just swallowed at a different time

about a different face

with a different though equally

private name that brings it back,

too keenly, too deeply.

I write this in an open boat

where yards from me the heron

perched on turtle rock is spreading

its wings in the sun, holding

perfectly open and still,

the light filling, glazing its eye.

I am drifting here, heart spreading

like a heron’s wing, more alive

than I thought possible.

You think me indifferent.

I want this for you

more than you can dream.

I am here. Drifting.

Come. Please. Swim.

If you can.

Who Will Live Your Life?

WHO WILL LIVE YOUR LIFE?

This is what the great choice comes down to—the great conflict between first-hand experience and tradition, between spontaneity and decorum, between compassion and obligation. Other life forms have no part in this. It’s strictly a human affair. The sapling doesn’t look to its elders for approval. It just grows toward the light. The bee feels its hunger and finds its honey. It doesn’t embark out of any sense of duty.

When I speak of these things, distrustful minds, against all intention of getting involved, blurt out, but we have to live in the real world. After a long silence, I offer, you must meet the outer world with your inner world or existence will crush you.

And so it begins, continues, ensues: Who will live your life? The answer is obvious. Yet the difficulty is not in knowing the course, but in accepting the many ways we give our life away, accepting the many ways we abdicate the one outright gift we have.

Too often, we’re told that to live in the real world we must give up our dreams in service of a survival that looms as pragmatic. In truth, it’s the opposite. Living in the world in a real way requires the evolution of an interior life, and much of our health depends on how we, at our porous best, negotiate the infiltration of outer and the release of inner.

Kabir, the great mystic poet of India, suggests that the soul is merely a portion of ocean gathered in our pitcher of a life:

Take a pitcher full of water and set it down on the water—

now it has water inside and water outside.

We mustn’t give it a name,

lest silly people start talking again

about the body and the soul.

When we tend our soul, we tend to our portion of ocean. When we give complete attention to our portion of God’s Being, we take up space and emanate the depths of our original energy. It’s how we shine within. And at the edge, where the individual soul meets the world, where the pitcher meets the ocean, where inner light meets outer light, there is a kinetic border we can’t resist, a rim called wonder that draws us back into the Whole.