Instructions to the Monastic or the Pilgrim

Instructions to the Monastic or the Pilgrim

A poem by Nicholas Samaras

Enter this room and call it a cell.

Fold yourself and put yourself away.

For your whole life, you will be an amateur.

But be an amateur striving.

Enter this room and call it vigilance.

Make your ego the threadbare rug you walk on.

Before your quiet face, hold

the fane of your folded hands.

Fold yourself and put yourself away.

Become the parent to your parents.

Cast their names on the wind of your breathing.

Enter this room and be alone with dialogue.

Take the name of silence and let it speak.

Come from your life and lay down your life.

Come from always, go away everywhere and nowhere.

Enter this room as the threshold of spirit.

Take the movement of stillness.

Approach stillness and hear every song of your adolescence.

Take every melody and still them all.

Stay vigilant through each black hour and learn

the language of the stars that are both absent and present.

Every peasant you meet will be God.

Every one of your exhalations

will become the name of God.

Take the name of God and breathe it in,

until each dying breath breathes God.

Take everything you have been.

Take everything you can become.

Take the name of this place as your name

and come from nowhere else again.