Looking For Grass

Learning from Kabir's deer

It’s not true that I’ve exhausted my own Firebird poems – I’ve been sharing them here over the past year or so – but I picked up a book of poems by Kabir this morning instead. I only picked the book up because I want to offer something here – going to my bookshelf is a rare occurrence these days. What I mean is, over the past couple of years, I’ve been unable to read poetry and unable to read prose. That’s not entirely true either: my husband bought me The Hole by Hiroko Oyamada and I loved it. It’s a somewhat surrealist, somewhat absurdist short novel, just the kind I like. But he also bought me The Sacred Awakening, Reclaiming Christ Consciousness by Sami Awad and Darkness Between Stars by John Deane and James Harpur, a collection of poems in search of God. No doubt, they’re both wonderful books, but I can’t read either of them. That’s to say, when I try to read them, my mind disappears. This has been going on for some time now. A kind of emptiness or blankness overtakes the ‘place’ where my mind usually is. I can try and try, but each time it’s the same.

I also have no desire to read (or to do anything much!). I read The Hole partly out of a desperation to prove to myself that I can still enjoy reading. And there’s the clue. Reading has been such a central part of my life these past forty or so years, that not reading is felt by the ego as a kind of death. Not writing elicits the same egoic fear, or used to – not writing has become so familiar that the fear no longer arises. Egoic fear is just wobbly darkness anyway; it has no real substance (it comes & goes).

When I try to think about or remember books I’ve loved, this same blankness descends. Nothing. No images arise, no feelings. It’s as though the entire library of my mind has been deleted. I’m sure menopause aids this process, but this isn’t entirely down to hormones. There’s a part of this Em Strang being that knows this is a necessary purgation and the I-creature has no say in the matter. Well, so be it! (She says blithely! In fact, this is the hardest path I’ve ever walked.)

Photo by Colin Davis on Unsplash

In the meantime, here’s the poem by Kabir that I wanted to share, translated by Robert Bly in Kabir, Ecstatic Poems (Beacon Press, 2004):

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There's a moon in my body, but I can't see it!
A moon and a sun.
A drum never touched by hands, beating, and I can't hear it!

As long as a human being worries about when he will die, 
and what he has that is his,
all of his works are zero.
When affection for the I-creature and what it owns is dead,
then the work of the Teacher is over.

The purpose of labour is to learn;
when you know it, the labour is over.
The apple blossom exists to create fruit; when that comes,
the petals fall.

The musk is inside the deer, but the deer does not look for it;
it wanders around looking for grass.

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