Monday, April 13, 2009

NO ENTRANCE TO THE MIND

NO ENTRANCE TO THE MIND


No entrance to the mind.

No entrance to space.

What needs to open

when you’re the gateless gate?

Don’t think of yourself as a thing.

Don’t attribute form to the formless.

Don’t assume there’s a little person

the size of your thumb

mired in your brainmud

like an understudy of you

that you can consult like a script

when you forget your lines.

Reality isn’t impersonating you.

There may be a play going on

but there’s no actor

and everything is making itself up

as it goes along,

spontaneously improvising itself

out of circumstances and events.

But you’re not the play, the player,

or the expletive audience.

Not the theatre of the abyss

in which all this occurs

nor the confluent weaving of themes

into a recognizable resolution.

And there’s nothing wrong

with making constellations out of fireflies

and following them

as if they were reliable guides.

Anyone of them will lead you home

as long as you realize you’ve never left

and every step of the way

is the long road of a narrow threshold

that can’t be crossed.

Right now, you’re like a mirage,

supple palms and undulant water

trying to get down to its roots,

trying to discover the truth of yourself

in broken pots and noseless statuettes,

and the skulls of those whose thirst for life

believed in you until they discovered

that you were rooted in the air.

Have you ever considered

what you owe to the desert

that sustains the illusion?

And when you get right down to it

why pretend you’re the child

of clarity and confusion

when you know in your depthless depths

that no one’s there

to be confused or clarified?

You don’t need to sweep

dead stars off

your stairs and windowsills,

or mirages from the desert,

illusions and truths from your mind,

the northern lights from the sky,

or stand under a tree

collecting bird feathers

to learn how to fly

when you’re already the freedom

they fly through.

And in or out of the egg,

it’s the same, vast, tranformative view

and when you remember to realize

that no one’s there to see it,

that what’s left

is not what’s left of you,

that you have no origin or end

there’s nothing to wound,

nothing to mend.


PATRICK WHITE






1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I have such a short attention span, but hand on heart I read every single word of yours written here.
'making constellations out of fireflies'
Beautiful, you. Just beautiful.