Doctor Grandma

My husband never does anything –and I mean anything — for Valentine’s Day. In fact that includes birthdays, and any holiday. Even Baha’i holidays where we give gifts, he does not. This is a source of a certain resentment on my part, but we’ve been together so long, you learn what things to let go and accept as part of a person. Logical thinking tells me the reason why (Holidays are manufactured and promoted by the media as times you feel obligated to buy a gift and it’s all part of glitzy, capitalistic America.) But it’s hard to go through life never recv’g a gift from the one you love. It’s just tiring. After awhile, you don’t really care so much about logic.

However, this Valentine’s Day, after a snowstorm, which is rare in South Carolina, he wrote me a poem. Two rarities in one week! It’s called “Blanket”.

Blanket

I love the peace of a snowy windless night
That falls as a sky tossed blanket
Over the nakedness of my town
Each flake laughing – oh, so quietly
About a myriad acts of kindness
Angels descend with white crystalline
Blankets sewn of water diamonds

I love the peace that Carol brings
She covers my shivering soul
With our quilted marriage blanket
Each fold a joy – a pain – a challenge won
Thirty eight years and counting
Our memories the threads that stitch
The fabric covering our nakedness

(Al Black, 02/14/10)

One of my poems got a couple of comments recently. The following one is the only other one inspired by a small book by Baha’u’llah, “The Seven Valleys”. The 7 valleys are the journey a soul takes, on its way to the Creator. Moving to higher and higher levels of understanding, through pain and love, the soul in the end, gives up the self entirely, voluntarily.

I WOULD LIKE TO OFFER TO SEND ANYONE WHO WANTS ONE, A FREE COPY OF THE LITTLE BOOK, SEVEN VALLEYS, by Baha’u’llah. If you would like a copy, send me your address on my e-mail, ladybahai2@gmail.com 

The last valley is called “True poverty and Absolute nothingness.” Each person can interpret that however they want. For me, personally, I do not think it is that we enter a realm of nothingness in the sense of void, empty, nothing, kind of like the “nothing” that approaches creatures in the film, “Never Ending Story” and absorbs them into an empty void. (In that film, people were losing the ability to dream, to imagine, hence “the nothing” was erasing the dimension of imagination and dreams.)

The 7th valley, to me, is a voluntary giving up of all the importance of one’s own desires, and rather, giving that over to the Ancient One, the Creator.

Baha’u’llah was writing this for the Sufi’s, a mystical branch of Islam. Famous Sufi poets include Ru’mi. (My favorite line by Ru’mi: “Thinkest thyself a puny form, when within thee the universe is folded?”) I was very attracted to the Sufi mystical way, and studied them for awhile. They reject the laws of Islam, and Muslims consider them to be heretics. They describe themselves as those who are delirious with the love of God and care about nothing else. (Some there are who worship the pools of water left on the beach. A Sufi is one who dives headfirst into the waves, drowning himself in the sea.)

So here is the little poem that came to me for “The Seven Valleys”:

Seven Valleys

Let us SEARCH for the good in all things,

Letting LOVE for the truth bind our souls,

Let KNOWLEDGE protect us from ignorance,

and UNITY be our goal,

Let CONTENTMENT rise up from the heart

filled with WONDER at nearing its quest,

To give up the self, to understand

TRUE POVERTY, ABSOLUTE NOTHINGNESS.

Recently I ran across a number of my older poems. This is one that intrigues me, still.

The Valley of Love

The past is the present, is the future, is past,

where all are first,

and none are last,

and roads that travel to different ends

lead us all to the Ancient Friend.

The steed of the Valley of Love is pain,

it opens the eye of thine inner being,

and lifts the heart to worlds above,

where love is love, is love, is love.

Final Exam

All classes

roll up into this one

last, dreaded exam,

the final moments, to see what,

if anything, they remember.

Students gather

in this room all semester,

sitting in the same, exact chair, always.

We like repetition, we like

to know our place,

and so the seat and those around you

become familiar, expected,

something you know.

Sitting in someone else’s seat

would be like stealing their wallet,

and you would be considered: deviant.

This week is about transitions,

endings, then new beginnings,

Next week is non-existent,

There will be no more meetings

of this particular group,

It is also about finality,

percentages tallied

and one – letter – grade,

For some lucky ones, graduation!

For the professors?

a break,

and then we do it all over again,

with new faces.

I hear them now, laughing,

sharing answers,

They await my entrance

and so I leave this page

to enter the room,

with their final exam.

In reality,

we are all cradled in the hands of God,

and exist on many planes of existence

all at once,

Our true reality

is spirit in essence,

unaffected by time and space,

The meaning of every event in our lives

is only understood there,

where all the love your hold in your heart

expands to those around you,

Only on this plane do we really know

that we are truly one.

Caught in a moment of time

We are caught in a moment of time,

Each of us on the road

To the rest of our life,

For some, it may be over tomorrow

For others, many decades to come,

Some of us are nearer the end of our journey,

But whose journey is longest

None can tell,

We are here in this brief moment together,

That is all we know for sure,

What shall we do with it?