By The River Of Existence I Behold Him Poem by Mystic Qalandar

By the river of existence
I behold Him—
not as an image among images,
but as the Beauty
through which every image becomes visible;
the Beauty of the Creator
who, with no hand but His own,
continually inscribes His hidden form
upon the revolving tablet
of manifestation.

From the unapproachable height
of His own Being,
He lifts the veil—not away,
but just enough—
and the river receives
a flash of the Nameless.

Then He flows through Himself
as an incomparable radiance,
or perhaps, in some depth
where even light has forgotten its name,
breathes without breath:
a concealed heartbeat,
a light without origin,
a silence beneath all voices,
moving secretly
under the veils of things.

Every moment,
in the mirrors of the horizons
and in the inward mirror of the soul,
He adorns the face of His Being.

And we begin to understand:
nothing is scattered.
No atom wanders outside
the circumference of His knowing.
No form is severed
from the mystery that gives it form.
Everything is joined
to something unseen—
every particle a sign,
every separation a disguised return,
every silence a sealed letter
addressed to the heart.

Each leaf is a threshold.
Each river, a script
written before memory.
Each breath, a question
the Real asks of Itself
through the trembling instrument
of the human soul.

This world,
in which we appear to be paused,
is still learning
the grammar of love.

The earth, delicate and astonished,
is teaching matter
how to remember tenderness.

And perhaps the world is slowly discovering
that wealth does not speak
in the dead language of possession—
that it is not what the hand gathers,
but what the heart can shelter;
not what remains imprisoned
within the walls of the self,
but what the soul releases
until even loss begins to shine.

For beauty does not perish.
It withdraws its veil.
It passes through
the silent furnace of time,
through the dark interval
where forms surrender their names,
and searches among the ashes
of annihilation
for the seed of another disclosure.

Then, in the hidden alchemy
of renewal,
it returns—
not as it was,
but as a deeper possibility
of appearing.

The artistry of nature
does not end in language.
Sometimes it becomes
a prayer so subtle
that the tongue cannot contain it.

Sometimes it rises
as invisible incense
from the lips of the truthful,
dissolves into the transparent body
of the air,
and descends again
as an unnamed life
into the lungs of the world.

Every breath is a covenant.
Every kindness,
however brief,
is a flash of self-disclosure—
a moment in which
the unseen order beneath desolation
allows its pulse to be heard.

Perhaps the world,
with every new unveiling,
takes one more step
toward its secret centre:

beauty becoming majesty,
majesty becoming mercy,
and mercy becoming
more visible than the wound
that conceals it.

Then we remember:

the earth is not our possession.
We are the earth's astonishment,
its temporary mirror,
its brief capacity
to behold itself.

When we injure its body,
the wound travels inward.
Somewhere beneath the ribs,
the soil darkens.
Somewhere in the soul,
a river loses its way.

Perhaps one day
all things will begin
their long return—

the rivers will become transparent
to their own depths;
the forests will recover
the silence from which
their first prayer arose;
the frightened creatures
will move without fear
through the green eternity
of their belonging;

and life will flower
with such primordial brightness
that death itself
will seem only a veil
it once forgot to remove.

Then the secret may open:

salvation was never
a foreign light
descending suddenly
from a distant heaven.

It was sown here—
in hands lifted toward service,
in words steeped in prayer,
in mercy that asks for no witness,
in that gentleness
which entered silently
the wounded body of the world
and kept it from becoming
entirely dark.

And then my river
will whisper to itself:

The One we kept calling nature—
when was He ever separate from us?

Was He not
the breath within our breath,
the gaze within our seeing,
the current beneath
the illusion of shores?

Nature was only
the visible vesture
of the traceless Mystery—
a veil,
a splendour,
a silent verse
through which the Hidden
made Himself legible
without becoming diminished.

And we—
these passing forms
carried by the current—
are not returning
to somewhere else.

We are returning
to the realization of
the Secret
from which every
appearance was born.

The river does not begin
where the river appears.

Its source is in the sea,
and even as it flows
through the changing landscapes
of appearance,
it remains joined
to the vastness
that is its source—
filled, always,
with the water of the sea.

And perhaps this is the Secret:

we were never separate
from the Ocean of Being;

we only mistook
the changing shape of the river
for the absence
of the sea.

— MyKoul