English version by Tony Stewart and Chase Twitchell

Listen, can you hear it?
His bamboo flute speaks
the pure language of love.
The moon enlightens the trees,
the path, the sinuous Yamuna.
Oblivious of the jasmine’s scent
I stagger around,
disheveled heart bereft of modesty,
eyes wet with nerves and delight.
Tell me, dear friend, say it aloud:
is he not my own Dark Lord Syama?
Is it not my name his flute pours
into the empty evening?

Go to her, Lord, go now.
What’s stopping you?
The earth drowns in sleep.
Let’s go. I’ll walk with you.

— from The Lover of God, by Rabindranath Tagore / Translated by Tony Stewart

/ Image by Rajesh Nagulakond /

There is a fascinating story behind this poem and the other poems of Tagore’s The Lover of God… In the late 19th century, a respected Bengali journal published a newly discovered collection poems by a previously unknown 17th century poet, Bhanusimha, or Sun Lion. The critics celebrated these newly unearthed bhakti masterpieces.

The problem was that Bhanusimha never actually existed. Bhanisimha was the pseudonym used by a brilliant 14-year-old boy — the young Rabindranath Tagore.

He of course matured into one of the greatest poets of modern India.

Tagore continued to edit and refine these poems over his lifetime, leaving us with a collection of modern bhakti masterpieces.

Just a few notes about this selection:

As with many bhakti poems, this is, on the surface, a poem of love and longing. Radha pines for her beloved, Krishna. But these are usually understood to reflect deeper truths. It’s always fascinating the response I notice when I recite a bhakti poem aloud — with emotion, with passion, but also with a sense of the deep spiritual longing that imbues the phrases. It evokes a direct, intimate form of worship and connection to the Divine.

Radha (the poem’s speaker) is the soul, the lover of God, the spiritual seeker. Krishna (Syama) is God, the Beloved.

Krishna plays a flute, an enchanting melody that calls all souls to himself. The sound of his flute is the hum that underlies all creation, the soft sound heard in the silence of meditation.

His beauty is often compared with the moon. This moon is also the luminescence of enlightenment.

The Yamuna is one of the great rivers of India, feeding into the mighty Ganges, but she is also a goddess who fell in love with Krishna. So the reference to the sinuous Yamuna is meant to evoke both an erotic femininity and also emphasize that love for Krishna. To dissolve in the Yamuna is to disappear into eternal love for God/Krishna.

The final verse switches from Radha’s voice to the poet’s, encouraging Krishna to respond to the longing of the soul. Something quite playful in that…

Go to her, Lord, go now.
What’s stopping you?
The earth drowns in sleep.
Let’s go. I’ll walk with you.

Recommended Books: Rabindranath Tagore

The Longing in Between: Sacred Poetry from Around the World (A Poetry Chaikhana Anthology)	Gitanjali	The Lover of God	The Fugitive	Lover’s Gift and Crossing
More Books >>

Rabindranath Tagore India (1861 – 1941) Timeline Yoga / Hindu

Rabindranath Tagore wrote the national anthems of two countries, founded a university, and in 1913 became the first non-European to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. It is easy to let all of that stand in front of the poems. But the work readers actually love him for — the Gitanjali songs above all — came out of something much quieter: a dawn on a Calcutta veranda when he was twenty-one, when the world briefly came unveiled, and then a lifetime of learning how to live in the light of what he had seen. He spent that life refusing to keep God in a temple. He looked instead in the river, in the human face, in the man breaking stones by the roadside.

—

Life

He was born on May 7, 1861, in the Jorasanko mansion in Calcutta, the youngest of thirteen surviving children in one of the most remarkable families in Bengal. His grandfather Dwarkanath had been a merchant prince; his father, Debendranath, was known as the Maharshi, the great sage, and led the Brahmo Samaj — the reform movement that had turned back to the Upanishads for a formless, imageless God and set aside caste ritual and idol worship. The house was full of musicians, playwrights, philosophers and magazines. Rabindranath grew up inside a living argument about what religion was for.

It was also a lonely childhood. He was raised largely by servants — he later called it, wryly, a kind of servocracy — with his father away for long stretches and his mother, Sarada Devi, absorbed in an enormous household. She died in March 1875, when he was thirteen. In *My Reminiscences* he admits that the grief did not arrive at once; it came later, at the thought that she would never again come through that particular door.

Two years before that, at eleven, he had been taken away by his father for four months — to Santiniketan, to Amritsar, and finally up to Dalhousie in the Himalayas. At the Golden Temple he heard the Sikhs singing and never forgot it. In the mountains he rose before light to learn Sanskrit verses from the Upanishads at his father’s side. It was the first time the family religion stopped being furniture and became something he was actually doing.

At sixteen he pulled off a small literary fraud. He produced a sheaf of devotional poems in archaic Bengali, attributed them to Bhanusimha, a seventeenth-century Vaishnava poet whose manuscripts had supposedly just come to light, and watched the scholars accept them. It is worth noticing what that means: his first religious poems were written in costume, in someone else’s voice, because the longing in them was not yet his to claim. Sent to England in 1878 to become a barrister, he studied nothing in particular, read Shakespeare and Sir Thomas Browne, and came home after less than two years without a degree and without apology.

Then, in 1882, came the morning that changed everything — a sunrise seen from a veranda on Sudder Street that split his life into before and after.

In December 1883 he married Mrinalini Devi. Four months later, in April 1884, Kadambari Devi — his brother Jyotirindranath’s wife, and the companion of his youth, his first reader and sharpest critic — took her own life at twenty-four. He was writing toward her, in one way or another, for the rest of his life.

In 1890 his father sent him out to manage the family estates at Shilaidaha, on the Padma river in what is now Bangladesh. He stayed, on and off, for a decade — much of it on a houseboat, drifting, watching the water and the villages. He collected token rents, sat with farmers, and listened to the wandering Baul singers of the district. Those years made him. Then, in 1901, he founded a school at Santiniketan: classes held outdoors under the trees, a marble prayer hall, a library, a garden.

What followed was a run of loss that would have broken most people. His wife Mrinalini died in 1902; his daughter Renuka in 1903; his father in 1905; his youngest son, Samindranath, of cholera in 1907. His daughter Bela died in 1918. The Bengali Gitanjali (1910) rose directly out of that ground.

In 1912, sailing to England and unwell, he began putting the songs into English prose to occupy himself — nothing more ambitious than that. W. B. Yeats read the pages and was undone by them. The India Society published the little book in November 1912; the Nobel Prize came a year later, in November 1913.

Knighted in 1915, he gave the honor back after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of April 1919, writing to the Viceroy that “badges of honour make our shame glaring in their incongruous context of humiliation, and I for my part wish to stand, shorn of all special distinctions, by the side of my countrymen.”

The last decades were restless and enormous. He built Visva-Bharati into a university in 1921 and added a rural reconstruction institute at Sriniketan the following year. He traveled to more than thirty countries, delivered the Hibbert Lectures at Oxford in 1930, argued with Einstein about the nature of reality, denounced Mussolini in print after meeting him, and publicly rebuked Gandhi in 1934 for calling the Bihar earthquake divine punishment. In his late sixties he took up painting and produced thousands of images. He died on August 7, 1941, at eighty, in an upstairs room of the Jorasanko house where he had been born.

—

Spiritual Context

Tagore inherited a religion and then had to find out whether it was true.

What he inherited was unusually good raw material: the Brahmo Samaj’s austere monotheism, drawn straight from the Upanishads — one reality, without form, present everywhere, not to be housed in an image. But it was his father’s, and for years it stayed his father’s.

The morning that made it his own came in 1882, at 10 Sudder Street in Calcutta, where he was living with his brother and Kadambari. He was standing on the veranda at sunrise, looking at the tops of the trees, when — as he later put it in My Reminiscences — “a covering seemed to fall away from my eyes, and I found the world bathed in a wonderful radiance, with waves of beauty and joy swelling on every side.” Nothing was trivial after that; nothing was ugly. The same day he wrote Nirjharer Swapnabhanga — “The Awakening of the Waterfall” — a poem that comes down the page like water breaking out of ice. It fed the whole of Prabhat Sangit (Morning Songs) in 1883.

And then it faded. The radiance stayed with him for some days, dimmed, and was gone by the time he reached Darjeeling. Everything afterward is the work of a man who has seen something once and refuses either to forget it or to pretend he still has it.

The Padma years gave that vision a human face. Drifting on the river in the 1890s, Tagore came to know the songs of the Bauls — the wandering, half-mad, deliberately casteless minstrels of Bengal who belong to no religion and borrow from all of them. Through a village postmaster named Gagan Harkara he encountered the songs of the great Baul, Lalon. What the Bauls sing about is the moner manush, the man of the heart: God not above the world but hidden inside the human being, to be found nowhere else and by no shortcut. That idea went straight into the marrow of Tagore’s work, and he never disguised the debt. When he stood up at Oxford in 1930 to deliver the Hibbert Lectures — the height of his fame, the most establishment platform imaginable — he built his argument toward the divinity of man and the humanity of God, and then appended to the published book a section on the Baul singers of Bengal. He gave the last word to illiterate villagers.

The God of his poems has a name he coined himself: Jivan Devata, the Lord of his life. Not a monarch and not an abstraction — a presence that is lover, friend, guest, master and stranger by turns, who lives his life through him and who is sometimes maddeningly late in arriving. This is why Gitanjali reads as both prayer and love poetry, and why it never resolves into doctrine.

He had no patience for renunciation as a spiritual career, and none at all for piety that turns its back on the world. Gitanjali 11 is as close to a manifesto as he wrote:

Leave this chanting and singing and telling of beads! Whom dost thou worship in this lonely dark corner of a temple with doors all shut? Open thine eyes and see thy God is not before thee!

He is there where the tiller is tilling the hard ground and where the path-maker is breaking stones. He is with them in sun and in shower, and his garment is covered with dust. Put off thy holy mantle and even like him come down on the dusty soil!

That is the whole of his religion in four sentences — and it is also why his politics and his mysticism were never separable. The man who wrote that was the same man who handed back a knighthood.

—

The Poetry

Most of his poetry is song. Tagore wrote well over two thousand of them, words and music together, and in Bengal they are not literature but common property — sung at weddings and funerals, on the radio, by people who could not name the collection they come from. Reading him only on the page is like reading a hymn book and thinking you have heard the singing.

What you notice first in the poems is how close he stands to the one he is addressing. There is almost no distance in them, and almost no formality. The beloved is expected — a lamp is lit, a room is swept, and then there is waiting, and the waiting itself becomes the poem. He is unembarrassed by longing, unembarrassed by joy, and entirely willing to sound small: “Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure. This frail vessel thou emptiest again and again, and fillest it ever with fresh life.”

Then there is the weather. Very little of his work happens indoors. Rain, rivers, boats, the first storm of the monsoon, a road going somewhere, a flute heard from across a field — these are not decoration but the actual furniture of his spiritual life, and they come from the decade on the Padma.

And there is his refusal to make death an enemy. Having buried a wife, a father and three children, he wrote some of the most untroubled poems about dying in any language — not consolation exactly, more a kind of courtesy extended to the last guest.

What a reader should listen for is the intimacy. He is not describing God. He is talking to someone.

—

Translations

Tagore’s own English versions — Gitanjali: Song Offerings (1912), and the volumes that followed — are the ones the world fell in love with, but they are transcreations, not translations. He turned tightly rhymed and metered Bengali lyrics into unrhymed English prose, cut and recombined freely, and drew the 103 pieces of Song Offerings not only from the Bengali Gitanjali but from half a dozen other books. He also reached for a King James solemnity — thee, thou, hath — that the Bengali does not have. The result is beautiful and it is genuinely his, but it is a softer, more churchly, more archaic poet than the one Bengali readers know, and it is the main reason his Western reputation cooled for decades after the Nobel.

For readers who want to hear the other Tagore:

– William Radice, Selected Poems (Penguin, 1985) — the translation that reopened Tagore in English; keeps the muscle and the form.
– Ketaki Kushari Dyson, I Won’t Let You Go (Bloodaxe) — widely regarded as the closest anyone has come to the musicality and the sensuous Bengali-ness of the originals.
– Tony K. Stewart and Chase Twichell, The Lover of God (Copper Canyon, 2003) — the Bhanusimha poems, the teenage forgery, rendered as the passionate Vaishnava love poetry it always was.
– Joe Winter, Song Offerings — a verse translation of the Bengali *Gitanjali* that restores the rhyme and meter Tagore himself abandoned in English.
– Wendy Barker and Saranindranath Tagore, Rabindranath Tagore: Final Poems — the last work, written as he was dying.

More poetry by Rabindranath Tagore

And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles,
no matter how long,
but only by a spiritual journey,
a journey of one inch,
very arduous and humbling and joyful,
by which we arrive at the ground at our feet,
and learn to be at home.

— from The Collected Poems of Wendell Berry, 1957-1982, by Wendell Berry

/ Image by LittleLottexo /

The poet Wendell Berry passed away earlier this week, and I’ve been returning to his poems all week, his quiet voice speaking to me as I go about my work day and find silent moments amidst my activity.

Several of his poems have become part of my interior space. The Peace of Wild Things, The Real Work, How to Be a Poet, The Wild Geese, his Sabbath poems. But I chose to feature this one today. It’s short. It feels almost like a Zen koan. Yet it is speaking to me. I hope it says something to you too.

—

Few writers these days are truly willing to be still and to befriend the world of growing things outside the city limits. In the modern world, that’s practically blasphemy. Writers like that get labeled “poet” and “crank” so they can be safely ignored — unless their writing is unavoidably good. Unfortunately for the hyperactive world, Wendell Berry’s poetry is filled with the presence and heart secretly craved by us all, making his words difficult to ignore.

And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles,
no matter how long…

Recommended Books: Wendell Berry

The Collected Poems of Wendell Berry, 1957-1982	Given: Poems	Selected Poems of Wendell Berry	A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997	The Mad Farmer Poems
More Books >>

Wendell Berry US (1934 – 2026) Timeline Secular or Eclectic

Wendell Berry spent nearly sixty years on a hillside farm above the Kentucky River, writing poems, novels, and essays that circled back again and again to a single conviction: the world is holy, it has been given to us rather than owned by us, and how we treat a field, a creek, or a neighbor is a spiritual act. He became one of America’s great dissenting voices — a patient, unyielding critic of industrial agriculture and extraction. But beneath the argument was something quieter: a lifelong practice of attention and reverence, carried out mostly on foot, in the woods, on Sunday mornings. He died at home in Port Royal, Kentucky, on August 31, 2026.

—

Life

He was born in Louisville on August 5, 1934, and raised in Henry County, Kentucky, on land his family had farmed for generations on both sides. That inheritance became the whole subject of his life’s work.

He was a gifted young writer. He took degrees at the University of Kentucky, went to Stanford on a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in 1958 (Ken Kesey, Larry McMurtry, and Ernest Gaines were among his classmates), traveled to Italy and France on a Guggenheim, and taught at New York University in the early sixties. He was on the path a promising American writer was supposed to take.

Then, on the Fourth of July in 1965, he moved his wife Tanya and their two children back to Henry County — to a twelve-acre place called Lane’s Landing, on the western bank of the Kentucky River near Port Royal. Everyone told him it was a mistake; a writer went to New York, not away from it. In “A Native Hill” he explained his reasoning: he had found the place he was answerable to.

He stayed for sixty-one years. He farmed the hillside with draft horses when tractors would have been easier, kept sheep, wrote in a cabin he had rebuilt himself, and never in his life owned a computer — he wrote by hand and typed the pages on a machine he bought new in 1956, with Tanya as his first reader and editor. This was not nostalgia. It was an argument made with his own body: that scale, limit, and the willingness to do work slowly are not obstacles to a good life but its conditions.

From that fixed point he became a formidable public conscience. He spoke against the Vietnam War in 1968, was arrested at a nuclear plant protest in 1979, debated the Secretary of Agriculture on the ruin of small farms, withdrew his own papers from the University of Kentucky in 2009 over its coziness with the coal industry, and at seventy-six joined a weekend sit-in at the Kentucky governor’s office to protest mountaintop removal mining. He accepted honors — including the National Humanities Medal — without ever seeming to need them, and went home afterward to the same chores.

—

Spiritual Context

Berry was raised Baptist, baptized at New Castle and belonging, loosely and lifelong, to the small Baptist church at Port Royal. But he was honest about the looseness. He called himself a “marginal” Christian, or better, a “forest” Christian: in good weather he was more likely to be walking his ridges than sitting in a pew. He said plainly that he took the Gospels very seriously — more seriously, he suspected, than much of the church did — and his 1993 essay “Christianity and the Survival of Creation” is one of the most searching indictments a believer has written of his own tradition. If Christians read their own scriptures closely, he argued, they would find themselves called to steward the world rather than strip it.

Out of that came the sentence that may be his most quietly radical: “There are no sacred and unsacred places; there are only sacred and desecrated places.” It refuses the whole architecture of separation — sanctuary from field, spirit from dirt, worship from work.

His actual devotional practice was walking. Beginning in 1979 he spent Sunday mornings outdoors on his own land, and wrote what came — poems he called the Sabbath poems, an unbroken practice of nearly fifty years. They are the closest thing we have to a record of his inner life: unhurried, attentive, written in the presence of trees rather than about them.

He was a friend, briefly, of Thomas Merton, eighty miles south at Gethsemani; they exchanged letters and shared a lunch in December 1967, a year before Merton’s death. The two men were working the same seam from different sides of the cloister wall — silence, place, refusal of the age’s momentum.

—

The Poetry

Berry’s poems are plainspoken to the point of transparency. There is no glitter in them, no straining for the striking image. They read like someone speaking carefully to you across a table, and their power sneaks up: you finish one and find it has quietly taken something off your chest.

The great subject is presence — the ordinary world attended to until it opens. “The Peace of Wild Things” begins in fear, in the middle of the night, and ends in the presence of still water and “the day-blind stars”; it has become, for many readers, something closer to a prayer than a poem. The Sabbath poems have the cadence of the Psalms without their formality. And when he was in the mood to be dangerous he wrote “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” a poem that instructs the reader in cheerful sabotage of the profit motive and ends with two words that are as good a summary of his theology as anything he wrote: “Practice resurrection.”

He knew exactly what silence was worth, and where poems come from. “Accept what comes from silence,” he wrote. “Make the best you can of it.” And then, with a candor rare in a poet: “To be quiet, even wordless, in a good place is a better gift than poetry.”

More poetry by Wendell Berry

Says Farid,
Why do you roam the jungles with thorns pricking your feet?
Your Lord dwells in your heart.
And you wander about in search of Him.

/ Image by That Guy Who’s Going Places /

The poem today is a short one. Simple. We might almost be tempted to rush past it because it seems too simple and rather obvious. But I would encourage all of us, myself included, to pause for an extra moment and just contemplate these few lines.

That closing couplet where he declares that the Lord dwells in the heart and yet we wonder about in search of God. I certainly was caught by that pattern myself in my early searching. I intensely, even desperately wanted a direct experience of God — the Divine, the Eternal, however we want to name that transcendent reality. Yet I was hampered by the same sort of romantic exoticism that we often suffer from, particularly in the West — this idea that mystical insight and truth can only come from an exotic culture. I couldn’t imagine deep insight coming from a person who looks like me or a culture I recognized. I hungrily read about spirituality of India and China and Native Americans. In my attempt to pare my life down to get to that essential truth, I was often cutting away connections to the culture in which I was raised. I was alienating myself intentionally from what I knew because it felt so unbearably mundane.

And frankly that path works really well up to a limited point. It frees us from the prejudices and cultural assumptions that we are all raised in. It brings about important internal confrontations, forcing us to re-assess who we are and the world around us. It also creates a profound problem for spiritual progress beyond that point: the more we define the Divine as somehow outside, outside our world, and most importantly outside our own selves, the more we create an internal gulf that can never be bridged when ultimately that true, essential spark is not somewhere “out there.” It is never found outside ourselves or outside our world. It’s always, always found within at the truest point within ourselves. This is why many traditions refer to the Divine as the Self. It is the Self of our selves, it is the self of all of us. It is the Heart, the center of our being. A certain amount of external seeking and wandering can help galvanize our energies and free us from limiting assumptions and patterns. But we must always, always return to the Self of selves, to the Heart.

We may call what we seek “Lord,” “Him” (or “Mother” or “Beloved”), but even those words become a trap. They are other. It’s useful to externalize the Divine in order to create focus, a goal, have an object of devotion. But when we’re really, truly ready to melt, it can only ever be recognized as the true self that we already are and not other than what we are.

I had a whole other commentary planned this morning, but I saw this poem and went off in a new direction. So much for plans!

Recommended Books: Baba Sheikh Farid

Songs of the Saints from the Adi Granth	Anthology of Great Sufi & Mystical Poets of Pakistan	Sri Guru Granth Sahib	Sri Guru Granth Sahib

Baba Sheikh Farid Pakistan (1173 – 1266) Timeline Muslim / Sufi Sikh

Baba Farid is remembered as the first great poet of the Punjabi language — and, just as importantly, as one of those rare figures whose voice crossed every line that was supposed to contain it.

He was born Fariduddin Masud, near Multan, into a family with some learning and some means. As a young man he traveled to Delhi and became a disciple of the Sufi master Qutbuddin Bakhtiar Kaki, entering the Chishti order — the Sufi lineage that, more than any other, took root in India and shaped its spiritual imagination. The Chishtis were known for poverty, for music and poetry as paths to God, and for opening their doors to everyone regardless of caste or creed. Farid took all of that to heart.

He is often called Ganj-i-Shakar — “Treasure of Sugar.” The stories told about how he earned that name vary, and they have the flavor of legend rather than record, but they circle the same idea: sweetness that came from somewhere other than the world.

What is clear is that he chose obscurity. Rather than remain in Delhi near the court and its patronage, Farid settled in the small town of Ajodhan — today Pakpattan — and lived there in deliberate poverty, teaching, praying, and turning away the gifts that powerful men kept offering him. People came anyway. Among those who found him was the young Nizamuddin Auliya, who would become on of the most beloved Sufi saints in the subcontinent.

Farid wrote in Punjabi, the language people actually spoke, rather than the Persian of the educated and the courtly. That choice mattered. It meant his verses could travel by memory, in the mouths of farmers and weavers, and they did — so widely that when the Sikh Gurus gathered their scripture generations later, more than a hundred of Farid’s verses were included in the Guru Granth Sahib, where they remain sacred today. A Muslim Sufi, held in reverence within Sikh scripture, and honored still by Hindus.

His poems are short, plain, and unsparing. They talk about death without flinching, about the body’s frailty, about the foolishness of chasing what cannot last. But the hardness is never cruelty — underneath it runs an ache of longing, and a tenderness toward other people that can stop you in your tracks: *Do not break anyone’s heart, for each heart is a priceless pearl.* He keeps pointing in the same direction, which is inward. *Your Lord dwells in your heart. And you wander about in search of Him.*

His shrine at Pakpattan still draws crowds each year. The city of Faridkot carries his name. Eight centuries on, people are still reciting him.

More poetry by Baba Sheikh Farid

English version by Ivan M. Granger

The fire rises in me,
      and lights up my heart.
Like the sun!
Like the golden disk!
Opening, expanding, radiant —
      Yes!
      — a flame!

urging me
      to summon words
      from my silence.

— from Real Thirst: Poetry of the Spiritual Journey, by Ivan M. Granger

/ Image by Dewang Gupta /

I know it has been far too long since our last poem email.

In recent months I have needed to focus my energies on my work as a database application developer. I was preparing a major presentation on AI, which I delivered at a developer’s conference. The presentation went well, and I am now back and rediscovering my regular rhythms — which should once again include poetry.

In fact, I had a nice moment just yesterday morning. I was sitting at a coffee shop reading The Book of Mystical Chapters, by John Anthony McGucking, a book of contemplative sayings from the early Christian tradition, especially Eastern Orthodox voices. While I was sitting there reading and sipping my matcha latte, a man walked up to me, drawn by the book. He said he knew the book well because he discussed it in a course he taught. It was a sweet moment of talking about early Christianity, poetry, and doorways into deeper exploration of the mystics — and discovery of figures, like Symeon the New Theologian.

=

This is a poem of fire and silence.

Why fire? In ecstasy, there is often a sense of heat — filled with immense love — that permeates the body. This warmth seems to emerge from the seat, flares in the belly, and rises upward, fanning out at the heart.

The fire rises in me,
and lights up my heart.

As this fire moves through the body, it also moves through the awareness, consuming all thoughts (or, more accurately, the tremors from which thoughts emerge).

I say again:
      I don’t know
      what to say!

This fire burns away even the thought of “I” — only the sense of this living flame remains.

it leaves me open mouthed
      like a fool…

But the heart, giddy with the expanding vista of bliss, nonetheless wants to share its joy. Though it has no words left, it still wishes to speak of “this marvel,”

urging me
      to summon words
      from my silence.

Have a day of bliss, fire and silence!

Recommended Books: Symeon the New Theologian

The Longing in Between: Sacred Poetry from Around the World (A Poetry Chaikhana Anthology)	This Dance of Bliss: Ecstatic Poetry from Around the World	Real Thirst: Poetry of the Spiritual Journey	The Enlightened Heart: An Anthology of Sacred Poetry	The Book of Mystical Chapters: Meditations on the Soul’s Ascent from the Desert Fathers and Other Early Christian Contemplatives
More Books >>

Symeon the New Theologian Turkey (949 – 1032) Timeline Christian : Eastern Orthodox

Symeon was born into an aristocratic family in Asia Minor (Turkey) and was given the name George. This was when the region was still part of the Christian Byzantine Empire. From boyhood George was groomed for a life in politics. At age eleven, he was sent to the capital Constantinople (Istanbul) to live with his uncle who guided him in his early education.

When he was 14, George met a monk at the monastery of Studios named Symeon the Pious. George accepted Symeon the Pious as his spiritual director while continuing to prepare for a life in politics.

Somewhere around age 20, George was overcome by an ecstatic state in which he experienced God as a living presence of radiant light.

Despite this radically transformative experience, he spent several more years attempting to fulfill his family’s expectations, eventually becoming an imperial senator. However, his continuing mystical experiences were not compatible with such a public life and, at age 27, he renounced his previous life and became a monk, entering the monastery at Studios to continue under the direct guidance his spiritual director, even taking on the same monastic name — Symeon.

The closeness teacher and disciple shared worried the monastic authorities and the two were separated. The young Symeon was given the choice of remaining at Studios and no longer receiving spiritual guidance from the elder Symeon, or he could go to another monastery and keep his spiritual director.

So as not to lose the guidance of Symeon the Pious, the young Symeon chose to move to the monastery of St. Mamas in Constantinople. There, Symeon was ordained a priest and eventually became the abbot of the monastery, reviving the monastery’s life of prayer and meditation. While abbot of St. Mamas, Symeon wrote extensive treatises (called the Catecheses) as guidelines for the ideal monastic and God-focused life, emphasizing the power of contemplative prayer and meditation.

The mystical spiritual practices that he advocated led to further conflicts with authorities and Symeon was exiled in 1009 to a small hermitage on the far side of the Bosphorus.

Disciples began to gather around Symeon and soon the small hermitage grew into a full monastery. It was there that Symeon wrote his most personal work, Hymns of Divine Love, a collection of poems describing his mystical experiences.

Symeon’s doctrines and poetry emphasize not only the possibility, but the necessity of personally experiencing the Divine. He also stated that one need not be a monk or renunciate, saying that one “who has wife and children, crowds of servants, much property, and a prominent position in the world” can still directly experience communion with the divine.

Giving him the title of “Theologian” does not mean that he was a formal, rationalist Christian philosopher, as we might use the term today, especially in Western Christian and philosophical traditions. Within Orthodox Christian tradition, the epithet of “Theologian” has been only given to a few figures, specifically indicating that this is a figure with direct experience of God. In other words, he is considered to be a mystic of full Realization.

More poetry by Symeon the New Theologian

English version by Ivan M. Granger

Sometimes
      I go about pitying myself.

Yet all the while
      I am carried by winds
      across the sky.

— from This Dance of Bliss: Ecstatic Poetry from Around the World, Edited by Ivan M. Granger

/ Image by ahermin /

Usually, all it takes is a shift in perspective.

We frequently feel hurt or angry or sad or just trapped. The common response, especially in our task-oriented modern era, is to decide what we are going to do about it. We try to take charge. We act, we do, we fix. And, yes, that approach can be useful in many circumstances.

But we need to make sure we don’t ‘do’ as a way to avoid feeling. Frequently we have an impulse toward action because, otherwise, we will have to feel, and what we actually feel may not be pleasant or contained. But if we don’t feel fully, some part of ourselves has been shut down, separated from the whole, and our field of perception has narrowed.

That’s the other reason not to rush to action. ‘Doing’ can become a way to reinforce our limited ideas about reality. Action is like a ritual, it makes everything feel more real, more imprinted in the mind. This can be a good thing or it can be a trap. It depends on whether or not we are seeing clearly.

In any situation, the first thing to do is to not do anything. Instead, we should first allow our perspective to shift. We must see what we see. This is the most potent act possible. Seemingly doing nothing, all of reality changes. The willingness to step aside from our own internal dramas allows us to recognize and utilize the great currents already flowing soundlessly through our lives. Then, in harmony with that underlying momentum, should we choose to act, our actions have a power and purpose, bringing extraordinary results.

We soar, we dance, we are carried by winds across the sky.

Recommended Books: Ojibway (Anonymous)

The Essential Mystics: Selections from the World’s Great Wisdom Traditions	The Path of the Rainbow: An Anthology of Songs and Chants From the Indians of North America

The Ojibway (Chippewa) are one of the most numerous nations of Native Americans. Traditional Ojibway lands are centered in Michigan, Minnesota, Saskatchewan and surrounding regions.

Attributing this to the 19th century is a guess. The source book did not estimate the date of composition.

More poetry by Ojibway (Anonymous)