Eulogy

Your hand on my head is gentle still,
Your kiss on my forehead tender,
Heartfelt are your blessings still,
Your love as always overfull.

Why would I weep and moan and groan,
And rend my clothes asunder?
From this useless shell, empty and worn,
Oh gentle spirit, long have you flown.

Death may have pulled a trick on us.
And torn this bond asunder,
But how can there be a goodbye
When I hold you deep inside?

My place of worship

I have a litle forest in my backyard, tall trees grow close together along with ferns and bamboo and flowering bushes and the ground is carpeted with brown, rotting leaves. On sunny days, sunlight slants in and lights up the spaces in between. Leaves rustle in the still air and sometimes birds call in lilting cadences. This is my place of worship. The trees standing tall are the columns of the temple and the bushes are the altars. The birds are the unrehearsed choir and the camelias are the offerings. Here my soul bows to a gentle presence, here my soul sings His rhapsody, here I touch His soft-footed feet, here I find my God.

Twenty Special Secrets

1. When two people meet, the prize always goes to the one with the most self-insight. He will be calmer, more confident, more at ease with the other.

2. Never permit the behavior of other people to tell you how to feel.

3. Pay little attention to what people say or do. Instead, try to see their innermost motive for speaking and acting. (Now, apply this very same rule to yourself and you become an enlightened person!)

4. Any friendship requiring the submission of your original nature and dignity to another person is all wrong.

5. Mystically speaking, there is no difference between you and another person. This is why we cannot hurt another without hurting ourselves, nor help another without helping ourselves.

6. When we are free of all unnecessary desires toward other people, we can never be deceived or hurt.

7. You take a giant step toward psychological maturity when you refuse to angrily defend yourself against unjust slander. For one thing, resistance disturbs your own peace of mind.

8. You understand others to the exact degree that you really understand yourself. Work for more self-knowledge.

9. Do not be afraid to fully experience everything that happens to you in your human relations, especially the pains and disappointments. Do this and everything becomes clear at last.

10. The individual who really knows what it means to love has no anxiety when his love is unseen or rejected.

11. If you painfully lose a valuable friend, do not rush out for a replacement. Such action prevents you from examining your heartache and breaking free of it.

12. Do not be afraid to be a nobody in the social world. This is a deeper and richer truth than appears on the surface.

13. Every unpleasant experience with another person is an opportunity to see people as they are, not as we mistakenly idealize them. The more unpleasant the other person is, the more he can teach you.

14. You can be so wonderfully free from a sense of injury and injustice that you are surprised when you hear others complain of them.

15. We cannot recognize a virtue in another person that we do not possess in ourselves. It takes a truly loving and patient person to recognize those virtues in another.

16. Do not mistake desire for love. Desire leaves home in a frantic search for one gratification after another. Love is at home with itself.

17. There are parts of you that want the loving life and parts that do not. Place yourself on the side of your positive forces; do all you can to aid and encourage them.

18. You must stop living so timidly, from fixed fears of what others will think of you and of what you will think of them.

19. Do not contrive to be a loving person; work to be a real person. Being real is being loving.

20. The greatest love you could ever offer to another is to so transform your inner life that others are attracted to your genuine example of goodness.

- Vernon Howard

Father

One night a father overheard his son pray:
"Dear God, Make me the kind of man my Daddy is."
Later that night, the Father prayed,
"Dear God, Make me the kind of man my son wants me to be."

-- Unknown

The Imposter

Laugh not your lifeless laugh,
Shake not your fleshless bones.
You have stalked us through life,
Through every living moment.
Relentless, you have followed us
Through our nights and our days.
You have cast your shadow on our sleep,
And eaten with us at our table.

But now your stealthy steps bring no dread,
Your deathly pallor frightens me no more.
For I have pulled aside your dark mask,
Unafraid, I have looked you in your face,
I have parted the veil and exposed your lie.
For all I can see is life everlasting,
A journey endless, a peace eternal.
Proud death, you are but an imposter.
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Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting. - Wordsworth

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Writing

Writing is essentially a solitary activity. When a writer writes he enters the dark cave of his mind, where no one else can enter, sets fire to his soul, fuels it with his joy and his pain and everything else in between and hopes that the ensuing light will pour into his pen and transform itself into words. After he has done with putting it down, he has finished his work, he has answered his calling. A writer who seeks fame and recognition is a peddlar of his soul.

Haiku

The ashes of my dreams
I have poured into my pen,
Look, how the poems blossom !

A place called home

There is a place called home
Where my spirit moves among the trees
And rises as sap into the leaves
And rustles as the wind beneath birds’ wings.


There is a place called home
Where yellow wildflowers sprinkle the grass
And always amaze me with their love for life
And fairies dance beneath the toadstools.

There is a place called home
Where my spirit sings to the drumbeat of rain
On the roof, and stands in awe to the moan
Of the wind wailing against the walls.

There is a place called home
Where my spirit soars to the twinkling stars
In a cloudless sky and trips across the Milky Way
And the moon rises laughing behind the hills.

There is a place called home
Where my spirit rests in the hollow of the valley
Nestling among verdant hills lit up with the laughter
Of a hundred, babbling, sparkling brooks.

The crumbling conversation

I stand before your door, dear friend,
Desolate, begging, bowl in hand,
Asking a crumb, a stitch, a caring hand,
This broken heart with which to mend.

But talk you would of the weather vane,
The howling wind, the thundering rain,
While my heart lashed with stormy pain,
Seeks a solitary, soothing word in vain.

Of war and peace you talk of next,
Of orphans, widows, of seething unrest,
While peace has fled my ravaged heart,
And sleep is but a fleeting guest.

Surely India cannot be left behind,
The wealth, the growth, the prospering land,
My hunger meanwhile gnaws and growls, and
The bowl grows heavy in my hand.

Where are those radiant, open lines of trust?
Those shining pathways to your heart,
How well you play a stranger’s part,
While the bowl sadly crumbles into dust.

The serene air

The day dawns misty and rainy, the hills outside our window fade in and out of the mist like specters. The rain is a fine spray on the windshield. As the train runs past the sea the hills in the distance are completely obscured by the mist and the bay looks like an open sea, vast and endless. There is no colour visible except varying shades of grey from white to a shiny, steely blue, and Mt.Victoria rises in the distance like a ghost hill, mysteriously stripped of the dwellings clinging to its sides. In spite of the dark, brooding sky and the colourless landscape, I feel a serenity matched by the floating mist, the still air and the gentle presence of God in the wind gently caressing the steel sea.

Love or Sacrifice?

Being an Indian woman, years of conditioning have taught me to sacrifice. Sacrifice my needs, my wants, my desires, my dreams for the needs of others. But in my book sacrifice is a bad word. If you are giving up something for someone else it should be out of love, willingly, it should be an act of love, a giving, then it blesses you and the receiver too. But sacrifice implies that you are doing it out of obligation, it is forced out of you by conditioning, by a sense of duty, there is an element of force to it, albeit hidden. Or it is done out a hidden fear, as if you might lose something if you didn’t sacrifice..

So we have been taught to sacrifice, we are told the rewards are many, all to be reaped in the afterlife. And maybe there are rewards in this life too. For sacrificing allows a person to feel morally superior, self-righteous even, all the brownie points that you collect to be redeemed according to the Law of Karma. And often it is used as emotional blackmail, as in “I sacrificed my life for you and you can’t even do this little thing for me….”. It gives you leverage over others. But in the final analysis, in total honesty, if can you look deep into your heart, it is quite possible that you mind find anger and resentment, a touch of bitterness even, over all the things that you sacrificed, because you did it not out of love.

Therefore, above all, love yourself. Like Buddha said “You can look the whole world over and never find anyone more deserving of love than yourself”. Then you are brimming with love and it flows in all directions towards all things. Then there will be no need to sacrifice, because all your acts will be acts of love.

All things are possible

Today evening as the train goes by the sea, I can see the clouds sitting atop the hills, grey clouds with rosy plumes like exotic birds, and the water rippling silver with the faintest touch of pink. And the folds in the hills lit up by the reflected rays of the setting sun. And I ask God how he paints a masterpiece on the sky every evening. He says, "All things are possible with me, all things are possible with you too". Somehow it is very comforting to know that my life is in the hands of someone so loving, so creative and so encompassing.

You come to me, always

On gloriously alive mornings,
The golden light slanting.
You come to me, laughing
As playful sunbeams, tripping,
Dancing, kissing my face.

On bright, sunlit afternoons,
Walking towards the hills,
You come to me, smiling
A beauteous vision of wildflowers
Around a sudden bend.

In the hush of twilight,
As the night falls gently.
You come to me, joyous
On the velvet wings of birds
Coming home to roost.

In the still of the night
Shadows asleep ‘neath the trees.
You come to me, soft-footed
As silvery moonbeams, treading
Tiptoe across the grass.

In the warm embrace of sleep,
Mind still, heart at peace.
You come to me, singing
Sweet melodies of spirits
Mingling, merging, becoming one.

Like a dream come true……

A Return to Love

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 and fabulous -
Actually, who are you not to be?

You are a child of God.
Your playing small doesn't 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 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.

- Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love

Trees

I think I shall never see
A poem as lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the sweet earth’s flowing breast.

A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray.

A tree that may in summer wear,
A nest of robins in her hair.

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

- Joyce Kilmer

Flower musings, pumpkin and lemon

It is Sunday morning and I am in the backyard. This part of our yard is secluded; it is cut off from neighbours’ eyes by fencing and from our house by thick clumps of trees, like my own piece of paradise. The cranberry bush is laden with fruit and I pluck them off and eat the sweet, juicy berries as a prequel to breakfast. The pumpkin vine in the vegetable patch gleams a tender green, the leaves with tiny translucent spikes, and a pumpkin in the early stages of infancy. There is also a single bloom, yellow and radiant, with a bell like base flaring into the delicate petal. I peep inside and to my wonder and surprise there is a bee inside, doing a kind of dance which I’m sure only the bees know the steps of. It is such a wondrous sight, nature in the process of symbiosis, giving and taking, wordlessly.


I walk past the clumps of trees, giving off a woody fragrance, exclusive to trees on early mornings or under damp, moist conditions and my heart rises in joy and gratitude like as if the trees had just sung a ghazal. Past the bird bath, the water turned rancid and brown, and the elegant ferns with fronds rising like fans fit for queens, till I reach the lemon tree. There are a few flowers and fewer fruit, nature is winding down for winter. Lemon flowers have this most delicately exquisite fragrance and when the tree is in full bloom, I just stand next to it and drink of the smell or when I am passing by, a whiff hits me and makes me pause and remember that the beauty in life lies in the tiny, imperceptible things that we so often unknowingly pass by.

Weekends, among other things …………

There is a practice here in the workplace that I found a bit odd in the beginning – asking about your weekend. I used to find it difficult to answer at first, but then I realized that it was just a means of starting a conversation. You are free to say anything you want, even invent something and often it leads to other discussions that can get quite interesting.

Then one day I said to a friend “why do you ask me what I did on the weekend, I might tell you all that I did but not what I experienced. I might not tell you that I stood on the balcony at night and watched the full moon rise over the trees and even the clouds that hung over the moon couldn’t dilute the magical quality of the light that filled the sky and lit up the hills, the trees, the grass, the house with a gentle, dreamy light. And in spite of the moonlight, the stars twinkled and the universe that stretched out into eternity, God’s benediction everywhere, His lovely smile everywhere.

Or that the petals of the rose that felt velvety to the touch, God’s love and his joy of creation in every fragrant whorl, as if God’s saying to me, ‘Let you every act be an act of love, my child. Let your every thought, every word create beauty, bring harmony, introduce joy’.”

Daybreak

Today morning I am catching the early morning train which is rather unusual but such a treat. The day is just breaking and patches of silvery sky are visible behind the clouds. The river gleams silver into the distance where it meets with the sea. The is a lone paddle boat in it, the rider gently paddling away like a ghost oarsman. As we come to the sea the scene is eerie, the hills are in shadows and water is a rippling sheet of silver, the light cast by the sunlight escaping from behind soft, cottony clouds has a mystical quality to it. There are a group of oarsmen rowing a canoe in perfect unison. Wellington gleams dully in the distance caught by stray patches of light, willing it to wake up.

Daybreak is a herald of new beginnings, like God has kept his promise and it is up to us to seize the opportunity. It brings hope and light into the darkness that has gone before and the light breaking out through the gaps in the clouds fills my heart with gladness and joy.

Surprising enough the train is full, Wellingtonians like to start early. But the sleep tugging at my eyelids reminds me that I am a nightbird still.

The Deep

I want to go,
to the middle of the sea,
and lie face down,
with my back to the sun,
looking into the depths.

At some point I will succumb
to those watery arms.
Body racked, with want of air,
until I start to inhale,
water filling up the lungs,
also the stomach,
bloating, exploding.

I don’t know when
my soul will leave the body.
Will it be sad?
Disappointed ? Glad ?
Will some animal dine on the shell?
Or will it be washed up
on some forgotten shore?

A thin line of reason
holds on to this life,
but the desire is long gone.

One heck of a lady

There are lots of things about Kiwis that are commendable but their die-hard spirit and independence often stand out.

My friend's 80 year old mother suffers from Leukemia (incurable) and her Dad (also 80) from Alzheimers, who sometimes has difficulty remembering who he is and who his wife is (who is the old lady with grey hair in the other room?). Both of them live by themselves and refuse to move into the children's homes. Her Mum drives herself and her husband around, does the shopping, housework, pays the bills etc. When her blood count drops, she requires transfusions and last month she had to be rushed to hospital with a clot in the leg.

So yesterday when my friend said to me that her Mum's going to Australia alone for two weeks, I was surprised. I asked "Why?"

"Oh ! She's got cousins. She has put Dad in a respite home so he'll be okay. She said she needed a break and wanted some time to herself".

All I could say was 'WOW !"

I know that different people will call it different things, but I call it 'nurturing yourself'.