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.

Eyes to See

 
The Lord of Love holds in his hand the world,
Composed of the changing and the changeless,
The manifest and the unmanifest.
The individual self, not yet aware
Of the Lord, goes after pleasure, to become
Bound more and more. When it sees the Lord,
There comes the end of its bondage.
—The Shvetashvatara Upanishad

If the Lord of Love has a hand other than our hands

then that hand must hold everything that is, that was,

that could be.

If the Lady of Love would open her mouth,

we could look inside and see multiverses

spinning and gyrating, putting on a show.

If the Lord of Love would touch us,

we would feel no different, for the Lord of Love

is closer than our jugular vein.

The Lady of Love has always been within

and beyond, has always been the present

and all that it holds.

We all seek the Lord of Love, only

most of us don’t know what we are truly seeking,

don’t know what it means to be whole.

We long for the Lady of Love because

we were once whole as her, but

we have entered the realm of separation,

where distance is an illusion we believe in.

And so we seek the Lord of Love

in the touch of our lover and the Lady of Love

in the taste of a cake.

We seek sweetness and escape each

and every day.

We long for the Lord, the Lady, of Love,

but we don’t know how to find

the Lord, the Lady, of Love

within ourselves.

All we know is our longing.

The drinks we seek to quench our thirst

become our addictions.

The thrills we seek to distract us from

our deepest need are never enough.

They end, leaving us longing for more.

We seek our own chains

and wrap ourselves up in them.

The strange thing is

the answer to our longing for wholeness

is to know that we are already whole.

To see the Lord of Love,

we need to look at the world

with new eyes.

Call out to the Lady of Love.

Ask her to give you eyes to see.

Ask her to reveal herself.

And she will reveal herself,

as long as you keep looking.