poets and angels

Kolkata, India

He said the reason he travels was not to climb the mountains or see the sights but to meet poets and angels. Within forty-eight hours, from a chance meeting on an airplane, we would find these qualities in each other. And so yet again, in the most unexpected place and time, the seeds of an inner and outer revolution would be sowed.

He was just a year older than I but he had more than 40 years and eight lives worth of experiences on me. Bends in the rivers of our lives found parallels but only in brief reflection. Miraculously and he was the first to admit it, he was damn lucky even to be alive. But it was the striking congruent nature of our intended ascents that we felt compelled to climb, or perhaps the knowing descents of our moving lives into the ocean of origin waters, that the routes from here on out illuminated the alliance of our brotherhood.

Truth comes when we create the quiet for it to be heard, seen, and experienced. Even in a glimpse of stillness, the light shines and like moths we know that we must go there. Practice stretches out the glimpses and soon we see the path in front of us.

Who is to say who the real revolutionary is? After enough life experience, after enough mistakes, after enough close calls, after enough frustration, after enough learning and listening, if one still has the desire to go inward to find the resources and foundation to then put it all on the line for those with less perceived status, for those with a smaller voice and less organized muscle, the seeds of change are still viable. A revolution begins in the heart and it comes from a vision, however brief, of the truth. And it is this truth that can provide the light along one’s path – for however long that it lasts. At least one isn’t walking, stumbling in the dark all the time.

But revolution in mind and language is just that. Who will benefit by talk of change? Change happens when action is initiated. It happens after this action is repeated and rebroadcast and finds self-amplifying reverberation in the fabric and egoic structures of those in power, those who think they are in power, those who would like to feel a sense of self importance.

And so with these questions I ask to the universe within my soul: Will we move through the inspired rhetoric and initiate the necessary actions to water the soil that these seeds have been cast over? Will we be bigger than our minds and more courageous than just being men of ideas? And will we find a way to not go at it alone so that our passions can find synergy and the product of such chemistry can aggregate into something with more certainty?

And who is to say if such confluence for transformation was to happen that the waves produced would reach the shores of the persons who need this water the most -- including ourselves? But to submit to resignation and cynicism that all is lost and that we should hide away in an insulative bubble because it is too late and that we are too few, well this to me seems to be the real end of life, the end of living, the end of love. So we must follow our dreams to live in a garden by working in that garden, by understanding the plants and the seasons and to embrace the storm when it comes -- and it will come -- and it will seem to wipe out everything because that is the challenge of participating in the complex simplicity of being creative in the face of adversity and of walking a little closer to living the self-remembered truth that is waiting to be discovered.