I take the path that ecstatic human beings have taken for centuries.

I don't steal money. I don't hit anyone. What will you charge me with? I have felt the swaying

of the elephant's shoulders. And now, you want me to climb up on a jackass? Please, try to be serious.

These were the lines that first introduced me to Mirabai, a mystic poet from the 16th century in Rajasthan in India.

Her passionate intelligence and sarcastic humor grabbed me right away.

And any time I recited, that last line gets a good laugh,

usually from the women in the room. Today, I want to share my experience of poetry as a form of

contemplative and creative resistance. To do that, I will draw on some excerpts from some of my

favorite poets.

What I've especially been drawn to in this domain is poetry that is a radical embrace of being human of the body,

of selfhood beyond cultural conditioning, religious dogma, or social pressure.

Indeed, of what can be described as an organic sense of the

sacred, discovered, celebrated, and even fought for within the natural world.

In line with that theme, it helps to know that Mirabai was born into a royal family, but

eschewed a life of comfortable privilege for a

devotional spiritual path, usually only followed by lower caste people, and those were usually men.

She had an arranged marriage, which she refused to consummate, saying that only Krishna was her true beloved.

And when her husband was then killed in battle, she refused the custom of that time of Sati,

in which widows were supposed to throw themselves onto their dead husband's funeral pyre and die with

him.

She associated with sadus, you know, those ascetics with the dreadlocks who are covered in ashes from the funeral pires

and have very few possessions and just wear a loincloth. And she even took a low-cast spiritual

...