By Jindati Doelter

To write poetry is to tap the subterranean river of your consciousness. It is about trust and honesty, its divination. To write poetry is to sustain yourself and to sustain knowledge, says poet and long-time resident of California’s Vajrapani Institute, Ashley Walker.

“You have to find the water that runs underneath, the river of blood, and the river of calling,” he says. But when asked if he is spiritually motivated to write poetry, he says, “I don’t really know why I write poetry, I just have to, it’s an obsession.” Poems appear in his mind, like an audible vision. “You don’t hear them?” he asks.

For many poets smithing words is a compulsion. For Ashley poetry is a way of living and has to be expressed as an art of living. “Poets have to find their voice, not stifle it,” he says. “I didn’t make a conscious decision to become a poet; I’m a carpenter. Compulsive poetry writers have a hard time surviving, they’ll never be rich – this is taken for granted.”

Lama Yeshe, the founder of Vajrapani Institute, also was a poet, Ashley says. He often contrived little phrases that made people laugh like “See you soon – on the moon.” But it was how he lived his life that made him a poet, Ashley feels.

Poetry has permeated his life as long as he can remember. A native Australian, he was brought up in a Methodist family. “I used to read the Bible to myself, went to church on Sunday mornings, and when I was 16, I received confirmation with a big hang-over,” Ashley says.

This was a time when his choked up feelings began to trickle out in rivulets. His father had just died, and he felt he owed it to his family to follow the stream of his orthodox education, but in his heart he was rebelling and rejecting the garb of traditional piety.

“I was a young kid in a macho scene … I was a closet poet,” he says. His mother, however, was encouraging his creative voice. She would tease him, predicting that he would take off to India and become a Buddhist monk. Well, the idea was right. Ashley started to travel as soon as he turned 20, and he met Lama Zopa and Lama Yeshe in 1979 at Kopan Monastery in Nepal.

He enjoyed reading Tibetan poetry then, but he was more involved in the inner journey of learning about the Dharma than outwardly expressing his own poetry. It was more his job to listen than to be heard, he says, and he didn’t know enough about the Dharma to write about it. “I kept a journal and wrote a hell of a lot of letters. This time was a retreat from Australia and the West. I lost my language, I lose my voice, I just watched.”

During his sojourn in the East he heard about Vajrapani Institute and that the residents were sincere Dharma practitioners. Being in love with his American girlfriend Shasta Wallace finally brought Ashley to the land that would become his home, and a special place for Lama Yeshe. Shasta is now his wife and they have a six-year-old daughter Angelica who, inspired by her dad, writes poems.

When Ashley arrived in 1981, a tribe of American people lived in the redwoods in tipis. Houses were made out of black plastic, and Vajrapani’s Gompa was only a concrete slab, he says. As the groundskeeper, Ashley is one of the hardworking residents who have transformed a rough redwood hill into what some people call Vajrapani Shambala today. Lama Yeshe lived there before he died, and was cremated there.

Then, Ashley’s passion for writing poetry was held at bay. “In our society poets are not really valued … Poetry is considered a waste of time,” he feels. In fact, poets are society’s guides in reflecting its ups and downs, golden ages, havoc and ruins. And the setting of FPMT centers does not emphasize arts, he says, although the Sixth Dalai Lama was one of the greatest poets in history.

This didn’t keep Ashley away from reconciling his passion for the Dharma. As he approached his fortieth birthday, the poetry gushed out of him, a barraged river vehemently striving to flow. “I felt a strong aquifer running then,” he says.

He doesn’t write Dharma epistles. He is not into converting people. Sometimes there doesn’t even to be a strong link between the Dharma and his poetry, Ashley says. But Dharma pervades his life, especially in his writing about non-killing. In his opinion poetry lacks substance if it doesn’t reverberate a spiritual core.

“A lot of my poetry has to do with pacifism,” he says. He is inspired by Kenneth Patchem, an American pacifist, and Wilfred Owen, a Fabian socialist whose poetry came from the trenches of World War I and is vehemently anti-war. “I feel I sort of carry on in that lane – not going to war,” he says. And he uses more Christian terms and images, rather than Buddhist, because Christianity played a big part in his upbringing.

His poetry doesn’t just accumulate on paper, unheard and unsung. He has found a community of fifteen compulsive poets and an audience in the nearby mountain village Boulder Creek. Sixty people, mainly listeners, meet every month in the Boulder Creek Bistro, a café and pub. The active poets confide in each other and speak their souls.

In the cozy setting of the Bistro with its Native American decoration and a photograph of five children tulkus, including Lama Osel, the poets are in the spotlight on a little rostrum. Some are shy, reading their poetry timidly, others are actors and comedians, unabashedly telling the world of their desires, pain, confusion and insights.

Ashley describes his poetry as disturbed and obtuse, but he is surely an entertainer. No fear comes across when he presents his reading, whether it be dramatic, sarcastic or sincere. He makes eye contact with his audience, and he usually receives thunderous applause when he emerges from his engaged performance.

Poet Jeri Monroe says about Ashley, “He has a way of pulling emotions together and painting a picture that is unique. There is something in his poems for everyone. He puts the words out there and lets people make their own stories.”

Here is one of Ashley’s poems for the mystically inclined:

Elegy upon Finding Pheucticus Melanocephalus

O grosbeak

noble Pheucticus Melanocephalus

Not you too!

I always loved your song’s arrival to our mornings

your golden breast

the way you held your hooded head

as if to keep its knowing eyes from rolling out upon the world you sang to

O grosbeak

the madrigal

of the life in your heard is frozen solid

you fly no more

here your neck twisted

rearranged by the Dark Shadow of that luminous lyre we knew you by

No one can weather Yama’s savage bite

the river of survival is ended

thick blood like gravel at your tongue

how will I tell my daughter you have gone?

you have flown into the Window of Death

you have flown where you saw no wall

yet perceived as solid what had no substance

such are the airs of matter

I loved your song

O Pheucticus Melanocephalus

Noble Winged

Be more careful with your next life