The Paradox

text | 250 words — on seeing truth in all its guises

The Paradox

by Maja Apolonia Rodé 

Look inside your favorite box

and there you’ll find a paradox.

For what appears as love and light

contains within the dark of night

illumined only by your sight.

Now look into your oldest pain,

and let the sorrow fall, like rain.

Then watch the rain begin to clear

away the dust of grief and fear

revealing only joy here.

Be aware of paradoxes.

Don’t put the things you love in boxes.

For every time you set your mind,

you disallow another kind,

a universe is left behind.

Instead of tearing things apart,

put your eyes into your heart,

and from this core, awareness rises

to see the truth in all its guises,

and discover what the big surprise is!

What you see is who you are,

and you don’t need to travel far

for what you seek. It’s always been

the substance that you’re swimming in.

What you seek has always been

the substance that you’re swimming in.

So jump into the widest see,

and find the you that’s also . . . me!

Then, look into the clearest sky,

don’t waste a second asking why

for in this moment you . . . die.

The breath returns a sense of day

as love begins to have its way

through the one left standing there.

The world is seen without the glare

of knowing who or why or where.

Freed from nothing; nothing attained.

Everything lost, and everything gained.

Beyond the realms of will and chance,

revealed in every circumstance,

Emptiness continues to dance.

❤ 2000 | Maja Apolonia Rodé

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Creative Process Backstory

The seed-line of this rhyme came about five years before the rest of it. That seed was: “Be aware of paradoxes.” It was a one-line poem from a book of free-form poems, One Love, which I self-published in 1995. (I’ll make that available on this website at some point.) I felt that statement was so important I put it on a page all by itself. Maybe something in me knew that there was a whole lot more to come from it.

Five years later, I recall pondering this rhyme as I walked down a sloped drive at the home where I lived in the Santa Cruz mountains. It was during a break from a day-retreat we were hosting with meditation teacher, Adyashanti. I remember when the thought came in….

And let this rain begin to clear
away the dust of greed and fear.

I recall thinking, that’s odd to have the word greed there. It didn’t quite fit into the flow of meaning, but I went with it, since that’s what showed up in the creative unfolding. Later in my writing process I realized the word is supposed to be grief. Grief made perfect sense in the context of the poem. Reflecting on this process made me realize — Oh, part of my writing process must be that I hear things internally. I don’t experience hearing a voice. But I suppose I hear my everyday thoughts as well as creative/inspired thoughts from who knows where. In any case, I mis-heard the word grief as greed.

Another point a friend encouraged me to mention is that I wrote this poem a few years before Adyashanti’s book Emptiness Dancing got its title. I’m quite sure that the idea of Emptiness as a fundamentally useful “reality word” came to me via Adyashanti. But the idea of combining it with the notion of dancing likely came from my emergent process in writing the rhyme.

That’s actually a great example of what I love about writing rhymes. It forces unexpected idea combinations since rhyming combinations are limited. In this case, I was working with the words chance and circumstance. The concepts in their respective lines came from prior revelations. So nothing particularly revelatory to me at that point. But then I needed a rhyme that would work in terms of meaning and structure. Some good possibilities: glance, stance, trance, dance, expanse. I likely tried a few out and dance came out as the winner. It worked in the sentence structure, sparked the insight of the unexpected, and it rang deeply true.

Beyond the realms of will and chance,
revealed in every circumstance,
Emptiness continues to dance.

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