Unknown Wanderer - Ed Crowley

People often
ask me where
I live and what's
the name of my 
hometown road
I smile
as I tell them
it's nowhere

Yet
it's everywhere
and it's simply

my humble abode
I'm the
Unknown Wanderer
and hence
I simply wander
then I pivot
Awareness around
Into the stillness
of the Silence
as I lay my soul
down in Rumi's field
Where the
Beloved Ones
teachings are revealed
If you want to know
where I call home at
the end of the day
look up at the stars
It's beyond your vision
but if you look
long enough you'll
sense me there
spinning like a Sufi
in the boundless
galaxy
of the Milky Way

[.....]

Ed Crowley

with thanks to No Mind's Land

~*~

"Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field.  I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase 'each other'
doesn't make any sense.
The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don't go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don't go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the door sill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don't go back to sleep."

Rumi

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

There is Music in Us - Jack Gilbert

Our heart wanders lost in the dark woods.
Our dream wrestles in the castle of doubt.
But there's music in us.  Hope is pushed down
but the angel flies up again taking us with her.

The summer mornings begin inch by inch
while we sleep, and walk with us later
as long-legged beauty through
the dirty streets.  It is no surprise
that danger and suffering surround us.

What astonishes is the singing.
We know the horses are there in the dark
meadow because we can smell them,

can hear them breathing.

Our spirit persists like a man struggling
through the frozen valley
who suddenly smells the flowers
and realizes the snow is melting
out of sight on top of the mountain,
knows that spring has begun.

Jack Gilbert, 1925-2012
Horses at Midnight Without a Moon

with thanks to Love Is A Place

~

Photo - Me on path into the woods

 

Confessions of a Wanderer - Fred LaMotte

The grail knights thought it a disgrace to quest in a group.
So each entered the forest where there was no path, and
where it was darkest.

La Queste del Saint Graal, 13th C.

Up until age seven, I wandered.  Then I began to buy the
propaganda of my school.  The teachers insisted that if
I wanted to grow up I had better get life all figured out, and
learn to be a success.  Of course, they were just passing along
to the next generation their own fear of failure.

Took me the next half century to realize that they were pretending.
Absolutely every adult I met was pretending to know.  Over the
years I too pretended, and played the role of knower.  So that I
could be a successful doer.

Now I know that I don't know.  And the more I don't know, I know
who I am.  And the more I do.  Because it is not the do-er who
does, but Being.

If you've found the true path, congratulations, please don't guide
me. If you've found the movement that will finally save
humanity, congratulations: please don't sign me up.  Because
what I have found is the courage to wander again.

I have abandoned the compass technique.  Now I enter the ancient
forest precisely where the trees are unfelled.  I have no desire to
super-impose my map of consolation over this unfathomably mystery.

.....The blossom of Correct Teaching withers away, we are the
fragrance that remains.  Just by admitting we know nothing, we
sigh together and breathe life.

Letting go of our search, we meet each other where we get lost, 
and arrive at our destination.

Fred LaMotte

Uradiance

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering
Full Moon July 2022

 

Be A Wanderer - Fred LaMotte

"Not everyone who wanders is lost" ~ Tolkien

I am most aware and most present when I am wandering,
when I am a pilgrim.  I find myself most vulnerable, alive,
and open then.  Not when I claim the kingdom of "Non-
Duality," but when I wander in the wonder of duality, the
both-ness of being on the Way and arriving at the same
time.

There is something authoritarian to me about "Non-Duality,"
and those who claim to be instantly enlightened just by 
saying that all is One.  Oneness can be very oppressive
when it is a "spiritual teaching," when it is not lived as a
journey of constant opening and discovery.  Yet for a
journey, there must be the dynamics of twoness.  There must
be eternity, and not-yet...

Those who claim to be "non-dualists" never deign to call
themselves seekers, disciples, or devotees.  They are only
content to call themselves "spiritual teachers."  Their message
is, "I have arrived."  But doesn't being-there get rather smug,
rather boring, when there is no more to [discover] and no more
wandering to unfollow?

.....a pathless Way is different than being "lost."  Those who
feel lost assume there is a destination.  They are dissatisfied
 with where they are, because there must be somewhere better. 
 But wanderers discover beauty in each step.  They never and
always arrive.  This is the lively paradox, the blessed not-yet,
of enlightened Duality...

The Gnostic Jesus doesn't say "Follow me." pointing up
to a final resting place.  He shows me the never-ending 
labyrinthine spiritual power of waylessness.  If I follow,
I follow the one who leaves no footprints on the water.
Each breath is the end and the beginning of my pilgrimage.

I learned this not from Jesus, but from his favorite and most
beloved companion, Mary Magdalene.  She became my 
anam cara, my Friend, when I was wandering down the
Medieval pilgrimage routes through southern France, 
knowing not at all what I was looking for.  And I had no
idea about herstory, for it has been submerged in history.

After the first Easter, she became a wanderer.  She was lost
at sea in a rudderless boat, tossed up on the shore in southern
France, at what is now Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer.  A pilgrim,
a stranger, she found herself with no map, and no rudder for
her boat.  That is how we all find ourselves.  She finally
arrived at the beginning of her journey, awakening Christ-
Consciousness in the Western world, before theologians
and evangelists were ever invented.  And even now, she is
the Friend who blesses me when I am most fallen and far
from any path.

I must say, in  my old age, as I no longer try to go anywhere,
it is delightful to realize that such great soul-beings as Jesus,
Mary, Krishna, Radha, Qwan Yin, Lakshmi,Gurudev,
are not mere archetypes or abstract symbols in some pablum
of "non-duality."  They are living Persons I can know in
the wonder of friendship.  I bump into them somewhere out
in Rumi's meadow, when I abandon the destination,
and become a wanderer.

Fred LaMotte
Uradiance

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering