When the fire in your heart cannot stop, cannot start but to flame all the folly you’ve conjured apart from the glory of peace in its thunderous roar and its pounding of waves on its silent shores

When the shadows you’d painted have cracked to the core all the canvases broken in heaps on the floor and the fire tears through them and rids them of form and the anger you’d felt is released and transformed

And the world that you see is a phoenix, a dawn, that rises from ashes, remoulded, re-born, but by hands that are sacred and know how to heal, by a mind that’s awakened and knows how to feel from the depths of its heart an infinite joy that creates in the wake of the love it employs

When the fire in your heart cannot stop, cannot rise, but to purge all the memories you’d deigned to baptise but will gratefully offer up to take their part as they whisper the seeds of a glorious new start

I found a story in my heart, a story about wanting you;
Bubbling up within and beyond suffering
Circumscribing, beginning to envelop all other stories.

I found it within them, at their deepest core.
I found it in unexpected places – longings, wavering certainties and incoherent tinctures of experience
From whom no clarity had previously been asked or achieved.

I found it there, a deep, desperate heartfelt call
Powerfully giving voice, in no surprise at all at being finally recognised.

And I could tell, despite MY feeling of surprise
That this voice has ALWAYS been calling from deep within all stories
That this story always was being told,
At a softer volume, at a greater depth, but with a stronger force than all the others
And most of all, with a powerful constancy of which I have never believed myself capable.

I am not capable of this:
Of the constancy required to reach Your blessed Mind.
But within me is That Which is, and That Which has never wavered, not for a single instant of time.

Your Son in me my Father, God,
He shouts with perfect constancy from the very centre of my being.
He shouts continually and continuously for his return to You.
His cry is absolute and his faith unwavering,
Unhinging my previous uncertain sense of identity.

Father, your Son in me is certain.
He is persistence, resilience, abiding pure in clarity, He is beyond active determination, He is determined already by Your Thought, before any need for determination arose.

I am capitulation, surrendering to His perfect surety, sincerity and infinite endurance, which silences at once every single doubtful thread of thought which tries in vain to rise.

And He is justice, surging with powerful swell to swallow my pitiful reasoning. And it is incongruous, dismissed, blanched and boned, rendered incapable, blatantly inept, powerless, redundant;
It completely disappears.

And His Truth, the Truth that You have given, to Him, to me, is forcibly presented, undeniable, indubitable, hopelessly, incontestably, happily, blissfully True.

So here is my one, last Story:

I have found within myself the Story within all stories, the Story that leads away from stories forever:

And it is this, only this:

That I want You.

In your deepest self there lies awakening

Growing and evolving all the time

Opening and reassociating

At ever higher levels of the mind

In your deepest heart there is a silence

Beating with a mindful rhythmic grace

Asking you to listen to it’s secrets

Open to receive it’s gentle space

Deep within the soul that you are feeling

In the quiet moments that you give

Lies a nourishment that brings you healing

Welcomed by the mind’s desire to live

Life wells from within and rises gently

Soaking up through spongey open cells

Flooding all the senses, taking over

Rippling past a thousand silent bells

Vibrations of a pure, divine order

Shudder through this extraneous form

Radiance, bequeathed to my acceptance

Comes alive in me – this day, I’m born

Look what happens when I give my life to You!

Little things, things I could not have dreamed of

Alone.

Look what happens when I give my life to You

The void dispersed, the darkness cleared, and You can comfort me,

At last.

Look! Look what happens when I give my life to You!

Your perfect entreaties that I BE that which I AM are FINALLY considered,

Deemed acceptable.. and embraced!

With arms open to the Heart that speaks in bottomless glory to the soul in surrendered joy.

Look! Look what happens when I give my life to You!

All longings dispersed, discarded, rendered redundant, relinquished, released.

All pain and fear of future loss removed and renounced.

I am resigned to the ever present incoming flood of genuine beauty and peace that you Are.

Look! Just look what happens when I give my life to You.

Look what happens when I give my life to You.

Look what happens, here, now, just.. LOOK!!!!

Everyone knows how beautiful you are

Everyone knows the extent to which you give your whole heart to everyone

Everyone knows how extraordinary the light that pours from your purity of soul

Everyone sees it, throughout the universe and further into realms that words do not have presence for

Everyone knows how much you shine

Everyone feels the light that radiates eternally through your expression

Everyone knows the beauty of your sacred smile that blooms and sheds its petals in swathes of gentle colour

Lighting up the pathway for the ones who follow on

Everyone sees the depths you think you go to, to deny the promise that you gave us

Everyone sees, and no-one cares, but you. Everyone just… waits. Waits for you to finally understand

That everyone knows how beautiful you are, how much you give, how much you love for the pure sake of loving

Can you not now give yourself to this.. this that everyone, everyone knows?

The passionate broth within

That bubbles and broils and rises through sin

That steams and boils through the anger, the din

Of a wretched mind choked to the brim with itself

And its pain

Brought to death on its knees through its dishevelled health

All the flesh that is sickened and creeping insanely

Denying its beauty and wealth.

Feeling the rise of dutiful fire

That cannot but burn with the force of desire,

That rages, transforms all its path will bestow

It is raging in me, melts my body like snow.

And the crown it is opening, top of my head

Like a big fluffy hat is expanding through dread

And through anguish and grief and my wild thrashing rain

Till I let it transform to conversion again.

And it lifts me, awareness is taking me Home –

To a beautiful life, unencumbered soul

A dream of awakening, everything changed

Into peace, yes these wild rushing fires are the same.

For the peace of the infinite isn’t your death,

The rest that you crave in this house of the flesh,

The wish that they’d all bloody leave you alone

To be free, that your freedom could lie in these bones.

It’s a lie! All your longing to be here and free

Is your longing for death of the wretched body

But its death will not free you, for you are a mind

And you’ll choose in this moment which truth you would find.

You will find yourself here in this bodily form

Till your mind is transformed into Heaven’s sweet lawns

Till you offer a real alternative to

All the figures you’re dreaming are outside of you.

You cannot be free in a mindless state!

Your awareness reformed is the Mind that creates

In the glorious extension of Love as Itself

The body surrendered is its perfect health.

And its purpose so changed, from believing in pain

The desire to die yet again and again

To a freedom that gives its surrendered and whole

Implacable generous mind to the world.

Communicates wholly its gentle release,

And loves all it sees as its fire is unleashed

From its heart as it gently relaxes and knows

That from this sacred passion its gentleness grows.

Inspired by Sri Chimnoy – from Seventy Seven Thousand Service Trees:

http://www.srichinmoypoetry.com/library/77000-service-trees/

The beauty of self-giving
Eventually grows into
The fragrance of God-becoming.                                                                                                                                                           Sri Chinmoy, part 10, #18

In my loving service to You

Let me be gratified in depths before unknown

Unreached by chimes of playful servitude

Let me experience the need of my soul

To give truly, unexceptionally, perfectly

Without the mask of human intervention.

Let me be released through giving to the joy of Your true gratitude

That welcomes all who come with gentle determination to be truly free.

In my loving service to You

Let me be taken apart and rendered unimaginable without You.

In my loving service to You

Let me at last in sincerity abide

Let me at last to Your wholeness attend

Let me at last bequeath my wanting to Your waiting heart

And commit at last to wanting only You.

Your intrinsic Heaven is Your constant gift to all who seek for meaning in it’s only Home.

Your intrinsic wholeness is the Life that beats it’s constant glorious drum,

Harmonising with Itself, attuning to it’s own accession with everything that it counts in as it’s own.

Allow me to include myself in this heavenly, uniting chorus.

Allow me to experience mySelf as truly part of Your whole, expressive joy.

Help me allow myself release of every boundary I have clung to

As I learn to give myself, through my loving service,

To the guiltless ardour of Your eternally encompassing arms.

Heaven is the decision I must make.

I make it now and will not change my mind, because it is the only thing I want.

ACIM Lesson 138