My Little Boat

( to celebrate my favourite Kabir poem and Ramanavami.)

Tossed on life’s tempestuous ocean, fortunately, my little boat is unsinkable.

Its timbers are prayers, faith is its sail, filled with the guiding wind of grace.

Peace is a force-field protecting it from deluge and gust and lightning.

Stillness is its rudder and the Guru’s compassionate hand is steady upon its tiller.

How fortunate, how blessed, how favoured am I - gratitude springs like a fountain from my heart!

My little boat is God : in it, I rest so peacefully and joyously like a babe in his mother’s arms.


The Guest:
“The Guest is inside you, and also inside me;
you know the sprout is hidden inside the seed.
We are all struggling; none of us has gone far.
Let your arrogance go, and look around inside.

The blue sky opens out further and farther,
the daily sense of failure goes away,
the damage I have done to myself fades,
a million suns come forward with light,
when I sit firmly in that world.

I hear bells ringing that no one has shaken,
inside 'love' there is more joy than we know of,
rain pours down, although the sky is clear of clouds,
there are whole rivers of light.
The universe is shot through in all parts by a single sort of love.
How hard it is to feel that joy in all our four bodies!

Those who hope to be reasonable about it fail.
The arrogance of reason has separated us from that love.
With the word 'reason' you already feel miles away.

How lucky Kabir is, that surrounded by all this joy
he sings inside his own little boat.
His poems amount to one soul meeting another.
These songs are about forgetting dying and loss.
They rise above both coming in and going out."
Kabir, Translation by Robert Bly