Foolishly,
I thought the wound
Had healed
Scar tissue now
Where once, raw flesh,
Bled.
Foolishly,
I thought the memory,
Lost, buried,
An autumnal leaf,
All power decayed,
Was gone.
How can it be, that
A line of poetry,
A word even,
Can revive the pain,
Twist again the
Long forgotten knife,
That once,
Plunged so deep?
And still does.
On the road to understanding
there is a tollgate that bars some travellers.
Reason is forbidden and also it’s cousin
rationalisation, as is explanation.
Science bans itself, cast out
into a rational wilderness of its own making
unable to escape its mechanistic view
of a universe beyond its understanding.
So who travel the road beyond the toll gate?
Poets. Painters. Lovers. Artists. The people
who make others uncomfortable.
The odd people who don’t quite fit in.
And of course, all of those who have experienced
a Love and Bliss beyond comprehension,
who have come to know
the name of the Divine.
Namaste is such a wonderful term. It recognises the soul that dwells within each of us, and the journey from birth to death that we all of us must make. Yet it is so difficult to see the soul in another. It is masked by our perceptions, and by how the other chooses to show themselves. Are they arrogant, self-centered maybe, a braggart, or perhaps good company, honest and caring? They too will have been fashioned by the vicissitudes of life, for better or for worse, which also shapes the face we present to the world.
But it is you and I who decides what to see, how to judge the “other” stood before us. And it is so difficult to move beyond our perceptions.
And this is the challenge. Namaste, to see the soul in another, to see underneath the surface. That does not mean to accept arrogance, or misogyny, or wrong doing, but to remember that, within that persona, there is another soul there, making their way along the same road that you follow.
It didn’t even warrant the title “stream”, trickle was a more apt description for the small outflow of water running over a few rocks and surrounded by a mantle of mud. I trod warily, trying to avoid the soft, sticky mire, distracted also by the number of items hanging from the trees surrounding the water. I found myself constantly looking up into their branches, which were hung with a panoply of teddy bears, ribbons of all descriptions, and a host of small trinkets and mirrors that glittered as they spun in the breeze and caught the sunlight.
So it was an unexpected discovery. There at the source of the spring, was a face. It stopped me in my tracks, and for a moment I wondered if I was really alone, the face seemed to have been so recently created. As I looked harder, I saw the two green leaves that represented tears and felt the pain that seemed to emanate from it. I wondered who had created it, and what it meant to them, and I hoped that it represented a turning point, a transition that led to light and love. I stood there for a long time, feeling the mystery of the face, wondering about its creator, caught also by the ancient spirit of my surroundings, a place that felt outside of time. Of my time anyway.
I returned to that place a few times during the week that I spent holidaying nearby. I learnt that it was a place of healing, with a history that went back thousands of years, before Roman feet walked the land, and that somehow, the knowledge of its power had not been lost, and some still visited it.
On my visits, I never did see anyone else at this sacred site, although there was always a feeling, a feeling of awareness of a – I have no word for it – a presence.
The structure of the Universe bubbles and froths. Particles and ghost particles come into existence, embrace, and vanish. From this quantum energy was born the Stars, the Planets, all, the all that includes us.
What is this energy that confounds science? The name they give it is “the vacuum energy”. But can it’s true name be Love, Love unbounded perhaps?
Reflections on life in Poetry and Prose. 