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Two Poems (in the Vacana tradition of India)

By William T. Hathaway

Surf the Apocalypse

We stand on doomsday’s beach

watching waves rise and crash,

breathing the brisk and final breeze.

Shiva holds in one of his four arms

a surfboard carved from a bodhi tree,

His partner Durga and their son Ganesh

stand beside him, boardless.

I clutch a battered styrofoam body board,

knuckles white.

Over the waves gallops a white mare –

mane and tail streaming.

Kalki, the last avatar, rides her –

white beard streaming,

blowing his conch and shouting,

“Time’s up!”

Shiva paddles with four hands through the surging surf.

Shivering, I flop onto my board and try to keep up with him.

Durga and Ganesh mount the air and drop onto the waves.

She rides them barefoot on a cushion of kundalini;

he skims them on ivory skates.

The sea swells and circles us,

whirling in rings that seem to rise,

but it’s we who are sinking into them.

The ocean becomes a funnel of fire

that doesn’t burn but caresses in farewell

and turns my fear to joy.

All the waters and lands are sweeping together,

all the creatures are riding and whooping,

swarming over the waves in the final celebration,

end of time, space and matter,

end of the universe,

into the great womb of Parashakti,

taking it all back home to Brahman.

As we shoot the curl down the chute,

Durga blows Shiva a kiss,

and he waves and shouts, “Good show!”

We laugh, we laugh, we laugh

all the way to silence and dissolution

until the next emerging

into another blissful miserable divine profane glorious monstrous all-sacred cycle. Aum.

Jamming in Prime Time

Rudra and the Maruts, the multi-media band,

are bored with winter and want to play.

They tune up behind the sky,

shadow the sun and hush the birds,

blow a fortissimo fanfare to open the show,

rumble and flash the air,

spit and splat staccatos of rain,

push big blue cloud cushions down to earth,

soak us with lush spews,

caress us with windblown scents of pine and humus,

then end with a crescendo of hail.

All we helpless humans can say is,

“Springtime!”

* * *

If you’d like to contact Shiva and his family and enrich your life with their presence, this website will show you how, all for free: https://meetshiva985866381.wordpress.com/

William T. Hathaway’s books won him a Rinehart Foundation Award and a Fulbright professorship in creative writing. His peace novel, Summer Snow, is the story of an American warrior falling in love with a Sufi Muslim and learning from her that higher consciousness is more effective than violence.

Shiva photo courtesy of Ompalace.

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snowflakes and fireflies

by Mankh

they say no two snowflakes are alike but there is
no way to prove that think of all the blizzards no
way to check each one even though scientists
infer from what’s been seen that no two are alike
yet no way to prove that so what was the point
anyway that we’re all alike but different? yet what
of raindrops, sandstorms, hail, dust and loose dirt
in your eyes when the wind blows strong?  what
of bone-dry days thirsting for liquid? air soup-thick
with humidity your hair curls, breath wavers?
goosebumps on human skin when the air first
autumn cools or from a lover’s heart of winter
touch? and by the way you can’t step into the same
river twice if you consider everything in motion
nothing exactly the same yet somehow strangely
familiar unless your first time on your back in the
wilderness and there that fiery streak all of a
sudden out of nowhere goes your first time seeing
a shooting star but even that a memory the light
from so long ago yet there today smack in your
sky-vision just before a firefly (they all look alike)
brings you closer to Earth home blinking light
up into your eyes

 ~ Mankh (Walter E. Harris III)
allbook-books.com

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Quantum Virus Theory

Percolating throughout the Covid era has been the riddle of riddles, “Do viruses exist?” To ignore this fundamental skepticism risks being branded “controlled opposition” or simply naïve. To pose the question risks, from the other side, accusations of derailing the discussion of more practical matters that normies can relate to, and failing to keep some rabbit holes safely off limits.

Having delved into arguments and evidence (or lack thereof) on both sides, I’m satisfied to conclude at last that, like everything else in this universe of philosophical interpretation, it’s a matter of quantum entanglement. In other words, the so-called “virus” at the center of all our fears is either a “particle” or a “wave,” depending on how you look at it, and what you are looking for.

Science amateurs like me don’t have to have a degree in quantum physics to get the gist of it: it was already laid out by Lao-Tse thousands of years ago in calligraphic verse. The same principle applies wherever we look: in politics, arts, cosmology, or nature. It’s a function of creation itself, of language, of metaphysics.

Take any number of terms from the quantum field of politics, for example: corruption, democracy, racism, fascist, public health…

Beauty, or good and evil, is in the eye of the beholder. Any of the above derogatory or praiseworthy terms can be arbitrarily assigned to the faction of your choice… assuming you have a choice. Naturally, in a controlled system like any human society, it’s the default choice that is presented first—enforced, boosted, reinforced, amplified, regulated, bioengineered.

Back to the viruses, or lack thereof… it does no good to get stuck in the weeds of microbiology, epidemiology, vaccine development, purification protocols. You get what you are predisposed to get. You’re a Pasteurizer or a Bechampion, and it’s all a matter of spin. One man’s particle is another woman’s wave, and occasionally the twain may meet, if your mind is open enough to the possibility that Yin and Yang can coexist: they are just two sides of the same quantum coin we use to tithe to that supreme deity, Reality.

Likewise (speaking of the Covid era, still percolating and shedding its repercussions as we speak) we can pose the question of what is happening today in the world at large:

Zeitgeist 2023: Chaos or Awakening?

Again, the answer depends on your lens, the story you live by. Are you sapped by fear, addicted to bad news, a reactor to Chaos? Or does all that darkness fuel an upsurge of redeeming Light, a mass Awakening to the exact degree that is demanded by the enormity of the challenge?

Both perspectives have evidence and legions of believers. Can they both be right? What is true?

You decide. But it’s also more than your own stance. Step back and consider the whole. Given the array of forces on both sides of the Battle for Reality, the War for the Future, it’s only fair to acknowledge that black and white are complementary, codependent, as twinned as Yin and Yang in the spinning world egg.

Choice then is more relevant to where you put your energy, how you spin your prayer wheel. You can choose to feed the madness with more anger and despair, or you can choose to ease the suffering with grace and equanimity. Either way, the dance continues, snarling met with kisses, darkness with dawn. Around the wet world rolls, seabirds flying in and out of our tawdry circus tents, bound at day’s end for a perch of silence before a setting sun.