The great aphorism, that there is an external world.
These lives, this excursive dailyness
peering into distance, sighting
rainbows, faces in oil on water,
seeing suns, shadows, lives,
connecting in death, separating,
bowing to the inscrutable
in genuflection’s truth,
melding with the inevitable
and receding like tidal rivulets
as if no lives had been,
although we swear we are.
Inconclusive and frustrating
in an undying procession
of ensouled psychic beings
sovereign over all else,
we are driven to ourselves
by the art of self-discovery
to deeply knowing :
“Words are approximations.”1
Mirra Alfassa, Mother of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, said this often. ↩
Prev: Copper kettle | Next: Flippancy