East-West

No! I refuse.

You want to think of East or West, what is open or closed, but here, here at the still point of my heart there are no such distinctions.

No. I do not think of the future and your return, nor shall I live in the present. This life is but the moment when the past became the past. Here, in dark passageways, I shall live alone with the Alone.

No, do not hold on to my image, do not remember my stone face. We must forget everything. Let the black fire consume me. I want to live, I want to die.

The swami said, 'you know, there was a time when people would hardly ever leave the place where they were born. My mother only rarely left home'.

As we walked our separate ways, one to the east, one to the west, I looked back over my shoulder and saw the saddest thing imaginable: the back of a loved as she moved towards another life...and the gaping silence between us grow, an abyss where words not spoken fall and the moments not shared rest, like a dead body in a stream or a receding image in the dark glass.

(I am told of a wonderful Jewish tradtion where on one particular day the doors are kept open so that the spirit may return)