IF YOU HAD ANY COMPASSION FOR YOURSELF

IF YOU HAD ANY COMPASSION FOR YOURSELF

If you had any compassion for yourself,

others wouldn’t have to suffer for you

and the world wouldn’t show you

such a sad, woeful, wounded face.

You wouldn’t see the withering leaves

and petals of the rose in autumn

as merely the scar tissue of its thorns.

In winter, mend your severance.

In spring, attend to your joys.

Like fishing nets and snow fences.

Like delphiniums in a garden bed

that’s beginning to bloom like a starmap.

And you know that stranger inside

that’s always witnessing everything we do

like a perfectly clear mirror, even in dreams?

Take another look, you might be surprised

at whose face you see at a meeting of eyes.

It’s important not to pass judgement on yourself

for fear of condemning the world.

Show me a mirage that isn’t a friend to water

or a wishing-well that resents a rainbow

for the pot of gold at the end, though

no one ever knows which end at the time.

Be kind to your delusive paradigms of life,

as you would an old skin you shed like the moon

when your serpent-fire could no longer contain itself

and broke out of its sacred chrysalis like a dragonfly

that had made itself a house of life out of matchsticks

and went up in flames like a snake with wings.

If you could see your life for what it is,

a teaching device for mentoring your own enlightenment

you might read the books of all the sages

rooted and flowering in you like the wisdom of a seed,

or the star in the ore of a panspermic universe

that was planted in you like the garden you’ve been from birth.

You might think that the wildflowers

are looking up at the stars to understand themselves

but, in truth, they’re looking up at their roots

like rain reveres the lightning that engenders it.

You don’t need to convince the wind of your freedom,

you’ve just got to ride it out to the end,

a friend to yourself, a worthy companion,

the intimate familiar of a cloud with a clear blue sky

or a subliminal lover of the darkness

love mushrooms up in like a moonrise.

If you knew how to nurture yourself

by breaking bread with the spirit of life within you

there wouldn’t be millions of children

all over the world who will go hungry tonight.

They’d be licking the spoon with stealthy laughter

like cookie-batter out of the begging bowl of your heart.

Enlightenment isn’t going to add one ray of light

or a single star to the night you’re already shining in,

and whatever wavelength you’re on, regardless

of the mystic polarities your potential flows between,

like dark matter and light, whether the journey you’re on

is orange or infrared or the blue white violet of the Pleiades,

absorption or emission spectrum alike, no wave

of thought or mind, light, heart or water

is discontinuous with the oceanic consciousness

they rise upon, so why turn back to the source

like a solar flare to ask for directions from a starmap

that sent you out like a bubble in the multiverse to look for land.

You know, if you were more of an explorer

without a preconceived destination, more

of a space probe leaving the solar system periodically,

the rest of us wouldn’t feel so lost or out of place at your table.

And even if you’ve made a vehicle

of the wheel of birth and death

and think you have a firm grasp on things

with your arm out the window in the driver’s seat,

enjoying the passing view with the wind in your hair

without clinging to anything along the way

it still might be a good idea to learn how

to come down off your throne like a pauper

and change a flat tire now and again.

Your life is not an untimely interruption of eternity.

The eternal sky does not inhibit the flight of the white clouds,

and it even bends down sometimes toward the earth

to pick up Venus like a lost earring in the sunset.

It’s your point of view that turns your back on yourself

like the retrograde motion of Mars, not

the planet itself playing rope tricks with your spinal cord.

Why go looking for your mind

like a lighthouse with a flashlight,

a flame for the source of the fire

or a star for the constellation it belongs to,

or the homeless for a home when everyone’s

the foundation stone of their own habitation

wherever they are at the moment.

If you chase the wind, it will be you

that loses its breath like the atmosphere of the moon.

And when you run out of air, breathe light, breathe space,

and don’t try to fix an expanding universe

to your nostrils like a bicycle pump

to get you back on the road again.

Or you’ll find you’re swimming out of your depths

to run to the rescue of an empty lifeboat

that’s already unloaded its contents ashore.

If you don’t want to go blind as a starless night

it’s prescient to eclipse your blazing from time to time,

turn the lights down low, snuff the candle,

and learn to see in the dark there’s just as much reflected

in the depths of the dark abundance

of a black mirror, though it takes time to focus,

than there is in the expansiveness

of the bright vacancy of the white

that takes things in at a glance.

The seed of a every glimpse of insight contains

the whole of the vision in advance,

and at the core of the apple of the issue

is a green star with dark auburn eyes

on the nightshift of the maternity wards of spring.

And o come on now, how long can you hang on

to being this box kite on a string

watching another phoenix ride your thermals

like inspiration on the wing, without feeling

like the premature ghost of yourself at the onset of spring,

all smoke, and no fire, your flightfeathers smouldering

like a pyre of wet maple leaves who haven’t got the courage

to break into flames and flap their wings and rise above it all.

Better to be a weather balloon losing altitude like Icarus

or even a candling parachute taking the fall for all of us,

as daring said feathers and falling took flight,

than not risk falling through the black holes of life to paradise?

And what if I were to tell you’re they’re just the pupils

the light enters through like your eyes into your imagination

to be transformed from a visual into a vision,

the visible form into the invisible shining of the spirit

that raises everything in the known and unknown multiverse,

and the trees and the stars, the rocks and the clouds

are all counting on you to do this for them,

because this is what you’re here for,

if you’ve ever wondered,

to raise them up to eye-level

with a human who knows the names of things

like parents know the names of their own children

running toward them down the street. It’s how

we were meant to meet and greet the universe.

So if once, just once, for my sake, your sake, the sake

of the forsaken with their elbows on the windows of the world tonight

watching it all go by like stars on the firewalks beneath their noses,

that are not embedded in cement like a mausoleum

of movie-stars that refused to become fossils

before their shining was spent,

you took a chance, and that’s all it would take,

one step forward with no return address,

to risk falling down at the dance,

and seven times down, eight times up,

such is life, get up on your own two good feet again

and discover you’ve got wings and spurs on your heels

the rest of us wouldn’t feel so lame

when we came over to your place

like a riot of erratic fireflies to celebrate

the lightning moves of the rain that’s dancing on our graves

where the dead lie down like the corpses of candles

knowing they’ll be reincarnated

as wildflowers and Luna moths

because nothing that’s ever given its life up

to this business of shining on everything alike

from a first magnitude star, to the night light in the hall

that shoos the ghosts away from their portraits on the wall

so the whole world can bloom in the tears of your eyes,

the fire in your heart, and in the human divinity

of the spirit of your imagination, can ever be put out

because every shadow of doubt

leads back the light that cast it

in love and sorrow, time and space

to the life and death mask of your own face.

PATRICK WHITE