Saturday, December 12, 2009

The Essence of a Straw

This World is Made of Our Love for Emptiness

Praise to the emptiness that blanks out existence. Existence:
This place made from our love for that emptiness!
Yet somehow comes emptiness,
This existence goes.
Praise to that happening, over and over!

For years I pulled my own existence out of emptiness.
Then one swoop, one swing of the arm,
That work is over.
Free of who I was, free of presence, free of
Dangerous fear, hope,
Free of mountainous wanting.

The here-and-now mountain is a tiny piece of a piece
Of straw
Blown off into emptiness.

These words I’m saying so much begin to lose meaning:
Existence, emptiness, mountain, straw: words,
And what they try to say swept
Out the window, down the slant of the roof.


The 13th century philosopher and poet Jelaluddin Balkhi, better known as Rumi, wrote that poem about consciousness and never called it that. Rumi used words like emptiness and existence to explain the foundation for the energy we project into physical life. We don’t know how to explain or describe this sensation that singes all our senses. We believe it never touchs them physically so we create other realities to experience in order to find other aspects of the self. Each self arranges energy into understandable forms, and our imagination develops a comfortably existence in the waters of diversity.

The water is a baptism of emptiness filled with the here-and-now self, which creates mountains to either climb or ignore depending on how open and accepting we are. This sea propels us from one mountain to another looking for a straw of remembrance. The deafening sound of nothing drips down the mountain, and forms a cloud of verbal thoughts. The sameness of the words dissipates into a fine mist of wisdom that showers us in awareness. We suddenly sense that the essence of a straw is always within us.

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