A bambino with a circumspect eye
you peeped
out of the shadows
and asked,
fearfully,
and with a certain stressful temerity,
how long is the day in the winter,
or a night in the dark?
A week, a month, a year,
or ages?
Bambino, a graffiti image , favorite of the watercolour kids
who have grown up overnight.
Thousands and thousands of miles mean nothing more than an abyss,
easily described , because they have now the language and its vocabulary.
Miles away, the flight of the eagle or the white swan, or the weary heron,
it is for some an insurmountable passage of time and space.
The bambino comes forward again in the dream to ask, "What are we striving for? Do we know? Does anyone know?"

Sushama Karnik

May 22, 2015

Fawn

i429.photobucket.

Originally shared by Kostas Michalis

Originally shared by ****

18.01528 g/mol

"Intimacy is making known to a close friend what is innermost.  In other words: intimacy is most essentially a sharing of innermost qualities.  In nonhuman relations, the inseparability derives from the inherent qualities of the things themselves."

"We speak of the intimate relations between flora and fauna in a particular ecosystem, for example, or between matter and energy in the context of particle physics.  In such cases, we cannot fully understand one side of the pair without considering the other.  although we can conceptually isolate the two through abstraction, they are really intertwined: we cannot divorce what one is by nature from what the other is by nature. " ( Intimacy or Integrity : Philosophy and Cultural Difference / T. Kasulis)

Image: Weight of Water / “There are moments in your life when you know that the sentence that will come next will change your life forever, although you realize, even as you are anticipating this sentence, that your life has already changed. Changed some time ago, and you simply didn't know it.”  (A. Shreve)

AGALMA
The seal I print and leave here
at the foot of the ancient tree,
is a cult, an image, a shadow of my dreamlike evanescent self,
a belated offering in a belated shrine made.
I leave it here and go.
My prayer stands, alone and weathering the storms,
the imprints of a night's stopover,
while the ceremony of the change of guards
occurred with no witnesses around.
My prayer stands that you may find, perchance by some divine mistake,
the collectibles I left, and that would be no mistake at all,
that they were the agalma left for you.
The prayer stands guard that no stray marauder passing by
on a fortuitous night of some dark phase,
may steal it out of your sight.
The prayer stands that the words, the agalma elaborately crafted,
though never to be placed on a pedestal,
may still stand firm in the storms that may be caused by raging winds.
The prayer stands that the sacredness of the song may not be defiled by the casual mockery of ignorant tribes of passers-by,
and may you find this mendicant's gift worthy of perusal in your restless nights.

Sushama Karnik
Jul 10, 2015

Dawn, such a private and universal event,

The day dawns,
and on a day like this,
it dawns as if
in a mesh of wires,
like a question mark
barely seen
through the jostling weeds,
like a small eye leering across the thickets on a hill.
Dawn, such a private and universal event,
seeping through the pores of the skin,
like the look of love,
omniscient and unnoticed.
The dawn, hiding in a mist, rolling across the sky and the sea,
and landing on mountain crests,
surreptitiously entering human abodes,
one by one, the stragglers of the night
put out the lights that burnt through the hours of midnight,
shining mysteriously on solitudes in the deserts,
and drawing a curtain on the delusional God
who was awake at night to the howls of wolves and the man.

Sushama Karnik
May 17, 2015

Paradigm Shift

Satori : a sudden, intuitive and liberating realization, that existence is but an unexamined postulate.

Like looking at the fields from a tower-window,
mountains looking like bastions, withdrawn and arrogant,
or like looking at the world from an urban omnibus,
 running on the tracks of the cities,
sweating, panting exhausted with the memories of the insignificant but essential things to do,
the rush and the flow of intimacy that never drops its garb,
simply drags, with no pause.
I belong nowhere: neither to the heights nor to the lows.
Glimpses from the omnibus
which remind, just remind and vanish
before they sink anywhere in the acrid smells of the city in the morning.
You have to rush and reach, rush and reach,
and then come back home.
There is no room to expostulate.


Yet a pause, whether you want it, or want it not,
need it or need it not.
All distances start from where I am,
and I know, I know that I always think with my heart, whether true or false, there is none to judge and no need to judge.
 It's somewhere you go unprepared.
Not a question of a path, but instinct alone
that ultimately leads and you follow.
Speaking for yourself, but speaking as though you are speaking for all.
But that's the way after all the instinct speaks.
Something must speak
from the geography of silence,
not from the geography of the mountain or the city lying out there.

At the end of going nowhere, boldly and audaciously alone
I realize that I need a refuge in silence alone.

Sushama Karnik
May 5, 2015

"That goodness is what survives death, a fundamental goodness that is in each and every one of us. The whole of our life is a teaching of how to uncover that strong goodness, and a training toward realizing it."

Originally shared by Sogyal Rinpoche

Although we have been made to believe that if we let go we will end up with nothing, life itself reveals again and again the opposite: that letting go is the path to real freedom.
Just as when the waves lash at the shore, the rocks suffer no damage but are sculpted and eroded into beautiful shapes, so our characters can be molded and our rough edges worn smooth by changes. Through weathering changes, we can learn how to develop a gentle but unshakable composure. Our confidence in ourselves grows, and becomes so much greater that goodness and compassion begin naturally to radiate out from us and bring joy to others.
That goodness is what survives death, a fundamental goodness that is in each and every one of us. The whole of our life is a teaching of how to uncover that strong goodness, and a training toward realizing it.
—Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, chapter 3

From the archive: June 24, 2015
A sparkling goddess up in the snows, on the icy heights of the mountains,
be thou the source of the energy in all beings, great and small.
The spirit of humility, be thou the star that shines with a steady light on the path of devotion to beings all.
A guardian mother, thou O Goddess hold thy children to your heart, the mother that thou art to all.
Serene like the moon in the autumnal sky, shower peace on all
from thy silence where you dwell in a quiet contemplation.
O goddess of grace what shall we do without your vigilance, as we wander away from the path?
O goddess of faith, let our faith not waver in doubt
of the awareness of that which you hold; that which is what is true for all.
O goddess of plenty, do not withhold anything;
anything that's not thy gift in a disguise, thy profuse bounty of love and grace.
O goddess of infinite compassion, thy rays of mercy may find the path to each tormented heart of every being.
And at the end of the hectic day, let thy gentle light enter our sleep and give us the lost treasure we always seek, a glimpse of thy mysterious form, thy Maya, the beautiful illusion of thy divine form that has no earthly parallel.

Based on a Sanskrit hymn addressed to Goddess Saraswati.

Thank you +Suma Ro for bringing it back  (23 Nov. 2016)