BEGINNING OF HIS TRUE CREATIVITY

 
Towards the end of this session Meher Baba gave both Murshida Duce and Brabazon a certain spiritual practice to be performed from 11:30 pm to 12:30 am for nine months and told Brabazon he was to return almost immediately to Australia. This latter directive shocked Brabazon. It was all too much for him to contemplate. How could he now, having found the love of his life and the spiritual Master of his life simply leave them both?

To make matters worse, the reason Meher Baba gave for his decision appeared to be rather abstruse: he wanted Brabazon in Australia when his "Full Free Life" began on 10th July. And in his response to Brabazon's query about his relationship with Sparkie Lukas, Meher Baba only gave the rather indefinite reply, "We will see later".

This was a hard testing on Brabazon's conviction in his Master and something which forced him to dig even more deeply within himself before he could answer, as before, with "Yes". And yet, Brabazon's final and unequivocal acceptance of Meher Baba's directive to immediately return to Australia is not surprising, even though it was the last thing he would consider doing on in own. For in Meher Baba he felt he saw the living Christ and he half expected that he would be required to do no less than to "sell all and follow me"; he just wished it was not so sudden.

To be in Australia by 10th July as Meher Baba requested, Brabazon had to move swiftly. On 13th May, he caught the all night bus to New York; then, with little time to spare, he caught the train to New Orleans which arrived just in time for him to catch the last ship to reach Australia before the July date. Soon after he left Myrtle Beach, Brabazon started to record his feelings and thoughts in a verse and discovered that his writing flowed more easily in a new, more lyrical style.

Significantly, he later described this moment as the beginning of his "true creativity", and the first poem to come out of this new creativity was "Dawn through Sunrise". This poem started out as a single couplet of seventeen syllables which Brabazon wrote between dawn and sunrise after travelling through the night from Myrtle Beach to New York....

"Dawn through to Sunrise" reads like a spontaneous outpouring of deeply felt thought which spills out into an assemblage of images, events, perceptions and interpretive commentary. There is no seemingly logical pattern nor structural form imposed on the work, only line breaks separating contained pieces of expression. What, however, gives the work a sense of unity is its feeling tone and sustained rhapsodic quality. As Brabazon was working on this poem, on the last leg of his journey at sea, he experienced "an almost continuous sort of vision of beauty" of which Sparkie Lukas "was an integral part."

Brabazon described this gratuitous experience as mystical and far greater than anything which he had ever gained from meditation. Its most distinctive quality was Sparkie’s spiritual presence intimately pervading his own being to such an extent that he felt no longing for her physical proximity.