Is it the Greeks with all their wisdom—

That engaged my young mind to a point beyond endurance?

But now they are all broke, having lived with other people’s money for so long.

So are they wise?

Is it the saints—the Saint John and Jeremiah and all the Christians who admire,

To then cheat and torture, creating hell on earth while praying to their holy men.

So are they wise? And should we bow and listen and humbly pray?

Or maybe it is the poets, the philosophers, the intellectuals,

All those who spent a lifetime doing what they did

As you have done and as I do,

With that four letter something as a constant element in our lives.

So was the unknown one who wrote his definition, full of adjectives and modifiers, which I found pinned to a refrigerator’s door;

The one that helped me in a moment of pain.

Indeed a sentimental fool,

Presenting false gold, clothed with adjectives and verbs that beguiled me and others,

But not you?

Well, who is to say?

Is it expressed by John Lee Hooker with his 12 bars, three cords and just five words hypnotically repeated,

To stir what we all feel but spend a lifetime to express?

Or is it Dylan with his cynical verse reflecting from outside society looking in, when stuck on desolation row?

Or maybe Mozart with his Opera of hundred voices and thousands instruments

To lift the spirit to a high where we can then feel it so we can express it?

Is it in the crass colors of a Van Gogh, the hues of a Rembrandt,

The hallucinations of a Dali or the indecipherable lines of a Picasso?

Well who is to say?

Who is to be the judge?

For that thing that runs through all our lives, all the time

And endlessly urges us to express it in its essence

While inciting rage and desperation, a lifetime of dedication and murderous hate?

Who is to say?

Where is the expert to dissect the essence of that thing?

To tell us whether it is the raw sex, the platonic feeling, the artistic agape, or none of that or all of that combined?

Was I beguiled?

Or were you?

Or could it be that there is no one really—

Could it be that this thing called love, which some say is all we need—is too close to:

the Tao,

the Dzogchen,

the Theta Universe,

the Nirvana,

the Heaven,

the Olympus,

life’s essence

To ever be described?

Could it be that this again shows how we all, deep down, just feel that we should be—

Outside wide-awake, looking into what we have created as the game of life,

Rather than inside trying to look out

While asleep with eyes wide open?

Could it be that we are trying to express what one can only be?

Says Lao Tzu:

“Words  can never convey the beauty of a tree;

to understand it you must see it with your own eyes.

 

Language cannot capture the melody of a song;

to understand it you must hear it with your own ears.

 

So it is with the Tao: the only way to understand it is

to directly experience it.”

Says humble me:

I am here and see,

I am  here and experience

And I really have nothing to say.

But I do know that—

I do love you.

Studying life since I was born. Writing since I was 12. Searching for life’s meaning since I was 13. Leaving the monastery at 16, before becoming a monk. Travelling the world in search of sex, which I thought was the essence of love since I was 18. Getting trapped by masters and false gurus till I was 50. Finding Lao Tzu when I was 60. Thinking for myself ever since. Now, working on being where I am, so I do not miss life!

~

Editor: Cassandra Smith

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