Poetry for Transformation

When your eyes are tired

the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone

no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark

where the night has eyes

to recognize its own.

There you can be sure

you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your womb tonight.

The night will give you a horizon

further than you can see.

You must learn one thing.

The world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds

except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet

confinement of your aloneness to learn

anything or anyone that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

– David Whyte (Sweet Darkness)

For the raindrop, joy is in entering the river-

Unbearable pain becomes its own cure,

Travel far enough into sorrow, tears turn into sighing;

In this way we learn how water can die into air,

When, after heavy rain, the storm clouds disperse,

is it not that they've wept themselves clear to the end?

If you want to know the miracle, how wind can polish a mirror,

Look: the shining glass grows green in Spring.

It's the rose's unfolding, Ghalib, that creates the desire to see-

In every color and circumstance, may the eyes be open for what comes.

– Ghalib

And what you thought you came for

Is only a shell, a husk of meaning

>From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled

If at all. Either you had no purpose

Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured

And is altered in fulfillment.

– T.S. Eliot (Little Gidding)

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope for hope

would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love

For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith

But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:

So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

– T.S. Eliot (East Coker)

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

Through the unknown, unremembered gate

When the last of earth left to discover

Is that which was the beginning;

At the source of the longest river

The voice of the hidden waterfall

And the children in the apple-tree

Not known, because not looked for

But heard, half-heard, in the stillness

Between two waves of the sea.

Quick now, here, now, always-

A condition of complete simplicity

(Costing not less than everything)

And all shall be well and

All manner of thing shall be well

When the tongues of flame are in-folded

Into the crowned knot of fire

And the fire and the rose are one.

– T.S Eliot (Little Gidding)

Keeping Quiet

Now we will count to twelve and we will all keep still

for once on the face of the earth, let's not speak in any language;

let's stop for a second, and not move our arms too much.

It would be an exotic moment without rush, without engines;

we would all be together in a sudden strangeness.

Fisherman in the cold sea would not harm the whales

and the man gathering salt would not hurt his hands.

Those who prepare green wars, wars with gas, wars with fire,

victories with no survivors, would put on clean clothes

and walk about with their brothers in the shade, doing nothing.

What I want should not be confused with total inactivity.

Life is what it is about...

If we were not so single-minded about keeping our lives moving,

and for once could do nothing, perhaps a huge silence

might interrupt this sadness of never understanding ourselves

and of threatening ourselves with death.

Perhaps the earth can teach us as when everything seems to be dead in winter and later proves to be alive.

Now I'll count to twelve and you keep quiet and I will go.

– Pablo Neruda

Let Your Light Shine

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.

Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.

It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.

We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?

Actually, who are you not to be?

You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world.

There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you.

We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us.

It is not just in some of us, it is in everyone.

And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.

As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

– Marianne Williamson (Nelson Mandela's 1994 Inaugural Speech)

Come, Come Whoever You Are

Come, come whoever you are!

Wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving.

It doesn't matter.

Ours is not a caravan of despair.

Come, come even if you have broken your vows a thousand times.

Come, come yet again, come!

– Inscribed at the tomb of Jelaluddin Rumi

There is only one mistake you are making:

you take the inner for the outer and outer for the inner.

What is in you, you take to be outside you

and what is outside, you take to be in you.

The mind and feelings are external,

but you take them to be intimate.

You believe the world to be objective,

while it is entirely a projection of your psyche.

That is the basic confusion . . .

– Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj (I Am That)

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