Please Come Home: Poetry to open the heart, nourish the soul and transform the mind

By Guthema Roba

“In the depth of Guthema's words, one indeed finds oneself coming home, to a place of solace, a place of peace, and a place of constant bliss. There is no better alchemy to what ails all of us in this modern world, then to return to the whispers of The Beloved found in Guthema Roba's divine poetry.” —Paul Goldman, author of Journey into Oneness, Wild Joy: Ruminations and the spoken word CD Wild Joy: The Ecstatic Poetry of Paul Goldman

• Language: English
• Publisher: North Star Press of St. Cloud
• Release date: Jun 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9780878398324

Guthema Roba

Guthema Roba currently works for the Hennepin County library. He was born and partly grew up in Ethiopia, East Africa, before he immigrated to the United States.  His book Please Come Home is a collection of  mystical poetry that remind us to live in the present moment. He says life becomes a prayer when fully lived and celebrated each day. Good poetry, he adds, is the one that brings us closer to our heart. He writes poetry on a daily basis and lives in Minneapolis with his wife and daughter. 

Book preview

Service

Introduction

The moment you teach a child the name of a bird, that child will never see that bird.

—Jiddu Krishnamurti

We walk down the street or turn on our TV and see a thousand faces full of suppressed tensions and worries. In the marketplace, at the malls, at work places and schools, there is fear, insecurity and resentment. In Africa, the Middle East, Asia and elsewhere there are cycles of dictatorial regimes, corruption, wars, greed and drug trafficking. Inside each household, there are dysfunctional relationships, domestic violence, addictions, homicides and depression.

An adult’s mind does not like to be in the Now. It chooses to be either in the past or the future. We’re always waiting for something special to happen. We believe we have to acquire something in order to be happy. For instance, we have to get a job or a partner to be happy. While waiting for something to happen, we miss the flow of life because life happens only in this moment.

Early in the mornings, freeways are jammed with people who drive to work they don’t enjoy any more. In many cultures, there is so much fear of aging, death and dying. This is because there is a very strong attachment with the physical world or the form and most humans think they are their body.

The world is in a dream state of consciousness and humans have forgotten who they are and where they come from. There is a great disconnection. In other words, they’ve walked away from what really matters most and by doing so they are not available to life. They’ve torn themselves from nature. They try to solve every problem with the mind that has created it. If we need to describe what the mind is, it simply means the accumulation of stories we have been gathering ever since we were born. Depending on how we were raised, most of us have crammed so many stories while others might have collected less. The more stories you collect, the more conditioned you become. This is what is commonly known as education. Here, we can call it domestication. If you meet a ten-year-old child and ask how he is doing, he will tell you that he is bored. If you want to know why, he would say, life sucks. That’s it! Life sucks. Imagine, he is only ten years old and life has become meaningless for him already. I am in my mid-forties now and I am still madly in love with life. I get up in the mornings and find myself genuinely intoxicated by the beauty