The Fate of Me

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Ink Landscape’ – Kanō Motonobu, 16th AD (Art Institute of Chicago) – Wikimedia

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I saw you rise so many times,
Invade the space of my being,
To occupy my whole presence,
Take everything, leaving nothing,
Not a corner of emptiness
Where I could recognise my self.

I saw you rise so many times
Acquire my whole, my essential
To leave me lost, truly yearning
For that silence now filled by you;
To leave me sad, truly longing
For the one here just before you.

I saw you rise so many times
T’was impudent, how did you dare
Burying light in obscurity,
Dimming joy with your avid search,
Thinking it right to lead my life
When you are but a malign ghost.

But more than once, you did vanish
I’ll tell you why, listen to this:
I found you had no consistence
The reason is: you are not found
Your reality imagined
Your existence: your insistence.

Look at yourself, you are not here
You’re not the one you claim to be
You’re just a thought that’s tossed about
In an ocean of presence;
That sea is not a place to be
When you are but a lump of salt.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Kanō Motonobu (1476–1559)

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Website:
– Kanō Motonobu (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
– Voices from Silence (other poems from the blog)

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A Fabulous Secret

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Poetry of N. Gumilyov’ – Oleh Sokolov, 1973 – WikiArt

I’ve always had the intuition that writing hid a fabulous secret. That there lay a soft power, a beauty to which no other thing compares. That words could express harmony. That a particular form of them could take me into the unformed, into the soft ether of life. That words had the capacity to unravel the meaning of the totality of possible existence. That they were alchemists that could produce in all of us the perfume of their own land of birth — which is ours too. That they could clear all the mist that keeps lingering around this life of ours. This is the promise that words held for me. And I do not mean that they could do all of that through their explanatory power alone. Through their simple, logic, arithmetic value. They could and would comply to do so if you wanted them to. But it’s not quite why I had praised them all along. Words could seduce me through their music alone. Through their soft capacity for intimacy and poetry. Through the intrinsic harmony that they carried, and were a vehicle for. Words could be like Tango dancers. And their arabesque was love itself.

And yet. Yet words had eluded me all my life. I have always been short of them. They were never allowed to run freely in my field. They had been concealed by the majesty of pain. But would I be willing to engage with them, that they would come hastily as a balm on myself. Would I be willing to let them express their all, that they would arrive in bouquets that flowered with all their perfume. Words can act in us as clarifiers. They make clear and clean. And they can be hard workers, if you let them be. If you keep still while they come inviting you into their round. This is where they service you — in the power of their expression. This is where they silence you — in the stillness of their homeland. This is where they present you with the simple gift of being. Listen to them carefully: they will show you how they share the same ground of being than you. I’ve always had the intuition that writing hid a fabulous secret…

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Oleh Sokolov (1919-1990)

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Website:
– Oleh Sokolov (WikiArt)

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Other ‘Ways of Being’ from the blog…

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The Program

Posted on by Alain Joly
Image by Pete Linforth in Pixabay

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There is a program that shows up in our being. This program was created since the dawn of time. It has been affected by countless lines of conditioning. It is moving, dancing like a sea, moulded by habits or necessities, defined by laws, created by the limitations of having a body. It has its own incentives, formed out of previous incentives. It develops in an infinite number of ways. The program is always surprising. It never stands still. It is entrancing, captivating. It occupies us all, and it does it totally. There is no escape from the program. At least, there doesn’t seem to be. Until one day. Until one day…

That day is the day where light shows up at last. And that light comes as a revelation. It is here to clarify the situation. To give us the truth of the matter. There is in fact a way out of the program. We can be free of it. It doesn’t have to mesmerise us, make us fearful. The program was never really a program. It never was limiting. It was play. And the stage for it was not the universe. The stage for the play was dimensionless. It never came into existence. It didn’t have to. For it is unborn, uncreated, unsubstantial. It is not itself a program. Thank god that it isn’t. It would have had tragic implications. Now listen carefully…

All of life is contained in this infinitesimal point of being that is responsible for your saying ‘I’. This is the stage of life. Beware though of mistaking the stage for the program. That sublime ‘I’ is not the ‘I’ that carries the formulation of the program. It is not the ‘I’ that borrows its existence to the existence of the program. Not that shaky ‘I’. No. That sacred ‘I’ of being is the only thing that is seemingly in the program but is in fact not. That all encompassing ‘I’ is before everything that you can name. It is the nameless that harbours all names. It is the no-thing that contains all things. It is independent of all the things that only depend on it. It is alone within itself. And that aloneness is you, ‘I’, all that you are now. All that you have ever been. Will ever be. Can ever be…

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Text by Alain Joly

Image by Pete Linforth

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Website:
– TheDigitalArtist (Pixabay)

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Other ‘Ways of Being‘ from the blog…

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Longing

Posted on by Alain Joly

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Longing
Is happiness already formed
Crying for your noticing.
It is the soft yet
Heartbreaking expression
Of our forgotten completion.
To suffer was never bad;
Not a thing to run away from
Or curse, or cover, or repair.
It is presence itself ignored —
The wound that it provokes;
It is the plaint of your beloved —
Who wants to turn her down?
Pain is the ecstasy of love
Pushing hard through you,
Elbowing its way on you:
It wants to be revealed;
It aims at being recognised;
It doesn’t thrive in the dark;
Cannot quite find you
In the slumber of your indifference.
Believe me
Suffering has no other attributes
Than the radiance of your being;
No other name or identity
Than a plain and infinite joy —
That thing indescribable
Knocking at your door.

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Text and photo by Alain Joly

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Suggestion:
– Voices from Silence (other poems from the blog)

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Hunger

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Raager på Pløjemarken’ – Laurits Andersen Ring, 1891 – Wikimedia

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So this is the mystery,
That there is no mystery,
That it’s all out in the open:
Consciousness being aware of itself.

No dark intrigues, no hidden thoughts,
No story — what an insanity!
Nothing that you were meant to
Invent, project, and be afraid of.

And you were not left away
from the banquet table — never!
Didn’t have to be hungry, to be thirsty,
Had no necessity to believe in any thing.

Your hungers? They were your
Desperation, your final lassitude;
The only thing you could come up with
For not facing death.

So hunger for one thing only:
That one which is without hunger;
And thirst for one beverage and no other:
The beverage of your heart.

Care only for that one spark of light
That will ignite your world
And reveal it to be devoid of hunger,
of thirst, of story — whatever.

But don’t think too big here,
Only have a little hunger,
An infinitesimal thirst,
That will suffice.

That will break
Your hunger
In a thousand
Golden pieces.

It will precipitate you into that
Which is before all hunger,
Incapable of even conceptualising it,
Of only conceiving of it.

The peace of satiation?
Not even that;
The bliss of fulfilment?
That’s too far ahead.

Listen, I’m not admonishing you;
I know about hunger,
To what untold extremities
It can lead us.

Yet its destructiveness
Comes short compare to that
Which will be given to you when
You can be hungry no more.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Laurits Andersen Ring (1854-1933)

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Website:
– Laurits Andersen Ring (Wikipedia) 

Suggestion:
– Voices from Silence (other poems from the blog)

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The Fountain of Dark Silence

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Above the eternal tranquility’ – Isaac Levitan, 1894 – WikiArt

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“There is a fountain inside you.
Don’t walk around
with an empty bucket.”
~ Rumi

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Dorothy Walters is my newly invited guest on ‘The Dawn Within’. The ‘fountain’ refers here to this deep source at the core of our being, this “fountain of dark silence”, as Dorothy wrote in one of her poems. Dorothy experienced a profound Kundalini awakening in 1981, at the age of 53, which she described as “God moving through your body”, “the Beloved within“, “the goddess above all other goddesses”, or a “relentless agony of ascent”. This was her first expression of the ‘fountain inside’, a fountain of bliss in which she dipped again and again until, as she beautifully expresses in one poem:

“… nothing is left of us
but a fine ash
at the core
and then that, too, melting
to a nothingness,
a no place,
only a marker
where a somebody,
a something
once was.”
(Marrow of Flame)

Profoundly transformed by her experience, Dorothy began writing numerous spontaneous poems which are the direct expressions of the beauty and freshness of this inexhaustible source. They have been gathered in her website “Kundalini Splendor”, and in her numerous books.

Dorothy spent most of her youth as a lover of language and books. She took a PhD in English and American literature and taught both classical and contemporary literature at university. She had a life-long interest in some of the great poets and philosophers like W.B. Yeats, Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, and later on Rumi, Hafiz, Mirabai and Kabir, which had a deep influence on her poetry. She also helped to found one of the earlier women’s studies programs in the U. S. and directed it for many years. She continues sharing and writing on the subject of Kundalini awakening to this day. After an extended residence in San Francisco, Dorothy now lives and writes in Colorado. I have selected here a few of her poems, which are like the “raw honey of God”. I hope you will enjoy…

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“Turn me to gold.”
~ Kabir

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Preparing to Meet the Goddess

Do not think of her
unless you are prepared
to be driven to your limits,
to rush forth from yourself
like a ritual bowl overflowing
with sacramental wine.

Do not summon her image
unless you are ready to be blinded,
to stand in the flash
of a center exploding,
yourself shattering into the landscape,
wavering bits of bark and water.

Do not speak her name
until you have said good-bye
to all your familiar trinkets –
your mirrors, your bracelets,
your childhood adorations –
From now on you are nothing,
a ghost sighing at the window,
a voice singing under water.

(from ‘Unmasking the Rose’)

[…]

Discover more of Dorothy Walter’s beautiful poems… (READ MORE…)

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Into the Night

Posted on by Alain Joly
Photo by johnpaulsimpson on Foter.com

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They left into the night, like thieves, far from the crowd and the taxis. The old Delhi airport was still human-sized for them to be able to get away from it so easily. Peter had no idea what was going on. Where was he going, riding on the determined, almost fiery steps of his two guides? What madness had he gotten himself into?

The little group stopped in front of a garage door. By accepting the hotel proposal from his flatterer, Peter had set in motion a chain of events of which he was not yet aware. Barely off the plane for his first trip to India, he chided himself for being so malleable, for not being more resistant. But the abandonment to which he had now succumbed had the full-bodied taste of the tropical Indian night that enveloped him. A shiver of excitement appeared and mingled with his general apprehension. He became more attentive to the scene unfolding before his eyes.

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A very short story that narrates Peter’s entry to sacred India… (READ MORE…)

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