Grist for the Inner Mill
There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy.
– Robert Louis Stevenson
The mind is an ocean…and so many worlds
Are rolling there, mysterious, dimly seen!
And our bodies? Our body is a cup, floating
On the ocean; soon it will fill, and sink….
Not even one bubble will show where it went down.
The spirit is so near that you can’t see it!
But reach for it…Don’t be a jar
Full of water, whose rim is always dry.
Don’t be the rider who gallops all night
And never sees the horse that is beneath him.
- Rumi
(from The Soul Is Here for Its Own Joy: Sacred Poems from Many Cultures, translated by Robert Bly)
Tat Tvam Asi:
thou art that –
that leaf, that tree,
that cow, that cat,
that cloud, that sky,
that moon, that sun,
that you, that I –
for all are one.
So here you are
and there you go
and who you were
you hardly know.
I think this I
is only me:
a drip, a drop,
but not the sea.
Yet when I wake
from all these dreams,
then, like the snake,
I’ll shed what seems:
this mask, this skin,
this ball and chain.
I will begin
to fall like rain.
Our heart’s last home:
the wind-whipped foam,
the sweet, deep sea.
Tat Tvam Asi.
-from Silent Awareness
