SamadhiMuse

         I awoke on the subject of biting my fingers
         to find that I’d been nibbling them for several hours
         since midday when I’d thought, “OK, 1st day of ‘87
         and I haven’t bitten them yet.”
         I smiled at myself; these resolutions and siestas.
         Bhagwan’s dictum to “watch the thing you want to drop”
         came to me and I reflected that I hadn’t held the thought,
         I hadn’t kept watching.  Then I wondered “how do you
         practice holding thoughts and I thought of meditation.
         Meditation is exercise for the mental muscles
         to tone them to hold a thought.
         Hence the mantras and the koans.
         Its the fruit of exercise that gives you the power.
         Power to remain awake on as many things
         as you have developed mental muscles to hold.
         And once you can hold what ever thought you wish,
         everything which CAN be changed,
         come within your grasp.
                           Gallagher
                           01 Jan 1987

— Copyright 1965-2008 by Dennis Gallagher —

         T. Lobsang Rampa
         must have been shot
         by a spiritual cannon
         loaded with 1300 years
         of Tibetean intent.
         But, in the end,
         spectacular as his rise was,
         he came back to earth.
         For while others
         may give us velocity
         and direction
         we, alone, having nothing
         but mass and inertia
         and our own small flame
         of awareness
         to sustain the flight.
         The spiritual equivalent
         of the roller derby whip.
                     gallagher
                     02 Jan 1987

— Copyright 1965-2008 by Dennis Gallagher —

            Small worlds, dreams we’re passing through,
            mist and light in broken time.
            I love you, and you love me,
            dreams are all we’ve come to see
            here against the surging tide,
            hearts and hopes are open wide,
            honest, now and then, and then, we’ve cried
            I know nothing stays the same
            love’s an ever finer blade.
            Can’t we find the light of love
            among the shifting scenes and pain?
            Time is passing here outside
            and I love this place we’ve made here inside.
                                       gallagher
                                       1-6 Jan 87
            - to the cadence of ‘Love is comin’ around again’
              by Joni Mitchell

— Copyright 1965-2008 by Dennis Gallagher —

            Sparks of love in a material world,
            spirits of light in rivers of change.
            I love you, and you love me;
            hands across a changing sea.
            Sunlight, shafts of gray and blue,
            it’s love in our eyes that I can see
            but what do I mean, do I mean, to you?
            I’ve got dreams and so do you.
            God must have put us here to find
            how our dreams can love the rain.
            Dreams and love, love can bring us pain.
            Love brings us around and around again
            to where we face the light in pain
            to where we find our spirit’s name.
            I love you and I just don’t care
            I’ll follow love and dreams anywhere
            for time is a raging running tide
            washing us away inside our lives.
            I will love you, damn the rain.
            I will love my dreams and damn the pain.
            Love is a shining light to be
            but God never said that love came for free.
                                    gallagher
                                    2-6 Jan 87

— Copyright 1965-2008 by Dennis Gallagher —

   An early winter evening, motorcycle wind and headlights moving
      through the lights of houses full of warmth
      I open the door into a dark room … the sound of running feet.
   She is there with the smell of incense
         lighting candles behind the bedroom door.
   She and George Winston play in the candle’s light
      and I am deeply touched … a smile burns.
   I am blessed.  …see her love, her playfulness, her passion.
       My hands are cold from the dark ride - she enfolds me,
      kisses my neck like the heat from a wood stove in wintertime
   These feelings of intimacy and togetherness;
      I am both spirit and flesh here, transient and imperishable.
      This washes over me.  …I am loved.
   So many years and so many women, just to gain this vision.
      To be able to see how deep her goodness and sincerity,
         her honest and caring, are.
   I tell her this and she laughs at me
      she says it just takes some of us longer than others
      to see the obvious.
   My feelings well … beyond the bed and moment … beyond the page.
      All the secret spaces, soft lights, and warm loving embraces,
      in all the rooms, centuries, countries, cultures and faces….
   These soft moments of intimate reality are,
      are much of what is real
      and worthy in us.
   The rest are only the moments - between the moments
      when we touch and cup the small lights   of God
      which are in each of us.
   These moments pass amid jungles …
      soft eyes … and bullets …  the hands of babies … and death
      mixtures … light and shadow … we, who cherish amid destruction.
   People abused, people bought and sold,
      people confused and used,
      people who were once children of light
         now rusting in corruption.
   This world cannot see it’s insane.
      I put down the newspaper, Gorbachev’s struggle,
      the starving, the criminal, the heartless.
    History rolls behind my eyes … so much night waits
      against our small candles, but I remember what is real.
      I, too, will dim the room and burn incense.
   I know what feeds our hearts and spirits;
      the small flames of the Godhead within us.
   Through these many centuries of death and corruption,
      confusions and loss I will light a candle
      and gather our love and peace against the storm.
                                    gallagher
                                    20 Nov 87
      

— Copyright 1965-2008 by Dennis Gallagher —

            The winter storm finds me
            watching the trees swaying
            against the gray and blowing sky.
            I feel the Buddha’s thought,
            if what he experienced
               could be called a thought,
            as the trees sway
               …continous, elegant, flowing…
            the beauty of it
            rendered on the canvas of no-mind.
               …being and presence and timelessness,
                  cold and wind,
                  winter and
                  death and beauty…
            I watch them sway like they did
            when the mastadons roamed the north
            and men wore skins.
            Such a small glimmer of focused awareness are we
            amid the turbulence and tumble of existence.
            Identified with our names
            our jobs, our bodies, our personalities
            and our memories
            we go blind almost all the time.
            Surely, those many centuries ago,
            Buddha watched trees in the storm
            and felt the benediction and blessing
            of the vision.
            I know his thought
            and feel his joy for a moment.
            But he walked away into the rain,
            chose to advance openly towards his death.
            He   gave up every fiction and pose,
            chose to meet existence in the raw
            and found the roll of God’s thunder
            while we sleep
            and barely feel the breeze.
                              gallagher
                              16 dec 87
                              Newport Beach

— Copyright 1965-2008 by Dennis Gallagher —

         If you get a good thought, write it down.
         Meditate on it.
         Our thoughts occur like flashes in dust,
            for a moment we understand and possess
            an awareness…then, unless we can hold it
            we only remember that we knew….
         Our thoughts and understandings are like
         writing in the sand; transient and easily lost.
         Gaining possession of our realizations
         is meditation.
                              Gallagher
                                 27 Dec 87

— Copyright 1965-2008 by Dennis Gallagher —