Writer in the Artist Studio – This and That

(a story about entering the studios of Nasser Ovissi – dictated on the drive home)

Oh, this sweet exhaustion.
This weariness from wanting,
this fire that burns towards having.

I woke this morning
and went to visit the Artist.
The colors on His gallery walls were alive.
Each portrait poured the water of life
into white woven canvas.
I was surrounded by an eternity,
Wing to wing with jeweled angels
arm in arm with all of burgeoning humanity.

Breathless from a palpating heart,
I walk quite trustfully
into this craft of love that entwines us
and everything we see, and hear, and do;
even among those things that remain hidden
from our deepest perception,
from our senses day-lit views.

Slipping into a ceaseless state of wonder,
swelling with the sense,
that my purpose is to be fully thankful,
that this bears fruit in expressions
that serve all
By this art within,
inspired by the Artful.

I am always transforming
In these threshold doorways.
This is not a road with many stoplights,
this is not even the road.
It is a wide and expensive flatness
the Artist’s studio
going in all directions,
endlessly.
We do not stop to turn or to let others pass,
nor do others stop to let us
for nothing impedes us
on this path.

Happiness birthed by love
is a writer’s cup spilling over,
cascading into an ever thinning
but never disappearing,
veneer of water,
purling outward infinitely.
These ripples do not expire,
it does not evaporate.

When I entered His abode,
it was into a place where my heart
was already waiting.
This is how lovers come up to one another.
Arriving where they had already arrived.
A rekindling of a bonfire spirit,
one that might at times smolder,
but is never near extinguished.

Maulana says that we are moving swiftly down the stream,
and what appears to be trees passing by us on the banks
is just the speed of our vessel leaving this world.

You and I talk of this and that,
these cycles of melancholy and ecstasy.
We see sinuating patterns where there are none.
In the end it is a white light,
in which to feel the spectrum
of all its hidden colors.

There are no cycles beloved friends,
we scintillate in a perpetual state of splendor
here there is no end
and to remain here we need not try,
we simply surrender, you and I.
A writer with an Artist’s eye.

Surrender to the resistance of effort,
Surrender this, for resistance is effortless.
This is what illuminate’s distractions;
and when these distractions lift on the light,
it is one Bliss about us,
it is all One portrait’s
indescribable sight.

We are part of the single thread
that weaves through time
and space
and our part is a whole.
What we want and cannot have,
is distraction, so have
without wanting.

The sweetness of the sugar cube
is not in the cube;
It is in us.
It is not on the tongue,
it is of the tongue.
The Us we seek, seeks us!
Let us turn toward it, not away
It is only ubiquitous Love.