit world and branded amongst the Living, our unwillingness to stay affected all kinds of balances.
With passionate ritual offerings, our parents always tried to induce us to live. They also tried us to reveal where we had hidden the spirit tokens that bound us to the other world. We disdained the offerings and kept our tokens a fierce secret. And we remained indifferent to the long joyless parturition of mothers.We longed for an early homecoming, to play by the river, in the grasslands, and in the magic caves. We longed to meditate on sunlight and precious stones, and to be joyful in the eternal dew of the spirit. To be born is to come into the world weighted down with strange gifts of the soul, with enigmas and an inextinguishable sense of exile. So it was with me.How many times had I come and gone through the dreaded gateway? How many times had I been born and died young? And how often to the same parents? I had no idea.
So much of the dust of living was in me. But this time, somewhere in the inter space between the spirit world and the Living, I chose to stay. This meant breaking my pact and outwitting my companions. It wasn't because of the sacrifices, the burnt offerings of oils and yams and palm-nuts, or the blandishments, the short-lived promises of special treatment, or even because of the grief I had caused. It wasn't because of my horror of recognition either. Apart from a mark on my palm I had managed to avoid being discovered. It may have simply been that I had grown tired of coming and going.It is terrible to remain forever in-between. It may also have been that I wanted to taste of this world, to feel it, know it, love it, to make a valuable contribution to it, and to have that sublime mood of eternity in me as I live the life to come. But I sometimes think it was a face that made me want to stay. I wanted to make happy the bruised face of the woman who would become my mother.When the time arrived for the ceremonies of birth to begin, the fields at the crossroads were brilliant with lovely presences and iridescent beings. Our king led us to the first peak of the seven mountains. He spoke to us for a long time in silence. His cryptic words took flame in us. He loved speeches. With great severity, his sapphire eyes glowing, he said to me:"You are a mischievous one. You will cause no end of trouble. You have to travel many roads before you find the river of your destiny. This life of yours will be full of riddles. You will be protected and you will never be alone."
We all went down to the great valley. It was an immemorial day of festivals. Wondrous spirits danced around us to the music of gods, uttering golden chants and lapis lazuli incantations to protect our souls across the inter spaces and to prepare us for our first contact with blood and earth.
Each one of us made the passage alone. Alone, we had to survive the crossing - survive the flames and the sea, the emergence into illusions. The exile had begun.
These are the myths of beginnings. These are the stories and moods deep in those who are seeded in rich lands, who still believe in mysteries.
I was born not because I had conceived a notion to stay, but because in between my coming and going the great cycles of time had finally tightened around my neck. I prayed for laughter, a life without hunger. I was answered with paradoxes. It remains an enigma how it came to be that I was born smiling.

Rumi

wake up, wake up

this night is gone

wake up

abandon abandon

even your dear self

abandon

there is an idiot

in our market place

selling a precious soul

if you doubt my word

get up this moment

and head for the market now

don’t listen to trickery

don’t listen to the witches

don’t wash blood with blood

first turn yourself upside down

empty yourself like a cup of wine

then fill to the brim with the essence

a voice is descending

from the heavens

a healer is coming

if you desire healing

let yourself fall ill

let yourself fall ill

Ghazal 2133

Edwin Muir

Circle and Square

‘I give you half of me;

No more, lest I should make

A ground for perjury.

For your sake, for my sake,

Half will you take?’
‘Half I’ll not take nor give,

For he who gives gives all.

By halves you cannot live;

Then let the barrier fall,

In one circle have all.’

“A wise and ancient scorner

Said to me once: Beware

The road that has no corner

Where you can linger and stare.

Choose the square.
‘And let the circle run

Its dull and fevered race.

You, my dear, are one;

Show your soul in your face;

Maintain your place.
‘Give, but have something to give.

No man can want you all.

Live, and learn to live.

When all the barriers fall

You are nothing at all.’

Sachal Sarmast

Ko keeaN chavey,

ko keeaN chavey,

AaooN joee ahiyaaN, so ee ahiyaaN.

Ko kaafir-u chavey,

ko momin-u chavey,

AaooN joee ahiyaaN, so ee ahiyaaN

Some say one thing,

some say another,

I am, who I am.

Some say I am an infidel,

some say I am a believer,

I am, who I am.

Wisdom Of The Idiots-Idries Shah

WHY ARE YOU HERE?
One day Nasrudin was walking along a deserted road. Night was falling as he spied a troop of horsemen coming toward him. His imagination began to work, and he feared that they might rob him, or impress him into the army. So strong did this fear become that he leaped over a wall and found himself in a graveyard. The other travelers, innocent of any such motive as had been assumed by Nasrudin, became curious and pursued him.
When they came upon him lying motionless, one said, "Can we help you? And, why are you here in this position?"
Nasrudin, realizing his mistake said, "It is more complicated than you assume. You see, I am here because of you; and you, you are here because of me."

Rumi

Allama Iqbal

The secret divine my ecstasy has taught

I may convey if I have Gabriel's breath.

What can these stars tell me of my fate?

They are lost themselves in the boundless firmament.

The total absorption of thought and vision is life,

Scattered thought is selfhood's total death.

Pleasures of selfhood are a blessing of God,

Who makes me lose my awareness of myself.

With a pure heart, a noble aim, a poignant soul.

I care not for Solomon's wealth or Plato's thought.

The Prophet's 'Mairaj' has taught me that heaven

Lies within the bounds of human reach.

This universe, perhaps, is yet incomplete,

For I hear repeated sounds of "Be, And It Was."

Thy mind is ruled by the magic of the West,

Thy cure lies in the Fire of Rumi's faith.

It is he who has given my eyes a blissful vision,

It is he who has blessed my soul with light.

Eliot and Faulkner's "Love Song" versions!

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,
Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherised upon a table;

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,

The muttering retreats

Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:

Streets that follow like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent

To lead you to an overwhelming question...

Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"

Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,

The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes

Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,

Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,

Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,

Slipped by the terrace,made a sudden leap,

And seeing that it was a soft October night,

Curled once about the house,and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time

For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,

Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;

There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

There will be time to murder and create,

And time for all the works and days of hands

That lift and drop a question on your plate;

Time for you and time for me,

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

And for a hundred visions and revisions,

Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

And indeed there will be time

To wonder, "Do I dare?" and,

"Do I dare?"

Time to turn back and descend the stair,

With a bald spot in the middle of my hair -

(They will say: "How his hair is growing thin!")

My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,

My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin -

(They will say: "But how his arms and legs are thin!")

Do I dare

Disturb the universe?

In a minute there is time

For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all -

Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

I know the voices dying with a dying fall

Beneath the music from a farther room.

So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them all -

The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,

And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,

When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,

Then how should I begin

To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?

And how should I presume?

And I have known the arms already, known them all -

Arms that are braceleted and white and bare

(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)

Is it perfume from a dress

That makes me so digress?

Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.

And should I then presume?

And how should I begin?

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets

And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes

Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?...

I should have been a pair of ragged claws

Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!

Smoothed by long fingers,

Asleep ... tired ... or it malingers,

Stretched on the floor,

here beside you and me.

Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,

Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?

But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,

Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,

I am no prophet - and here's no great matter;

I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,

And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,

And in short, I was afraid.

And would it have been worth it, after all,

After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,

Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,

Would it have been worth while,

To have bitten off the matter with a smile,

To have squeezed the universe into a ball

To roll it toward some overwhelming question,

To say: "I am Lazarus, come from the dead,

Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all" -

If one, settling a pillow by her head,

Should say: "That is not what I meant at all."

That is not it, at all.

And would it have been worth it, after all,

Would it have been worth while,

After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,

After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor -

And this, and so much more? -

It is impossible to say just what I mean!

But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:

Would it have been worth while

If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,

And turning toward the window, should say:

"That is not it at all,

That is not what I meant, at all."

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;

Am an attendant lord, one that will do

To swell a progress, start a scene or two,

Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,

Deferential, glad to be of use,

Politic, cautious, and meticulous;

Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;

At times, indeed, almost ridiculous -

Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old ... I grow old...

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind?

Do I dare to eat a peach?

I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves

Combing the white hair of the waves blown back

When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

T.S. Eliot (1888–1965). Prufrock and Other Observations. 1917.

Love Song
(from "Vision in Spring", 1921)
by William Faulkner

Shall I walk, then,

through a corridor of profundities

Carefully erect ( I am taller that [than?] I look)

To a certain door - - -

and shall I dare

To open it?

I smoothe my mental hair

With an oft changed phrase that I revise again

Until I have forgotten what it was at first;

Settle my tie with:

I have brought a book,

Then seat myself with:

We have passed the worst.
Then I shall sit among careful cups of tea,

Aware of a slight perspiring as to brow,

(The smell of scented cigarettes will always trouble me);

I shall sit, so patently at ease,

Stiffly erect, decorous as to knees

Among toy balloons of dignity on threads of talk.
And do I dare

(I once more stroke my hand across my hair )

But the window of my mind flies shut,

I am in a room

Of surcharged conversation, and of jewelled hands;

- - -Here one slowly strips a flower stalk.

It is too close in here, I rise and walk,

Firmly take my self-possession by the hand.
Now, do I dare,

Who sees the light gleam on her intricate hair?

Shall I assume a studied pose,

or shall I stand -----Oh,

Mr. . . .? You are so kind . . ..

Again the door slams inward on my mind.
Not at all…

Replace a cup,Return and pick a napkin up.
My tongue, a bulwark

where a last faint self-possession hides,

Fails me: I withdraw, retreat,

Conscious of the glances on my feet,

And feel as if I trod in sand.
Yet I may raise my head a little while.

The world revolves behind a painted smile.

And now, while evening lies embalmed upon the west

And a last faint pulse of life fades down the sky,

We will go alone, my soul and I,

To a hollow cadence down this neutral street;

To a rhythm of feet

Now stilled and fallen.

I will walk alone,

The uninvited one who dares not go

Whither the feast is spread to friend and foe,

Whose courage balks the last indifferent gate,

Who dares not join the beggars at the arch of stone.
Change and change:

the world revolves to worlds,

To minute whorls

And particles of soil on careless thumbs.

Now I shall go alone,

I shall echo streets of stone,

while evening comes

Treading space and beat, space and beat.

The last left seed of beauty in my heart

That I so carefully tended, leaf and bloom,

Falls in darkness.
But enough. What is all beauty?

What, that I

Should raise my hands palm upward to the sky,

That I should weakly tremble and fall dumb

At some cryptic promise or pale gleam;

- -A sudden wing, a word, a cry?

Evening dies, and now that night has come

Walking still streets, monk-like, grey and dumb;

Then softly clad in grey, lies down again;

I also rise and walk, and die in dream,

For dream is death, and death but fathomed dream.
And shall I walk these streets while passing time

Softly ticks my face, my thinning hair?

I should have been a priest in floorless halls

Wearing his eyes thin on a faded manuscript.
The world revolves.

High heels and scented shawls,

Painted masks, and kisses

mouth and mouth:

Gesture of a senile pantaloon

To make us laugh.
I have measured time,

I measured time

With span of thumb and finger

As one who seeks a bargain:

sound enoughI think, but slightly worn;

There's still enough to cover me from cold,

Momentous indecisions, change

And loneliness.

Does not each fold

Repeat - - the while I measure time,

I measure time -

The word, the thought, the soundless empty gesture

Of him that it so bravely once arrayed?
Spring . . . shadowed walls, and kissing in the dark.

I, too; was young upon a time,

I too; have felt

All life, at one small word, within me melt;

And strange slow swooning wings I could not see

Stirring the beautiful silence over me.
I grow old, I grow old.

Could I walk within my garden while the night

Comes gently down,

And see the garden maidens dancing, white

And dim, across the flower beds?
I would take cold:

I dare not try,

Nor watch the stars again born in the sky

Eternally young.
I grow old, I grow old.

Submerged in the firelight's solemn goldI sit,

watching the restless shadows, red and brown

Float there till I disturb them, then they drown.
I measure time, I measure time.

I see my soul, disturbed, awake and climb

A sudden dream, and fall

And whimpering, crowd near me in the dark.
And do I dare, who steadily builds a wall

Of hour on hour, and day, then lifts a year

That heavily falls in place, while time

Ticks my face, my thinning hair, my heart

In which a faint last long remembered beauty hides?
I should have been a priest in floorless halls

Whose hand, worn thin by turning endless pages,

Lifts, and strokes his face, and falls

And stirs a dust of time heaped grain on grain,

Then gropes the book, and turns it through again;
Who turns the pages through, who turns again,

While darkness lays soft fingers on his eyes

And strokes the lamplight from his brow,

to wake him, and he dies.

Charles Dickens-"A Tale of Two Cities"

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all doing direct the other way--in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Edwin Muir

In Love For Long

I've been in love for long

With what I cannot tell

And will contrive a song

For the intangible

That has no mould or shape,

From which there's no escape.

It is not even a name,

Yet is all constancy;

Tried or untried, the same,

It cannot part from me;

A breath, yet as still

As the established hill.

It is not any thing,

And yet all being is;

Being, being, being,

Its burden and its bliss.

How can I ever prove

What it is I love?

This happy happy love

Is sieged with crying sorrows,

Crushed beneath and above

Between todays and morrows;

A little paradise

Held in the world's vice.

And there it is content

And careless as a child,

And in imprisonment

Flourishes sweet and wild;

In wrong, beyond wrong,

All the world's day long.

This love a moment known

For what I do not know

And in a moment gone

Is like the happy doe

That keeps its perfect laws

Between the tiger's paws

And vindicates its cause.

Rilke

Derek Walcott

After The Storm

There are so many islands!

As many islands as the stars at night

on that branched tree from which meteors are shaken

like falling fruit around the schooner Flight.

But things must fall,and so it always was,

on one hand Venus,on the other Mars;

fall,and are one,just as this earth is one

island in archipelagoes of stars.

My first friend was the sea.

Now,is my last.

I stop talking now.

I work,then I read,

cotching under a lantern hooked to the mast.

I try to forget what happiness was,

and when that don't work,I study the stars.

Sometimes is just me,

and the soft-scissored foam as the deck turn white

and the moon open a cloud like a door,

and the light over me is a road

in white moonlight taking me home.

Shabine sang to you from the depths of the sea.

Johannes Taule-Song Of Bareness

I will sing of bareness a new song,

for true purity is without thought.

Thoughts may not be there,

so I have lost the Mine:

I am decreated.

He who is unminded has no cares.

My unevenness no longer causes me to err:

I am as gladly poor as rich.

I want nothing to do with images,

I must stand free of myself:

I am decreated.

He who is unminded has no cares.
Would you know how I escaped the images?

I perceived the right unity in myself.

That is right unity

when neither weal nor woe displaced me:

I am decreated.

He who is unminded has no cares.
Would you know how I escaped the mind?

When I perceived neither this nor that in myself,

save bare divinity unfounded.

then I could not longer keep silent,

I had to tell it:

I am decreated.

He who is unminded has no cares.
Since I am thus lost in the abyss

I no longer wish to speak, I am mute.

The Godhead clear has swallowed me into itself.

I am displaced.

Therefore the darkness delighted me greatly.
Since I have thus come through to the origin,

I may no longer age, but grow young.

So all my powers have disappeared

and have died.

He who is unminded has no cares.
Then whosoever has disappeared

and has found a darkness is

so rich without sorrow.

Thus the dear fire has consumed me,

and I have died.

He is thus unminded has no cares.

-trans. Martin Buber

DER ALCHIMIST -Rainer Maria Rilke

He capped a flask and hissed a quiet curse -

Bleakly smiling, tapped a switch to bleed

A pressure vessel.

(Clearly what he needs,

To manufacture his own Universe,

Is time - not years - millennia of time

And funding ready to withstand the strain

Of a black hole.

He needs stars in his brain

And something like the ocean in his mind.)

A project which, at length, had gripped his thinking

That final night he jettisoned -

he gaveIt back to God.

(Clearly the scale was wrong!)

Muttering like one who has been drinking

He slumped upon his record safe and craved

The simple chunk of gold there all along.

Eugenio Montale

Bring me the sunflower so I can transplant it

here in my own field burned by salt-spray,

so it can show all day to the blue reflection of the sky

the anxiety of its golden face.

Darker things yearn for a clarity,

bodies fade and exhaust themselves in a flood of colors,

as colors do in music.

To vanish,therefore,

is the best of all good luck.

Bring me the plant that leads us

where blond transparencies rise up

and life evaporates like an essence;

bring me the sunflower sent mad with light.