You are not here to drink SipSi or Pepola, are you?

I’m not here to promote such ‘heady’ stuff!

I’m here to serve water – ‘hearty,’ pure, and unadulterated;

No, not even that –  it is not water, but thirst I offer!

***

I wish you become thirsty – so thirsty that you start digging a well – digging desperately with your bare hands,

To seek the water that liberates from all thirsts, water from wells dug with the hot salty sweat of your brow!

But you are not yet dying of thirst, and so you say, there is no water – that only Sipsi-Pepola exist and no other;

Your thirst is not even ignited yet; you merely seek liberation from the effort of digging the well.

But alas, I cannot ignite thirst; I can merely intensify a thirst already kindled!

***

You want various flavoured drinks, served on a platter, chilled –

You don’t even make the effort to choose, and merely sip whatever drink is placed in your hands,

Then coolly wear sweat-shirts proclaiming ‘I dig SipSi!’ ‘I dig Pepola,’

And casually ask what flavour, what colour, what ‘ism’ I sell.

***

You complain you tried digging, but found no water!

Perhaps your greed for a quick-fix made you shallow – sent you rushing off to holier pastures.

You forget that digging even a hundred one-foot-deep wells will not lead to water just two feet deep!

I can assure there is water everywhere – even in hard rock – and your thirst surely will be quenched!

***

But hard rock yields not to senile sinews and fossilized minds!

Do not think the digging is time-pass, to be indulged in when one is ‘tired’ or ‘retired’ from the ‘duties’ of life.

This digging demands the best you have – start early and intensely in your prime,

Motivated by a thirst that knows not what water tastes like, nor how deep to dig –

Yet keeps digging through rock and stone, convinced that if thirst be there, the water too will surely be!

***

When one digs on, without raising one’s eyes from the digging to look at ads of any cold drink –

Determined not to clutch the straws of SipSi and Pepola even if dying of thirst,

Then surely you will find the sweetest water ever tasted,

For I have found and I am quenched, I have seen and I am blessed –

I am in a state of permanent intoxication as you too soon will be!

***

You are welcome to drink from my waters, there is enough for all, enough for you to drown in!

For the water is not mine to withhold, it overflows, it surges forth, no well deep enough to confine it!

But alas, true thirst cannot be quenched by drinking at someone else’s well!

It’s your salty sweat that provides the sweetness to the water –

your heated body that makes the water chilled!

***

Once you have tasted the water, you can sit back

and enjoy drinks green and white, yellow, orange and blue,

With fancy caps to distinguish amongst two!

And you will smile, for now you know,

behind the different drinks lie the same waters pure!

***

Now let me take a dig at you, as you dig your holey well!

What you dig is not a well but just a hole in your ego shell,

You were living on an illusory ‘I’land in the middle of the sea,

And I fanned your thirst to make you dig a hole, while I laughed up my sleeve.

The water is not in this well, its the well that is in the water!

***

The smaller the ‘I’land, and wider and deeper the hole, the easier it is for the ‘I’land to collapse into its ‘empty’ self,

And with this drowns the thirsty man and his thirst; the holey hole and the empty shell;

And everything becomes the water which is all there is.

And now you can exclaim with joy,

‘There is no I, no ‘my’ – All there is, is water, and that thou are, and that am I!

***

Now you can laugh and play with God, for God is naughtiness, play, and dance!

God is life exulting in romance!

God is curiosity creativity and innocence!

God is intelligence, truth, and coherence!

God is love in overabundance!

***

God is a friend waiting to say Cheers!