Consciousness Seeds

Poetry seems to me more physical than intellectual. A year or two ago, in common with others, I received from America a request that I would define poetry. I replied that I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat, but that I thought we both recognized the object by the symptoms, which it provokes in us.

Alfred Edward Housman, the classical scholar and poet, was born in Worcestershire, England. Housman was the main character in the 1997 Tom Stoppard play, The Invention of Love. Housman wrote an early 1900s collection of poetry called, A Shropshire Lad. A wall hanging was created for A Shropshire lad, and it now hangs in St. Laurence Church in Ludlow, England.

Poetry floats above our beliefs structure, and it creates a cloud of thoughts that showers our objective world with subjective hail. The hail melts and our belief system floods with new roots. Those roots move to the rhythm of our consciousness. We feel the need to explore these roots, even though we have a hard time accepting them.

Poetry defies the collective conforming creature in us and shakes us awake. Every poem drenches us in the knowledge of nothing, but the pureness of our own freedom. The freedom to perceive and interpret it in an individual way.

We recognize poetry by its consciousness symptoms. Poems are consciousness seeds that dwell outside the rigid walls of our beliefs. They wait for a crack to appear in that guarded wall, and then they fill it with awareness.

You Are An Eye

Since you have perceived the dust of forms, Perceive the wind that moves them; Since you have perceived the foam, Perceive the ocean of Creative Energy.

Come; perceive it, for in you Insight is all that matters; The rest is just fat and flesh, A weft and warp of bones and muscle.

Your fat never increased the lights in candles; Your flesh never became roast meat For someone drunk with spiritual wine. Dissolve this whole body of yours in vision:

Pass into sight, pass into sight, pass into sight! One sight perceives only two yards ahead; Another sight has beheld the two worlds And the face of the King.

Between these two Is an incalculable difference: Seek the remedy of vision, And God best knows that which is hidden.

Rumi, the 13th century mystic and poet, was actually born in Afghanistan in 1207. He lived most of his life in Konya which is in southern Turkey. Rumi uses 13th century language to describe 21st century concepts. He understood the power that rests within us. We can use our inner senses to experience physical life once we become aware of them.

Silence

A bird delegation came to Solomon complaining, “Why is it you never criticize the nightingale?”

Because my way, the nightingale explained For Solomon is different. Mid-March to mid-June I sing. The other nine months, while you continue chirping, I’m silent.

Rumi, the master mystic and poet, wrote those words over seven hundred years ago. At first glance the story is hard to understand, but given a little focused attention the meaning is clear. Appreciation is the key to happiness, and a positive outlook on life is the door that leads to heaven on earth. Our idle chatter is the noise that blocks the ego from hearing the mind, but silence is the sound of our aware consciousness.