Boundless

by Colin Oliver


Original Language English

Like the wind searching,
lifting feathers round
the sparrow's neck,
lifting leaves in a wave
across the bean field,
I find no place
where I can say,
here my being ends.

-- from The Longing in Between: Sacred Poetry from Around the World (A Poetry Chaikhana Anthology), Edited by Ivan M. Granger

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Commentary by Ivan M. Granger

I find no place
where I can say,
here my being ends.

I love these lines. These are the fundamental questions we live our lives asking: Who am I? What am I? What is this experience I call myself?

If I want to know what I am, I also find myself asking what I am not. That's when I must go searching for a boundary. Where does self end and not-self begin?

And a very strange thing happens: I can find no clear boundary. Sure, we construct mental maps all the time, proclaiming this is me, and that over there is foreign territory. I must protect this "me" at all costs. But, when we stop staring at that artificial map we've constructed in the mind and actually walk the landscape, we find no fences or lines on the ground. When we choose to see it, the self goes on and on. Each individual is really a magical act of seeing with no fixed eye.

Try to find your boundaries; you will find your are boundless. Imagine the possibilities of being and interrelationship that follow...



Recommended Books: Colin Oliver

The Longing in Between: Sacred Poetry from Around the World (A Poetry Chaikhana Anthology) Stepping Into Brilliant Air Nothing But This Moment



Boundless