Here's the script: from an early age your interest in intimately knowing what my daughter would call the Greater Spirit (I like that) drew you to science, to the arts, to T'ai chi and yoga, to cooking and foods, to learn, to learn, to learn.

And along that wild and sinuous path, you do learn – or at least, you make some decisions: these things I hold true, for now, until further learning modifies or disproves them. I have written poetry for some years, well, since I was a boy, so now it is lots of years. And it dawned on me (that's a nice turn of phrase, if you think about it) it dawned on me that a poet's poetry rests on the fact that everything is in everything else, that all the things around us and far away from us are made from the same stuff of Being, and so being, has at their core a common thread. When a poet opens her mind or his mind to that broad ocean, metaphor isn't only obvious, it is inescapable.

So along those days and years and words you select and collect and begin to reflect it all back to others. Each affirmation goes out in words or colors or musical notes, and the world mirrors it: if it rings like a matins bell, you can feel it was closer to the center of things, to a Truth you can rest upon; if it clangs like a piece of scrap tin thrown in the street, you know it to be part of the myriad Things, a superficial view of the world that sees everything as separate.

Well. What happens when you toss out an idea and it pleases you? And you toss it out again and it pleases someone else? For a time it makes a sweet mantra, like saying yes, yes… yes… as you walk down the street, accepting everything.

And what happens when you pick up book by an ancient sage, and find your words and your images, down to the last bleat of your voice, in his or her writing?

I'll tell you the progression: first, elation because the world mirrored back something you hold so pure and so dear to your heart. Not only that, it was one of the great hearts of the past, and it is almost as though the Master had heard your words, and looked you straight in the eye, smiling from past to present, saying "Welcome." That is a beautiful affirmation.

And an affirmation not only of words, but of movement of words through time. So second, there is humility and a quiet kind of joy: you have been looking for the Good with your whole life, and this brief encounter with another, older, advanced seeker, sets your right in the middle of the Path. It is not an Achievement, and not an Attainment – we pass our lives learning and practicing for the day we will leave – but instead a simple, gentle acknowledgement that your time and your love and your efforts have, indeed, taken you closer to the divine.

As the golden glow begins to fade around the edges, the ego starts yapping, and you begin to get a little petty. No one will believe I thought this up on my own… as if it mattered, as if all that is thought and felt and done had not been thought and felt and done uncountable times before. You are bound to repeat what has been offered, you are bound to be an echo, particularly as you move away from the millions of superficial baubles that attract crows and babies, and move closer and closer to the universal bits of existence that make us all and everything around us One: from that multiplicity, which has almost infinite descriptions for nothing, to a singularity, whose true name will always be solitary. Yes. Is. God.

Then it can happen that the mind slews further to the right, and a few downright distorted thoughts pry their way in, before summarily being shown the door: "Someone will think that I plagiarized this, slapping my name on the work of …" 

But the first responses, those that come before the thinking and the fears slip in, are the true responses. The truth always comes first, before our fragile minds and more fragile, constructed realities rush to hide or deny it.

Finally, fortunately, all voices have spoken, and the ones you know are not total bunk remain, warming you, welcoming you, embracing you, accompanying you.

Yesterday, I attended a Kirtan by Benjy and Heather Wertheimer – incredible hearts and musicians, and playing three feet in front of me in a small local yoga center. Beautiful devotion through song, around song, through each other, around each other. In one of their chants, there were two lines in English, translated from a poem by Hafiz. I don't remember the lines exactly, but in essence they said: Because I see the one I love within you / I lean always in your direction. It was more beautiful.

Me, lacking a good collection of Hafiz, found a copy of The Gift today at the restaurant-bookstore where I ate lunch. I opened a page at random and read this poem:

BECOMING HUMAN

Once a man came to me and spoke for hours about

The "Great Visions of God" he felt he was having.

 

He asked for confirmation, saying

"Are these wonderful dreams true?"

 

I replied,

"How many goats do you have?"

 

Surprised, he said, "I am speaking

of sublime visions, and you ask after goats!"

 

I spoke again, saying, "Yes, brother —

how many do you have?"

 

"Well, Hafiz, I have sixty-two."

 

"And how many wives?"

Again, surprised, he answered, "Four."

 

"How many roses bushes

in your garden, how many children,

are your parents still alive,

do you feed the birds in winter?"

 

He had an answer for them all.

 

Then I said, "You asked me

if I thought your visions true;

 

I say, they are true

if they make you more human,

 

kinder to every creature and plant

you know.

Amen.