The Holy Fool

When it's cold and raining
You are more beautiful.

And the snow brings me
even closer to Your lips.

The Inner Secret,
that which was never born,

You are That Freshness,
and I am with You now.

I can't explain the goings
or the comings. You enter suddenly,

and I am nowhere again,
Inside the Majesty.


                   -- Rumi

        Last night I found myself once again "Inside the Majesty." I had been far outside it for a long time. Rejection by a close friend had wounded me deeply. Then I believed my job was being threatened because of unjust criticism and accusation. I felt old, hurting, angry and afraid, and could not stop obsessing about mistakes and wrongs of the past, dangers and difficulties of the future. I was lurching all over the psychological map--everywhere except here, now, in the Reality of the immediate present, the Eternal Presence.

       Yet from past experience I know that that Reality is always here, now, unchanging, incorruptible, a Beacon of Singing Light at the innermost core of my being, of all being. When Rumi writes "I can't explain the goings, / or the comings..." I don't take that to mean the goings or the comings of God, or Grace. Those goings and comings are my own; they expose how I chronically become obsessed by, then addicted to, my hurt, fear, anger, desire or despair. These delusions are the "goings"--my willful or clueless estrangement and alienation from my Higher Self. That's where I found myself last night--lying awake, staring into the dark, beseiged by my demons.

             MONSTERS ON PARADE

the ferocious piranhas of raw dread are tearing

bite-sized chunks right from my mind    a chair

is now the ridiculous pawn in a power struggle

the Nextel keeps shutting down in my pocket

DeWayne's pissed off because I've blamed him

I'm worried viral gossip could cost me my job

you'd think after so many years I'd have won it--

this endless pitched battle with chronic demons

you'd think a terrified little boy would grow up

stop cringing at those monsters under the bed

you'd think enough time was wasted    enough

chances blown    then you'd have to think again

you can't look at a life and judge: success/failure

not until you've suffered the same bitter wounds

wrestled with the same nightmarish obsessions

tasted the same bile of horror coating the tongue

but after that all judgement goes out the window

what's left is a naked mirror reflecting your soul

                               ***

     After going round and round in my head, harried with insomnia, I became transfixed by that naked mirror reflecting my soul. Staring into it intently I understood that I have a choice, I always have a choice. I could continue to gaze--obsessed, addicted, spellbound--at the endlessly seductive or obscenely horrifying contortions of my demons, riddled with cosmic dread. Or by a drastic, purging, unconditional surrender; a profound, wholehearted metanoia penetrating right down to the naked core of my being, I could radically Focus Elsewhere. But not just any "Elsewhere." I could, and I did, uncompromisingly re-orient my soul's single-pointed attention to the radiant, joyous, serene, eternal, transcendent Light, the illuminating Presence which is always there and which never changes, falters or fails.

                       PIVOT POINT

the journey from one edge of an eyelash to another

                                how infinitely far!

and the time it takes--that microsecond's an eternity

but ride the next express between heaven and hell

either direction        now there's hair-raising speed!

               you'll arrive even before you depart

I know a breath    inside a breath    inside the breath

I know the pivot point for swirling clouds of worlds

tell me    are you awake yet    see what you can't see

hear what you can't hear      feel what you can't feel

there's a   pure   cold   stream   that's always flowing

if you find it don't hesitate    kneel    kneel and drink

                                  ***

     Paul wrote: "For the foolishness of God is wiser than men..." (1Co 1.25). The choice I made last night to "focus elsewhere" felt at the time like a foolish thing to do. The issues I'm struggling with are real, damaging, serious. There are no easy fixes. Don't I need to focus exclusively on them, worry incessantly about them, constantly be humping to troubleshoot them? Yet when  I'm caught in a hurricane, it's impossible to cope effectively while I'm being blasted by 100-mile-an-hour winds! Only from the safety of the calm, clear, luminous eye of the storm can I get my spiritual bearings, find my essential balance, and discern the means of wise action. Coming back Home to my Higher Self was a choice to seek refuge in the Divine Eye of the profane storm. There's a difference between a blind fool and a Holy Fool. The blind fool sticks his head in the sand. The Holy Fool wraps her soul in the Light. 

     The Inner Light is beyond both praise and blame, like unto space it knows no boundaries; yet it is right here with us, ever returning to serenity and fullness...You remain silent and it speaks; you speak and it is silent. The Gate of Heaven is wide open, with not a single obstruction before it.

                                              -- Yung Chia

  

     

The Unseen

     This world is but a bridge, cross it, but build no home upon it. The world endures but for an hour. Spend it in devotion. The rest is unseen.

                      -- Akbar the Great

     I spent a good part of my life longing, even lusting, for fame. I would become  a Great Poet, lionized by millions! Even a great Spiritual Teacher! My self-worth was dependent on my becoming widely recognized and applauded, a Major Player in the only Game that really counted--this Earth Plane ego dance; this shimmy-shake of vainglory and public spectacle; this endless, shadowy hall of glittering funhouse mirrors.

      But simultaneously, a higher, wiser Spirit was pulling me in exactly the opposite direction--toward deeper interiority, painfully acquired humility, purging emptiness. I began to realize that what's truly important is invisible, a transcendent sphere of being not directly detectable by the senses, and therefore mostly ignored by our overwhelmingly materialistic civilization. I fell in love with silence, solitude, mystery, the Unknown. I learned that to be a real "Player in the Game" meant I had to wean myself from my addiction to the chimera of worldly success, the mirage of ephemeral fame.

            A STRANGE WIND

The face turned away from the feast --

       learn that, be

             that one.

A strange wind is blowing

              through the black rectangle

         of the open doorway,

beyond which, night

      smells of unappeasable distance,

             and the narrow steps

lead down to no street

                  you can remember...

The heart weaned away from the world --

       earn that, free

              that one.

Let desire expand

          until it transcends

               all objects.

Possessing nothing,

          possessed by nothing,

in the perfection

        of such emptiness

                         make your Home.

                   ***

      My ultimate Home is in the no-time and no-place of an infinite and eternal consciousness where "I" cease to exist. My own consciousness is only fully awake there for the first time; and what it's awake to is a Oneness beyond all separation. That is Reality. Beside it the tawdry child's play of worldly fame and glory is exposed as ludicrous and absurd.

                     THE WAY IN

Whoever you are: some evening take a step

out of your house, which you know so well.

Enormous space is near, your house lies

where it begins, whoever you are.

Your eyes find it hard to tear themselves

from the sloping threshold, but with your eyes

slowly, slowly, lift one black tree

up, so it stands against the sky: skinny, alone.

With that you have made the world...

                               -- Rainer Maria Rilke

      My greatest challenge is to take that crucial step out of the familiar house of my ego, which I know so well. "Enormous space is near." That's where the deepest meaning of my life suddenly breaks open. Dumbstruck, I experience my soul illuminated at last against the scale of the stars...

   Out beyond ideas of

wrongdoing and rightdoing,

there is a field.

I'll meet you there.

                 -- Rumi

     

                   

      

Soul Wounds

There are some blows in life so hard...
                            I don't know!
Blows that seem to come from God's hatred;
                            as if before them,
the backwash of all suffering
were welling up in my soul...I don't know!

                            -- Cesar Vallejo

     If I love with radical openness from my soul, sometimes I will radically suffer. There's no way to avoid this. At least I've not found one. If the ultimate goal of the spiritual path is to attain a pure and constant state of utterly blissful detachment, exempt from "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune," then I still have many lifetimes of learning to go.

      Yesterday I lost a beloved friend--suddenly, shockingly, irretrievably. And today I'm a walking wound. How can I escape from this terrible grief, which after all is only the opposite face of that once joyous love? It's the risk I had to take for opening my soul unconditionally to the beloved; it's the price I must pay now, now that that love has shattered beyond all mending.

                  CRIMES

There are crimes so bad

                       I can't find words,

wrongs too obscene to bear.

If you think I'm lying

we've got nothing to talk about--

you inhabit

              a different universe.

There's an inferno of hate

         the human mind

                       can't encompass--

like a flame thrower

                    incinerating a rose.

Nothing's left

              but ashes that scream.

At such times

                all love can do

seems less than zero.

      We gaze dumbstruck

                    on Medusa's face,

despair

       scorching us to stone...

                 ***

     Do you know what I mean? How can you not know--here and now in 2011--either by direct experience, or from what you've seen and heard about the suffering of others? What I understand of "enlightenment" is the choice, every single moment, to keep my soul wide open and profoundly awake to the incalculable winds of the whole universe. The corrolary must be immense courage--for I can never predict or control what those winds will bring. So my soul is also a cosmic window, and to remain alive and growing there, in my naked soul, means to accept that absolutely anything may potentially enter  and profoundly transform the innermost sanctum of my being.

             WHAT THE WIND SAID

We agreed to meet this hour so I'm here

wind, faithful to the promise. As are you,

gusting with biting urgency on my face.

Then let our palaver begin. But mostly I'll

listen, hoping to grasp what you're trying

to say. Thus far, this is what I understand:

Don't clutch at even the barest "certainty."

It blows away like shingles in a hurricane.

Everything's provisional, forever changing.

That's all. The rest is theme and variation.

Which still leaves me alone with my heart--

its loves and fears, its longing not to die.

Wind, I concede; you're older and wiser.

You prowled before the icecaps formed!

Spellbound shamans conjured your voice.

But I'm so small. The dark's so immense.

Isn't there an axiom I can hold and save,

some truth that doesn't always confound?

I'm the free quintessence of who you are--

the Spirit's breath transforming all things!

Surrender your crutches. Fly home to me.

                            ***

        What I hear that Spirit's breath telling my soul is not "don't let everything in," but rather "don't try to hold on to one bit of it," because that's impossible anyway. As Heraclitus wrote: "Nothing is permanent in the world, except change." There are so many priceless moments my friend and I shared. They're enshrined in my heart forever. But I can't bring them back, because I can't bring her back. I can't even hold on to our love as a living, breathing, astonishing and immediate experience. All I can do is to be wholeheartedly grateful for what we once had, and to know that it's a part of me now, and has changed my life forever.

     We see clearly...that there is suffering in life, that the suffering is inherent in it, that the cause of it for us is our grasping or our identification. When we learn to be free in that way, nothing can touch us. We discover that there is a real liberation that is possible for every human being. We come to understand the teachings of the heart, and see that it is possible for the heart to open and to contain the entire universe.

                                   --- Jack Kornfield



The Still Small Voice

   
  Great ideas come into the world as gently as doves. Perhaps then, if we listen attentively, we shall hear amid the uproar of empires and nations, a faint flutter of wings, the gentle stirring of life and hope.

                       -- Albert Camus

      Are we listening attentively? Unless we are, we'll miss the summoning, the wake-up call, the beaconing voice of a New Consciousness which is struggling to birth right now, right here, at any moment of our lives. But what could be harder, while careening along on our globalized, digitalized, information superhighway, than to take the next exit and pull over; to simply stop and truly listen? And listen for what? For nothing out there, "amid the uproar of empires and nations." But rather--for a still, small voice like the faintest fluttering of wings--whispering from the innermost depths of our souls.

                      NAMELESS

Not the barest swaying of a small branch

in the breeze this morning, not that. Not

a starling stretching out one wing, pecking

at its feathers. Not the thought of you

with both hands cradled around your

first cup of coffee. Not even the silence.
No, none of these...Not a single ant

crawling across the tabletop. And not

the farthest galaxy wildly cartwheeling

from the Big Bang! Not any kiss. Not

every tear. It can't be named by these...

                       ***

     

      Another name we might use for this mysterious voice, however, is "intuition" -- a knowing which transcends emotion, imagination, conscience, intellect, will, senses, desire, instinct and experience, yet somehow encompasses all of them. There's only  a single, interior "bull's-eye" where the contradictory priorities of each of these many different poles of our beings can ever finally be integrated and reconciled--the human soul. Here alone the Timeless intersects time, the Infinite overarches space. Yet in a supremely materialistic age such as ours, in which the soul itself has been virtually rationalized out of existence, our task of radical rediscovery can scarcely be more difficult, or more essential. 

At the still point of the turning world.

Neither flesh nor fleshness;

Neither from nor towards:

At the still point, there the dance is.

But neither arrest nor movement.

And do not call it fixity,

Where past and future are gathered.

                      -- T. S. Eliot

     It's from Eliot's "still point of the turning world," where the dance is, that the still small voice of our intuition addresses us. And just as only a condition of completely open and attentive stillness may enable us at last to participate in that intuitive dance, so a comparable state of completely open and attentive silence is necessary before we can truly hear and respond to that intuitive inner voice. 

                  LODESTAR

What we have no words for, never

stops speaking to us strangely inside,

although its voice is so terribly small,

so easily drowned out by the clamor

of pain, desire, or even some brief,

minor irritation, like a fly in the soup.

But there comes a moment when,

despite ourselves, awe spills across

every barricade we erect to repel it.

The ecstatic murmur of the universe

swells subversively, waking our souls,

and we shudder, flooded by grace!

Here's the huge, scandalous secret

we sleepwalkers still carry around.

Bit by bit, an incomparable lodestar--

our luminous wisdom, a holy gift!--

got shunted aside. Now we worship

things, money, power, status, self.

Ever since I realized this, I began to

die, over and over. And each time

I'm changed, reborn! The only way
I could recover the treasure I'd lost

was to break free from possession--

that suffocating armor of my fears.

                      ***

    

     Nothing drowns out that still, small voice more drastically than fear. As long as I'm mesmerized and obsessed by my own particular demons of terror--or repressing them such that they control my life from the shadows--I can never hear the gentle, wise, intimate, redemptive, divine voice of my soul. So part of the unavoidable spiritual spade work I must do, is first to honestly face and then to courageously come to grips with, my worst, most crippling and addictive fears. As Carl Jung wrote: "There is no coming to consciousness without pain." But this also is true:

The pain was great when the strings

were being tuned, my Master!

Begin your music, and let me forget

the pain, let me feel in beauty

what you had in your mind

through those pitiless days.

        --Rabindranath Tagore

    

    

What Brings Us To God

The heat of midnight tears
 will bring you to God.

                                         -- Mirabai

     The personal pathways to God are unique, individual, countless, but in each there's a Turning Point--the Ancient Greeks called this Metanoia. Sometimes we recognize it instantly; or the discovery may only dawn in retrospect, after a lifetime   of experience and   reflection.   For me, the revelation was

instantaneous, mind-boggling, overwhelming! And as Mirabai understood so many centuries ago, it was "the heat of midnight tears" which brought me to God.

      In my early thirties I found myself "lost in a dark wood"--more specifically, I was

hunched up on a closed toilet lid one night wailing my guts out. All the unfinished deaths in my life up till then had finally coalesced into a monstrous abyss of anguish inside me which seemed bottomless. My sister's death, my father's death, and now the death of my marriage--there weren't enough tears to grieve them all at once, not after shutting out their reality for so long. I was stripped bare to the emotional bone, helpless, hopeless, bereft.



      One thing that comes out in myths is that at the bottom of the abyss comes the voice of salvation. The black moment is the moment when the real message of transformation is going to come. At the darkest moment comes the light.

                            -- Joseph Campbell

     These words describe what happened then. In my aching despair I prayed for the first time in my adult life. But since I'd long abandoned any belief in God, all I could conceive to pray to were the sentient atoms of my own dead father, which I envisioned still floating around somewhere far out in the interstellar void. What happened then still staggers my being. Instaneously, I was catapulted from agony to ecstasy--as if my soul were a pebble pulled all the way down to the depths in a Cosmic Slingshot, then abruptly released and sent soaring into the Heavens! I was transfixed by a laser beam of invisible Light; embraced in a profoundly compassionate, transcendent Presence, and irradiated with an irrepressible, all-encompassing Joy!  Mere words simply cannot express it. I had encountered an unfathomable Reality beyond any I'd ever known--ever imagined even existed!--and I knew at once that my life was changed forever.

                   KANSAS CITY RENGA

April still conjures blossoms   but the house is long gone

where I prayed to the far-flung atoms of my dead father

glittering like a sentient constellation at the galaxy's core

instantaneously    from hair tips to heel ends    I was split

wide open    riddled by a blinding strobe of cosmic Light

that yanked me inside out      catapulting grief to ecstasy

I was sitting on the toilet lid weeping in a rickety house

while my hollow marriage collapsed around me    when

all heaven suddenly broke loose and everything changed

one timeless night     at 47th and Jarboe    in Kansas City

                              ***

     I wrote this poem earlier this year as my 10-line contribution to a 30-poet Renga titled Ghosts Over Water; and the Renga in turn was one facet of the AMERICA NOW AND HERE national celebration of all the arts which kicked off here in Kansas City. The unifying thematic thread for the Renga was Kansas City itself. But while most poets wrote more or less evocatively atmospheric urban slice of life pieces, I decided to go for broke and spectacularly fail by trying to compress into 10 lines--in a chain of 29 other 10-line links--the most overwhelming spiritual turning point and soul-transformative experience of my life. Impossible of course, but once the inspiration seized me, I felt I had no choice but to go for it.

      Since that astounding night so long ago I've amassed a whole collection of spectacular failures--poems which attempt to square the circle by presuming to put into words something that's truly unspeakable. Nevertheless, isn't it time we begin to risk more courageously the scandalous absurdity of such heroic failures by opening out our personal and literary dialogues to encompass the invisible, ecstatic, transcendent dimensions of our lives? We're so glutted with suffocating information, but so poverty-stricken for insight, wisdom, revelation! As Emerson wrote: "We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that Divine Idea which each of us represents."

                  SONG OF THE SUPERNOVA

FOR THE UMPTEENTH TIME I TRY TO STAMMER THE INEXPRESSIBLE--

THE GREAT SUPERNOVA THAT BLOWS MY MIND, INUNDATES MY HEART,

CAPSIZES MY SOUL. NEVER HAVE I FELT SO UTTERLY INADEQUATE!

ALL I CAN DO IS BOW LOW--BLIND, CLUELESS, GROPING FOR GRACE.

I REALIZE I'VE FAILED. BUT I HOPE AT LEAST THEY'LL SAY THIS:

HE NEVER TURNED BACK. HE FACED WONDERINGLY INTO THE LIGHT

AND KEPT ON STUMBLING FORWARD, CONSUMED BY A TRANSCENDENCE

WHICH OVERMASTERED HIM, STRIPPING HIM DOWN TO THE NAKED CORE.

YOU CAN HAVE YOUR PRESTIGIOUS PRIZES AND GLITTERING AWARDS.

I JUST WANT TO FALL IN LOVE, OVER AND OVER, WITH THE MYSTERY.

SO WHAT IF I'VE HARDLY HAD A DIME, OR EVEN A POT TO PISS IN.

THE EMPTIER I BECOME, THE VASTER THE UNIVERSE THAT FILLS ME!

STROKE YOURSELF, EVERYWHERE. KISS YOUR SHADOW TILL IT SHINES!

DON'T YOU KNOW? HAVEN'T YOU GUESSED YET? YOU ARE THE GLORY!

I AM THE SPLENDOR! WE ARE THOSE PRECIOUS PEARLS BEYOND PRICE!

ONCE THIS CAT GETS OUT OF THE BAG, ALL HEAVEN BREAKS LOOSE!

IF YOU SCRUTINIZE ANY ACT OF HATRED, OPPRESSION OR ABUSE,

YOU'LL DISCOVER IT ALWAYS SCREAMS "DENY YOUR OWN DIVINITY!"

DON'T. STAND FAST, WHATEVER THE COST. BELIEVE IN YOUR SOUL.

THAT STAR THAT EXPLODED? IT DECIDED TO BE REBORN--AS YOU.

                                          *** 

     Let's be talking more about this-- both the depths and the heights, and about how one can be threshold to the other. Let's break out of the toxic, soul-deadening trance to which our materialistic, post-modern dystopia addicts us. Let's swing the doors of our beings wide open once again to rediscover the vaster dimensions stretching beyond, around and within us. 

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.

             Don't go back to sleep.

You must ask for what you really want.

             Don't go back to sleep.

People are going back and forth across

  the doorsill where the two worlds touch.

The door is round and open.

             Don't go back to sleep.

                                   -- Rumi