Know

The primary world
Narrow and compressed
Occupies the soul
Makes it forget
The depths it knows

Things seem ever lasting here
And all can be explained
Movement in straight lines
Does freedom dissuade
The primary world; a charade

The other world
Knows not constriction
The closer you look
The more a thing expands

Things move slower here
On a grander scale
And all that you bring with you
Shrivels up and fades

Creatures of different sorts
Remind you of the plot
Things go the same way every time
No matter what

Trees grow skywards
And when they drop their seeds
Squirrels to the bases come
To mop them up with greed

Born into a paradigm
Where our kind dominates
Dazzled by so many stories
All around us, all the time
Even the stars would be too much
If they filled up the entire sky

We are marred by delusion
Thinking our world is all
Forgetting everything
That happens beyond

Neglecting the truth of death
And the truth of One
Creating false normality
Succumbing to humdrum

The other world can be accessed
When we rip ourselves away
To any outer margin
Untrodden unpaved

We call such places ‘Nature’
Conceited that we are
To have a word that means
Not us, not ours

As if I say a woman is Hannah
And all women not I, are called ‘not-Hannah’
Such is the foppery we enjoy
When this ridiculous word ‘Nature’, we employ

When you get out of human-dominated habitation
Listen with deliberation
Cast your eyes to really see
In stillness wait patiently
As down tunes the din of the chattering mind

Witness as everything around you
Welcomes you home
It’s all alive…
And wants to eat you!
Especially that brown mucky substance
Under your feet
To him, you are meat
And when you die
You’ll make the greatest feast!

But for now you’re alive and conversing
With long lost friends
The leaves beckon you in
The bark brings you along
The cobweb climbing down the branch
The blue-tit singing a song
The meditating cranefly
The spangled bird’s nest
The twiggy bush quavering
The spiky heads of moss

You almost forget
All that pains and troubles you
In the primary world
It all seems silly now
How serious we take it
Sweating over judgements and deadlines
False and fleeting things
That expand to enormous size
And overcrowd our mind
Making us forget
That we too will die

In among the grass
The trees already know you
They don’t care about your name
So what need to try and explain?
They see through

Do away with language for a while
That obstacle creator
Causing confusion
Between the description and
A thing’s true nature

But these are words
Are they not?
So it pains me to confess
My goal will never be met

I can never make you see what I see
Nor feel what I feel
I can never get my point across
Only way-markers I can toss

We must experience the truth
By going astray
Where people are sparse
Our minds fall away

Avoiding courses or programs
That claim to get you there
The voice inside
Will surely guide

Blanket of comfort
Peeled back to remind
You are alive
Whimsical wonder
Is this life

Though perhaps you may feel sadness
Settle like ashes upon your heart
When you remember
How the world’s beauty is being stripped back
As papery birch-bark

How ever more people are barricaded
Into the confined dark cave
Lives of misery
Cause us
To awful atrocities make

Helpless migrants regarded not
Children scavenge in parking lots
Animals in a factory line
Such are the perversions of the penile mind

May I attest
That these nauseating acts
Are not committed out of evil tact
Instead out of severe lack

Of beauty, truth, peace
Things found between branches of trees
Banished when
Living too neat

Disconnection from the source of life
And the source of self
Can lead one to put upon others
Torture, captivity, death

If one has never been acquainted
With places that shrink the traces
Of human-world-anxiety
The mind will likely breed
Tragic insensitivity

One may live
Killing blindly
Not even hearing
The agonised crying

Saving the world
Is plain absurd
If you’ve not heard
The sound of birds
And thought you were in heaven

How can you behold
A quest so immense
Without love to inform
Your new coat of arms

The only hope
Is that you and I
As many as possible
Stay truly alive

That as many as possible
Come to know
Beyond-the-human
The great show

Know.