Jogyata's Blog

Past things lie about like fallen leaves from some long ago summer, rustle underfoot in later years and random recollections. Why, sitting in my chair early this morning did I suddenly remember this uninvited trifle? These light-hearted lines are not serious, no , just the rustling of a few tiny leaves from a far off time when whales and we – a companion and I – all crossed paths, sadly, on an east coast beach...

The Stranding

When you were nineteen
You smoked Gauloises
And dressed up for rebellion.
Apostasies flowered on your tattooed skin.

Travellers, at Mahia we stopped awhile
From rambling's discontent,
Waited out the rains in a cottage by the sea.
All day long I dug fence posts
On that high-up wind-swept ridge
A far-off pencil sketch against the winter sky
While you put in a garden.
Green-fingered,
Everything flourished where you touched.

All night the tide murmured in our sleep.

We floated there sometimes
On that uneasy frontier, face down
Where the reef fell away
Into inky depths and darkness.
Whales sang from the deep
Such mystic, mournful songs
And a pod of calves one night beached.
The Maori wailed and brought tractors, buckets, ropes....
Oh how we toiled and heaved in that freezing sea.
You knelt by a huge round eye, prayed and wept.
Our hands, heedless, were bloodied from barnacle welts.
The listless tide rose at our beckoning,
Then pitiless, withdrew.

Gulls and mongrels connived
With the indifferent falling swells.

You bought a straw hat, noticed
Other kinds of strandings, lamented our own.
I joined Greenpeace, tried yoga, dreamed of whales
With pleading eyes in my restless sleep.

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If you leave here in the dark, rouse yourself protesting from a warm bed, pick up a friend, head out on quiet night roads to the west, you can be at Karekare before sun-up. This is a lovely place I am often drawn to, a holy place for me that soothes the spirit – a huge canopy of sky slowly coloring in at daybreak, silver rumpled folds of sea, a long mile-wide shoreline of tidal flats, dunes, swamplands and secret lakes, paradise of wildfowl and timid animals. Down the endless shoreline you can amble for hours, never see another human being. You feel unburdened here, immersed in eternity, a speck in this sweep of distance. You can pray to your God, sit on a sandhill and weep at your life and your memories, meditate to the seas cadences that are soft and rhythmic, beguiling. This is a place to be alone in – as of a shrine where Mother Nature is your only companion. Rough poetry that you won’t bother to polish or revisit comes easily and you scrawl lines on a piece of paper. You look at the dawn sky and talk to your Beloved without effort or guile – you are all sincerity, just yourself, babbling in the dawn at this great shrine of God.

When Daylight Comes

When daylight comes
you roam the crinkled shores
stride out to a beckoning emptiness.
Wednesday’s sun flares up
from the crook of grey hills.
Your footprints weave
the virgin wastes like an aimless drunk,
beetle across this wilderness of rumpled dunes.
The sands are a map
and last night’s other lives
have left their feeble tracks and tiny stories:
claw prints of a bittern
soft paws, a rabbit under moonlight,
stitch marks of a swift predator–
millipede, night hunter on the prowl–
the strutting bold stride of a pheasant.
And here a tiny death–
last nocturne of a beetle
a black eight-oared boat toiling
the mineral heaving dunes
it's final furrowed wake in a
moonscape’s wrinkled swells
till shipwrecked here,
speared by a beak at dawn.
Sunrise scatters golden light.
Frail thing of flesh, you lift
stick arms in supplication
captive to a sky of cirrus charms
eyes raised up
to it’s tousled random beauty.
Might some grace yet come?
Subdued by sea mists
the dawn sun stares,
a tamed red Gorgon’s eye.
You come here sometimes
comforted by seas that measure time.

Related Link:

• Karekare Beach, West Auckland – photographs

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Last week two visiting New York friends, Bipin and Mridanga, accompanied us to a favorite spot in the mountains for three days, a six hour drive down through the central North Island. At the tiny rural settlement of Raetihi we take a back road out of town, a slow ride south down a bony, narrow gravel road that winds down to the Wanganui River, snakes through scrubland, hill farms, valleys clad in the variegated olive greens of native forest and bisected by dark ravines. Arriving an hour and a half later, weary from the corrugated road, at our destination the 'Flying Fox'. Here two cabins await you over a river and your only access is by a small box car suspended from a single wire cable.

Sometimes I spend half an hour with a ninety year old neighbour two doors along on my street. Some say she is a little mad but her human face, the polite masks and conventions of behavior, have simply been stripped away by time. I had a cup of tea with her the other day and she shared some photo albums with me. A recent life of brave travel, taking refuge from loneliness in perpetual motion. Here she is in Hanoi, a solo journey aged eighty-eight, with a boa constrictor wrapped around her neck against a backdrop of dark green jungle; and here in Kukup, Johor, aged eighty-seven, stepping off a game fishing boat with a beaming Indian guide; and now in Singapore last year, in a wheelchair and aged eighty-nine, dark glasses, mad lady tourist laughing with a group of Asians in a fruit market.

Two new articles have been added to Jogyata's Articles folder:

A Few Reflections

Sometime after Sri Chinmoy's passing I jotted down some reflections and reminiscences, letting the flow of memory with its sweet things and moments of understanding carry me along...

Late summer is a vivid blaze of green, in the shading boughs of oaks and sycamores at Aspiration-Ground, in the all engulfing mass of driveway vines – but look carefully, autumn is stealing in, a hint of yellow high up in the crowns of trees, in the industry of squirrels, a sudden night chill. Winter stirs in the falling sap. In the afternoon breezes, a slow flurry of falling leaves, tawny golds and browns tumbling down, the season turning on its heel. Many dread the coming months, the long summer of our Guru’s earth-life now in one sense ended, the bereft contemplating the chill of a harsh new season. But no, this is not the case. Guru is alive, and alive too in each one of us, a part of us. There in the silence-nest of meditation we can quickly find him. And the outer goal which he embodied and held up to us is the inner Self within each of us – enlightenment is an act of remembering. Read more...

Christmas Trip Notes

On the long haul to North America, thirteen hours plus some, a chance to cram in some of the old unvisited classics on our personal screens. I really liked The Bridges of Madison County with Clint Eastwood – a very thoughtful look at human love, its quirks and foibles and its sometimes underlying beauty. How is it that this perennial experiment so entrances us, and when it has failed, so haunts us with its memories? Perhaps because our botched human entanglements and sorties were the closest we ever came to love’s final flowering in God-oneness, and sensing it in the shadowlands of human life we mistakenly sought its fulfillment there. And it was there too, like a blade forged and tempered by the fire and the anvil, and we would refine our understanding through suffering and loss to at last understand where true satisfaction really lies.
Read more...

Enjoy...

This morning while looking for something entirely different to what I would find and sifting through a dishevelled corner of my room (here a muddle of discarded things, doodlings; a ruined volume of Sylvia Plath’s poetry, the pages tumbling free; my father’s lost letters; a slither of sepia brown antique snaps; a teddy bear holding a flattened pink parasol) I came across a faded, neatly folded sheet of paper inscribed with a poem, inside a picture of a man leading a horse through a field, a little girl clinging to the saddle. Oh, floodgates of memory! This was a farm owner I had worked for to pay my way through my studies and with whom I became good friends, the little girl his niece Jodie who died very young of leukemia. The photo touched my heart.

Read more: Jodie

On the long (painful) flight from the U.S. to Auckland recently I was remembering some people from my long ago, and penned this little semi-autobiographical story...

In his three days in America Brad Anders attended first a wedding and then a funeral, the marriage of one relative and the burial of another, neither close to him but reason enough to pry himself out of his going nowhere life for a short vacation. Both experiences left him in somber mood, the wedding for its unsettling sense of something lost, his long ago unrequited loves still tugging, the funeral for it’s stark reminder of mortality, his nineteen year old niece Annie lying almost ludicrously dolled up for all to see in an open casket, quite radiant though definitely not breathing and shortly thereafter reduced in the undertakers furnace to a small mound of grey ash, a portion of which was later placed ceremoniously in his hands, a small unmarked casket, for keepsake or scattering.

In an almost empty funeral parlor Brad contemplated his departed niece. Rigor mortis had begun to undo the mortician’s careful toil, the cute final smile tightening at one corner into an almost quizzical grin, the portrait of a happy exit betrayed by sagging flesh, a drooping eyelids half wink. A single tear of brown fluid stained the mascara’d cheek; and partially visible, one milky blue eye, a dead cod’s stare. Trussed up though in her prettiest finery, a red dress to counterpoint the pallid laced hands and sleek golden hair. Staring at her as though to memorize her face or wrest some close-by secret, some answer to his own incomprehension.

I went out to Auckland's unpopulated west coast last Sunday for a dawn ramble. Two very nice boys from our meditation classes came with me. They had not met each other before but almost instantly became friends – more, it was as though they had discovered a profound commonality of character and interests, like a meeting of two long separated brothers. How they talked – they were conversing endlessly. We were driving for much of an hour through bewitching forested hills, vistas of sea, picture postcard scenery unfolding on all sides but they were consumed with their conversation, serenely oblivious. Their talk swept across a bewildering range of topics – natural healing; kundalini yoga; car accident experiences; organic gardening; favourite novels; Fellini – screen giant or fraud?; Asian travel highlights; the moon landing – fact or fiction?; the epic journeys of Marco Polo; preferred classical composers.

Seven new articles of varying hues...

'Guru' is a Sanskrit word meaning 'the one who illumines' – although my own Guru always tells us that the One who illumines and the only real Guru is God. I call Sri Chinmoy 'Guru' in this short account, for among the many wonderful teachers I have met, he is the one who has accepted responsibility for my illumining and I am certainly the one who needs illumining – posthaste!