INTENTION

I believe in all that has never yet been spoken.

I want to free what waits within me

so that what no one has dared to wish for

may for once spring clear

without my contriving.

If this is arrogant, God, forgive me,

but this is what I need to say.

May what I do flow from me like a river,

no forcing and no holding back,

the way it is with children.

Then in these swelling and ebbing currents,

these deepening tides moving out, returning,

I will sing you as no one ever has,

streaming through widening channels

into the open sea.

–Rilke’s Book of Hours:  Love Poems to God, Barrows and Macy, Riverhead Books, New York, 1996

NOSTALGIA

How we long to become that which we hardly ever dared hope we might be.  How we long to become that which we have always been.  —PirVilayat Inayat Khan, my lifetime teacher and father, paraphrased from my most cherished memories of his voice and Being

BEING

… to exist as a human Being in an authentic relationship as mortal to other mortals, to earth and sky, to the divinities present or absent, to things and plants and animals; it means, to let each of these be–to let it presence in openness, in the full appropriateness of its nature–and to hold oneself open to its Being, recognizing it and responding to it appropriately in one’s own Being, the way in which one oneself goes on, lives; and then, perhaps, in this ongoing life one may hear the call of the language that speaks of the Being of all these Beings and respond to it in a mortal language that speaks of what it hears.  (Heidegger, Being and Time, 1971, p. x)

THE FRAGRANCE THAT EXISTS…ONCE THE FLOWER HAS DIED

Then Almitra spoke, saying, “We would ask now of Death.”

And he said:

You would know the secret of death.

But how shall you find it unless you seek it in the heart of life?

The owl whose night-bound eyes are blind unto the day cannot unveil the mystery of light.

If you would indeed behold the spirit of death, open your heart wide unto the body of life.

For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one.

In the depth of your hopes and desires lies your silent knowledge of the beyond;

And like seeds dreaming beneath the snow your heart dreams of spring.

Trust the dreams, for in them is hidden the gate to eternity.

Your fear of death is but the trembling of the shepherd when he stands before the king whose hand is to be laid upon him in honour.

Is the shepherd not joyful beneath his trembling, that he shall wear the mark of the king?

Yet is he not more mindful of his trembling?

For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?

And what is to cease breathing, but to free the breath from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered?

Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing.

And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb.

And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.  –Khalil Gibran

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I came here and stayed for several reasons:  one was that I wanted to have a place to put things I didn’t want to lose.  Most of these things consisted of words and pictures that cut through to the core of Being for me, and it seemed to me that it would be a good thing to have them where they’d be when I called them.

The second reason I came here and stayed was because it seems to me that all of us come here for a reason, and the miracle of that bequeathes the responsibility to give something to the world.  This is one of the things I can give:  my words and the shapes of the footsteps I find as I search for the Ox.

Another reason was that I have a passion for expressing that which can’t be expressed.  Enough said about that, I’ve already blown it.

What a wonderful development in Being is the Internet.  Spirit speaks to spirits, world to worlds.  Please use the links here if you’d like to read some of my words and the words of others that make my life worth living and my death worth dying.  Leave me a message, if you’d like, so I’ll know for sure that you were here.