Dissolve

I am Al-Kahira, the comparer of nonsense and flowers.

I am grateful for my stupidity, admitted easily, yet I am concerned with specific details of style as I sit here in rags.

By circumstance not by choice this shrub has blossomed: by choice and not by circumstance this life has been kept plain.

I made an effort and found stuff to ignore, leaving rusty strings unstruck.
I neglect the spectacular and overlook the apparently important with deliberation.

I've waited aeons for the reversal of my interests: Now life has become the joke and the sweetness and hilarity of my own thoughts have turned into a point of fascination for me.

No matter what anyone tells you: I don't belong to any creed or sect, culture or race, nor to any period in history.

My only qualification is the age of my soul: I own three hillside palaces of quiet pre-dawn moon sound.

Humiliation is my clothing that I wear to sit and bark with the dogs. I disconnect like dusk and most likely no one will bring flowers to my grave.

I am ardent without deed and I am information zero, unimportant iridescent: Grand Palace of Mercy.

Till now I stayed in one place not avoiding you: now that the traditions are beginning to dissolve, I put on my winter coat and walk away. Business done.

My contemporaries have declared society to be the central item and are discussing things of importance as I'm speaking to you now.
As my mother taught me to, I keep to myself a lot.

I am the lover of trees, found worthy of loneliness.
I could be the postman, the milkman, the sick person, the transvestite.
It takes one, to recognize one…….

I am the unknown dervish."

A Place

"This empty kitchen's where
I'd while away the hours
Just next to my old chair
You'd usually have some flowers
The shelves of books
Even the picture hooks
Everything is gone
But my heart is hanging on

If this old neighbourhood
Survived us both alright
Don't know that it withstood
All the things that took our light
You on the stair
I can see you there
Everything is gone
But my heart is hanging on

Once there was a little girl
Used to wonder what she would be
Went out into the big wide world
Now she's just a memory
There used to be a little school here
Where I learned to write my name
But time has been a little cruel here
Time has no shame

It's just a place where
We used to live
It's just a place where
We used to live

Now in another town
You lead another life
And now upstairs and down
You're someone else's wife
Here in the dust
There's not a trace of us
Everything is gone
But my heart is hanging on

It's just a place where
We used to live
It's just a place where
We used to live"

Lyrics of 'A Place Where We Used To Live'

Mark Knopfler

Wake

The Waking

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.

Theodore Roethke

Morning

Morning

You know how it is waking
from a dream certain you can fly
and that someone, long gone, returned

and you are filled with longing,
for a brief moment, to drive off
the road and feel nothing

or to see the loved one and feel
everything. Perhaps one morning,
taking brush to hair you'll wonder

how much of your life you've spent
at this task or signing your name
or rising in fog in near darkness

to ready for work. Day begins
with other people's needs first
and your thoughts disperse like
breath.

In the in-between hour, the solitary hour,
before day begins, all the world
gradually reappears, car by car.

Deborah Ager

To sit apart

....What I most want
is to spring out of this personality,
then to sit apart from that leaping.
I've lived too long where I can be reached.

Who says the eternal being does not exist?
Who says the sun has gone out?
Someone who climbs up on the roof,
and closes his eyes tight, and says,
--I don't see anything.

.....With one silent laugh
You tilted the night
and the garden ran with stars.

Jelaluddin Rumi

And nothing is given

Be not too hard

Be not too hard for life is short
And nothing is given to man.
Be not too hard when he is sold or bought,
For he must manage as best he can.

Be not too hard when he blindly dies
Fighting for things he does not own.
Be not too hard when he tells lies
Or if his heart is sometimes like stone.

Be not too hard for soon he'll die,
Often no wiser than he began.

Be not too hard for life is short
And nothing is given to man.
And nothing is given to man.

From a Joan Baez song

Child

The playful Child self,
More alive than Life itself,
It goes away
When the playground is empty
Of companions.

And when it does not return
Through the open door,
Death creeps in,
Dark vapor, swirling,

And floats up to the ceiling,
Waiting.

Give me your hand

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don't let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Salaam, Nemanja!

"...It is getting really hot now.Summer is coming and it will bring a lot of heavy experiences i'm sure. Like yesterday a new stomach infection for me...some new life growing in my body or maybe grooving inside me."

:) :)

The second time we bump into Nemanja Rebic, Serbian guitarist, he refuses to eat anything other than curd rice. We are all rolling with laughter listening to his terribly funny renditions of endless bad food episodes in India ("You refuse to eat our kababs? You are insulting my country, man!") and the dramatic results thereof.

Sensitive tummy apart, he was having a wonderful time in this country learning Carnatic Classical Music and meeting fabulous people. We had just heard him play at the all-night music event organized by Fireflies, under a huge banyan tree surrounded by a natural amphitheatre. No one who was there that night is likely to ever forget his soulful Macedonian and Serbian songs and his guitaring - and his immense easy warmth.

Listen to this fabulous piece - Guru Ji in here - http://www.myspace.com/nemoworld

It made my day. It is one of the most energizing positive-feeling, happy-making pieces I have ever heard.

Groove on, Nemanja! Wishing you all the very best!

We stay

Morning drive to work. Man sitting alone on bus stop bench talking loudly to himself, gesturing wildly. Labourers with blank expressions standing silently in the back of trucks coming into the city, packed like sardines. The lostness of empty faces in plush cars at traffic signals.

O Siddhartha, we too see what you saw, daily, but we do not go away in search of the Answer; we stay and try to forget, and worry about the rising price of real estate and the impending loneliness of old age.........

I passed this way

The Ideal

This is where I came from.
I passed this way.
This should not be shameful
Or hard to say.

A self is a self.
It is not a screen.

A person should respect
What he has been.

This is my past
Which I shall not discard.
This is the ideal.
This is hard.

James Fenton

Until only the mountain remains...

The birds have vanished down the sky.
The last cloud drains away.
We sit together, the mountain and I,
Until only the mountain remains...

Li Po, 'Zazen on Ching-t’ing Mountain'

Li Po (701 – 762): https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/li-po

Look

In Blackwater Woods

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let go,
to let it go.

Mary Oliver

A Zen Moment

The squirrel thief who regularly comes in through the windows and the open balcony door, in spite of all our efforts at scaring him away. We have reached such a stage of familiarity that he now walks in when you are sitting on the chair a few feet away from him, drinking your early morning tea.

He climbs on to the dining table, picks up a groundnut from a badly closed packet, jumps onto a tin for a better vantage point, holds the nut in his hands and quietly gnaws away nonchalantly, watching you.

He seems to say - "Look - you got no children, and all the young ones you looked after and fed at this table so fondly have gone away. So why don't you just share your food with me? Aren't I like a little child anyways? And I won't ever go away, will I? I got no dreams to chase, nothing to prove to anyone, my life is plain and simple. I''ll keep you company all my short life."

He's got a point there.

You continue drinking your tea looking away out of the other window at the sky turning lighter; while the groundnut packet empties on the dining table, and the apple basket awaits it turn.

In the early morning half-lit house, a Zen moment of acceptance and peace.

Blessed Space

A friend gifts you this string of Tibetan prayer flags for your birthday. A most thoughtful gift, you are moved. It is now hanging on the window above the dining table, though it is supposed to be hung in a big open space, in the wind etc etc. But you don't have a space like that.

At that table, you have served and fed so many good friends, and people from so many countries, people you hardly knew - people of so many temperaments and talents and various kinds of niceness and strangenesses. Much great conversation and affection and laughter and sorrow has been shared across that space. Many children have spilt curry on it, many toasts have been raised, and many broken hearts mended with listening and hot food.

It is in all rightness that the prayer flags hang behind it like a blessing.