In God Makes the Rivers to Flow; An Anthology of the World’s Sacred Poetry & Prose, Eknath Easwaran includes a selection from the Shvetashvatara Upanishad entitled “The River of God.” I’ve written the following poem-like reflections inspired by this selection.
Already Done
The world is the wheel of God, turning round
And round with all living creatures upon
The wheel. The world is the river of God,
Flowing from him and flowing back to him.
On this ever-revolving wheel of life
The individual self goes round and round
Through life after life, believing itself
To be a separate creature, until
It sees its identity with the Lord
Of Love and attains immortality
In the indivisible Whole.
—The Shvetashvatara Upanishad
It’s like we’re on a spinning merry-go-round
and we don’t know how to get off,
the scenery surrounding us blurring
green into blue into green again.
It’s like we’re on the inside of a kaleidoscope
and we can’t see the picture change,
only flow with it, caught in someone else’s creation,
a color flipping with other colors
that can’t see its own color
like a fish doesn’t know what life
would be without water.
It’s like we’re riding a tube in a whirlpool,
unable to reach the shore.
And everyone we know is
in the same whirlpool, riding
their own tube and saying,
“that’s just the way it is,
it’s impossible to reach the shore.”
And we try to see what’s on shore
and it seems as if there could be
something worth reaching there,
but it is a blur, a world
that doesn’t seem solid or real.
“Just stay on your tube,” our friends say,
“it’s not safe to swim in the water.”
But, you’re curious. You want
to believe that if you let go of the tube
and merge with the water
you could escape the current
and reach the shore
and discover what it’s like to be there.
The water is the Lord of Love.
The shore is the Lord of Love.
The tube is the Lord of Love.
You are the Lord of Love.
Your friends are the Lord of Love,
or Lady of Love.
But none of you know
that in knowing yourselves
and each other you know the Lord, the Lady, of Love.
None of you know
until you see a new tube
being launched into the water
and there is a sage riding that tube
and she says, “I have been to the shore
of immortality and bathed
in the sun of love and I have come
to tell you the way.”
She speaks of light. She speaks of love.
She speaks of oneness.
And she gets off her tube
and shows you how to swim.
The others don’t believe her,
won’t listen to her, won’t
try to swim. But a longing has awakened
within you to swim to the shore,
to bathe in the sun of love,
to know yourself as the oneness
that is all one, to, for a time,
stop spinning. There must
be a time for wholeness, for
indivisibility, and you ask
the sage when the time will come.
She says, “When you realize
it’s already done.”
