December 8, 2018
The following poems were published in the December 2018 issue of the Oasis Magazine, an online publication by the community that has grown up around author and teacher Gangaji. I owe so much of my transition over the past 4 years to Gangaji’s articulate teachings and abundant expression of love. I dedicate these words to her and to this timeless quest to end all quests.
You can learn more about Gangaji and her work at www.ganganji.org
1.
There are seemingly two ways of existing in this life:
I’ve been wholeheartedly embraced by both.
Resisting life and flowing with it
Being paranoid and being vigilant
Living in a state of chronic skepticism and living in a state of constant trust
Living in fear and living in love
Identifying with thought and identifying with silence
Identifying with the transient and identifying with the eternal
Believing that I am my story—my past, my pain, my fears, my joys, my likes, my dislikes, my race, my religion, my education, my talent, my job, my family, my enemy, my body and my mind—and knowing that I am the book in which those stories are written, the air through which those stories are spoken and transmitted
Believing I am separate and knowing I am everything
Believing I can be destroyed and knowing I was never born and can never die
Believing salvation is in the future and knowing that there is nothing to be saved
Believing in any God and daring to open to the truth that I AM
There are seemingly two ways of existing in this life:
I’ve been wholeheartedly embraced by both.
2.
The sweet seduction of convincing
What a rush it brings when successful
Molding another mind to fit one's own
The power to supersede another's truth
It feels good to be right, validated, agreed with, to win. But at what cost?
Do I persuade to serve myself or truth?
When the counter argument comes
And I feel the sting of a personal slight,
The answer is clear.
A sense of self built on the manipulation of others is a phantom house.
And then, I encounter a teacher...
Who's mission is to receive those who bring their burdens
Of aching honesty to her feet.
Already knowing the deepest truth, which does not fit
In this sack of self denial.
So many beliefs to sort through,
But only one truth at the deepest depths.
"No convincing, just reminding.
No forcing, just inviting.
The power of gentleness
Dissolves the leaden burden and leaves
Nothing but love."
3.
Bed like purgatory. Mind at its loudest and fastest. Oh, how it feels both seductive and terrible, the thought of sleeping the day away. It would not be restful sleep. It would be lying in a bed of stressful dreams, anxiety and not-good-enoughness.
Amazing how as soon as one sits up, the brain chemistry changes.
No more hiding from the world under covers. No more piecing together a hazy victim story, scanning all one's past rejections, projecting painful possibilities into the future.
Does one know, even suspect, who one is in these moments?
The rehearsal of the story of suffering creates dark clouds, limited vision, an apparent closing of the heart.
"Let me sleep away my life before attempting to open the heart, taking responsibility, before waking up."
How long have I been asleep?
Rise, Lazarus. Your body has been in the grave four days too long,
While your spirit soared above the ground and beyond your wildest dreams.
4.
I could tell you the truth,
I won't call it "my" truth,
and yet "the" truth still smacks of arrogance...
I could tell you that truth, but you wouldn't believe me.
You'd blame it on my privilege, my youth, my sex.
You'd feel a shudder run through your body, and then dismiss it.
Is there nothing truer than distrust and doubt? Than fear and skepticism?
Of what is it born and to what does it return?
The air moves, my stomach churns, the heart beats, the mind closes and opens like heart valves or fish gills.
All are life processes trusted to things unknown and unseen.
And the truth is revealed when doubt and fear are seen as sacred in the moment they are born.
5.
What if someone told you that we crave connection and love simply because we have forgotten that we are both?
6.
I have spoken enough words in my life to fill many lifetimes.
I have spent so much time trying to convey meaning, have others understand me perfectly, and convince others I am right.
What an exhausting enterprise, when we can silently gaze into each other's eyes and know with our greatest knowing the deepest truth!
7.
The invitation of one, golden-green leaf:
Stop looking and start seeing.
No need to read between the lines,
Make up stories, and believe them.
See until all comes into focus.
We have our whole lives to see; take that whole time.
Be silent, be still until you are silence, until you are stillness.
Stop looking and start seeing.
No need to run from or change or keep it.
Just see.
Gaze steadily until the crisp clarity stops everything.
We have our whole lives to stop; Be every moment.
Be grateful, be loving until you are gratitude, until you are love.
Stop looking and start seeing.
8.
All the masters say surrender.
Some of us say it’s too hard.
Others say that surrender is our natural state; it’s only hard to keep hanging onto the suffering.
Some of us say it’s impossible.
Others say it’s our birthright—that we will incarnate on this earth over and over again until we remember who we are.
Who's to say? Take comfort in that we will keep spinning sayings until the silence of surrender claims us.
9.
Eyes hypnotized by the tops of these trees,
they stand erect, branches extended into blue infinity.
The unseen invites them to dance,
and they yield ever so gently, but completely to the wind.
No effort,
Just nature surrendering to it's subtlest self.
10.
And so it came to be
That after years of living
Being tossed around by life, rather
I found myself changed:
I still had the yearning to be seen,
But louder was the knowing
That I am that which is always seen, always known
I still had the desire to make love,
But deeper was the knowing
That I am love.
I still felt lonely, separate, and awkward
But truer was the connecting with other
Over feeling the same, a union in loneliness.
I still felt a magnetic pull to live in the past and the future
But stronger was the stillness of the present
All had merged: the dream with the reality,
The desirable with the undesirable,
As I found myself with a fever, smiling
As I washed someone else’s dishes
And recognized this metamorphosis