We are now having a thunderstorm. When I walked up the stairs after class it was dumping rain, and then by the time I got my jacket on, it had stopped. So, I got back to work in the dry window, even patches of blue sky, but that's gone now. Dark, thunder, wind kicking up.
Lot of information today, I wanted to remember this poem by Kabir, a reminder for me that now is all we've got. Everything important that you think you can keep putting off, what would you regret if the opportunity to change things, to say things, to do things, were suddenly taken away?
The Time Before Death - Kabir (Robert Bly Translation)
Friend? hope for the Guest while you are alive.
Jump into experience while you are alive!
Think... and think... while you are alive.
What you call "salvation" belongs to the time
before death.
If you don't break your ropes while you're alive,
do you think ghosts will do it after?
The idea that the soul will join with the ecstatic
just because the body is rotten --
that is all fantasy.
What is found now is found then.
If you find nothing now,
you will simply end up with an apartment in the
City of Death.
If you make love with the divine now, in the next
life you will have the face of satisfied desire.
So plunge into the truth, find out who the Teacher is,
Believe in the Great Sound!
Kabir says this: When the Guest is being searched for,
it is the intensity of the longing for the Guest
that does all the work.
Look at me, and you will see a slave of that intensity.
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