A Year with Kabir

Getting Lost and Found in the Particulars

As I’ve crawled into bed every night for the last two weeks, I’ve said to the ceiling, “I’m lost.” The ceiling didn’t answer me, but two other things did. The first was this old photograph of myself. As soon as I saw it, I said, “Well, hello. Don’t you look puckish? What kind of mischief should we create together?”

The second thing was I read this poem by Kabir, a 15-century Indian mystic, poet, and saint.

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I talk to my inner lover, and I say, why such rush?

We sense that there is some sort of spirit that loves birds and animals and the ants—

perhaps the same one who gave a radiance to you in your mother’s womb.

Is it logical you would be walking around entirely orphaned now?

The truth is you turned away from yourself,

and decided to go into the dark alone.

Now you are tangled up in others, and have forgotten

what you once knew,

and that’s why everything you do has some weird

failure in it.

I’d read Rumi before, but not Kabir. God, how I loved his attitude. It was as if Emily Dickinson and Oscar the Grouch had had a love child. And didn’t I have “some sort of spirit that loves birds and animals” and didn’t I want to free myself from the tangle and seek radiance and truth?

So, I’ve decided to spend “A Year with Kabir.” The plan is to write a poem a day for a year in the style of Kabir. And I will only give myself 23 minutes to do so.

The first one drops tomorrow. I can’t wait.