Whispering Tree

 

When I joined the spiritual life I thought that it always be like how it was at the beginning- in which I would just have revelation after revelation.  Doors would open to me and my life would be perpetually bathed in amazements.

I’m saying this because the gap between the spiritual life and the ordinary life that I was used to, that I was brought up in was so vast- and I thought that that’s how things would be.

But that’s not the case!

Unfortunately or maybe fortunately, I have my six or seven daily spiritual practices, mostly involving chanting or reading of spiritual books, and I do my chanting and reading every day- as I shuffle through the minefield of my life’s mistakes.

One practice that I’ve learned recently is not to really give my shortcomings and mistakes too much attention but to spend most of my time focusing on the things that uplift me and help me: reading, recitation, singing, gratitude-offering.

So I guess what I’m trying to say in a roundabout way is that the spiritual life as I have lived it is essentially a lot of repetitious practices conducted with a view to these techniques eventually transforming me.  It’s slow going.

I sing Sri Chinmoy’s Forgiveness song “Jiban Debata” (God of my life) many times a day.  This is just an example of a spiritual practice that I do over and over every day.  How many times I do it doesn’t matter.  What matters is the soulfulness and the sincerity.

Soulfulness and sincerity!  When I’m doing my daily sadhana, my inner “homework”, if I feel sincerity and soulfulness, I know I’m on the right track.

But when I don’t feel soulful or sincere I just do my daily meditation and practice anyway!  What’s the alternative?

The first time I cried during an artistic performance was back in March of 2008, during a performance of the Saint Matthew Passion by J.S. Bach, performed at Avery Fisher hall and conducted by Kurt Masur.  There’s a powerful opening chorus where Jesus Christ is referred to as the lamb and there’s a double soprano chorus of women mourning him and lamenting for him and then the chorus ends abruptly and Christ stands up and says to his disciples : “You know in two days I am going to be handed over and crucified!” And the following chorus is this keening lullaby: “Herzliebster Jesu, Was Hast Du Verbrochen” (O sweet-hearted Jesus, what law have you broken?” and it is so pathetic that I started shedding tears and I shed tears throughout the performance.

The next time I cried at a performance was in 2023, so about 15 years later.  I attended another performance of the Saint Matthew Passion, this time put on by a local church.  The tenor, who plays the Evangelist, has the biggest role as he narrates the story.  In this case the tenor came from the Deep South, but sang in impeccable German, and just the depth of his feeling, the depth of his oratory brought forward my tears and I noticed some of the musicians were also shedding tears.  A sea of tears.  It was transformational.  I am not a Christian.  But when the St Matthew Passion is done well, for three hours I do become a Christian so that I can fully participate in the mystery and the majesty of this immortal music.

Until recently those were the only times I’ve ever cried at a public performance. I find public expressions of emotion unbalancing and disconcerting.  I’m an emotional guy which is not a good or a bad thing but I’m also an extreme extrovert!  This is not the best combination.

But I treasure my time alone. I like being with people but I really like being alone- with my books and my thoughts, my music and my poetry.

I go to all of my community’s (the Sri Chinmoy Center’s) spiritual Celebrations and every time I find it overwhelming- these public gatherings with people from all over the world.  I often take refuge in the “housing office” appointed apartment, refurbished just for us, or unfurnished just for us, but always impeccably clean. And I stay there in my decrepit or ultra modern tower and I just read Guru’s books.

Last night I went to a performance of Angels In America, a justly famous play written by my landsman Tony Kushner.  A few weeks ago, I saw two guys smoking outside of the theatre.  I had seen the signs and I asked them if it was true that they were putting on Angels In America, and they said it was.  I then asked them who was playing Prior, and one of the guys, tall, skinny and blond, shook my hand and told me he was.  And his friend, a Black man, came up and told me he was playing Belize, the rough equivalent of King Lear’s “Fool” who sees things the other characters don’t.  We spoke for a few minutes, and they were both in character!  It was such a privilege to talk with them.

In the first scene of the play a younger middle-aged guy named Lewis is burying his grandmother and the rabbi is lamenting that all of her grandchildren have goyisher (non-Jewish) names.  After the funeral Lewis goes home to his partner, his boyfriend.  The play takes place in 1985 in New York, and his boyfriend, Prior, says “I have to show you something”- and he rolls up his sleeve and he shows Lewis a purple spot on his arm.   For a sexually active gay man, in 1985, to find a purple lesion on his arm, a cardinal sign of HIV infection, is an incontrovertible death sentence.  The actor who was portraying Lewis started to cry and it didn’t feel like forced tears, but hysterical tears of despair.

I didn’t sniffle, but copious tears streamed down my face. These tears did not leave me.

Lewis says to his partner, Prior, that he doesn’t think he can stay and watch Prior die and Prior asks Lewis not to leave him but Lewis leaves him anyway!

Lewis goes to his rabbi and he asks the rabbi “What do the scriptures say about someone who betrayed a loved one in their time of greatest need?” And the rabbi says that the scriptures have nothing to say about such a person.

The play has a few more subplots- prescriptions pills, Mormon moms, Black drag queens, the infamous Roy Cohn, and the fuzzy borderlands between dreams and waking life where we sometimes, fleetingly, glimpse deep truths.  The eloquence of the writing, and the emotional honesty and vulnerability of the characters left an impression on me.

My friend who taught theater for many years at a local Christian college, told me that Angels In America is one of the greatest plays of the twentieth century, and he made his students study it.  Some of his students come from missionary families, and protested being assigned a play that depicts things like gay sex and drug use.  He would respond to them that the message of the play is resonant with the Gospel, that we are the angels in America ourselves, and it is our duty to take care of each other.  He told me he couldn’t produce the play at this college, but he did assign it as reading.

The play is about many things: Where do we derive our sense of right and wrong? Who do we listen to when we make moral choices?  Can we trace a streak of the divine operating in American history?

Lewis’s AIDS-infected boyfriend Prior, in the course of the play, turns out to be some kind of divinely chosen messenger!  So another question that occurred to me last night was: “How broken do you have to be before God feels that you will be surrendered enough to convey his messages?”

I guess the sense of brokenness and betrayal is taken up by Bach in his St. Matthew Passion as well.

The goal of my spiritual practice, my sadhana (funny, the auto-dictation heard “sad night”)  is to reach that state where I can shed soulful tears for God.  I don’t mean pretend tears, or crocodile or demonstrative tears, but authentic tears for God.

Unfortunately, in my day to day spiritual life, that doesn’t happen with me.

I go through the motions, I do everything by rote.  I try for soulfulness, but tears do not come.

But when I saw the St. Matthew Passion, and also last night when I saw Angels In America, I shed genuine and soulful tears, in silence.

Sitting next to me was some guy who looked like a Hell’s Angel with the beard, the tattoos and the long braided red hair, and I caught him three or four times wiping away his tears.

The spiritual life must always be new.  Guru says “That which is eternal is outwardly new.” (From God the Supreme Musician)

If I can’t renew my sadhana on my own, then I think it’s good for me to see the greatest works of art that can evoke really deep and soulful tears, for it is through the tears of the soul that I recover newness- and also the sense of purpose that I started my spiritual life with.

Sometimes I worry that some of my thoughts and actions may separate me from my own divinity, and so last night, while I was empathizing with the characters on stage I took advantage of these tears to beg my Master for his forgiveness-oneness.  I realized finally that these were really tears of self reflection and self discovery.

But whether they were tears of repentance or gratitude or discovery I can’t deny that, like Bach’s immortal Passion, Angels in America gives me a chance to connect with something deeper and universal in myself.  Therefore I can say that those tears were ultimately tears of my soul’s joy.

I am a spiritual seeker.  I don’t need anything else.

Thanks, Prior.

 

I haven’t been sleeping well recently.  I get by in my day to day with cat naps.  Mostly I sleep in the cafeteria of my schools during lunch or my prep period.  Alas, sometimes my naps can spill over.  I mean, as a sub it’s not like I have a lot to do anyway, but I do, at a minimum, need to stay awake.  This can be easier said than done.  I was proctoring a class in a middle school a few weeks ago.  I was streaming, through my ear buds, Haydn’s Opus 33 string quartet number 1, a masterpiece (Haydn wrote virtually nothing but masterpieces in the string quartet genre).  The music lulled in me into a daze, then a deep sleep, and I started to dream that I was at a live performance of the piece!  At the end of the performance, along with the rest of the audience, I clapped thunderously.  I clapped so hard I woke up!  All the students had paused taking their test and were looking at me.  “Why was the substitute clapping in his sleep?” was the question on every kid’s face.  I gave them a serious look and they returned to their tests.

The other day I was at the gym at a local college.  I met a man in his late fifties in the locker room.  He told me his name was Jared.  I assumed he was a professor and I asked him what he taught.  He said “Mathematics”, and then he asked me my field of study and I told him that I’m not a professor but that I study poetry.  He asked me who my favorite poet was, and I said among the American poets I probably love Wallace Stevens the most.  And then and there he recited the entirety of “The Emperor of Ice Cream” by Wallace Stevens!  “Call the roller of big cigars, the muscular one…”  We recited it together, word for word, and we were so happy and thrilled that we both knew the work.  He asked for my interpretation of the poem, and why it is so brutal and reductionist- and I said that the poem is about the author serving ice cream in the house of his neighbor, who has just died.  She is lying in one room, stretched out, her friends preparing her body for the viewing, and he is in the other room serving ice cream.  He reflects that she has lived a whole life, but it is finished, and now she is just a thing, but he lives, he is serving ice cream, he matters more, even though all her friends are streaming in to say goodbye to his neighbor.  It’s really a poem where what you see is what matters, the reality in front of you.  How you interpret it is up to you- but facts are facts.

I told him what I love about Stevens’ work is the mouth feel- your tongue and lips love to shape the words of his poetry.  He liked that.  Then we recited An Idea of Order At Key West: “She sang beyond the genius of the sea…” and also the last lines of Sunday Morning: “And in the isolation of the sky at evening, casual flocks of pigeons make ambiguous undulations as they sink downward to darkness on extended wings.”  (One of my favorite passages in all literature) It was such a thrill to meet someone who loves Stevens as I do, I said, “We are a small fraternity” and he finished, “But we are proud!”  Any fan of Wallce Stevens is my friend.

It’s funny- Wallace Stevens made his money as a life insurance executive.  His co-workers never knew he wrote poetry- they described him as hard boiled and all business.  In the same way, Charles Ives, America’s greatest composer, was also a brilliant life insurance salesman.  He made a fortune!  There’s something about selling life insurance that turns people into creative geniuses.  Maybe it’s the constant going from door-to-door and seeing how different people live, or maybe there’s something in explaining complicated policies and benefits that triggers something in the brain.  I don’t know.

The other day I was going for a walk, and I got an “inner message”.  It was an encouraging message, so whether it was real or not doesn’t matter.  It said “Identify your best quality and then intensify it enormously until it overshadows all of your so called bad qualities.”

Yesterday I had the day off so I read Guru’s books for five hours.  When I read Guru’s books I become a different person.  St. Augustine said to Christ, “You are more deeply in me than I am in me.”  In the same way, I can say that Guru’s books represent me better than I represent myself.  When I dive into his writings, all my bad qualities disappear, or they become meaningless.  Guru’s words are my true existence.  I feel this also when I recite Guru’s poetry because I become a different person.  That consciousness is not my usual waking consciousness, but Guru’s writings- especially his poetry- are ladders to an exalted consciousness that I can inhabit and claim as my own.

This morning I was reading Guru’s book Perfection and Transcendence, and I started reading some pages aloud.  After twenty minutes I stopped, but I heard a ringing in my ear, and that ringing soon spread throughout my body.  Everything in me was ringing, ringing, humming, vibrating.  I get that feeling when I chant AUM, also.  This means that reading Guru’s writings is the same as chanting AUM- the seed sound of the Universe.  We can enter into a deep, universal harmony and get enlightenment just by reading Guru’s books, meditating on these ideas, and chanting his mantric utterances.

I’m not always happy with myself.  I have a lot of attachments.  I’ll spare the reader the details.  But yesterday I was sitting in a small park near my house, and I sang Guru’s immortal song on forgiveness- “Jiban Debata”- six times.  And the sixth time I sang it, I sang it with more feeling than I ever have, and I saw that each note had a color, and I dived into the meaning of each note-color, and I felt the song wash over me like countless waves.  I sat there in silence for a few minutes and just offered gratitude to God and to my Guru for this experience.  As a seeker, I need these experiences to feel spiritually alive.  My friend the mountain climber slash English channel swimmer slash Celebrations housing Lord once told me “We are people of high moments.”  Other people live for nice clothes and status and fast cars- we live for those thirty or forty fleeting moments in our lives when we connect with something higher and deeper.  Guru says that “Even an iota of progress in the spiritual life is much more important than the so-called success-life” (Seventy Seven Thousand Service Trees).

It’s interesting when I read the Bengali lyrics to Guru’s songs- and I see that when he honours spiritual figures he gives them epithets.  For example, he calls Krishna “Bhangshid Hari” or “Flute Lord”.  He calls Christ “Khama Amarar”- “Embodiment of Immortality’s Forgiveness”.  For the Buddha, in his song “Namo Namo Buddha Deber” Sri Chinmoy took six or seven different names of Shiva to identify the inner divinity of the Buddha- “Ashutosh” (the one who is quickly satisfied), “Bholanath” (Lost in self forgetfulness), “Sthir” (“Firm” or “Eternally unchanging”) and the epithet that Guru applied specifically to Buddha is “Karuna Maitri Nir” (Compassion-Friendship Fountain).  He gives these names even to other Masters, to honor them, their supreme greatness.

I remember once, many years ago, I was washing dishes at Victory’s Banner, our long-gone divine enterprise restaurant in Chicago.  We had a Transcendental, embossed, in the dishwashing area, and I mistakenly sprayed it with the spray gun.  I immediately got a clean rag and wiped the picture down, and the Transcendental gave me the most compassionate smile.  Again, I remember once seeing Guru’s secretary on his knees before Guru, telling Guru all the important recent news, and Guru was looking at him and gave him the same smile that that the Transcendental gave me.  It’s as if our devotion feeds something divine in the Compassion aspect of the Master.  Maybe it is regular devotion-practice I need to stay spiritually healthy?

Well, school is out- which means I am out of a job temporarily, so I’m going to hit the pavement and look for work.  Geez, I wonder if there’s an eighteen-wheeler TQL truck out there with my name on it?

 

Four years ago, Abedan told me these following stories, during that year’s April Celebrations, at Circus.

In the early Seventies, the daily newspaper known as The Village Voice used to keep Ananda Mayi Ma’s photograph on its front page every day.  The image was of the Master in samadhi.  One night Abedan had a dream that Ananda Mayi Ma told him to become Sri Chinmoy’s disciple.  Abedan immediately obeyed Ananda Mayi Ma’s request.

During a bus ride around 1972, somebody asked Guru something about Sri Aurobindo, maybe who Sri Aurobindo had been in his past life.  Guru smiled and said with great affection, “Why are you asking about him?  I realised God long before that old man!”

Of course Guru always referred to Sri Aurobindo as a great Avatar!  Here he was just having a little fun.

During a private function around 1973, Guru was speaking about Swami Vivekananda.  Apparently, before Guru took birth, he had asked Swami Vivekananda to come down to earth with him, to assist him in his manifestation.  Swami Vivekananda refused, indicating he would prefer to stay in Nirvana.  Guru has written so many songs, poems and plays about the great Swami Vivekananda, but that night Guru expressed sadness and disappointment that Vivekananda did not consent to accompany him on his earthly manifestation.  He said that “Vivekananda could have done so much for me, and I could have helped him so much.”

What I think this means is that God-realisation has no end.  Even though Vivekananda is a God-realised soul, had he agreed to come down and serve Guru, our Master could have helped him go far, far beyond his current height.

—

It’s funny- during our last Celebrations, I kept seeing some of my friends who have passed on.  They were walking around Aspiration-Ground.  I spoke to another disciple about what I was seeing and he told me that he has also seen them.  He said there are some souls who have tremendous love for the Center, for Guru and also for the disciples.  They maintain this bond.

I told this friend that when I returned home from the hospital after having broken my foot, I went home and just started singing gratitude songs, for I knew it could have been infinitely worse.  My friend told me that he had recently fallen in the bathroom, dislocating his hip and twisting his ankle.  He told me that when he got up he also started singing gratitude songs to Guru.  It is good to keep this attitude of offering thanks to Guru and to God when bad things happen.  Because of our spiritual life, and the Master’s intervention, our suffering is minimal.

 

Beethoven said that “Missa Solemnis”, his last setting of the Latin Mass, was his greatest work.  I don’t know what that means.  It doesn’t have the refinement or the unity of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion.  It also doesn’t have the variety of styles, like we see in the older Master’s B Minor Mass.  What the Missa Solemnis does offer is power, and between thudding redundancies and musical experiments that fail, glimpses of another world.  These glimpses are so rarefied, and so exalted.

When I say parts of the piece are redundant, or that not every musical gesture “works”, I’m really saying that Beethoven had a high vision, and he wasn’t willing to compromise with it to make pretty music.  He stayed true to that vision, even if I wish he had written a work on a smaller scale, and kept only the best ideas.

But hey!  This is late Beethoven we’re talking about.  Even the most crashing cliches in the Missa Solemnis somehow reflect Beethoven’s genius that lifts them to another plane.  Take my least favorite feature of the Missa Solemnis- the extended violin solo in the Sanctus.  It express pat, conventional religiosity.  Beethoven was not a conventionally religious man.  Therefore, when he writes overtly religious music, and the violin tune sounds based on an old hymn, it sounds a little strained.  But when you hear it in the context of the piece, it sounds like the singers are basically oblivious to the violin line.  But then, they wake up, and they interpret the melody sung by the violin in their own way, and then the orchestra comes in at the end with slow, ponderous steps, and I feel the presence of a great universal soul.  I think the violin tune is Beethoven’s gracious encomium to religion, and its important role in offering some kind of supernatural hope.  Beethoven found God in nature, I think, but he offers his dutiful service to those who must have the Church to see God.

Riccardo Muti conducted the Missa Solemnis here in Chicago last year.  He said in the program notes that he’s wanted his whole career to conduct the Missa Solemnis, but he waited until he turned eighty-four, and about to lay down the baton forever, to actually take it up.  He also said that no performance can embrace every aspect of the Missa Solemnis.  It is too vast.  He said that he tries to embody the beauty of the piece.

And Muti was right!  Toscanini, in his 1935 radio recording, knocked it out of the ballpark with a deeply introspective reading.  Toscanini was obviously a spiritual seeker.  I didn’t hear that kind of spirituality in Muti’s rendition.  Rather, I heard pure sound, beauty for beauty’s sake.  I also noticed he made each strand of the piece clear and discrete for my ear, I could almost see each of the fibers that go into the composition.  He made sure I could hear everything, layer after layer, that makes Missa Solemnis so unique, and so satisfying.  Muti made the piece his own.  I’m happy he chose the highest mountain for last.  And I was there.    One of my customers had to go out of town, so she gave me her tickets!

What a thrill that was!

 

 

 

The Chicago Centre has around twelve people.  During the winter, the weather is often bad and inimical, and sometimes nobody comes to the meetings.  This past winter, I broke my foot, and the weather was often cold and slippery.  I missed many Centre meetings, and it affected me.  Even if I’m the only one there, I feel I’m making a contribution to the fund of human aspiration.  Every aspiring thing we do adds to that fund.  We owe it to our future selves to contribute as much as possible to humanity’s growth and evolution.  Go to the Centre, even if you’re the only one, and your voice echoes in the empty rooms.  You are singing for the walls’ appreciation, and you are also keeping Guru company.

This past Wednesday I was meditating at the Centre, and inside the Consciousness of the Transcendental, I saw Jesus Christ.  The image looked like a medieval devotional icon, or fresco.  He had red hair, a broad face, and he was smiling.  The vision lasted for just a couple of seconds.

What does this vision mean?  I saw Christ just for an instant, and then his Consciousness vanished.  But if I was much more developed inwardly, then I could have maintained the vision for hours, I could have communed with the Lord Jesus Christ on an intimate level.  Right now, I can only have a faint glimpse.  The reality, the living reality of Jesus Christ is far beyond my loftiest vision or dream.  But one day that vision must become living, vivid, real, eternal.

The founder of the Puerto Rican Sri Chinmoy Centre, Sudha, used to meditate so deeply that people would see Guru’s face on her face.  One boy, Sevananda, was there, and told me that he saw Guru’s face on her, like a painting in the Moghul Indian style.  So, not so far off from my experience of seeing Jesus in Guru, as a fresco, or mural.

Today we see.  Tomorrow we have to become.  Aspire, aspire.

 

If I recall correctly, which is a very big “IF”, Sri Chinmoy mentions somewhere that, at the moment of death, the soul often feels sorry over how much time it has wasted.  He says that all of us waste time.

I mention this because I have a habit of visiting one of Chicago’s last great bookstores, Open Books, and I try to buy new books every other week.  Often I buy books on Haydn, my favorite composer, or fiction by Muriel Spark or Edith Wharton, or biographies of Richard Feynman, and most recently a slightly quaint but brilliant economics book Freakanomics (I’ll have to mention this one to Tejvan).

And I never read them.  I only read Guru’s books.  I don’t read any of the books I buy.  I just want them near me.

But recently I’ve been feeling my Master’s sadness, that I accumulate these books, but do not read them.  He’s told me that if I could develop a little more speed and focus in my daily activities, and if I brought forward more determination, I could read these books- and still have plenty of time to read his books as well.

There is always time to do the things you want.  There is.  Guru says if we are working twenty-four hours a day for God, then God will give us twenty-five hours to please Him.

When I worked at Victory’s Banner, I read a lot.  My job ended at three o’clock, and I read obsessively.  I devoured over one autumn the complete works of E.M. Forster, including “Maurice”, which is how Guru would sign my name before he gave me a new one.  It’s funny how all of Forster’s novels include at least fifty pages of nostalgic reveries about Cambridge, including intricate details on the diet and menu of Cambridge scholars of the day, the endless tree-lined paths, the still quite dangerous motorcar taxis.  I love Forster’s work- Howard’s End above all with its gloriously understated climax (the protagonist inherits a house), with “A Passage To India” being a noteworthy second, with its ruminations on how colonization affects the colonizer as much as the colonized.

So, today, after I log off, I’m going to finish the story by Edith Wharton that I just recently began but put aside.  It’s kind of hilarious, that the story is found in her book of short fiction, Roman Fever and Other Stories, but the cover blurb reads “Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Innocence.”

It’s kind of like advertising Hamlet by saying, “Performed for the first time in 1601 for King James!”

Shakespeare is not great because his troupe performed for Kings and Queens.  He’s the greatest poet of all time!  (I am a Bardolator)  In the same way, Edith Wharton towers over American literature!  Her writing is endlessly beautiful, haunting, and deep.  Her short fiction is the among the very best I have encountered in English.  A lot of her work deals with questions of honor, promise keeping, and sacrifice.  I don’t know if she read the Ramayana or not, but she shares Valmiki’s sentiment that it is sacrifice that makes us human.

Sri Chinmoy writes, “A heart without love is no heart.  A life without sacrifice is no life.”

I get so invested in her character’s dilemmas that I can’t put the books down.

I wish I drank coffee.  It would make reading these books easier if I had a mug of java.  I’ll try rooibos tea and see if this helps.

I spoke to a friend about my latest poetry memorization assignment, From the Source To The Source, and I told him that the first poem I learned from the book pertains to America and India.  I recited it from memory:

“I dearly love my India and its age-old silence-peace,

I dearly love my America and its child-heart’s beauty-increase.”

And he knew the song and sang it on the spot!

I didn’t know it was also a haunting song!

And I thought, yes- this is exactly what Guru wants- for a disciple to share a poem he’s just memorized, and for his friend to enlighten him by singing the song!

I know this young man spends many hours a week practicing for Kailash’s group, the ensemble that has endeavored to sing all of the Master’s 23,000 songs.  But I didn’t know these people could actually recall songs they’ve sung years before!

I have more things to say, a lot more- but my homework is to read an hour before bed, it is getting late, and I have no time to waste.

 

–Mahiruha

 

 

Recently I’ve been reading Sundar Dalton: Seeker of Transcendental Beauty, written, compiled and put together by his old friend Trishatur LaGalia.  You can find it, and buy it, here:

 

https://www.amazon.com/Sundar-Dalton-Seeker-Transcendental-Beauty/dp/3895323942

 

Obviously Trishatur put a lot of care and thought into this book.  Sundar’s gentle nature and humor fill every page.  This book has given me a lot of delight to read.  Please buy it and read it.  I am now on my first reading, but I think I will read it many more times.

 

—–

In the poem that I shared recently on this site, Samarra, I included lines like:

“Every man is your walking stick”

And

“I will support your steps”

A few days after I finished the poem, I disembarked from the Number 49 Bus that takes me within a block of my house, and immediately slipped on the ice and broke my foot.  I recited Samarra for the doctor in the emergency room and he laughed as he passed me my new walker and said, “It sounds like you were ready for this!”

It’s a fifth metatarsal fracture, which is the most common kind of foot fracture.  I will have to wear my orthopedic “boot” for another month, but I can put weight on the injured foot which is a very good thing.  It took me three days to see my specialist, which just meant that, during those three days I had to hop everywhere on one foot, including up six flights of stairs.

It takes me usually five minutes to walk to the bus stop.  Hopping on one foot, it took me forty-five minutes.  Forty-five grueling minutes of acrobatics.  But I kept imagining I was back in my marathon years, at mile nineteen, chasing down the remaining distance, and I brought forward that spirit and energy.  I don’t run marathons at this point in my life, but the essence is still there inside me.  I can pull it out when I need to.  It’s interesting, isn’t it, that nothing we do in the spiritual life is wasted.  Everything can come in handy.

A disciple once asked Guru a question about her chronic disability and persistent pain.  And Guru said that this experience might be useful to her, either later in life or in a future incarnation.  It’s not a waste.

Fortunately, two or three days later, I saw my specialist who told me it was fine to put weight on the foot as long as I’m wearing the boot, and so I stopped my sack-race.

For the few days prior to my accident I had been in an aggravated, irritated consciousness.  Winters are hard for me.  I get lonely.  I stay here in my garret, carving my name into the wall with a penknife using the Greek alphabet/s.

I remember the night before the accident I dealt with a nasty cashier at my local pharmacy, but I was equally nasty to him.  I guess when I used to work at the fancy supermarket I always tried to give outstanding service, so I can get a little huffy when I don’t get it myself.  But that night I probably should have just kept my mouth shut.  I left the store with a black cloud over my head.

That morning, before I went to work (not in the prison high school for once), I looked at the Transcendental and tried to offer it my lousy consciousness.  I felt I made contact, I felt bathed in light, and I also felt that maybe I will be able to accept what comes cheerfully.

And that’s an important lesson for me.  To just cheerfully accept whatever comes.

On Friday I read Guru’s 1977 book Obedience or Oneness all the way through, and yesterday I read it two more times.   I was thumbing through it this morning and I noticed that I have underlined every single word in the book!  What’s the point of underlining if you’re going to underline everything?  I’ll have to get a highlighter next!

A passage I like is this one, on page 4:

“When I become aware that a problem has been dealt with inwardly, then my mind may ask my soul what was done on the physical plane and what is going to happen now.  Otherwise the soul may not necessarily give the message to the physical mind.  In the ordinary human life, unless the mind is aware of something, we feel that we do not know about it.  But although our physical mind may not know something, another part of our being may be aware of it.”

(From Obedience or Oneness by Sri Chinmoy)

So I knew I was going to have an accident on some level!  I knew this.  Without practicing the spiritual life, I don’t think I would get this kind of fore knowledge.

——

At my job, I usually don’t have anything to do.  The school district just wants substitute teachers to serve as warm bodies in the classroom so that the kids are not left unattended.  But they all have their assignments on the chromebooks, so they just tap away and I sit at my desk and watch art documentaries on my phone, or study Guru’s books or write poetry.  It’s not a bad gig, not at all.

Last week I worked (?) at a school on the near West side.  The students were all refugees, half from Venezuela and half from Ukraine.  I speak Spanish enough to dialogue at a basic level.  And from working in Guru’s restaurants for so many years I do know conversational Ukrainian as well.  Since the teacher hadn’t bothered to leave me any lesson plans, I just decided I would teach the kids each other’s languages!  It was fun watching the Venezuelans attempt Russian!  And the Ukrainians were completely baffled by Spanish pronunciation!

So much of language is in emotional projection and energy.  You have to feel the vibration of the people to speak the language.  When you say the Spanish word “La Verdad” (the truth), you have to identify yourself with how Spanish speakers use that word, how it feels to them.  It’s a masculine-feeling word, even with its feminine article, and it implies honor, and duty to one’s family, as well as just fact-stating.  In the same way, the word “Pravda”, the word for truth in Slavic languages, even though it means the same thing as “La Verdad” in Spanish, yet it carries  a different weight and energy.  Pravda to me smacks of sacred revelation, or something you would keep close to your chest and only confide to a few extremely close friends.  So it’s not enough just to be able to pronounce the words.  You have to know the people, the consciousness that flows through their language, in order to say the words properly.

At the same time, it was funny to watch them struggle with such strange words!  I taught each group folk sayings from the other group’s language.  It was a fun day.

I noticed the Venezuelans and Ukrainians sat in their own groups, but they still seemed friendly towards each other.  They recognized they were all refugees.  A black kid came into the classroom in the middle of the day, playing hookie from his scheduled class.  All the kids, from both countries, greeted him enthusiastically, and he listened to my cross-cultural lesson for a few minutes and said, “This tight!” and some other things I can’t print.  Soon he was asleep.

The following day I worked at another school, closer to my house.  But at this school, every door was kept locked all the time, and they do not provide subs with keys.  So I had to ask the security guard to let me in to the faculty lounge, the bathroom, and my classroom, all day long.  They don’t trust the subs.  They think we’re going to steal the keys.  Well, when you’re the “sub”, last in line, the last dam between an ordered school and complete chaos, well you learn to get used to being invisible.  But at least I get to pursue my hobbies and read Guru’s books all day.  I’ll take it.

In this new year, I’ve decided to be true to myself.

Oh, no!  All the self-help books I’ve read tell me I need concrete measurable goals.  “Being true to myself” is totally abstract!

Okay.

This year, I’m going to be myself.

 

The other night I dreamt I was at one of our meditation gatherings in New York, our bi-annual Celebrations.  Usually I stay in the shared visitor’s housing, and in my dream I had woken up late for the morning function, and was by myself in the apartment.  The space was sparsely decorated, almost abandoned-looking, but I saw the suitcases and sleeping bags of all the other disciples.

I knew I wouldn’t be able to make the function in time, so I just sang the Invocation.  I sang it with utmost soulfulness, trying to convey the meaning of each word through my voice.

Often I sing the Invocation by rote.  But, in my dream, I sang it slowly and with feeling.

I like it when I can aspire in my dreams.  Sometimes I’ll dream that I go up to random people in department stores and ask them if they want to hear a poem.  And before they can answer, I’ll just start reciting some of my favorite poems.  I do this in real life, too!

I was in the locker room of the YMCA recently, and struck up a conversation with a heavily tattooed younger man named Brian.  He told me he worked as a psychotherapist.  I usually joke with people about their jobs, and I have lots of psychotherapy jokes stored up (think Woody Allen humor).  But I didn’t tell him any of these jokes.  I told him that I have known what despair feels like.

I told him that after I graduated high school, I fell into a serious depression because I had not gotten into the college of my choice, namely Swarthmore.  I stopped eating, I stopped sleeping.  I just stayed in my room all day and all night.  This went on and on.

I had a lot of nightmares.  I dreamt I was running through a vast underground tunnel network, but I could hear two pieces of metal being stuck together somewhere behind me, in token of pursuit.  I couldn’t escape.  I dreamt repeatedly of hanging myself in the school stairwell with my uncle’s Harley-Davidson chain wallet.

Then, I had a different kind of dream.  In my dream I was in the living room of someone’s house that I did not know.  The carpet was pure white, and light streamed through the big windows.  The room was empty except for a big CD player in the middle of the rug.  I approached it, and a CD popped out, hovered in the air before me, and I saw an old, old Black man sitting on the CD.  He started singing a song to me:

“Turn the page!

Turn the page!

Turn the page!

And I started singing with him:

“Turn the page!

Turn the page!

Turn the page!”

And we started singing and dancing around the room in unfathomable ecstasy, like nothing I had ever felt before.

When I woke up, I felt like I was levitating, and I felt this deep sense of calm and fulfilment.  I knew I was going to be OK.

Then I told him about how one day my friend Sebastian invited me over to his house to listen to music.  He played me some guitar music by John Mclaughlin (Mahavishnu) and Carlos Santana (Devadip).  I found the music soothing.  We had a long discussion, and at the end of the night my friend, Sebastian, gave me a copy of Beyond Within and told me this man, Sri Chinmoy, was Mclaughlin and Santana’s Guru, or spiritual teacher.

I turned the book over to the back cover, and I saw Sri Chinmoy had the same face as the Black man I had seen in my dream!

Then, when I went home, I opened the book to a random page and I found the following poem:

“I fear to speak, I fear to speak-

My tongue is killed, my heart is weak.

I fear to think, I fear to think-

My mind is wild and apt to sink.

I fear to see, I fear to see-

I eat the fruits of ignorance-tree.

I fear to love, I fear to love-

A train of doubts around, above.

I fear to be, I fear to be-

Long dead my life of faith in me.”

 

I saw that Chris was looking at me very intently, and I said to him that that poem encapsulated exactly what I was feeling.  And I told him that I knew that Sri Chinmoy was reaching out to me through the dream world, through the psychic world, and through the poetry world and he was telling me that I was meant to follow him.  And two years later I met Sri Chinmoy at the Philadelphia Peace Concert, on my twenty-first birthday, and I got direct confirmation on the physical plane of what I already known.

Chris told me that it was so strange that everything aligned: the dream, the book, the poem, and he said that it is not a coincidence, but that there was a Higher Power involved.  He was so moved!  He said that I have a story to tell, and that it gave him chills, and he asked for the name of the book, and he pulled Beyond Within up on Amazon, and ordered it.

I know I have told this story many times, on this forum, and also to many people.  But, in a sense, it is the only story I have to tell: how I found my Guru, how I went from deepest darkness to Light.  I tell this story because nothing else really matters.  And I think in this New Year, which will begin my 50^th year, I want to make an effort to be as spiritual as possible.  In 2025, only God matters, only the Supreme matters, only Guru matters.  Nothing else is relevant.

Saw a teacher today sewing clothes and cushions for the kids.  I was moved to see this, I really was.

Chicago Public School teachers are heroes, especially the ones who work in the “alternative” schools, i.e. prisons.  I like going to the Cook County Jail actually.  Often fights will break out on the tiers, and all the classes will be canceled for the day, so I’ll just sit at a desk in the prison teacher’s lounge and watch YouTube videos.

Recently I’ve been watching Sister Wendy’s “American Collection” art history videos that she made for PBS.  She was a cloistered nun from South Africa who obtained permission to leave her trailer (she was an anchoress) and give lectures on art.  Her videos are so fascinating and so deep.  She mentioned that while she was cloistered, she would write letters to people who she knew were art lovers and she would ask them to send her postcards and photographs from all the museums they visited.  As a nun, she could not travel.  But she would spend many of her silent hours just meditating on the postcards of paintings from all over the world.  I don’t know how many years she lived as a solitary nun- I think it was between twenty and thirty years.  One day she received an inner call to share her love of art, enriched by decades of silent reflection on these reproductions of masterpieces, with the wider public.  I love her tour of the Chicago Art Institute.  I think it’s one of her best presentations.  She looks so out of place in her flowing black robes, walking down the crowded streets of the Magnificent Mile and sweeping down the halls of the Institute.  And yet, she still somehow fits right in.  Chicago is a place for pilgrims of all kinds.  This has been my experience.

 

I recommend “YouTubing” ‘Sister Wendy’ and ‘Art Institute of Chicago’ to find this particular video.  It’s worth your time, absolutely.

 

I listened to Haydn’s symphony number 58 today.  So inspiring!  It is beautiful, subtle, mystical, rich, deep.  Haydn wrote 104 symphonies, and all of them have reserves of imagination and poetry that dazzle me.  The string quartet and the symphony both existed before Haydn, but Haydn gets great credit into evolving them into the proving grounds for compositional genius.

 

About six months ago, I met a journalist by a bus stop in the Edgewater neighborhood.  We spoke for about ten minutes.  I recited some of Guru’s poetry, and also some of my own poetry.  Last week he contacted me.  His supervisor asked him to write a piece on local Chicago poets.  So we sat down for a three hour interview, and he asked me questions about every aspect of my writing process.  I also told him all about Sri Chinmoy’s poetry, and how essential my Guru’s poetry has been to my own creativity.  I recited about twenty or thirty of Guru’s poems and I also gave him copies of my own work.  I also had my typed manuscript of “From the Source, To the Source”, which is Guru’s book that I am currently memorizing.  He was astounded by Guru’s poetry.  I recited some of those poems also from memory while he followed along on the sheet.   He took out his phone and he photographed every page so he could study them himself!

 

He asked me how I found Sri Chinmoy and I told him everything.  I was talking and talking about being a seeker and looking for a Master, and my first impressions of Guru, and the dreams I had of Guru, and how Guru took away my breathing problem, and the visions Guru gave me, and the man just listened with utmost soulful attention.  He became like the Buddhist void, and I felt I was really talking to the vast omniscient vacancy within myself.

We also went over the poems I had printed out and brought, and he went over my poems with me line by line- repeating some of the phrases many times like mantras.  I could tell he was deeply impressed!  He asked me what my writing process was like and I told him that it takes me months and months of drafting to get a poem, but the final form, the final utterance will often come to me in a flash and I’ll write furiously.  Then I’ll take that final burst of inspiration and refine it until I’m satisfied with each word.  But to enter into that place of revelation takes me a few months of work.  He asked me if I ever get stuck, look through my countless pages of notes, and discover a jewel just waiting for me in the middle of a notebook, and I told him that YES, this has happened to me several times- I’ll be drafting and writing, but the poem was already written a hundred pages back and I didn’t know!

I told him that my poems ultimately are a function of Grace, God’s Grace or my Master’s Grace.  I often pray over a poem if I get stuck and can’t finish it.  After ten minutes of soulful prayer, the lines will begin to flow again, if not that  very day, then very soon after.  When it comes to my best poems, I don’t feel like I’ve written any of them.  I was just a channel.

At the end of our conversation he told me that he had been having a pretty bad day, but that our marathon conversation had raised his spirits immeasurably.  I told him I was grateful to him as well for giving me the opportunity to rise into a much better consciousness.

We shook hands and so concluded my first literary interview!

I’ll post a link to the article once it comes out…

 

 

 

Samarra

 

On an endless journey

In a searing desert

I asked a painted merchant

To be my walking-stick,

To be my guide,

To be my eyes.

 

He said,

“I am the King’s staff,

Of acacia carved

And set with opals

Distilled from water

And passed through sand,

And emeralds appointed

By the King’s hand.

 

“I will support your steps

For my wood is hard

And my heart is hollow.”

 

I said, “Your hardness creates

The echo

Your hollowness preserves.”

 

He said,

“Today I learned

That every walking man

Must have a song,
Or else he is no traveler.”

 

I said,

“Today I learned

There is no bird

On earth

That was not born

First

In my dreams,

And there is no man

In whom I have glimpsed

Infinity

Who has not

Awakened me

In silence,

Who has not

Shown me

In his eyes

The oasis

I must cross.”

 

–Mahiruha Klein

7 February 2025