spleen

Most of us are here trying to get the universe to notice us, and we don't even know it. We gather up riches or give them away, we commit amazing or terrible acts, we seek out comfort or seek to escape the comfort we have, we build dams against suffering, we try to make the world a better place than it was when we found it … and there is still this emptiness, this hole in us in the shape of something we can't quite identify. You do all of this, you carve out your own improbable epic, and in the end it seems to matter so little.

So you go to Amma, because maybe she will understand this gaping loneliness and help to ease it just a little. You go and find all these wonderful and sometimes flakey people, and you're particularly amazed because of the diversity – the rich and the poor, the black and white, the sick and the perfectly well. And you lie in her arms. No matter who you are, you lie in her arms and believe that the universe is listening to you.

Which, of course, it is. Don't you feel like an idiot not knowing that? It's what Rilke meant when he wrote:

Yes — the springtimes needed you. Often a star was waiting for you to notice it.

A wave rolled toward you out of the distant past,

or as you walked under an open window, a violin yielded itself to your hearing.

And now you know, being what you are, in your comfortable smallness, you know the universe is listening. It demands nothing of you, which is maddening. It knows no fear and no revenge, which is equally maddening. It asks you to be here for as long as you can, and then it asks you to go on. What matters more than to be witness to this, to the divine in the real, wings that beat the dull pedestrian air?

When you are alone, when you are lost, remember what the universe said to you, what it whispered in your ear as it held you close: My darling. My darling. My darling. My darling. My darling. My darling. My darling. My darling.

When I was alone, poetry comforted me. When I was utterly doomed, poetry saved me. When I was lost, poetry led me home. What more could I possibly ask of art?

κάλλιστον μὲν ἐγὼ λείπω φάος ἠελίοιο,
δεύτερον ἄστρα φαεινὰ σεληναίης τε πρόσωπον
ἠδὲ καὶ ὡραίους σικύους καὶ μῆλα καὶ ὄγχνας·

Loveliest of what I leave behind is sunlight,
Then the constellations and the moon's brilliant face,
But also apples, and pears, and cucumbers that are ripe.

– Praxilla of Sicyon (poorly translated by me)

Whenever I'm sad or lonely or feel particularly bad about myself, I think of an ant I met once when I stepped out of my body to visit a garden far away. One wall of this garden was very green, somehow simultaneously covered in moss and ivy, and I was so small that I could sit on one of those ivy leaves in the deep green shade. That's where I met the ant.

I said, "How did you get all the way up here, in the ivy leaves?"

The ant replied, "How did you get all the way down here, in the ivy leaves?"

I said, "You're very strange ant."

To which the ant replied, "I am the ant upon which the universe relies. I'm the one who keeps the universe turning. The dust on my feet are stars, and my antennae reach into all possible worlds."

I looked into the ant's eye, and saw more than the ant. The ant is in more than the ant, and more than the ant is in the ant.

"Where is this place?" I asked.

"This place is all," the ant said.

"I don't understand," I said.

The ant looked at me, unblinking. "Then you'll have trouble with this," it said. "This place is all, and nothing is all. There is no garden. There is no universe, and there is no ant. There is only the turning."

When you love, you understand by degrees that this reality is not centered upon you. Maybe this is the essence of love – that the real beauty of the world has nothing to do with you, and yet, miraculously, you're part of it.

I don't think you can really enter this reality until you have entered into love. Love is the gateway to the real.

Other things that decenter you and bring you into reality: art, spiritual practice, teaching and being taught. But love first, simple love. Your mother's smell, a cat at your hand, someone you kissed or should have kissed. However you enter the world, the world will enter you.