Not Human

Can’t feel
The difference
Between reality
Between day dreams
Made to cure reality.

Am I here?
Am I lost?
Selfish to share my sadness
Selfish to keep it to myself

Your personal battles matter
Mine are the same story over
Redundant, ‘Oh well’, move on.

Judge me forget me
Need me, use me.
All the same now
Not like I am human.

Just a portrait of
What you need me to be.

By Khushbo
Copyright @Lifealight 2017

Song of Silence

Lying in the lyrics of silence
Are many words left unsaid.
Many truths left hidden.

Yet the strongest words
The loudest answers;
Lie here in simple silence.

The deepest yearnings,
The heaviest hopes,
This fortress of broken hearts
Hides many emotions.

If only you would listen
To the whispers that no one heard,
Where so many stories lie buried.

Yearning to be sung aloud.

By Khushbo

Copright Lifealight @2017.

My Hero

As I rise from the musk of hardships,
Of days gone by in hopes of brighter dawns.
I am told to wait on a hero.

Who will gather my tears,
Hold my dreams up high,
Learn the sensitivities of my heart.

Swear upon a million stars to keep my heart,
Sacred and unscathed.
Through all the grinding days to come.

It’s just, there is no hero.
No Knight in shinning Armour
headed my way.

I am just a tiered warrior,
Who has taken off her Armour to breathe;
And follow a mirage.

Rest is over, the mirage vanishes.
I ride out once again at first light,
My sword aimed ahead as I charge.

I am my one and only hero.

By Khushbo.
Copyright @Lifealight 2016.

This Moment I live

In my chase of moments
Yet to come,
I drown fixing problems
I have yet to face.

This is my moment,
My only moment
To live;
I have lost:

Life.

-Khushbo
Lifealight Copyright @2016

Oh Wise Tree

“For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.

A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.

A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one’s suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.”

-Hermann Hesse, Baume. Betrachtungen und Gedichte

Ask My Story

Every passing person carries
A story woven intricately with
Emotions, moments never forgotten.
All connected together like a web.

The thoughts that run through
Every mind that walks past me.
I wonder at the people they miss,
The life they have lived.

Things they would stop to tell,
Faces animated with the true story
Behind the narrative of what happened.
If only I had the courage to ask.

By Khushbo

Copyright @2016 Lifealight

 

What I Miss

In the depth of my sadness
I wondered at how I could miss
Someone so ready to leave.

As the clouds lift,
I realize its not you,
Its me I miss.

The me I was
When you looked at me
With that silly smile.

– By Khushbo
Copyright @Lifealight, 2016

Love is Simple

One night I met a the embodiment of love itself.
A simple man, regular, old and happy.
I wondered at his plainness.
So I asked, what was love after all?

“Innocence”, he said, “Innocence is my nourishment,
I reside in the eyes of every soul willing to hold me
Fearless of the anguish of my departure,
For to not hold me would be a greater torment.

Endless is the search for the seeker full of fear.
To embrace me is to embrace the pain of my demise.
The games you play lead you further away with every
Choice of deception you make.

I lie not in the songs of your lover,
But in the glisten of her eyes, in the crinkle of her smile.
In the unspoken givings of lovers,
When does the sun speak of love to the life it creates?

Join the dance between two opposites
Those of joys and losses;
Those of felicity and sadness.
Just as life embraces its imminent march to an end.

Timeless is love that worries not of its demise.
Light as the breeze, joy of every petal it touches.
Loudest as time slows for the twirling dervish,
Whirling to the tunes orchestrated by the cosmos.

Oh seeker, love is simple,
Love is every breath you take,
It sits between the lips of your smiles
the joy in your eyes.

Orchestrated  by the universe
Carrying the weight of complications
The size of stars,
All but for one deep breath;
One simple smile.”

By Khushbo
@Lifealight 2016

Stillness of this Moment

After so many days of running
I am at peace for a few quiet moments
I sit here not worrying about
What is yet to be done
What I can and cannot achieve

Yet it seems this peaceful minute
I seek is a waste.
Every minute a text
Every second a thought
On what I should be doing next

And all I want is this one moment
Of absolute and total stillness
A moment of peace
To myself.

– Khushbo