Your radiant love!

Radiance by Brent Boechler at bau-xi

I want to
float
unimpeded
on an
imperturbable
bed of
silken, shimmering
ocean
traveling forever
in your
timeless, endlessness

I want to
soar
weightless
through
frictionless
air
charged
by the
radiance
of your
love

I want to
be
shattered
into
iridescence
seen only
by
the unseen eye
of
truth

I want to
be
the glow, the glint, the gleam
that remains
when all else
congeals
into
dim abstraction
The spark
in your
radiant love!

You have courted me

Image from Flickr

Rarefied
yet reminiscent
of unsoiled
yielding
splendour
The inward
outward breath
rolls
mortality
through the
infinite cosmic-scape
leaving in its path
the soundless sigh
of eternity
in which
you
have
courted
me
endlessly
and I
have
foolishly
refused to
succumb!

The unsurpassable delight

Image from Jakking

Have I not
touched
the freedom
of non-attachment?
Have I not
been spent
with ecstasy
from love unmade?
Has my languor
not been
sweetened by
your ageless perfume?
Haven't the
shadows
of my gloom
been irradiated by
the lustre of
your truth?
Haven't I
died
and risen
in the womb
of your
eternally unfolding mystery?
Why then
do I scrounge
in mindless desperation
for scraps of
fleeting relief
hoping
as only a fool would
that they will
somehow offer
the unsurpassable
delight
that is only ever found
in
you?

My heart is anxious

Image

And now that
the rain has ceased
having left its traces
of diamond drops
glittering in the
new light of an
ancient sun
my heart is anxious
for the day to
quickly end
and dusk's
gossamer vigil
to lure me
once more
into its sweet
alcove
where you
my darling
await me

Why did you come?

Image from flickr

Why did you come?
What brought you back
after all this time?
Ah
I know what you will say
That you never really left
That I have always been
like home cooking
and fresh mint toothpaste
an everyday event
lingering
long after
being forgotten
or secreted
in the private
quarters of your mind
and the guarded
chambers of your heart
and
always
always
kept warm
by the love we made
once upon a time.

That light, my love

Image from flickr

The light that
floats upon your skin
and rests upon your cheekbones
leaving some of you in
a valley of shadows
marrying sun and moon at last
That light, my love
quenches a longing
so mired in aimless wandering
I would happily die
knowing that
upon you
it held my final gaze

You are!

You are
a speck of enchantment
whirling dervishly
in the eternal playground
of love

You are
a mystery
pretending to be
ordinary

You are
a longing
endlessly longing
for itself


You are
god's sacred space
a shrine for
adoration.

Under the Spell of Love

Why do you crave the inner
And meanwhile shun the outer?

I do not shun the outer
I meet it at Joy’s door
But I seek to know what lies inside
And thus knowing, savour both outer and inner
It is as if I have fallen under the spell of love

You are wise Prophetess
But you are more than wise
You are the Waking Dream

Lucy Lopez

I have a longing. It is to penetrate reality. Why? To know. What? Ah, I almost fell for that one!

What is it that I wish to know? The unknown? The unknowable? The Nameless? The Ein Sof as it is referred to in the Jewish tradition?

Or, do I wish to know whatever there is to be known or whatever can be known? And if so, why?

Well, in either case, Why? is still an important question to ask. And answer.

Why do I wish to know anything? Because, on some level, I believe I will be happier for it. And actually, I am sure that on some level, I believe I will find complete happiness when I do know whatever it is that I am longing to know.

The child asks questions. It seems to have an innate need to know. Or at least to ask. Interestingly, it only begins to question after it has learned to speak - only after it has acquired a new toy/tool. A tool of separation - language.

Did it have questions before it acquired this toy/tool? Unlikely, since 'it' was not limited to the boundaries of 'its' skin. On the contrary, 'it' was everything and experienced 'itself' as (part of) everything. No sense of separation.

And the child, now grown up, has been conditioned by a need to know. But the need to know can sometimes overpower the longing to know, the desire to know. A desire, so sweet and so intoxicating, as if under the spell of love....

Helplessly Fascinated

I am helplessly fascinated by what I see and hear in this place that was once the only home I knew. Curiously, I find myself occasionally still calling it home even though I feel so much more like an onlooker rather than one who belongs!

There is, without doubt, a sense of my past, my ‘roots’, as it were. This is, after all, where I, the youngest of ten siblings, was born and where I lived for the first eighteeen years of my life and this is where I return time and again to be with my mother and my six brothers and two sisters, some resident, others visiting. So, this is home insofar as it is where we gather as family and where we recall memories, distant and recent.

This is also home because we plan for things that involve the entire family such as my sister, Michelle’s, recent birthday. Or at least, this is where such plans originate and are conveyed, where necessary, to family members no longer living here. And this is home because it is here where we meet, once again, friends from childhood and friends more recently acquired.

And all of this, against the backdrop of the brief and intense togetherness of family, punctuated by the much longer and more mundane cycles of separation, appears to create gaping holes of awareness from which fascination taunts me mercilessly!

For instance, as I am driven along local streets, now different to how I remember them, I hold in my mind, images of old, dilapidated shacks that were the dwelling places of families, some of which comprised at least three generations.

There is a bitter-sweetness about such images which I cannot explain nor adequately describe. I close my eyes and I hear sounds of evening chatter. For some reason, it is intense and not relaxed as one might expect at this time of the day. I hear the sound of a metal spatula striking the wok as the evening meal is prepared in a dim, yellow light and the distinctive smell of fish paste hits me as it used to so many years ago. In the dusk, I can still make out the shapes of stray dogs sniffing in vain for food.

I feel I am losing myself as my senses heighten and I wonder why I feel like I am teetering on the edge of pain, as if my next breath would cause me to free-fall into an interminable abyss? And yet, do I not also sense a tenderness waiting for me there - a tenderness I am finding so very hard to resist?

Or, for instance, I watch and listen as a family friend talks. His soft voice and local accent feel melodious and are achingly familiar. I am far less interested in what he is saying than in how he says it. It keeps me suspended in a place I feel I have been but never explored, so that there hangs over me the question, why?

Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened

By T.S. Eliot taken from http://www.quotegarden.com/memory.html

As I reflect on it now, I think I know the answer. I was in a hurry to leave this place of family and familiarity for, as my discriminating mind would have me believe, my most significant experiences growing up here were painful ones. Even now, I cannot seem to shift the heavy curtains they have drawn across my past. Perhaps if I could open them just a little, I might catch a glimpse of one or two joyous events that must have surely claimed at least some of my childhood. But just now, such optimism escapes me.

So this is the aching from my fascination. I want to go back in there and remember the past, the familiar, without the pain. I want to explore those places I so hurriedly withdrew from or was never allowed to enter without the fear of being imprisoned forever in them. Pain and fear that were intensely real to me all those years ago. Pain and fear that a part of me still fears. And yet, it calls me, like a lost spirit longing to return home. I realize now that I am its home!

Yielding to daily Graces

One of my great longings is to write that piece of prose that will lodge itself in the hearts of many, filling them with sweet enchantment, thrilling them in unimaginable ways to leave them drowning irredeemably in love! Could anything be better? Not much, I don't think!

"An enchanted life has many moments when the heart is overwhelmed with beauty and the imagination is electrified by some haunting quality in the world or by a spirit or voice speaking from deep within a thing, a place or a person. Enchantment may be" ~ Henry Louis Mencken
(From http://thinkexist.com)

There exists for each of us a state of consciousness that is enchantment itself. It is the enchantment of the child, suffused with wonderment and thrill. I long for it. No, I don't mean in a way that holds me back from engaging with life and all its shadow play. I do partake as fully as I can in the creative work of staying alive as well as I know how to. But what I long for are those runaway moments when, rather unexpectedly and to my breath-taking delight, I find myself in the softness and freshness of new life, a new form of beauty, disarmingly so!

Perhaps this is why I so love softly, falling rain. It seems to caress life forms, blessing each one indiscriminately. You know it, I'm sure.

Yesterday, I sat in bed with my laptop, as I have been doing in these recent wintry days, working away, stopping often to watch the rain fall upon the native just outside my bedroom. I am certain the green leaves on it looked even greener and the raindrops suspended from their tips were priceless diamonds. I knew the 'diamonds' would disappear in time, but while they lasted, I remained enthralled.

Water has this way of enveloping you so completely, it's silly to resist! What could be more intimate? Air, which we take so much for granted, is just as complete in his embrace. It is these moments of recognizing and yielding to daily graces that I long for. They leave me feeling full of something. I think they call it life.