Summer Spirits

A drop of water on a leaf in the moonlight
Is dancing naked in the night like an insight
Wet air after raining all day
Summer spirits are high

Silence chimes out signifying midnight
Soft sheets and some writing by lamplight
Joy hovers like a moment at play
Summer spirits' lullaby

A hot breeze fans the flaming sunlight
Blows shade, spellbound by the Fahrenheit
Roses reach, giving scent away
Summer spirits are why

Ready

Are you ready for personal growth? That's the only real question to ask.

You need to be standing steadily on the precipice of profundity, ready to surrender all to the ultimate, which keeps on unfolding and revealing mystery after mystery.

The revelation is in the surrender of the self. This is personal growth: disappearance.

You need to be ready for nothing else. All else is a phantom. Caving inwards, crumbling away, is closer to home, where the real happens. Out there is illusion, in here is real.

The work is in here. The work is finding the form, the solid, the shape, and letting it go. Whatever has structure within, is being reflected without. Work within, observe and release it, and you transform within and without.

Within is closer to home than what's out there, but it is still not home. Beyond the walls of inner structure and obstruction, beyond the real, is the truth.

Here, there is nothing. No self, no structure, only space. No sound or voice, only silence. No movement, stillness.

Still, silent space hums with eternal sound, vibrates with infinite energy, and brims with fullness. It is home.

Be ready every moment to see and surrender what keeps you from yourself.

Be ready for the discovery of who you are.

Bread

We were walking back to the hotel this evening in downtown Tehran, after viewing it from the snow down the sides of the mountain. The city was swarming, an avalanche of lights.

I stopped to look into a little window - a hole in the wall, really - about four foot square, to see that it opened into a bakery. Inside there was a tray of balls of unbaked bread being rolled by a man in flour-coloured clothes. Out of the window, another baker was leaning and calling to us.

Our host approached him and bought an oval loaf of flat bread, still warm from the oven. She passed it to each of us to tear off a strip. It was crispy and slightly salty, with a sprinkling of sesame seeds. Plain and perfect. I tore off a second strip as we strode through the sights and streets.

The bread and the moment were everything. To call them the simple things in life would be an understatement, as it would be to call me wealthy in my experience of them.

We can live by the moment alone.