God Pursues Me Everywhere
God pursues me everywhere, Enmeshes me in glances, And blinds my sightless back like flaming sun. God, like a forest dense, pursues me. My lips are ever tender, mute, so amazed, So like a child lost in an ancient sacred grove. God pursues me like a silent shudder. I wish for tranquility and rest -- He urges; come! And see -- how visions walk like the homeless on the streets. My thoughts walk about like a vagrant mystery -- Walks through the world's long corridor. At times I see God's featureless face hovering over me. God pursues me in the streetcars and cafes Every shining apple is my crystal sphere to see How mysteries are born and vision came to be. - from "Human, God's Ineffable Name," by Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, freely rendered by Rabbi Zalman M. Schacter-Shalomi. Available from the Reb Zalman Legacy Project

You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I'll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
'Cause I walk like I've got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I'll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops,
Weakened by my soulful cries?

Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don't you take it awful hard
'Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines
Diggin' in my own backyard.

You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I'll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I've got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history's shame
I rise
Up from a past that's rooted in pain
I rise
I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.

-Maya Angelou

The Moment

And not once,
but many times over,
again and again,
how we disappeared
into that deep well
of darkness, shuddering beneath that load of silence,
clinging to our narrow ledge.

Yet the darkness, sometimes,
unfolded as light.
Our atoms dissolved in it,
each separate molecule opening
into a radiant disk of feeling.

How still we became,
witness and thing seen,
spectacle and observer,
each point admitting an untrammeled flood.

~Dorothy Walters

The Ocean cannot stay alone
and so the notion of wave is created.
When waves rise Ocean loses nothing
and when waves fall Ocean gains nothing.
Samsara, the illusion, Maya, the play,
is the wave on the Ocean of Nirvana.

Waves are not separate from the Ocean,
rays are not separate from the Sun,
You are not separate from
Existence-Consciousness-Bliss.
This is a reflection of That.


Sri H. W. L. Poonja: author of This

Pablo Neruda:

Too Many Names
Mondays are meshed with Tuesdays and the week with the whole year. Time cannot be cut with your weary scissors, and all the names of the day are washed out by the waters of night. No one can claim the name of Pedro, nobody is Rosa or Maria, all of us are dust or sand, all of us are rain under rain. They have spoken to me of Venezuelas, of Chiles and of Paraguays; I have no idea what they are saying. I know only the skin of the earth and I know it is without a name. When I lived amongst the roots they pleased me more than flowers did, and when I spoke to a stone it rang like a bell. It is so long, the spring which goes on all winter. Time lost its shoes. A year is four centuries. When I sleep every night, what am I called or not called? And when I wake, who am I if I was not while I slept? This means to say that scarcely have we landed into life than we come as if new-born; let us not fill our mouths with so many faltering names, with so many sad formalities, with so many pompous letters, with so much of yours and mine, with so much of signing of papers. I have a mind to confuse things, unite them, bring them to birth, mix them up, undress them, until the light of the world has the oneness of the ocean, a generous, vast wholeness, a crepitant fragrance.