Post by MoonyLuna on Jan 19, 2009 12:51:50 GMT -5
do not want the last thing I say to anyone
to be how I feel something has gone cold in me
and I don't love you as much as I used to.
You always want the truth, don't you?
Well that's how it is with me at the moment.
I don't want that to be the last thing someone
like you hears from me, and the way to make
sure that does not happen is to not indulge
any moments of mean, prideful self-critique,
these failures of the heart to keep time in
the dance we are set down in the middle of
every day. Do not say it. Refrain, because
just one small step-minute more and it will not
remain true. It never stays long in that cold place,
the heart, or if it has in your experience, don't dwell
on those examples. My father's last words to me
were Drive carefully. I can't afford to lose
anyone else. Mother had died some weeks earlier.
Born in 1899, he was seventy-one in 1971.
Mother had died on May 5th that year
of lung cancer. He was about to die on July 3rd,
of a massive stroke and heart attack simultaneously,
as he leaned to kiss the ice-water plume
of the lobby water fountain. He was the head
of an old folks home standing talking to the nurse,
dead before he hit the floor, surviving mom by
eight weeks and three days. I am seventy-one now
and living through the May 5th to July 3rd segment,
the time that was such a triumph for my father's
surrendered heart. He would go out and walk
around, finding strangers to talk to. He had
unlimited attention and helpfulness for everyone.
It was beautiful to see that opening in him,
and surely it must have felt beautiful to be it.
I am not my father. In the last two days I have
turned down two invitations to talk to large
internet and magazine audiences. In his last
fifty-nine days my dad would not have declined
anything. He went to church every time it was
open. They always asked him to begin whatever
meeting it was with a prayer. He would just talk
with his eyes closed. Nobody had ever heard
anything quite like how he prayed those last
eight weeks, so hugely grateful he was for
the moments and the people the moments
brought to him. My refusals come because
I don't feel very freshly intelligent about
the subjects of Rumi and Islam and my own
kind of mysticism. I feel talked-out on
these matters, and that I would be repeating
what I have said and written elsewhere.
I don't know that for sure. I might surprise
new memories to come forward. I am lazy
with the talking-chances. In the inbetween
deaths my dad just so obviously trusted
completely that there was enough of whatever
was needed to carry him through whatever
the days made possible, and it happened that
way so magnificently. He might have said it
was the Holy Spirit, but I never heard him say
a thing like that. I guess I must think I am such
a big deal that these chances will come around
in other forms soon enough. They well might
not. My part in the Rumi phenomenon is slowing.
I still love repainting the high desert caravanserai
retreat cells of his poems, though sometimes
I would rather be writing this wandering, which
I claim has its own variety of kindness and
sudden-looking-in. It is a way my dad did not
have much interest in, or talent for. But I do
claim too to be open to listening to other people's
difficulties, dilemmas, delusions, and delights,
though I don't go out hunting them as he did.
I more enjoy scooting about like a zigzag
waterbug above the motionless Chinese goldfish
hung in the living jade of a shadow from where
one of them may, one will, suddenly twitch
and gobble me out of this talking any second.
Copyright
Coleman Barks
to be how I feel something has gone cold in me
and I don't love you as much as I used to.
You always want the truth, don't you?
Well that's how it is with me at the moment.
I don't want that to be the last thing someone
like you hears from me, and the way to make
sure that does not happen is to not indulge
any moments of mean, prideful self-critique,
these failures of the heart to keep time in
the dance we are set down in the middle of
every day. Do not say it. Refrain, because
just one small step-minute more and it will not
remain true. It never stays long in that cold place,
the heart, or if it has in your experience, don't dwell
on those examples. My father's last words to me
were Drive carefully. I can't afford to lose
anyone else. Mother had died some weeks earlier.
Born in 1899, he was seventy-one in 1971.
Mother had died on May 5th that year
of lung cancer. He was about to die on July 3rd,
of a massive stroke and heart attack simultaneously,
as he leaned to kiss the ice-water plume
of the lobby water fountain. He was the head
of an old folks home standing talking to the nurse,
dead before he hit the floor, surviving mom by
eight weeks and three days. I am seventy-one now
and living through the May 5th to July 3rd segment,
the time that was such a triumph for my father's
surrendered heart. He would go out and walk
around, finding strangers to talk to. He had
unlimited attention and helpfulness for everyone.
It was beautiful to see that opening in him,
and surely it must have felt beautiful to be it.
I am not my father. In the last two days I have
turned down two invitations to talk to large
internet and magazine audiences. In his last
fifty-nine days my dad would not have declined
anything. He went to church every time it was
open. They always asked him to begin whatever
meeting it was with a prayer. He would just talk
with his eyes closed. Nobody had ever heard
anything quite like how he prayed those last
eight weeks, so hugely grateful he was for
the moments and the people the moments
brought to him. My refusals come because
I don't feel very freshly intelligent about
the subjects of Rumi and Islam and my own
kind of mysticism. I feel talked-out on
these matters, and that I would be repeating
what I have said and written elsewhere.
I don't know that for sure. I might surprise
new memories to come forward. I am lazy
with the talking-chances. In the inbetween
deaths my dad just so obviously trusted
completely that there was enough of whatever
was needed to carry him through whatever
the days made possible, and it happened that
way so magnificently. He might have said it
was the Holy Spirit, but I never heard him say
a thing like that. I guess I must think I am such
a big deal that these chances will come around
in other forms soon enough. They well might
not. My part in the Rumi phenomenon is slowing.
I still love repainting the high desert caravanserai
retreat cells of his poems, though sometimes
I would rather be writing this wandering, which
I claim has its own variety of kindness and
sudden-looking-in. It is a way my dad did not
have much interest in, or talent for. But I do
claim too to be open to listening to other people's
difficulties, dilemmas, delusions, and delights,
though I don't go out hunting them as he did.
I more enjoy scooting about like a zigzag
waterbug above the motionless Chinese goldfish
hung in the living jade of a shadow from where
one of them may, one will, suddenly twitch
and gobble me out of this talking any second.
Copyright
Coleman Barks