To see life with soft eyes

The wind on the water sings with a face of forgotten words

I am a lover of poetry. Now I know what most people think of poetry – one of the most common things they say is that they don’t understand it. To which I must respond – do you understand music? Let’s talk about poetry in a much broader capacity – as a metaphor for a way of living life.

I spend a great deal of my time combining and recombining words in all manner of patterns. This is the writer’s work, but most of my own work is founded upon pattern, rhythm and structure. For example, my book ‘The Gene keys – embracing your higher purpose’ is formulaic – it has an energy configuration that is repetitive but at the same time unique. That is how you write words that you want to enter deeply into a person’s mind. These word formulae in the 64 Gene Keys are crafted and shaped to form an exact geometric resonance that both emerges from and returns to our DNA. To me, the Gene Keys is like a well-manicured garden in that it imposes a vision and an intent upon its reader. Its intent of course, is to highlight the darker aspects of our nature in order that their transmutation will raise the frequency of our consciousness.

However, there exists another kind of writing – a writing that is absolutely free from intent. This is poetry – it is like a slice of wilderness – an untamed jungle peopled by wild and unpredictable forms that will not be tamed. Like the haiku above, true poetry will not be understood. It is a stream of words that does nothing to the mind but create an uncomfortable short circuit. It is the language of the heart. Now, when I am talking here about poetry I am not talking about poems. Poems often have nothing to do with poetry. What you may be afraid of is poems, not poetry – and you are absolutely right to be afraid of poems. Many poems can be nothing more than clever rhyming words and stories. A true piece of poetry however, can be found anywhere – it is a stream or fragment of words that directly softens and opens your heart. That is my definition of poetry.

True poetry must arise spontaneously from the void and fall back again into that void. It can be a sentence you come across in a newspaper, or a paragraph from one of your favourite books. Poetry can only ever be a fragment, but in that fragment lies the whole universe in reflection. In a nutshell, the only purpose of poetry is to dissolve you, and at its deepest level, it doesn’t even require words. Those poems that have the greatest power are the ones that seem to rise up beyond their own words. Poetry is anything that does not fit – that cannot conform to the world you have constructed from your mind.

Autumn is perhaps the best season for poetry. It has always been so because this is a time of dissolving and decline. In autumn, everything that was certain begins to slip away and everything that was structured begins to soften and sag. It is a time of rounding edges, curves and arcs. It is a reminder that we must let go. In my writings I often speak of the return of the Goddess to the earth. When asked what this Goddess refers to I sometimes find myself for a moment stymied. She is definitionless because she is no one thing – she is the third aspect of the sacred trinity at the heart of creation, but that does not make her a number. Three unites, dissolves and ends, all at the same time. I assume this is why the Christians called her a Holy Spirit – because she cannot be grasped.

If I were to find a single word for what the Goddess really means – what she feels like, I would use the word ‘softness’. Those who are open-hearted enough to let this spirit into their lives will always find this softness right at the core of their being.

Lao Tzu said:

‘The very softest of things can ride
like a galloping horse
Through the very hardest of things
Like water through rock
Thus the invisible enters in’.

To speak from this softness is to speak poetically, on the very fringes of language itself. Softness takes us out of the drama of evolution, beyond system and structure to heal us from the inside out. Softness says: yes, yes, play with evolution, rise up on the wings of your dreams, but don’t forget that all these things will pass away, as you will pass away. Come rest in my arms a while…

In a recent course I spoke of the seriousness of Becoming as opposed to the lightness of Being. Both sides are aspects of life, but the softness of Being is the ground of it all. What I am hinting at is the spirit of the haiku – the short poem at the beginning of this article. You do not write a haiku. You simply come across it one day hanging there in the air before you.

I think life is like that.

The wind on the water sings with a face
 of forgotten words

We have to let the softness in. Listen to the wind and let yourself forget the words you were about to say. Enjoy it when you suddenly lose track of yourself. Let the softness of life slip behind those frown lines in your face. As you gaze at your own reflection in the water, let the wind brush it away. Wind, water, leaves, music – these are the agents of the goddess. In Being there is no heightened state of consciousness – nothing to aim for – just a melting and a great huge grin sprawled across creation. Whatever you are doing in your busy ‘becoming’ work I would like to invite you to approach life in an autumnal fashion. Let it make you softer rather than tighter. If you find that you have something to defend, then perhaps you might like to let that become looser. There is such a freedom in dissolution. If you have no agenda but play, then you are as invincible as consciousness itself.

When I look with soft eyes towards the future, I see only the return of the Softness, of the poetic and the harmonic, of the wildness and the wilderness. If you look ahead with only your mind, you cannot see this. The logic of the pattern we are currently caught up in seems only to lead to more and more complexity, danger and chaos. It is likely that we will one day arrive at an impasse, an Apocalypse. This is logically inevitable. But like those scarlet poppies dancing on the battlefields of the Somme, the nature of Being cannot be extinguished. The apocalypse is a necessary genetic and psychic event in the collective consciousness of humanity. As the old collapses, the new will be reborn. In a time of increasing global worry and fear about the future, we must follow our dreams and help however and wherever we can. But beneath it all, let us not forget the most important thing – that we are not doing any of this. If you look with your mind, you will only engender worry. If you look through your heart, if you view life as the poet views life, then you will always, always feel at ease.