Poetry, Enlightenment

Bodhgaya

A moment of enlightenment

The heat, the clash of sounds, the crowd of humanity, pressing in on me —

I couldn’t breathe.

We all came to see Bodhgaya, where Buddha denied the paths of austerity, and of living for prosperity, and taught us the middle path.

Beneath the Bodhi Tree, I sat, staring up at the birds and the leaves.

It seemed odd, at first, to me that those ordinary birds would be in this tree.

It was almost like they could sense its energy.

But then, I saw, this was not unusual at all.

For nature would not be in awe of herself.

The tree and the birds are part of the same, the same form, but with different names.

I looked away. I closed my eyes. Everybody else was meditating.

But where was I?

This poem is based upon a true moment, one of the big ones in this lifetime. I had traveled to India many times before this one. But, this time, I was with my classmates from graduate school during our summer semester in India. We had made it to the Bodhi Tree, in Bodhgaya. It was as if everybody else melted to the ground and into a state of meditational bliss. But I found myself looking at the birds in the tree and getting rather lost, then coming to, and thinking, “I should have been meditating.”

Erika Burkhalter is a yogi, cat-mom, photographer, and lover of travel and nature, spreading her amazement for Mother Earth’s glories, one photo, poem or story at a time. (MS Neuropsychology, MA Yoga Studies).

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Photos and poem ©Erika Burkhalter. All rights reserved.