Sadhu
by Jay RamsayOriginal Language English
sat chit ananda=being, consciousness, bliss
The way you explain it is this
If I am not my name, who am I ?
If I am not my country either...
my religion... or even my gender, who am I ?
Sat chit ananda: being consciousness,
I can only be what is real, being
beyond time
realer than everything
that is only relatively real
(maya, as you explain it
solid as it can seem... like this table...)
realer than everything that is born, and dies.
So you had to leave your life behind
to be this real one you are within.
You had to completely disidentify.
And the moment you did, peace.
Slipping out into the night.
Leaving your mother, the hardest thing, behind.
Out there in the world your only rule
only begging five times a day
prostrating your noble ego--
Food by grace.
Sleeping only three nights in one place.
And learning like a Taoist to be
indifferent to praise and blame
treated like royalty, and dirt.
As grounded as it gets.
Heaven, earth.
Poet of the living breath
you are teaching us to breathe again,
one nostril at a time.
And when thoughts come
not judging them, any of them
seeing how they can lose their power
suddenly hundreds of feet away.
Leaving the morning, always
the freshness of this morning
in any moment when we are free.
Sat chit ananda: blissful as we were made to be.
All you have, this shining white dhoti
and a smile as broad as the curve of the planet,
with the suffering of India in your heart.
Sadhu Nobody--no body !--you laugh.
And you're here to teach all you know
to those who can't leave their story behind
who can't leave their tribal divisiveness behind.
Religion of breath and life
of the Mysterious Transglobal Divine.
The way I explain it is this:
if I can leave my story aside
all my many stories in time
then and only then can I be free
for the world's freedom, for all we can be.
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