Truth is not to be found outside. No teacher, no scripture can give it to you. It is inside you and if you wish to attain it, seek your own company. Be with yourself. — Osho
Month: March 2009
Anymore Understand
Anymore Understand
Having believed I cannot
Anymore Understand
the great landscape of vines
and twigs which conceal
the great God…and
All His answers.
Plato believed
an ultimate perfected truth
Existed.
Descartes knew
his mind
rolled toiled and turned
in agitated thought
That equaled
Existence.
Alexander fought
to dominate the world
another effort to know
he lived.
I breathe in sanctity
The Word -His Word
All-meaning Word
Which tells me there is truth
Behind the verbiage
The words live a life
Of power and knowing and
There is
Existence.
Traveling Angels
A Story from Ego Dialogues (www.egodialogues.com)
Two Traveling Angels (author unknown)
Two traveling angels stopped to spend the night in the home of a wealthy family. The family was rude and refused to let the angels stay in the mansion’s guest room. Instead the angels were given a space in the cold basement. As they made their bed on the hard floor, the older angel saw a hole on the wall and repaired it. When the younger angel asked why, the older angel replied…”Things aren’t always what they seem”. The next night the pair came to rest at the house of a very poor, but very hospitable farmer and his wife. After sharing what little food they had the couple let the angels sleep in their bed where they could have a good night’s rest.
When the sun came up the next morning the angels found the farmer and his wife in tears. Their only cow, whose milk had been their sole income, lay dead in the field. The younger angel was infuriated and asked the older angel “how could you have let this happen!? The first man had everything, yet you helped him,” she accused. “The second 
family had little but was willing to share everything, and you let their cow die.”
“Things aren’t always what they seem,” the older angel replied. “When we stayed in the basement of the mansion, I noticed there was gold stored in the wall. Since the owner was so obsessed with greed and unwilling to share his good fortune, I sealed the wall so he wouldn’t find it. Then last night as we slept in the farmer’s bed, the angel of death came for his wife. I gave her the cow instead. Things aren’t what they seem.” Sometimes that’s exactly what happens when things don’t turn out the way they should.
Revenge Served Cold
Excerpt from RAIN: A Collection of Short Stories (1999).
The gentle summer rain danced like poetry across the old tin roof of the trailer. Most of her life had been spent in trailers, or “mobile homes.” It was a fact she despised. It seemed like she would never escape the trailer parks that marked a poor person in the south. She always thought there would be a better time, a time when she’d live in a fancy house on a large, open piece of land. That was the dream inside her brain and heart so many years. The dream that pushed her further and deeper into perfectionism and goal-setting. The dream that, when it failed to materialize, pulled her backward into a spiraling depression unlike any other dark thing she’d even known.
She reached those pinnacles of success at different times. Lived in nicer apartments and even a few houses through the years, but it never seemed to last. There was always some disaster, an unexpected health issue or a job loss, which led her back to the less expensive dwellings and lower-middle-class neighborhoods.
The trailer park was its own special phenomenon. It existed under a thousand different names in a thousand different small towns, but Sasha knew the truth, it was the same creature underneath. You could always count on the basics: a drunk living down the road, rebellious teenagers wreaking destruction on nearby mailboxes, a few pedophiles and peeping toms, angry spats between the neighbors that had slept with one another’s mates, and at least a few old people relegated to the mix, usually without any family that visited – unless there was still some money to be had or a car to borrow.
Sasha (more formally, Sashuanna, an Indian name that no one could manage to pronounce correctly) realized she had become the very stereotype she’d always hated. She was now the 50-year-old, standing on the back porch of a trailer, a cigarette held between her long red nails, wondering how the hell she ended up back where she started. Luckily, she knew the bitterness that came to mind in the vision of the stereotype didn’t really belong to her. At least, not yet. She had a plan. Her lips parted in a half-smile as she thought about the future. This would end…in just a few more days, she’d say goodbye to trailer parks forever.
Older Clips
This is a PDF file of some published clips from 04-05. It loads slow, so have patience. Thanks.
In dreams awake
Written December 2008
“Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.” – Thoreau
How you have learned to play me, beautiful one.
It was in the first glimmer of green eyes, brightly-lit and seeking that you captured my attention. Sway, roll, movement like a ship undulating on the tide in harbor – a sweet, delicious turning of the mind in ecstasy as each thought creates – tension, heat, vibration, force, tenderness.
Truth hides in the raw, wet, throbbing stream of the mind…In the depths of gray darkness, where dreams come to life and distant voices scream silent wisdom inside shadowed minds – THERE, I heard your voice. Your voice speaking in its soft, deep timbre of melody and vibration near my face, against the creamy flesh of my breast, beside the slow pulse beating in my throat. I could feel your breath against my face as words came flowing like slow, tender water.
Anchored in my gray-dark sleep, I felt your words move into the depth of my hearing, roll across my skin, felt them tumble across my breasts, slip down across my stomach, to slide within the sacred places, sheathed and protected. You were so close in that moment – the warm, moist tremor of your breath across my skin as tender lips trailed…you moved through me as dew across lilies in the early morning hours. Your voice, dear one, woke me from deepest sleep with clarity.
For R Rilke,
The poet R.M. Rilke has probably had the greatest impact on me of any writer. These poems were written in gratitude to him during 2005. © 2005 under Marissa Mullins.
Like Love
The Great Gift given
was not as simple
as your words.
Rather,
Like Love,
The emotion created by them.
Such simple little things
To grow such beauty
Out of stagnant air –
Fresh breath to a new
Century unlike the one
You came from.
We are Different –
Too busy, too smart, too …
We cannot perceive our own
Needfulness, do not realize
How Badly we need words
Like Yours –
Beauty flowing across
A white page of time.
It was all in the speaking
I look to where you saw —
wonder at the common tune
which seems to play itself
on both our instruments:
music goes on forever in our minds.
I see – here, there
A common chord. Same song
Sung by different voices
Years and times apart.
You are part of my heritage,
German Poet –
Souls and citizenship in common.
I would have liked
To meet you, have come
To know you, believe
We must be friends.
In the Quiet
in the Quiet (2006)
It is not unlike brokenness –
This feeling of having emptied myself
Into you, only
To find that you were already full
Unable to hold more.
I know of mistakes
That they are the “after-things”
The regrets and guilts of the next moments
Seem hidden in the times before.
I should apologize — for
The fact that you asked and received
The truth is it hurts
And that dismal pain reminds me…
I’m still breathing
It will be okay.
The world keeps moving
They keep talking
And I find in the Quiet
Moments of wonder
At the how and why of it.
Time-Lapse II
A few more relationship poems from 2005. ©2005 under Marissa Mullins.
Legacy: Untitled 6
I do not know the Truth you ask for.
It has no movement in me –
no belonging, no place of being.
The rivers of my mind flow
past the rock where you stand.
The stone beneath your feet
feels real to you, each rough-hewn,
jagged edge cutting
into the souls of tender feet.
It is sway and movement only –
To me. A place of displacement
so minor in my essence –
I am river – flowing, churning,
moving forward past the rocks,
moving around, in, across.
My Truth is a place of
moist current, trembling water,
that cannot make itself
a rock, a twig, a pond.
Why do you stand on that
which bruises and cuts you?
Can you not still swim?
Do you now fear the water,
that river which once carried you,
moved you, safely flowed you to
a new destination?
You have left the water,
cling to the jagged rock,
paralyzed and held immobile
by fear. You forget yourself.
The Truth – You are a river too.
You were born of Water.
Untitled 7
The answer that you seek
needs creating. It cannot come
to live in places of light – or
it will be changed, will lose
the darkness that names it.
We are always seeking what is lost.
Truth is that things drift
into invisibility, become
the essence of something else
because our definitions change.
It once meant “this” now “that”
or “the other” –
Truth will not be contained,
molded, shaped, limited
by our definitions.
It has a grander beginning
with the First and Only. Truth
does not betray Him as we do.
Marissa Colleen Mullins 