What’s Not There
Last night I listened (for the second time) to a wonderful talk by Phillip Moffitt, given at the end of the month-long retreat held this past February at Spirit Rock. The talk is called Liberation Now Leads to Full Liberating Awareness and in it, Phillip uses poetry (as well as examples from his own practice) to convey a sense of what all these teachers/sages/poets are talking about when they use words like “liberation.” (click here to listen to the talk)
Here is one of the poems from the talk that really spoke to me. It’s called What’s Not Here, by Rumi.
I start out on this road,
call it love or emptiness,
I only know what’s not here.
Resentment seeds, backscratching greed,
worrying about outcomes, fear of people.
When a bird gets free,
it does not go for remnants left on the bottom of the cage.
Close by, I’m rain. Far off,
a cloud of fire. I seem restless,
but I am deeply at ease.
Branches tremble. The roots are still.
I am a universe in a handful of dirt,
whole when totally demolished.
Talk about choices does not apply to me.
While intelligence considers options,
I am somewhere lost in the wind.