I am roaming the emptiness of the desert.
The moon's rotund fullness hangs in the void of the heavens,
Mid-way to the unseen horizon in the East.
The moon threatens to plummet into the desert floor,
Yet it maintains its oversight above its dominion.

The dulcet tones of the moon's milky-white soothe me,
But it is not my body they charm,
They pierce the ramparts to an unfathomable chamber in the bedrock of my soul.
And I feel a joy not confined to the borders of my flesh.
It is a joy emanating from deep within me,
And yet it belongs to us all.
And then I ask: Why is it that the sun's strong light exposes my body,
Yet the moon's milky-white exposes my soul?

I am peeking between two almost kissing cliffs.
I still my mind and then I see the snail's pace of the moon,
As it peeks at me behind the West cliff on its mission across the sky.
Gradually, almost imperceptibly, the moon's sliver advances past the cliff's edge,
And widens until it once more appears in all its rotund glory,
As it falls to the other side.
When the moon's edge reaches the other cliff it hides again,
Until once more I only see its thin sliver,
And then it is beyond my sight.

When the moon reveals this subtle dance to mine own eyes,
I feel an intimacy with it that no book can offer,
No teacher can teach.

On this night, the crescent moon floods the recesses of my soul with its pale milky glow,
And a mystical silence envelops the desert's void.
On other nights, in other places, the silence would be dulled by a crying baby,
while her mother sings a lullaby,
Or in the desert by the plaintive shriek of an anonymous wind,
As it hurtles across the desert floor,
To lands beyond horizon's reach.
But on this night, the silence is absolute,
And it comforts me like a blanket during this milky desert night.

I had unsuccessfully danced with the paradoxes of Reality,
Its feet were not in lockstep with mine.
And yet I sensed they were a lesser peak in the shadow of the mountain peak above all.
I went into the forest in a state of Chaotic confusion.
It was a cold day, my wispy breath wafted in front of me.
It was a sunny day, the sun's explosive light,
Through the trees bare and bright,
Exposed my body, my soul was nigh.
I walked into the forest as far as possible,
And then completed the journey on the half-way out.
I emerged at the precipice above a sea,
Its shoreline on the other side of a narrow and meandering road.
Across the waters were the North Shore mountains.
They were snowy and rugged and hoary.
The sea was a blue-green marble sparkling by the sun's strong light.
I sat at the precipice.
In front of me my feet dangled above a void,
And behind me the Autumn leaves were dying.
I reflected on Reality's paradoxes,
On what they are truly telling me.
I stripped them of all prejudices and banalities.
I pealed away their artifices and artifacts.
I aimed to see them with a Zen state of mind,
deconstructed and bare.
How to describe a state of Zen consciousness?
Imagine looking at a painting depicting a beautiful sunset.
This painting evokes powerful emotions in you.
Emotions of serenity and your soul's longing for communion with divinity.
You ARE Zen consciousness when,
upon pondering this evocative painting,
All you can see is a coat of paint.
Zen deconstructs reality and returns you to the white-eyed womb of Creation.
Imagine descending the branches of a tall and sprawling tree,
From child to parent branch,
And then repeated like nested mirrors,
Until you reach the trunk.
You are now communing with the Source.
When you descend the Tree of Existence it is for the void,
The nothingness, the ineffable truth at the core of Existence,
That you are yearning.
And when I fell into the Zen within me I saw a grand tree.
But the world of space and time,
The implicate order imprinted by the paradoxical,
Was only one branch and not its totality.
On each branch I saw a myriad of wrestling angels - the denizens of its dream.
They perceived only the completeness of their own branch,
But not of the totality.
And then a denizen of a branch's dream soared high above the tree,
And saw its entirety.
How naive he was to think its home branch was the whole tree.
How myopic to only aspire to wrestle its home branch,
Instead of yearning to dance with the entire tree.
To this wrestler it slowly dawned, freed from prejudices and tethers,
First a release of tension due to paradox resolution and then,
like a shadow illuminated by the light,
The paradox lost its fight.
And then I snapped out of my reverie.
I witnessed a sunset with a beauty transcending sight's domain,
And which can only be parsed as the soul dancing with divinity,
Reverberating within its innermost grasp - Creation's womb.
The sky splintered into crimson shards that pierced the wispy clouds,
And then the sun's turgid red ball hung low for an Eternity,
Above the sea's furthest edge,
And then sank into the void beyond horizon's ledge.

I reminisced of a time long ago when I was only twenty years old.
I was studying English 101 at the University Of British Columbia in the summer of Eighty-Four.
It was at a summer session because I had failed English 101 two years before.
A failure due more to my citizenship in a different realm than to the failings of my intellect, aptitude or the magnanimity of my core.
“You have such a poignant and evocative writing style,” wrote my teacher on the short-story I had submitted the week before.
I had written about a lonely sojourn on a desolate beach in the pregnant moment,
When sunset injures day's abandon and grants night the freedom to roam.
I had written about the mighty North Shore mountains,
Hoary with age and reverberating with an energy ineffable to the mind,
But savored by the soul.
I remembered how exhausting of mind, but above all of the soul, writing that short-story had been.
I tried to reveal my spirit bare and exposed.
I tried to destroy the ramparts and blow open the heavy gates shielding my secretive core.
But through my exhausting efforts I had only succeeded in weakening the facade between me and the world,
Usually held at arm's length,
But through my story then, only slightly nearer yet still remote.
There is an essence within everyone hidden in a chamber far beneath the veneer that encrusts our core.
We seldom allow it expression beyond just its fractured shadows dancing on an external wall.
But if we all dig deep and reach into this secretive chamber,
We will, to our astonishment, discover we are all reaching into the same chamber,
Not a separate one for each within the all.
And then we will grasp each other's same-hand.
We all share the same soul.
I knew that in the novel of my compulsion I would have to expose this chamber,
Ramparts and heavy gates destroyed once and for all.
And my novel would then cry out from this collective chamber,
And speak for my left and for my right with one voice for all.
It would be the ineffable ground of being reaching out to humanity from the navel of Creation,
Proclaiming the dawn of a Third Age.
It would announce the sunset of the Second Age before this coming dawn.
A moment pregnant with change that will forever be remembered in the annals of the Civilization of Man.
It would herald a paradigm shift far greater than the Renaissance,
Not just an age of reason, but of reason and divinity intertwined as an inseparable whole.
I envision the Third Age to be promoting the two primordial dancers,
The abstract magical and the other its complementary whole.
To engage in the Dance and thence unshard into the Eternal Garden from whence we all came forth.
They are in Eternity entwined, but sharded into the realms of space and time.
They are shards of the divine.
Would composing such a novel be an arduous journey,
Exhausting my body and above all my core?
Would I be as a drowning man,
Gasping for breath,
Kicking and screaming while with futility grasping for shore?
But would every paragraph and page exhaust me,
Yet also leave me yearning for more?
It would I am sure.
This arduous compulsion will also uplift and invigorate me with waves of catharsis and frisson.
And I pray dearly for the same in my reader,
of soul-piercing joy.
If I fail to evoke the same in my audience then I would have failed to breach the ramparts and the gates shielding my innermost chamber,
Our collective soul.
Only within this innermost shared sanctum can I truly touch someone's soul.
And by touching one, I will be touching them all.

Do you know that there is a Ladder to Heaven?
For all to climb, be it man or woman
But we mustn't stop at step seven or eleven
We must go on till we reach our heaven

Many of us want to go to God
But we don't know the truth about our Lord
We just go to a temple, mosque, and church
Instead of going on a quest to search

The first step to God is Belief
For those who don't believe, how can they achieve?
There are some who are atheist or agnostic
A life without faith, they choose to pick

But the ones who believe, they take their first step
The Ladder to Heaven they start to inspect
They know without doubt that God exists
They believe and pray and their belief persists

There is not a day that they don't Pray
With folded hands they go to God and say
Not only to the Lord everything they tell
They also listen to Him, not just ring the bell

The third step on the Ladder is Faith
Without this one cannot reach heaven's gate
Faith is Full Assurance In The Heart
Our journey to God, it helps to start

The fourth step on the Ladder is Hope
Without Hope, how can anyone cope?
Those who believe in God they find
He is there when you reach the end of the rope

And then, the believers in God, they Trust
It is Trust that forms their journey’s ******
Trust is unconditional surrender to God
And always accepting the will of the Lord

After Belief, Prayer, Faith, Hope & Trust
What is it that stands out first?
It is Enthusiasm, that is step six
'Entheos', 'In God,' that gets our problems fixed

Then comes step seven, it's Love for God
We make it a priority, the Love for our Lord
To us, God is not someone who lives far away
Every moment that we live, with us He does stay

It is this Love that makes us seek
Our passion for God makes us climb the peak
Because we want God, we Go on a Quest
And whatever we believed, we put it to test

In our search for God we Contemplate
We spend time in Silence and for God we wait
We don't accept what the scriptures tell
And we find the truth about heaven and hell

Importance of a Guru comes before step eleven
For without a Guru, how can we discover heaven?
A Guru takes us from darkness to light
And to overcome ignorance, he makes us fight

As we Overcome Ignorance and discover the myth
We climb step eleven to realize the truth
We realize that we are not the ego, body, and mind
We are the Divine Soul, on realization we find

Of course, there is Karma and we must do good
As we sow, so shall we reap, that will be our food
But step twelve on the Ladder is not to live after we die
But to learn how to God our Soul must fly

Realization is not the end of the game
There is a War Within that can make us lame
We must transcend our enemy – ME
From Mind and Ego, we must be free

Step fifteen on the Ladder is Liberation
Liberation only comes after Realization
Liberation, when alive, is from suffering being free
And from rebirth, to escape and with our Lord to be

The final step on the Ladder to Heaven
Comes after climbing sixteen steps, we reckon
It is Unication of the Divine and our Soul
Which is our life's Ultimate Goal

I dreamt a dream that was not mine.
"Stay," said the other dreamers, "it is a nice one."
But I stirred from slumber for the dream was not my own.
"What will you leave except for broken dreams?" they lamented.
I have to bear witness to the truth, I answered.

At the threshold of waking up, I beheld the wheel of death,
Spinning all the while brewing bodies and tormenting souls,
Before spitting them out mercilessly,
Hurling them to smash to the ground.
It was a terrible sight that filled me with dread and anguish.

I could not bear the desolation and hastened away.
I followed a path, to the sound of birds chirping joyously.
Some teetered into view and said unto me,
"Blessed are you who can hear our song,
May it stay with you for the rest of your journey."

I walked on till I came to a house that time had forgotten.
Memories of a different time flickered and came back to life.
I was grateful the path had brought me here.
I pushed the gate and tread an overgrown but familiar path.
I was back home.

We all die to keep god alive.

Love seldom comes once
It comes and goes
The way the stars kiss the ocean
Times without number

Thank God for a good kick in the ***
It's what reminds me life is precious

The world is rough enough, I can’t take it no more.
I’m not that tough you know, I guess I never was to be honest.
My soul is weak to the point of me being overwhelmed by agony.
My future’s bleak, the same as it was back in my childhood days or so I’d like to say.

So scarred am I by life by life events. I cannot even count how many there really were.
But I don’t want to complain. Even the best of soldiers have the ugliest of scars.
Wounded by swords. Wounded by arrows. Wounded by love. That’s the battlefield of today.
Those are the things you have to go through is order to survive. In order to “go on living.”

I fight alone. I fight my own battles. I fight my own wars.
To save my own. Meaning, my memories and my emotions.
I lost my breath today while fighting. That has never happened to me again.
Gosh I’m as scared of death, to death and by death, for as long as I can remember.

To God I speak loudly and clear but it seems to me that..
He’s deaf indeed, I cannot even hear his voice. Maybe it’s too late for me to believe.
True love I seek but will I ever find true love? I don’t think so..
A lover’s plead to the stars, that’s what every beat of my heart is really whispering.

I don’t know what the world is asking from me, I really don’t.
Sometimes I just wish to be left fully alone. I have nothing more to give.
I don’t know if all I want is to want or to not want. But isn’t that a desire in itself?
Will I live forever??? Please say to me that I get to live forever.

Many times when people get to find who you really are, they..
They tend to run away from you as fast as they can, maybe..
Maybe it’s vanity to desire perfection and to strive for ideals.
Maybe all that you really need to do is to just, to just, to simply…LIVE.

Only open your heart to someone who really cares,
And for sure don’t give your heart “just like that” to strangers..
They will use it and abuse it just like the rest of the world will.
Without caring, without any compassion, without any remorse

You are not the only person to be alive you know
(I guess that is my antidote, my cure for selfishness)
You are not the only one who has a right to experience things.
(I know) Yeah but you don’t seem to change your mindset/behavior at all.

It seems to me as though sometimes the whole of reality is just like a big movie
Everybody is playing their role. Unaware that they themselves, are being played too
Forever ****** to want to be somebody else. Denying themselves.
Don’t you see that sometimes too? I mean the movie part of it all?

(Now, tell me, just tell me, what is the secret to living a long, happy and fulfilling life?)
To not care about what others think but to trust them with your life without any second thought.
You see, that was a contradiction because I always tend to speak that way.
I’m elusive, I’m opposed to myself but also united. Fragmented and whole. I am the all-encompassing, ever eternal, [BROKEN & glued again] mirror of life!

I don’t know what the truth is. I guess the only thing that’s true is..
Searching for truth. That is the only “true” path of life. I believe so that it is at least.
And you? What’s your Truth? What’s the truth that you are after? Huh?
Money? Fame? ***? Love? Companionship? God? Or the smell of the essences of the very deep recesses of your own mind’s unconsciousness?

I don’t know if I was always like this.. A deep thinker.
Pondering about mine and other people’s existence for far more than it is “necessary”.
Stretching thought to its very own limits. Letting, leading, and teaching my mind into taking more than it can “actually” take.
I think that’s is my mission here. To find, realize and then express to people, the finer truths of this world. And to rid them. Of their mystery.

That – I believe- is the only thing that matters. Unite the contradictions in yourselves.
And maybe, maybe you will only find that NONE of them, really existed at all.
It’s been my life’s work to try and find words to express the inexpressible.
Attaining the unattainable. Realizing the un-realizable. Touching upon the very elusive “thing-ness” of this world. And yet still up to today, it escapes me.