Rashid’s most recent book of poems and drawings reviewed by Chinmaya.
A Master for Life
Verses and drawings of an Osho Lover
by Rashid Maxwell
available directly from the author: rashid (at) rashidmaxwell.com
rashidmaxwell.com
With a long life behind him, living on varied continents, parenting, drawing, painting, writing, gardening, beekeeping… Rashid’s creativity today is still in full flower. In ‘A Master for Life’ Rashid mines his past – impromptu sketches he made of Osho giving discourse over thirty years ago – delivering it to present relevance by associating them with fragments of poetry written during Covid lockdown.
At first glance these poems are a devotee’s expression of love and gratitude for his Master, forced, as he says on one of them, to dig amidst much of the same “quarry of old words” as have so many other of Osho’s disciples. But there are flashes of real originality too: we sannyasins as his living ‘authorized biography’, for instance, I found truly thought-provoking; as did this quirky way of viewing the Master/disciple relationship:
The great cathedral is built
within the heart
where you and i may sit and chat
disturbing other’s
meditation
Osho
To me the real gems in the mine however are those associated with a ‘mission statement’ Rashid included in the potted biography he sent me:
I have noticed that I write now with more and more urgency about the need to change ourselves if we want to change the world. With many beloved grandchildren, I cannot see our suicidal rush to the abyss without doing all I can to sound the alarm.”
One of the poems expresses this.
I suspect my grandchildren
being close to the storms
that threaten our earth
understand you better than i do
Osho
Our extraordinary times feature in many others. Behind the masks we are forced to wear and our social media facades, I’m sure we can all echo such chilling lines as:
Out there fires rage
we face each other with no safety catch…
Or:
Imposter syndrome is the new look…
Rashid re-creates Osho’s responses to such pain from his memories and his long experience as a meditator. They spark out like fireflies from the lines.
…the problem is always this end not yours
Osho
Sometimes i gaze out at this troubled world,
what’s the point i think
you reassure me
that there is no point
Osho
The scythe cuts swathes through
clover grass and wild flowers
i heard you say that
life and death
are one
Osho
But like so many manifestations of Osho’s vision, this book is playful. Sometimes the lines of the little drawings seem to be formed of some cryptic alphabet that I can almost read. And I find myself wishing I could see the lines of the poetry in Rashid’s handwriting, for might they not outline the contours of more portraits? Rashid’s eye sees Osho in the most human of lights, stripped of the glamour of photography. Having experienced myself how overwhelming Osho’s physical presence was, I’m amazed that Rashid was grounded enough to see and portray him as a man. To employ ink to delineate the raising of an eyebrow, or the piercing glance of an eyeball, requires a detachment, a witnessing, of the mesmerizing effect of that glance.
It must have taken guts (or simple honest-to-goodness naiivity) to sketch the Master. And then, as he relates in his introduction, to receive a ‘zen stick’ gracefully from Osho for not doing the job he was supposed to be doing in those moments!
I love the book. I will mine it again and again.
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