Life is a journey of Going Home

[NikolaiI]

Life is a Journey of Going Home ,
it begins by going home to the world,
then it is of going home to the house,
and the bed -
and the family -

it is of going home to the fall leaves,
and the rings on the stump -
of going home to the bird's call -
and the sunlight of the afternoon
and the straw grass in the sunlight.

Life is a process of Going Home;
it is of going home to the sky,
and to the grass, and the stars,
and the water -

[PrinceMyshkin]

Lovely thought and beautifully expressed but I did not know how to take "water" as the last, climactic destination. Should I have understood water to be symbolic in this instance?

[NikolaiI]

Yes I meant to leave it hanging and leaves the reader to ask that question. By water I mean the Dao, and to say that everything continuosly and eternal returns home in the sense of becoming something else, just as water does. It is going home to these different objects, like water, leaves, grass, a bird's call, sunlight, because in the eternal play of life, one becomes those things, one is them.

I guess it's paritally influenced by the following passage.

And then I remembered a passage I had read in one of Suzuki's essays. "What is the Dharma-Body of the Buddha?" ('"the Dharma-Body of the Buddha" is another way of saying Mind, Suchness, the Void, the Godhead.) The question is asked in a Zen monastery by an earnest and bewildered novice. And with the prompt irrelevance of one of the Marx Brothers, the Master answers, "The hedge at the bottom of the garden." "And the man who realizes this truth," the novice dubiously inquires, '"what, may I ask, is he?" Groucho gives him a whack over the shoulders with his staff and answers, "A golden-haired lion."

from "The Doors of Perception," by Alduos Huxley

[hoope]

Nice poem Nikolai .. :)
I liked it

[Delta40]

Life is a journey of going home is particularly moving for me atm. When I leave work, I think of my dog waiting for me but she went 'home' last week.

Thank you Nikolai.

[NikolaiI]

Nice poem Nikolai .. :)
I liked it

Thank you Hope :)


Life is a journey of going home is particularly moving for me atm. When I leave work, I think of my dog waiting for me but she went 'home' last week.

Thank you Nikolai.

You're welcome, Delta.

Here is a bit longer quote out of that book, at the same place..



Istigkeit - wasn't that the word Meister Eckhart liked to use? "Is-ness." The Being of Platonic philosophy - except that Plato seems to have made the enormous, the grotesque mistake of separating Being from becoming and identifying it with the mathematical abstraction of the Idea. He could never, poor fellow, have seen a bunch of flowers shining with their own inner light and all but quivering under the pressure of the significance with which they were charged; could never have perceived that what rose and iris and carnation so intensely signified was nothing more, and nothing less, than what they were - a transience that was yet eternal life, a perpetual perishing that was at the same time pure Being, a bundle of minute, unique particulars in which, by some unspeakable and yet self-evident paradox, was to be seen the divine source of all existence.

I continued to look at the flowers, and in their living light I seemed to detect the qualitative equivalent of breathing -but of a breathing without returns to a starting point, with no recurrent ebbs but only a repeated flow from beauty to heightened beauty, from deeper to ever deeper meaning. Words like "grace" and "transfiguration" came to my mind, and this, of course, was what, among other things, they stood for. My eyes traveled from the rose to the carnation, and from that feathery incandescence to the smooth scrolls of sentient amethyst which were the iris. The Beatific Vision, Sat Chit Ananda, Being-Awareness-Bliss-for the first time I understood, not on the verbal level, not by inchoate hints or at a distance, but precisely and completely what those prodigious syllables referred to. And then I remembered a passage I had read in one of Suzuki's essays. "What is the Dharma-Body of the Buddha?" ('"the Dharma-Body of the Buddha" is another way of saying Mind, Suchness, the Void, the Godhead.) The question is asked in a Zen monastery by an earnest and bewildered novice. And with the prompt irrelevance of one of the Marx Brothers, the Master answers, "The hedge at the bottom of the garden." "And the man who realizes this truth," the novice dubiously inquires, '"what, may I ask, is he?" Groucho gives him a whack over the shoulders with his staff and answers, "A golden-haired lion."


Lovely thought and beautifully expressed but I did not know how to take "water" as the last, climactic destination. Should I have understood water to be symbolic in this instance?

Does that help at all, Prince? Do you like the passage from Huxley's book? I wouldn't say that there's anything the reader necessarily should take away from my poem - I did lead up to "water" and leave off it with no explanation. I meant to, and the resulting poem is what my purpose in the beginning to write was. I'm glad if you liked it, and if you happen to not, I don't mind but am not particularly interested in changing it.

[Haunted]

On a quick sweep this is a beautiful poem, but reading between the lines it's quite a touching piece. A colleague of mine had a close friend who had cancer and she was getting progressively worse. Then one day she said to him, I'm ready to go "home". Your poem expresses that emotion in such beauty.

[hack]

I like it a lot Nik.
The water is not strictly
symbolic, as we are
mostly water. It reminds
me of Ursula Le Guin's
"Always Coming Home".
...peace...

[NikolaiI]

THanks so much, Haunted and hack, and I'm glad you liked it...