Mercy Flourishing
The reservoir was empty when You arrived,
atop a desolate (but not God-forsaken) landscape.
You gave it the name Mercy Flourishing.
Decades later, the hot winds were still awhirl,
dust coating the paths, porches, withered fields,
green banyans and neems, as I mounted the small hill
to reach Your Tomb and enter Your Immaculacy.
Sometime or another, I thought to bury myself
somewhere deep in that merciful ground
as best I could, but half-covered and mournful,
I couldn’t finish the job.
And now I can never come clean.
Returned to the world, everywhere I go
I’m still caked in the grave dust of Meherabad.
O child of God, it’s not a do-it-yourself task.
Reach a humility that allows His grace to flow.
Makeshift scaffolding
Meher Baba laboring in the body,
established schools, dispensaries, ashrams
and, at their height, abandoned them.
Mere scaffolding, He said, for the real work,
explaining no further.
One day my lifetime’s structures,
including this weathered tent of skin and bones,
shall also be razed, dismantled, dispersed –
things I consider vital, valuable and dear.
The real work having been accomplished,
all the apparent, quite human and temporal activities
shall come to an end, without sufficient explanation,
the makeshift scaffolding irrevocably removed.
O child of God, only the real work matters,
accomplished beyond your efforts and ability to grasp.
Love unadulterated
Eye to eye stand the man-eating tiger and I,
a safety sheet of plexiglass between us;
his ochre eyes gazing nonchalantly
as I admire his glinting tri-colored coat
and the symmetrical arrangement beneath it
of his latent danger, thrilling power and grace.
In the wild, I would enjoy no such beauty,
find no such magic and majesty,
my admiration thwarted by terror.
Daily our vulnerable selves
miss the terrible beauty of God and His creation
for fear of our own pain and demise.
It’s not the world from which
we must be liberated but our attachment
to this human, deeply-held view.
Free from self; free from mind;
free from death and fear,
we shall gain a God’s eye view
and become again capable
of love unadulterated.
O child of God, Meher said where there is fear,
there’s no love.
Where there’s love, there’s no fear.
Where you go to die
Folded body; observing the breath.
Trying to keep a toehold in the here and now
as wave upon wave of illusion crashes over me.
I’ve been told, time and again,
I must live in the now, where the real things are,
but lately I see – the now is where you go to die –
the false self sputtering to a halt
from lack of fuel; thoughts evanescing
before they can take root
and establish fully the ego
where it lives – in the realm
of mind and imagination.
There is only space in the now
for pure consciousness (none for me).
Meditation is a means of acquainting myself
with the reality of my own non-existence
while still tightly wrapped
in the illusion of self.
O child of God, the truth is unclaimed,
everyone cosseted in their own imagination.
