Saying Thank You To Your Own Life - Poem - John Siddique

Join John live on stage for this poetic journey through the connections and the realities of our lives that make meeting ourselves through our practice so important and valuable to ourselves and others. Recorded at the world-renowned Bradford Literature Festival, John shares one of his classic pieces followed by new material from his two forthcoming books for the first time. Grab a coffee or green juice, allow your heart to open, and walk in that place of reality and mystery that is life.

Transcript

Please welcome John Siddique.

Each of us changes when placed next to the other.

We place ourselves or are placed or paired,

Creating stories,

A new idea,

Sometimes love.

With love comes the desire to be seen for who we are.

From juxtaposition comes the marriage of existence,

Arranging ourselves as an exhibition of human things.

Marriages of the married and unmarried,

So many bedrooms and doorways,

Arranging ourselves as an exhibition of human things.

The marriage of shadow and light,

Born to an impermanent sun.

The music between the strings,

Between the staves,

Between the musician and the notes.

The sea and the sky,

Unified at one horizon.

Body,

Mind,

Action and consequence.

The writer and his notebook,

Learning the sacrament of ink.

The dancer and gravity,

Illustrate the music of freedom and force.

The portrait,

Given soul by the painter,

Going beyond technique.

Wedding rings on hands,

Held together and apart.

Arranging ourselves as gold and steel,

As youth and old age,

As prayer and its church,

As Christ in the garden,

As cobalt is to the truth of the sky,

As the sound of the Ong.

As alpha and omega and what comes before and after,

The seed of the sound.

An exhibition of human things,

A cup turned by hand,

Held by other hands.

The immigrant wedding in colours you didn't even know you could wish for.

Seagrass and sand dune,

Roots and mass they are entwined.

Wave and ocean,

Water given life from her movement,

From his death.

The exhibition of human things,

A country and its people,

The statistics and the individual.

No country without the individual.

No marriage without each partner existing within themselves.

No marriage without one being seen by the other.

No marriage without the creation of context.

Consider the decisions,

The fragments we make.

Alpha,

Love used as a verb.

Omega,

Love as a choice.

Love sometimes is not a choice,

It just is or is not.

I place my life here and it means something if I choose it to.

We place our lives together and they mean something if we choose them to.

We tell our stories for there are always stories.

The dancer knows how earth and body relate.

The poet journeys the pen through the connections.

We choose to believe in statistics or the mystery,

The mystery of marriage between each thing,

Between the life of each moment,

The mystery of marriage,

The mystery of human things.

Thank you.

Applause You've got a book called So,

So you can go So.

This is not available until January 2022.

And yet here I have one because the printers went to work and the distributors didn't.

So the distributors are waiting to distribute the book and the first they can do it is 2022,

January 2022.

So I'm afraid I have no copies to give out apart from I said to my publisher,

Can you just send me a couple?

And this is So itself.

So.

For the lack of love,

The world is dying.

And we are unconscious of and separated from each other.

Love is not to be found in the mind,

Yet it can illuminate it.

Love may be found in your heart.

The heart is both a vessel of unconsciousness and of light.

Love is the active principle of your spirit.

So listen and love and act from spirit.

Then look at your brothers and sisters,

People,

Animals and plants.

Listen to the earth in spirit.

Sacredness is not mooning round in a special way.

Rather,

Let sacredness use your talents and identity.

It's an open hand in motion tending to what is truly needed in the here and the now.

And.

I don't know if you know,

But in not Leeds Library,

Because there's Leeds Library,

But then there's the Leeds Library,

Which is a private library.

They have a first editions room and I was in there some time ago and I saw this book sitting there and I just couldn't believe that it was there.

And it was a first edition Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman signed and quickly looking online,

Finding out that it's worth three hundred and fifty thousand pounds.

Try to leave with it in my back.

No,

I didn't.

But,

You know,

And what amazed me is,

Is that Leeds of Grass.

Written in 1855,

18,

1855.

And you can have a book that's a hundred years old,

A thousand years old,

Ten years old,

Whatever.

And it doesn't matter whether somebody reads it or not.

And yet it's open when you open it.

The poet or the writer is just talking to you.

And that has always amazed me about books.

So.

So I wrote this poem as if it would be included in Leaves of Grass.

It's called Emissary.

That my voice might reach you across the years through the pages of this book.

That I might share with you a message of having loved this world and from the life which rises up from it all.

That you may hold this book in your hand,

Lift your eyes and your own heart anew.

As you step out this day to see the tree before it is named as tree.

To meet a stranger before the mind judges and decides on stranger.

That my life might meet your life and your life recognize itself in all things and in all people.

Love before it is named as love across time and across space by virtue of love's infinity.

Obviously I'm not used to it yet.

It only came in the post the other day.

Normally I go to India every year because my partner lives half a time in India and half a time here.

And we actually haven't been in the same room with each other for 18 months now because of the way the world is.

We've promised that we will figure everything out.

We Skype all the time.

And it's really,

Really hard going quite honestly.

With the situation.

And there's a place in between where we live in India is a place called Zirukpur.

And the biggest main city is Chandigarh.

It's like three cities together.

There's Zirukpur,

Chandigarh and Panchkula.

And in between the three there's this funny place called Mali Jagran.

And one morning I just got up at dawn and went there because I was told that I shouldn't go there.

And you know the Irish in me,

Because my mum was Irish,

Is like,

Tell me I can't,

You know.

Mali Jagran.

Slum town between two cities where trains get no rest at night.

Where the first star of evening rises to ask for your wishes.

Where cranes lift dinosaur necks.

Moving steel and pipes and gravel.

Chandigarh and Panchkula's litter bin.

Tinseled by foil snack packets and the snow of polystyrene tarley plates.

Where the railway sidings call you to go the distance into morning fog to find boys.

All with blackest hair playing cricket with sticks and stones.

The world is full of beggars.

Poor ones reciting constant pleas.

Rich ones with city towers of gold.

Turn down the volume on the television and they all make the same face while putting their hand out.

Mali can't look you in the eye without wanting a piece of you.

Don't go there,

You'll be killed I'm told.

Allah u Akbar sings out from the mosque away down the railway line and Muslim,

Hindu and Sikh mouth along.

Mali Jagran where the chai makers and bangle sellers live.

Heading out to sector 17 on endless bicycles in dust and highway noise.

Allah u Akbar Mali Jagran meet my eyes with your eyes.

Meet me only with yourself and your soul.

Most everything else in this world is not worth a damn.

I see a boy with a goat on a string.

A cell phone in his other hand.

I see a girl impossibly clean and bright.

Dressed to marry the day.

An hour moves differently here.

It's a syrup,

Clear and thick.

Allah u Akbar.

Last two.

So this is all new stuff really.

There's another book coming out.

Before so,

But I haven't got a copy of that to wave at you yet.

And that's actually a nonfiction book.

But my publisher Watkins Penguin asked me to put just like two or three poems in and there's a couple of translations of old poems as well.

And then the rest of it is a sort of a basic guide to living with your own awareness and how to actually sort of make a better job of that.

The blockages that get in the way from us accessing our own awareness.

Because most people go through life with the conditioning that's kind of layered into them by their family and so on.

And then the societal conditioning.

And then they believe that's who they are.

And yet underneath that,

There's the life,

The soul of the person saying,

Hang on a minute.

So my question has always been,

How do we really know the life inside us?

Do I just have to imagine more stuff or is that actually knowable?

And so I decided I wanted to explore that and be basically damn practical.

So that will be out 23rd of November.

Thanks,

Rose.

And one of the things when you talk about spirituality,

You know,

Is people think that it's just sort of shanty shanty,

Oh mom,

Happy clappy,

Smile smile,

Stick a face on.

And the truth is that when you start clearing some of this stuff out of the way,

The conditioning,

You feel more,

You feel all of it because you're actually able to feel rather than just be some reactive person,

You know,

Just well,

You're not even a person.

You just reaction.

You kind of until you clear some of that stuff out of the way,

You kind of haven't stood up yet.

So I thought I would write a thank you letter to all that I've lived through because I realized at one point that you can't get where you're going.

I was I was once in Glastonbury.

This is completely true.

I need to hurry up.

I might.

This might be the last one.

In fact,

And I was lost.

And I asked a woman for directions and she said to me,

Well,

If I were you,

I wouldn't start from here.

Honestly,

Honestly.

So if I were you,

I wouldn't start from the reactive place.

Start from that place that genuinely feels like you.

And then we realize that the life that we've had is the only life we can have because it's been trying to teach us all along how to be free and full and whole.

I'll close with this,

Actually.

Thank you to the broken road that led me here.

It seems no other road would have got me home.

Voices around you tell you to be spiritual,

To talk a sweet certain way,

Heal quickly from all things,

Find the positive,

Be present.

But I want to say thank you to my lost self,

To the fractured homes,

The addictions,

The codependence,

The bottles,

The drugs,

The lust.

I want to say thank you,

Nights with a knife held in my hand against myself.

So many nights not wanting to be here.

Thank you,

Road.

Thank you,

Lost friends and thankfully failed relationships.

Imagine if they'd have continued.

Thank you,

Lost.

Only lost can lead to found.

Only the broken can know the liquid meaning of mercy or show another how to heal.

Only bad love will know the distance to good love.

Only the divided can know the whole.

We don't have to build a house.

We don't have to build and live in a house on broken road.

Instead,

We make the journey through the inner wall.

And somewhere in the heat of the noise,

There is the silent,

Sacred heart.

And finally,

You listen for there is nowhere else to hang your coat.

You wash your face,

Place your hand where your heart is and say,

I love you.

Thank you.

I know the way home now.

Bless you.

Thank you so much.

Reviews

Vulnerability + openness + messiness of life when living the width as well as the length come to mind as I experience this John Siddique offering with gratitude, reaffirming that I am thankful for LIFE’s opportunities 2 simply B, ahimsa

John, your words touch me, I feel them in my heart. Thank you for sharing, and spreading love. 🙏🏼

Subtly profound. Congratulations on your beautiful work John 🙏

Beautifully inspirational,thank you beloved John..so much love.. 🤗💚🙏

Wonderful, I loved your description of lost and your poem, I'm glad you continue to find your way, inviting us into your life, a rich beautiful gift for everyone, many blessings, thank you 🙇‍♂️🌱🦋🧘‍♀️🙏

So awesome!! Loved every poem. The depth and beauty of each line, the flow of words that created images in my soul and the touching truth of each sentence is amazing. Want to keep listening... Blessed and deeply touched. Thanks

Utterly powerful use of language and message—simply gorgeous and profoundly moving 💗

Unbelievably beautiful. John’s words are an orchestra that evoke pictures, emotions bright and dark - but most of all, that sense of fellowship with a fellow traveler.

Thank you 🙏 I love you … I know the way home now 💜

A couple of gems came through to me here - especially the story and poem at the end about finding your way. Also your reflections about the slum in India. As I believe you intended, the poetry lifted me out of the day-to-day to the level of a soul navigating this one precious life 🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻

I have wanted to travel to India for several years. Thank you for bringing me there for a moment

I am speechless from listening. I am drinking it all in, like the finest wine I’ve ever tasted.

Beautiful!
Just what I needed in this moment 🙏🏼💕

Wow. Did not disappoint. I'm sad to hear he's been separated from his love all these months. Sending you love and hoping you can be together soon, John.

Very grateful. So powerful, so moving. Holding my breath, not wanting you to stop reading your poetry. Had to replay and replay. Blessings, John.

Just beautiful. I woke up with a broken heart because someone in my life doesn't see me. First thing I listened to this morning was this and I feel seen. The irony of life.

Only lost will lead to found.

Indeed brother John🕯️

Thank you for sharing your heart and soul 🙏🌀

I loved the last poem especially! Is there a recording available of each of these individually, or at least just the last one on its own?

Poetry. Beautiful, captivating. I want the whole book now.

Thank you, poet; thank you, heart; I know the way home now.