Letting Go

Being Your Self - Selva Oscura - Spinning - Mexican Samadhi - Farther Than Haut-Médoc - Karma Samsara & the Bug - Amore

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Being Your Self

i. The Boat

The boat of identity is tied to the dock in Calgary or Paris, Kingston or Geneva, Vancouver or Rome. Loosen the ropes, and let it float downstream.

You can’t calibrate what you are with each person you know, present or past.

Everyone has their own feelings; there’s no use trying to freeze them in time.

Live your life in the moment, till death do you part.

ii. The Sweater

But don’t bother trying to throw away everything that you are. This isn’t India, and you aren’t a saddhu wandering from your home beneath a tree into the deep stream of the Ganges, all the way to the Bay of Bengal.

You saw the Ganges once, but you were just a tourist.

Relax in your study and open Savitri or the Merchant of Venice. Put on your favourite sweater, the one you’ve had for years. It fits your body like a glove.

If you like, it’s a metaphor for your identity, no matter who says it’s too wide or too tight.

While others may look more stylish, the holes in the elbows cool you in the summer, and each tear and worn-out stitch are your own.

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Selva Oscura

You’re a traveller, travelling through the forest of doors

leading into gardens, arboretums, log-cabins, and swiss chalets.

You’re a traveller in the hot house, and on the garden of forking paths,

two roads branching in the yellow woods. There’s always a choice.

So you build your life on wood and sunbeams, on your choice of dreams

of where the Garden grows and where the tree-tops reach the sky.

❧

Ages ago, you scrambled down on branches into the gorge at Olduvai

and sailed the ark upon the sea. Random fears surged up

from some dark underwater hole. You lassoed them,

gave them a ride around the sky, and let them go.

You mated with the harlot Shamhat in a hut next to the Euphrates,

and from the fjords battered down the gates of Lindisfarne.

You built the slums of London-town, and set fire to the sky.

❧

You did all these things inside the glade of dreaming life and thinking self,

a stick-like form that finds the knot, turns the knob, and opens the door.

You find yourself floating, swimming through a rope-world of kelp

and towering vaults of ancient cities in the forest of a shamrock sea.

🍷 

Farther Than Haut-Médoc

I have been, and will return to being a bunch of red grapes when the wine presses of the South are empty of meaning. I have travelled from slope to cellar, from vineyards to the gullets of France.

In a past life of raindrops and caterpillars I slid down the rain-drenched vine into a jungle of green leaves and red roots. In others I was plucked by the fingers of Sicilian peasants, or pressed in the stained-wood carcasses of Provence. Steeped in the lore of languid hours, I laboured in gentian, high in the Swiss Alps, until the blue turned to amber.

I have sat with Omar Khayyam in a thousand cafes, but still can’t fathom the empty cup. 

⏳

Spinning

I used to spin on a dime from one end of the court to the next, slicing a cross-court drop and making the other guy spin like Baryshnikov.

But now the bus looms a foot from the curb and everything close seems so far away. The dance of bodies stops.

I can’t tell if this is my bus, a crack in the pavement, or a siren bell.

🇲🇽

Mexican Samadhi

Lord Shiva makes a brief visit to the Italian Coffee Company in the tree-studded Zócalo of Oaxaca City, on January 24, 2009, 4 PM.

1.

So then

what is there to do

but live in the naked present

with the things that brought us to where we are

recalling all the roads and by-ways

to the here and now? 

Nada mas.

2.

And yet

the cup is at our lips

and the present isn’t a fixed point.

It’s in constant motion, contracting and expanding,

with all of the molecules of space and time moving around it,

taking us from where we thought we were

to somewhere else,

beyond.

3.

This point

may be simple and obvious,

but to get the hang of the moment,

to flow smoothly from one moment to the next,

to get an easy balance between now and then, and now again

and what's to come, requires an insight that even the gods might dream of 

as Lord Shiva makes a brief visit to the Italian Coffee Company

in the tree-studded Zócalo of Oaxaca City,

January 24, 2009,

5:15

. 

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Karma-Samsara & the Bug

Beneath Shakespeare and the stars the ego shrinks

till at last you reach the size of Kafka’s bug

and scurry about your beetle business until you’re old and grey

and awed by the blades of grass some greybeard cosmos sowed over your little grave.

There you lie, like one of Poe’s unhappy victims waiting to be reborn

until finally you’re reincarnated in a caterpillar shape, inching your way toward the light

that glistens at the end of a dark wet bough. Finally, you take a daring leap

and shake your wings in the misty air in the mountain ranges of Shan Shui

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Amore

I

We may start from The One, a tiny point containing everything, but when matter widens, molecules start to move in wider circles, arcs, seconds. Space starts to tick and time starts to tock.

The expansion of the fixed heavens makes it even more difficult to understand the relationship between ourselves and a Maker, or between ourselves and our smallest part, DNA or vibrating strand.

So far ago, where were we born? The seed of our universe has sprouted into the game of twos and threes, into an infinite number of atoms, molecules, plants, planets, galaxies, plans, perhaps even universes.

II

Two Greek columns whose tops and bottoms meet suggest something elliptic: the dancing of planets, the rotation of stars and galaxies, the music of the spheres. Winding motions of the Deity?

0

Between the lines of darkness and light the chance of being walks, empty, like a grey god, with neither complete finality nor certain infinity, his brain a blank slate between the circling lines of solid ink, and so it seems that he is nothing, until he meets another who also circles with her eyes the circumference of the sky.

00

A double zero, back and forth, left and right connect in the nexus of voids.

⚭

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