Meditation explorations

**A comment came in about an entry I made in 2007 quoting a poem by Wes Nisker:

"Why did you leave out the last line? This poem ends this way: I meditate because I want to discover the fifth Brahma-vihara, the Divine Abode of Aw, and then I'll go down in history as a great spiritual adapt."

Actually I didn't leave out the last line, which is not the one cited above. It is this:

"I meditate because I want to discover the fifth Brahma Vihara, the divine Abode of Ah
And then I’ll go down in history as a great spiritual abbot
I meditate because I am building myself a bigger and better perspective
And occasionally I need to add a new window."

There also appear to be several versions of this poem around the Internet.

I spent a day at a Nisker retreat and even got to say a few words with him. I'm still not able to make the leap to that practice, though I've been reading several books about it, the most recent being Sam Harris's "Waking Up." I've also recently read "10% Happier" and "Training in Compassion." Still not convinced.

Masters Everywhere - a poem

Masters Everwhere
by Michael Attie

Passed a forest ranger on the trail.
Perhaps I looked lost, she asked
"Any questions?"
She was pretty
so I gave her my usual
smart-ass response,
"Are time and space real?"
She responded,
"What we love is real."
Met my match
on Saddleback Lakes Trail.

From Inquiring Mind

Poetry is a witness

** Gary Kamiya, in a Salon.com article, includes a statement about the function of poetry in a time of war:

Poetry, as the great Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz once wrote, is a witness...
Poetry, perhaps even more than pictures, makes war live. We understand the true horror of World War I not because of newsreels, but because of the searing words of Erich Maria Remarque and Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. And Iraq has produced its own poet, Brian Turner, who was an infantry team leader there for a year. In 2005, he published a collection of poems, "Here, Bullet," that is destined to endure long after the shrill arguments about the war have been forgotten.
...

2000 lbs

A flight of gold, that's what Sefwan thinks
as he lights a Miami, draws in the smoke
and waits in his taxi at the traffic circle.
He thinks of summer 1974, lifting
pitchforks of grain high in the air,
the slow drift of it like the fall of Shatha's hair,
and although it was decades ago, he still loves her,
remembers her standing at the canebrake
where the buffalo cooled shoulder-deep in the water,
pleased with the orange cups of flowers he brought her,
and he regrets how much can go wrong in a life,
how easily the years slip by, light as grain, bright
as the street's concussion of metal, shrapnel
traveling at the speed of sound to open him up
in blood and shock, a man whose last thoughts
are of love and wreckage, with no one there
to whisper him gone.

Sgt. Ledouix of the National Guard
speaks but cannot hear the words coming out,
and it's just as well his eardrums ruptured
because it lends the world a certain calm,
though the traffic circle is filled with people
running in panic, their legs a blur
like horses in a carousel, turning
and turning the way the tires spin
on the Humvee flipped to its side,
the gunner's hatch he was thrown from
a mystery to him now, a dark hole
in metal the color of sand, and if he could,
he would crawl back inside of it,
and though his fingertips scratch at the asphalt
he hasn't the strength to move:
shrapnel has torn into his ribcage
and he will bleed to death in minutes,
but he finds himself surrounded by a strange
beauty, the shine of light on the broken,
a woman's hand touching his face, tenderly
the way his wife might, amazed to find
a wedding ring on his crushed hand,
the bright gold sinking in flesh
going to bone.