I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
….
the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
– Adrienne Rich
When we respect our blood ancestors and our spiritual ancestors, we feel rooted. If we find ways to cherish and develop our spiritual heritage, we will avoid the kind of alienation that is destroying society, and we will become whole again. … Learning to touch deeply the jewels of our own tradition will allow us to understand and appreciate the values of other traditions, and this will benefit everyone.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
To laugh is to risk appearing the fool.
To weep is to risk appearing sentimental.
To reach out for another is to risk involvement.
To expose feelings is to risk exposing your true self.
To place ideas and dreams before a crowd is to risk being called naive.
To love is to risk not being loved in return.
To live is to risk dying.
To hope is to risk despair.
To try is to risk failure.
But risk must be taken, because the greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing.
The person who risks nothing, does nothing, has
nothing,
is nothing, and becomes nothing.
They may avoid suffering and sorrow, but they
cannot learn, feel, change, grow, love, live.
Chained by their certitude, they are slaves; they have
forfeited their freedom.
Only a person who risks is truely free.
– Janet Rand, Risks
Owing to its self-expanding and self-creating power, a great loving heart transforms this earthly world into one of splendor and mutual fusion…and this is where the Buddha is always abiding.
– D.T. Suzuki
…Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled—
to cast aside the weight of facts
and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.
I want to believe I am looking
into the white fire of a great mystery.
I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing—
that the light is everything—that it is more than the sum
of each flawed blossom rising and falling. And I do.
– Mary Oliver, from the House of Light
One of the obstacles to bodhisattva discipline is an absence of humor.
– Chogyam Trungpa
Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
To make sense is to release the body from the constraints imposed by outworn ways of speaking, and hence to renew and rejuvenate one’s felt awareness of the world. It is to make the senses wake up to where they are.
– David Abram
The more a person knows of himself, the more he will hesitate to define his nature and to assert what he must necessarily feel, and the more he will be astounded at his capacity to feel in unsuspected and unpredictable ways.
– Alan W. Watts, Nature, Man and Woman
Consider that our individuality radically may intersect with that of others as a common soul, that we aren’t as separate as our current philosophy implies.
– Thomas Moore
What is being asked of us is not a little thing. It is not just a new technique or a certain skill we need to learn. It is not an add-on or an adjustment to our way of being: it is a different way of being. It is a revolution in consciousness—more profound in its implications, perhaps, than the one initiated when Copernicus displaced the earth from its position at the center of the heavens; for we are not just accommodating a new piece of knowledge that overturns an old belief system and thereby changes us. The change that is needed is one we have to initiate within ourselves voluntarily: to self-achieve a submission to wholeness that will transform how we live in the world. It will displace the head from its position at the center of our thinking, and attune us to the very intelligence out of which and into which we were born. This journey into wholeness is a revolution that the entire planet is crying out for—and it can only begin with individuals like you making a personal choice.
– Philip Shepherd, a quote from Radical Wholeness
We call it “finding your own true north”– like on a compass. In production-driven societies, we’re tricked into believing that true north is outside of us. So we’re constantly looking outside ourselves to figure out if this is the right job, the right house, the right relationship, the right subject to be studying. But our true north is invariably inside us . . . if we do what we love to do, what we’re inspired to do, what we believe in, it creates an entirely different response.
– Julia Butterfly Hill
When your footsteps and thoughts carry you down the same path your heart and soul are directing you, you will know without a doubt that you are headed in the right direction.
– Molly Friedenfeld
Ken Wilber:
What if we took literally everything that all the various cultures have to tell us about human potential—about spiritual growth, psychological growth, social growth—and put it all on the table?
What if we attempted to find the critically essential keys to human growth, based on the sum total of human knowledge now open to us?
What if we attempted, based on extensive cross-cultural study, to use all of the world’s great traditions to create a composite map, a comprehensive map, an all-inclusive or integral map that included the best elements from all of them?
Welcome to the Integral Approach.
The New Masculine
He cleans up after himself. He cleans up the planet.
He is a role model for young men.
He is rigorously honest and fiercely optimistic.
He holds himself accountable.
He knows what he feels.He knows how to cry and he lets it go.
He knows how to rage without hurting others.
He knows how to fear and how to keep moving.
He seeks self-mastery.
He has let go of childish shame.
He feels guilty when he’s done something wrong.
He is kind to men, kind to women, kind to children.
He teaches others how to be kind.
He says he’s sorry.
He stopped blaming women or his parents or men for his pain years ago.
He stopped letting his defences ruin his relationships.
He stopped letting his penis run his life.
He has enough self-respect to tell the truth.
He creates intimacy and trust with his actions.
He has men that he trusts and that he turns to for support.
He knows how to roll with it.
He knows how to make it happen.
He is disciplined when he needs to be.
He is flexible when he needs to be.
He knows how to listen from the core of his being.
He’s not afraid to get dirty.
He’s ready to confront his own limitations.
He has high expectations for himself and for those he connects with.
He looks for ways to serve others.
He knows he is an individual.
He knows that we are all one.
He knows he is an animal and a part of nature.
He knows his spirit and his connection to something greater.
He knows that the future generations are watching his actions.
He builds communities where people are respected and valued.
He takes responsibility for himself and is also willing to be his brother’s keeper.
He knows his higher purpose.
He loves with fierceness.
He laughs with abandon, because he gets the joke.
This is the Mature Masculine – the New Warrior – The definition of masculinity for the 21st century. By no means is this list complete.
– Boysen Hodgson
The more a person learns wholeheartedly to confront a world and way of living that threatens him with isolation, the more are the depths of the Ground of Being revealed and the possibilities of new life and Becoming opened for him.
– Karlfried Graf Durckheim
America right now is what would happen to Bedford Falls if George Bailey had never been born.
– Frankie Zelnick
Shall we not recover ourselves? Shall we not redeem ourselves to one another? Shall we not restore this world?
Could we not be the generation who did what always should have been done? Who took the hard path so that humanity could be returned to the right path? Shall we not reexamine all that we choose to pursue and reconsider what will actually fulfill us?
The past has been defined by what we have done; while the present and future are decided by what we choose to do.
Shall we believe in what should be and go in search of it? Shall we believe in what needs to be and build it together?
We become more by believing that we can be more. Life becomes better when we are willing to act on the belief that it can be better.
To believe is to reach and reach is what we all must do.
– L.M. Browning
The Dalai Lama says that the world will be saved by Western women. Not any women, perhaps not all women, but Burning Women. Women who have stepped out of silence and into the fullness of their power. Angry women who love the world and her creatures too much to let it be destroyed so thoughtlessly for a moment longer.
Burning Woman is the heart and soul of revolution – inner and outer. She burns for change, she dances in the fire of the old, all the while visioning and weaving the new.
– Lucy H. Pearce, Burning Woman
What is that which can never die? It is that faithful force that is born into us that one that is greater than us that calls new seed to the open and battered and barren places so that we can be resown. It is this force in its insistence in its loyalty to us in its love of us in its most often mysterious ways that is far greater far more majestic and far more ancient than any heretofore ever known.
– Clarissa Pinkola Estes
How curiously one is changed by the addition, even at a distance, of a friend.
– Virginia Woolf
But, of course, to understand people’s changes, you have to love them.
– Pier Paolo Pasolini
It happens all the time in heaven,
And some day It will begin to happen
Again on earth –
That men and women who are married,
And men and men who are Lovers,
And women and women who give each other Light,
Often get down on their knees and while
So tenderly holding their lovers hand, with
Tear-filled eyes will sincerely say, “My dear,
How can I be more loving to you; my darling,
How can I be more kind?”
– Hafez Shirazi
Ladinsky’s translation
We are not as near each other as we would like to imagine. Words create the bridges between us. Without them we would be lost islands. Affection, recognition and understanding travel across these fragile bridges and enable us to discover each other and awaken friendship and intimacy. Words are never just words. The range and depth of a person’s soul is inevitably revealed in the quality of words she uses. When chosen with reverence and care, words not only describe what they say but also suggest what can never be said.
Bill [Stafford] suggests that these things which dwell out of reach, beyond words, are the things that make the soul rich. The inexpressible depth in us is our true treasure. In our endless social chatter and psychological labelling, we frequently cheapen its beauty. We need to learn the art of inner reverence and never force the soul out into the false light of social gratification and expectation. To observe an appropriate silence regarding our interiority means our talk will never be weak. In a culture where there is a morass of second-hand chatter, we need to mind our hearing; otherwise it becomes dull and deaf to the voice of what is real an d beautiful. To practise the discipline of reverence which Bill Stafford recommends means that we remain always secretly ready to receive the words that could illuminate our destiny.
– John O’Donohue, Beauty: The Invisible Embrace
A home is not simply a building; it is the shelter around the intimacy of a life. Coming in from the outside world and its rasp of force and usage, you relax and allow yourself to be who you are. The inner walls of a home are threaded with the textures of one’s soul, a subtle weave of presences. If you could see your home through the lens of the soul, you would be surprised at the beauty concealed in the memory your home holds. When you enter some homes, you sense how the memories have seeped to the surface, infusing the aura of the place and deepening the tone of its presence. Where love has lived, a house still holds the warmth. Even the poorest home feels like a nest if love and tenderness dwell there.
– John O’Donohue
The secret and the sacred are sisters. When the secret is not respected, the sacred vanishes. Consequently, reflection should not shine too severe or aggressive a light on the world of the soul.
– John O’Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom
I am grateful to have a mind that can be changed. I am grateful to have a heart that can break and mend and break again. I am grateful to be growing so quickly each day I look back at yesterday say, “I can’t believe I did that.” I am grateful that I love hard enough to have a life full of grief. I am grateful that I love hard enough to have a life full of joy. I am grateful that my loved ones want me to be kinder than they want me to be cool. I’m grateful to not know if “cool” is still a cool thing to say. I am grateful to finally be learning how to talk sweetly to my most vulnerable self. I am grateful to know that even when the truth isn’t hopeful the telling of it is. I am grateful to be certain everyone in my life is jealous of my dance moves. I am grateful that I always pay attention to what the sky is singing. I am grateful for the poems that never became poems because I was too awed by the moment to sit down and write. I am grateful to know there is still a chance I’ll grow up to be a treehouse builder. I am grateful that I close my eyes when I kiss the same way I close my eyes when I pray. I am grateful to have lived through. I am grateful for you.
– Andrea Gibson
Collins Emeghara
Melody in my heart
You’re the voice
Of a distant drum
Drumming from faraway land….
Reaching my ears
Here in Africa and forcing
My heart to move her hips
To the left and to the right…
Snow girl, you’re
The melody in my heart
The symphony of my soul
And the sweet fragrance of my life…
You’re the voice
Of a distant flute
Crying in the hands
Of a Chicken that lost her chicks…
Blowing for her lost chicks
Blowing to rewake the voice
Of a new generation, in Africa
All over the World…
Wild orchid, you’re
The melody in my heart
The symphony of my soul
The sweet fragrance of my life…
You’re the voice
Of a thousand poet
Reading with a new inspiration
From the stage of Ambrosia at
Midnight, in Valentine’s Eve…
My love, you’re the
Melody in my heart
The symphony of my soul
The sweet fragrance of my life…
And yes
You’re my voice
The voice of a distant poet…
PRAISE SONG
Praise the light of late November,
the thin sunlight that goes deep in the bones.
Praise the crows chattering in the oak trees;
though they are clothed in night, they do not
despair. Praise what little there’s left:
the small boats of milkweed pods, husks, hulls,
shells, the architecture of trees. Praise the meadow
of dried weeds: yarrow, goldenrod, chicory,
the remains of summer. Praise the blue sky
that hasn’t cracked yet. Praise the sun slipping down
behind the beechnuts, praise the quilt of leaves
that covers the grass: Scarlet Oak, Sweet Gum,
Sugar Maple. Though darkness gathers, praise our crazy
fallen world; it’s all we have, and it’s never enough.
– Barbara Crooker
My wish, indeed my continuing passion, would be not to point the finger in judgment but to part a curtain, that invisible shadow that falls between people, the veil of indifference to each other’s presence, each other’s wonder, each other’s human plight.
– Eudora Welty
Digging
Today I think
Only with scents, – scents dead leaves yield,
And bracken, and wild carrot’s seed,
And the square mustard field;
Odours that rise
When the spade wounds the root of tree,
Rose, currant, raspberry, or goutweed,
Rhubarb or celery;
The smoke’s smell, too,
Flowing from where a bonfire burns
The dead, the waste, the dangerous,
And all to sweetness turns.
It is enough
To smell, to crumble the dark earth,
While the robin sings over again
Sad songs of Autumn mirth.
– Edward Thomas
I don’t like work… but I like what is in work – the chance to find yourself. Your own reality – for yourself, not for others – which no other man can ever know.
– Joseph Conrad
The spirit of the valley never dies;
This is called the dark female.
The entry into the dark female
Is called the root of heaven and earth.
Tao Te Ching: Chapter 6
translation by D. C. Lau & Sarah Allan (Ma Wang Tui Manuscripts)
You darkness that I come from,
out of which all things come,
I love you more that all the fires
that fence the world,
for the fire makes a circle of light for everyone,
and then no one outside learns of you,
But the darkness pulls in everything,
shapes and fires, animals and myself.
How easily it gathers them,
powers and people.
It is possible a great energy is moving near us.
I have faith in the night.
– Ranier Marie Rilke
The purpose of life is to contribute in some way to making things better.
– Robert F. Kennedy
Even among those
who think themselves indifferent
toward most things,
it touches the very soul,
this first cool autumn wind.
– Saigyo
The poems felt like they were resuscitating me, making me care more deeply again, more deeply than I had in years, about writing, poetry, literature.
– Ocean Vuong
Would you like to save the world from the degradation and destruction it seems destined for? Then step away from shallow mass movements and quietly go to work on your own self-awareness. If you want to awaken all of humanity, then awaken all of yourself. If you want to eliminate the suffering in the world, then eliminate all that is dark and negative in yourself. Truly, the greatest gift you have to give is that of your own self-transformation.
– Lao Tzu
If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
True spirituality is not a battle; it is the ultimate practice of nonviolence.
– Chogyam Trungpa
We can place ourselves inside of time and culture and be bound by the constricting beliefs surrounding aging, or we can step beyond these boundaries and into a life-energizing matrix of new possibilities. Archetypes, internal allies, spiritual grounding and and a passion for a meaningful life can provide a whole new level of regeneration.
– Jean Houston, Ph.D.
I wish you a kinder sea.
– Emily Dickinson
Poem : you work on it, it works on you.
– Henry Gould
Oh! It is only a novel… only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.
– Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
I decided that the most subversive, revolutionary thing I could do was to show up for my life and not be ashamed.
– Anne Lamott
We are not here on this Earth just for ourselves. The goal of the cosmos is not for 7.5 billion human beings to seek their own private fulfillment, especially not at the expense of the rest of the planet.
Meditation is not supposed to be about “me and my mind.” Yoga is intended for much more than “me and my body” or “me and my chakras.” Good nutrition is not simply about “me and my health.” Religion is not supposed to be concerned with “me and my enlightenment” or “me and my salvation” or “me and my afterlife.”
And we in this convulsing country of ours are DEFINITELY not here to be obsessed with “America First,” as though such a thing were even possible on a continent located on a planet that is spinning through space with trillions of other fellow-creatures.
Rather, our beloved Source wants to experience ecstatic awe, wonder and surprise at the beauty and grandeur of the cosmos through our body, mind, imagination, heart, emotions, soul and spirit. And through our philosophy, theology, poetry, music, art, dance and culture.
Are we up to the task, or will we be up to the task anytime soon?
– Stephen Hatch
To Be of Use
By Marge Pierce
The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half-submerged balls.
I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.
I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.
The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.
What the poet is searching for
is not the fundamental I
but the deep you.
– Antonio Machado
We simmered tea and talked and talked
Coming up with one great line after another.
We hung up a lamp and read old poems.
I only just met you and yet I knew you all my life.
– Hsu Yun (Empty Cloud) (1840 – 1959)
Chinese-born Chan Buddhist master.
The greatest happiness you can have is knowing that you do not necessarily require happiness.
– William Saroyan
She it is that Solomon chose to have instead of light, and above all beauty and health…For all gold in her sight shall be esteemed as a little sand, and silver shall be counted as clay…And her fruit is more precious than all the riches of this world, and all the things that are desired are not to be compared with her…She is a tree of life to them that lay hold on her, and an unfailing light…He who hath found this science, it shall be his rightful food for ever…Such a one is as rich as he that hath a stone from which fire is struck, who can give fire to whom he will as much as he will and when he will without loss to himself.
Be turned to me with all your heart and do not cast me aside because I am black and swarthy, because the sun hath changed my colour and the waters have covered my face…because I stick fast in the mire of the deep and my substance is not disclosed. Wherefore out of the depths have I cried, and from the abyss of the earth with my voice to all you that pass by the way. Attend and see me, if any shall find one like unto me, I will give into his hand the morning star.
– Aurora Consurgens
At the cardiac plexus… there in the center of the breast, we have a new great sun of knowledge and of being… Here I only know the delightful revelation that you are you. The wonder is no longer within me, my own dark, centrifugal exultant self. The wonder is without me. The wonder is outside me… I look with wonder, with tenderness, with joyful yearning towards that which is outside me, beyond me…
– D. H. Lawrence
Whatever it is that poetry asks for, what it needs to survive and to be listened to, I can hear or see none of it without a human pattern, that stain or wear or humor or fear that is not last, that makes things said a hopeful enterprise, a whistling in the seemingly endless dark. Much like the story of the boy walking through the graveyard, who sings because he is afraid, I need a company, even my own voice if there is no one else’s. But how dear to hear another’s! What relief to know that someone is truly there.
– Robert Creeley
A person needs new experiences. They jar something deep inside, allowing you to grow. Without them, it sleeps- seldom to awaken. The sleeper must awaken.
– Frank Herbert
When I began this work, someone asked me, why are you doing this? … the answer came right from my solar plexus: I’m doing this work so that when things fall apart, we will not turn on each other…
– Joanna Macy
People who’ve had any genuine spiritual experience always know that they don’t know. They are utterly humbled before mystery. They are in awe before the abyss of it all, in wonder at eternity and depth, and a Love, which is incomprehensible to the mind.
– Fr. Richard Rohr
The hungers alone must suffice.
– Anna Kamienska, A Nest of Quiet
It’s almost impossible for people to change alone. We need to join with others who will push us in our thinking and challenge us to do things we didn’t believe ourselves capable of.
– Frances Moore Lappé
Einer Hilfe bedarf der Mensch immer.
(The human being always needs a help.)
– F. W. J. Schelling
Community not only creates abundance–community is abundance. If we could learn that equation from the world of nature, the human world might be transformed.
– Parker J. Palmer
Every poem needs something holy to hold it.
– Leah Nielsen
When you attune to nature, you bring yourself close to us.
When you attune to the stars, you bring yourself close to us.
When you attune to joy and wonder, you touch the fabric of our realm. When you touch your own sacredness, you touch the bond we share. Think of us when you do these things, and you may find a bridge opening between us.
– Conversation with the Sidhe, David Spangler
L’imagination . . . se lassera plutôt de concevoir que la nature de fournir.
(The imagination runs dry sooner than nature does.)
– Pascal, Pensées
HEALING: A WHOLE LOTTA LOVE
What if we don’t really grow or transform? What if healing isn’t ridding ourselves, changing ourselves, or shifting ourselves? What if our natural process is to simply ‘come out’ more and more as ourselves- as who we have always been?
In my view, the healing problem arises because much of who we are is invisible to us, unconscious. Given that, what is healing? Coming to know our wholeness, our diversity, our deepest nature and having that witnessed, appreciated, and nourished. I call that love.
– David Bedrick
Imagine you are a photon, a packet of light. You are a tiny blip of energy, hurtling through the universe on your own. But you have a twin, another photon to whom you have been intimately connected since the day you were born. No matter what distance separates you, be it the width of a lab bench or the breadth of the universe, you mirror each other. Whatever happens to your twin instantaneously affects you, and vice versa. You are like the mouse siblings in “An American Tail,” wrenched apart by fate but feeling the same feelings and singing the same song beneath the same glowing moon.
This is quantum entanglement. To non-physicists it sounds about as fantastical as singing mice, and indeed, plenty of physicists have problems with the phenomenon. Albert Einstein, whose own research helped give rise to quantum theory, derisively called the concept “spooky action at a distance.” Quantum entanglement seems to break some of the bedrock rules of standard physics: that nothing can travel faster than light, that objects are only influenced by their immediate surroundings. And scientists still can’t explain how the particles are linked. Is it wormholes? An unknown dimension? The power of love?
– Chicago Tribune
HAIKU
~
A nation in ruins
though nobody sees it yet:
the star-rubble sky
– Clark Strand
HAIKU
~
The cardinal’s song:
too much red for one body,
so it spills over
– Clark Strand
Leave this chanting and singing and telling of beads!
Whom dost thou worship in this lonely dark corner of a temple with doors all shut?
Open thine eyes and see thy God is not before thee!
He is there where the tiller is tilling the hard ground
and where the pathmaker is breaking stones.
He is with them in sun and in shower,
and his garment is covered with dust.
Put off thy holy mantle and even like him come down on the dusty soil!
Deliverance?
Where is this deliverance to be found?
Our master himself has joyfully taken upon him the bonds of creation;
he is bound with us all for ever.
Come out of thy meditations and leave aside thy flowers and incense!
What harm is there if thy clothes become tattered and stained?
Meet him and stand by him in toil and in sweat of thy brow.
– Rabindranath Tagore
listen for the sounds the fields make
the tongues the trees are speaking in
the love the leaves are making with the wind
– Anis Mojgani
In appearance it is the same sky, the same
swaying blue
treetops I noticed
at six months of age, but
these days I get the feeling
I really am seeing them,
lilac-blue treetops,
for the final time;
and have to say their being
there and my own
being perceiving them
here
seems to me now as identically
and inexpressibly strange
as it did then, I suppose,
in my elderly
infancy—I still can’t talk,
I still can’t
tell anyone.
– Franz Wright, The Next Home
I wanted to stay as I was
still as the world is never still,
not in midsummer but the moment before
the first flower forms, the moment
nothing is as yet past—
– Louise Glück
‘Longing,’ says the poet Robert Hass, ‘because desire is full of endless distances.’ Blue is the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in, for the blue world.
– Rebecca Solnit
I’ve always thought a voice might be content
to dwell inside the place it finds itself.
A voice could just belong to where it is,
to how the creek along its down-dipped stones
becomes the only song of answering
a voice might want to offer to this world.
A voice could be that faint, could find small things
like buckeye bits that fell away on moss,
or leaf-stems stitched to dust, or acorn shells.
A voice need not become a haunted thing,
intent on rectifying how it’s been
misunderstood or set aside. A voice
might find its way by being led along—
in hummed belief for being here, then gone.
– Jeff Hardin
Spring, among its other ingenuities, has the power of gathering flowers from our lips, of stealing away our words like windblown seeds.
– Lorenzo Carlucci
The writer is not, is not, your friend.
Do not go where he, where she,
Is trying to lead you.
The water will shift, the shore remain distant.
– Jeff Hardin
I can’t write you unless I am alone. But as for thinking of you, that I can do all day long, & nobody knows.
– Edna St. Vincent Millay
[Aldo] Leopold spoke of having ‘an intense consciousness of land.’ Such consciousness would counter techno-utopianism. In the patches, large and small, of what Arne Naess called free nature, utopia is irrelevant. If you exercise your inborn awareness, you’re in Paradise. And in the places that have been trashed by human purposes, the obvious need is for care and hands-on attention, reclamation and restoration, not sci-fi technology. Land is alive and actual. Cyberspace is notional, no place at all.
– Stephanie Mills
… I wonder
if I will ever find a language
to speak of the things
that haunt me the most.
– Bao Phi
whatever new part of earth you are—am I there?
– Colin Cheney
I guess that’s why I
listen toward the farthest trees as if a prayer
were stirring only I can hear. Perhaps its
single word is mend, a word that all my
other words have felt a kinship with.
Evenings when I sit out back, I think my
thoughts have always been inclining toward
a self whose soul has found a place to be
alone, away from others I don’t trust,
content to watch the falling leaves. Dull
image—perhaps cliché—but I’ll take it
nonetheless. The truth is: here we are
inside these lives we sometimes do not
recognize, these lives we don’t deserve.
So many selves we almost came to be
never came to be. So many words too true
to whisper to ourselves we go on listening
toward. So many bridges never crossed,
others stepped back from. So much I’ll
never understand about the reasons
I survived when others didn’t. Years
ago I found a book, like a gift, fallen
between two shelves. Inside, someone
had penciled, Language isn’t sad but
meaning is. I’ve held those words as
close as any I have known, having felt
a pull toward nothingness, toward lack
of anyone or anything that might repair
my ruined thoughts, and just as often
I have stood in shallow creeks, waiting
on my world to end, assured I have no
place, no name, no face, no words to say
the source of what I’m always reaching
toward. I have followed driftwood,
imagined my own dead self assigned
to stir above the silt. I’ve watched
the motions course along through shadows
soon to reach a bend and carry on unseen.
Still, I have a faith that what is next is what
the story most requires so that the shape
of time allotted, ordained to be, can then
reveal itself. Bend, mend—the echo isn’t
lost on me—and giving in to where I’m
being taken has been the way I’ve come
to know my life, to speak its mysteries.
– Jeff Hardin
A poem from Eleanor Wilner:
Landing
It was a pure white cloud that hung there
in the blue, or a jellyfish on a waveless
sea, suspended high above us; we were
the creatures in the weeds below.
It seemed so effortless in its suspense,
perfectly out of time and out of place
like the ghost of moon in the sky
of a brilliant afternoon.
After a while it seemed to grow, and we
inferred that it was moving, drifting down—
though it seemed weightless, motionless,
one of those things that defy
the ususal forces—gravity, and wind
and the almost imperceptible
pressure of the years. But it was coming down.
The blur of its outline slowly cleared:
it was scalloped at the lower edge, like a shell
or a child’s drawing of a flower, detached
and floating, beauty simplified. That’s when
we saw it had a man attached, suspended
from the center of the flower, a kind of human
stamen or a stem. We thought it was
a god, or heavenly seed, sent
to germinate the earth
with a gentler, nobler breed. It might be
someone with sunlit eyes and mind of dawn.
We thought of falling to our knees.
So you can guess
the way we might have felt
when it landed in our field
with the hard thud of solid flesh
and the terrible flutter of the collapsing
lung of silk. He smelled of old sweat, his
uniform was torn, and he was tangled
in the ropes, hopelessly harnessed
to the white mirage that brought him down.
He had a wound in his chest, a red
flower that took its color from his heart.
We buried him that very day, just as he came
to us, in a uniform of soft brown
with an eagle embroidered on the sleeve,
its body made of careful gray stitches,
its eye a knot of gold. The motto
underneath had almost worn away. For days,
watching from our caves, we saw
the huge white shape of silk shifting
in the weeds, like a pale moon
when the wind filled it, stranded,
searching in the aimless way
of unmoored things
for whatever human ballast gave
direction to their endless drift.
TURN THE KEY AND ENTER
Had you but the courage to acknowledge the haunted inner room, turn the key and enter, you would encounter nothing strange or sinister there. You would meet some vital self of yours that you had banished during a time of pain or difficulty. Sometimes, when life squeezes you into lonely crevices, you may have to decide between survival and breaking apart. The banished self from an earlier time of life remains within you waiting to be released and integrated. The soul has its own logic of loyalty and concealment. Ironically, it is usually in the most awkward rooms that the special blessings and healing are locked away.
– John O’Donohue
Every crisis contains with it the seeds for transformation and growth.
– Jodie Gale
The more present we are to everything on our plate, the more we learn to digest and assimilate all the moments and magic and opportunities that life gives us each day. We become “full” on life.
– Marc David
as many tongues
bring chaos
the wings of peace
reach shyly for
the night sky
– Frank Watson
The Sum Of It Squared
To discover the thing you’re brilliant at
you first have to endure discovering all of the things you’re average at
in discovering this
you will discover something about yourself
not all of it will be good
but some of it will be wonderful
I can promise no more than some of it
because there will be a contrast
some of it will be difficult
you will not be prepared for some of it
there will be lessons
both sharp and unforgiving
letter grades
will become the promises of those
upon whom you cannot rely
meaningless
you will not receive an F
at falling in love
though you yet may fail
at loving the one you fall for
you will not receive an A+ at doubting yourself
though you will doubt yourself greatly
the tests you will come to face
will pit you against needles of terrible consequence
the night sky will not blaze with the light of gold stars for your achievements
you will be awarded nothing for your survival
pass fail will depend on how you view the world
if money is everything to you
but you have only a little
you may come to regard your life as a failure
but wealth comes in different forms
the form it becomes for you
will depend on what you value
if you prize knowledge
but have only a library card
you will be rich in a different way
your treasures will be dug
from pages of thought
chapters of imagination
wisdom
illumination
will open to you like a friend
curiosity will become a trail
you follow deeper into yourself
and the world
your mind is an open hand
ready to grasp whatever proficiency you reach for
you are free to pursue whatever knowledge you wish
if an answer exists
it will be yours to find
important to note
there will not always be answers
there will be times when confusion falls all around you
descending in slow motion like shattered glass
raining wounds into your confidence
you may at times
feel abandoned by your own instincts
the needle of your moral compass
spinning directionless
as the polarities of joy and despair
change their minds about beliefs once held firm
some of your questions
will move you beyond the dimensions
or true or false
true
you will have multiple choices
false
every choice you make will lead to the doorstep
of the outcome you desire
there will not be a teachers copy
of the book of life
no secret chapter at the back
indexing solutions to the problems you face
yet
there will be rewards
unexpected and dazzling
in the times most troubling to you
laughter will become a fortune
you pull from your own shadow
like candlelight from a womb of dark anguish
friendship
will become a jewel
sparkling against the intolerable might of isolation
a shining reminder
that you need never build walls
to keep trust at bay
some of it will be brilliant
some of it will spill from street lamps at night
as if weeping an incandescence
some of it will pool at your feet into a reservoir of valour meant to rescue you from
the inevitable eclipses of regret
there will be regret
you will hurt others
wether by accident or act of will
your simply being
will cause pain
you will not be able to mend all of the scars you birth
you may not care
but be cognizant
that while the present may never say it to your face
history will not shy to say it behind your back
you are
in the end
accountable for what you create
in composing fear
you will sculpt hate
in forging inspiration
you will author hope
each choice will present you with consequence or reward
from this point on
the most important questions you will be asked
are the questions you ask yourself
your education
begins with deciding what you wish to discover
in discovering this
you will discover something about yourself
not all of it will be good
there will be days of empty
that march through you like soldiers of diffidence
cheering on the surrender of your gallantry
the glory of this pain will exist in the fact that it is temporary
that whatever sorrow is aching to receive you
I promise you no more than some of it
some of it too
will be wonderful.
– Shane Koyczan
There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.
– The Diary of Anaïs Nin
The classic statement is from the choral ode on human beings in Sophocles’ Antigone:
There are many strange and wonderful things, but nothing more strangely wonderful than man. He moves across the white-capped ocean seas blasted by winter storms, carving his way under the surging waves engulfing him.
(lines 334– 37; Ian Johnston, trans.)
Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst Das Rettende auch.
“But where danger is, grows / The saving power also.” He could have been thinking of fire. Some lines from Delmore Schwartz take us out:
Calmly We Walk through This April’s Day
BY DELMORE SCHWARTZ
Calmly we walk through this April’s day,
Metropolitan poetry here and there,
In the park sit pauper and rentier,
The screaming children, the motor-car
Fugitive about us, running away,
Between the worker and the millionaire
Number provides all distances,
It is Nineteen Thirty-Seven now,
Many great dears are taken away,
What will become of you and me
(This is the school in which we learn …)
Besides the photo and the memory?
(… that time is the fire in which we burn.)
(This is the school in which we learn …)
What is the self amid this blaze?
What am I now that I was then
Which I shall suffer and act again,
The theodicy I wrote in my high school days
Restored all life from infancy,
The children shouting are bright as they run
(This is the school in which they learn …)
Ravished entirely in their passing play!
(… that time is the fire in which they burn.)
Avid its rush, that reeling blaze!
Where is my father and Eleanor?
Not where are they now, dead seven years,
But what they were then?
No more? No more?
From Nineteen-Fourteen to the present day,
Bert Spira and Rhoda consume, consume
Not where they are now (where are they now?)
But what they were then, both beautiful;
Each minute bursts in the burning room,
The great globe reels in the solar fire,
Spinning the trivial and unique away.
(How all things flash! How all things flare!)
What am I now that I was then?
May memory restore again and again
The smallest color of the smallest day:
Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn.
– John Durham Peters
The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media
. . . whooping and stomping as sane people ought to do when they encounter a thing so miraculous as water.
– Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
Radio
Like a fish in water,
I live in music.
(Saint Saëns)
Music comes on with the ignition,
bursts in on my days as I drive
between house and office,
office and meeting,
and like Escher’s fish in the stream
or his birds in the air,
background becomes foreground,
and foreground background,
and my element of papers
turns to rippling staves.
– Meg Bateman, Transparencies
…’Slow’ and ‘down’ are modes of the soul; they are connective modes, ways of keeping connected to oneself and to one’s environment. ‘Slowing downwards’ refers to more than simply moving slowly, it means growing down towards the roots of one’s being. Instead of outward growth and upward climb, life at times must turn inward and downward in order to grow in other ways. There is a shift to the vertical down that re-turns us to root memories, root metaphors, and timeless things that shape our lives from within. Slowing downwards creates opportunities to dwell more deeply in one’s life, for the home we are looking for in this world is within us all along. The lost home that we are seeking is ourselves; it is the story we carry within our soul.
– Michael Meade
You’re afraid of changing.
Change tenderly calls for you to open
the places within that have been guarded
with a warrior’s vigilance for decades.
Change beckons you to come forward and
view the inner landscapes that have been
shrouded in mystery for years.
Change won’t offer you promises or
guarantees. But, as the rest of the world
moves along, the pages turn and others go
forth all around, change whispers,
I am still here and I have not forgotten you.
It is not too late to embrace change.
– Susan Frybort, Open Passages
No matter how many enemies that one meets, no matter what they do, no matter who they are, not one of them exists without being dependent upon the internal enemy. For as long as there is grasping at ‘self’, there will always be ‘other’. The moment that the mind is rid of this, all enemies, both internal and external, will disappear.
– Chamtrul Rinpoche
The humanism bypass. I did it for years. I saw glimpses of someone’s potential, their beautiful soul, their loving heart, and told myself that this was who they… truly were, ignoring all the rest. But the rest was what destroyed. The rest is where they lived most of the time. The rest was no illusion- it was them, too. This self-destructive pattern was birthed in two places: (1) my deep desire to see the best in my difficult parents. Not for them, but for me. I needed to believe that there was something kind and caring living inside of them; (2) a misplaced projection from my own self-concept work. I held the belief in my own potential, as a way of overcoming the shame I carried. But I made the mistake of assuming that everyone else was just as eager to find their light. Of course we all have glowing potential. At the core, we are all magnificent beings with profound capacities. But how many of us fully actualize it? At this stage of human development, not so many. The trick is to hold the space for two things at once- a deep belief in everyone’s possibilities, and a deep regard for your own well-being. It’s okay to pray for everyone’s liberation without joining them in prison. Pray from outside the prison walls, while taking exquisite care of yourself. It’s okay- you can’t do the work for them anyway. Boundaries, boundaries, boundaries… don’t leave home without them.
– Jeff Brown
The peace of Nature gets into your heart ‘ere you are aware, without effort.
– John Muir
Today: Blessing
by Irene Blair Honeycutt
May time grant you the lasting memory of the summer night
on Jonas Ridge when we were walking the dogs, late—
the white rail fence, our guide.
When we turned back toward the cabin, darkness pressed
against our faces
and a host of fireflies flashed in the mist
settling on the fields,
blinking green from another realm,
lighting the divide between road and weeds.
The dogs looked up.
Frenzied katydids took a rest.
Following the tiny globes, we felt our way
to the gravel hill that sloped
toward the yellow glow
of lamplight from the cabin window.
…We are a small earth. It’s no
simple thing. Eventually
we will be dust together; can be used to make a house, to stop
a flood or grow food
for those who will never remember who we were, or know
that we loved fiercely.
Laughter and sadness eventually become the same song turning us
toward the nearest star —
a star constructed of eternity and elements of dust barely visible
in the twilight as you travel
east. I run with the blue horses of electricity who surround
the heart
and imagine a promise made when no promise was possible.
– Joy Harjo
Our modern society creates so many young people without roots. They are uprooted from their families and their society; they wander around, not quite human beings, because they do not have roots.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
I learned that hearts, like flowers, cannot be rudely handled, but must open naturally…
– Louisa May Alcott
One would never think of removing a single dead limb or log from these woods, such is the sense of fitness and completeness. In contemplating some lovely grove, I have wondered how if this dead stump or white mast were removed, would it be bettered. But I never could see room for even such paltry improvement. See the fineness of finish, how each object catches the light. And so, when we walk the aisle-like defiles of the woods over ridges, through meadows, and still, cool glens, we find each in perfect beauty, as if God had everywhere done His best in putting it in order that very day.
– John Muir
Around us, life bursts forth with miracles—a glass of water, a ray of sunshine, a leaf, a caterpillar, a flower, laughter, raindrops. If you live in awareness, it is easy to see miracles everywhere…
– Thich Nhat Hanh
…As if your place in the world mattered
and the world could
neither speak nor hear the fullness of
its own bitter and beautiful cry
without the deep well
of your body resonating in the echo.
Knowing that it takes only
that one, terrible
word to make the circle complete,
revelation must be terrible
knowing you can
never hide your voice again.
– David Whyte
Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to light, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us in the act of sickness, how we go down into the pit of death a…nd feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads and wake thinking to find ourselves in the presence of the angels and the harpers when we have a tooth out and come to the surface in the dentist’s arm chair and confuse his ‘Rinse the mouth—rinse the mouth’ with the greeting of the Deity stooping from the floor of Heaven to welcome us—when we think of this and infinitely more, as we are so frequently forced to think of it, it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love, battle, and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.
– Virginia Woolf
THE HEALTH OF US
– Claudia Rankine, 2009
We heard health care and we thought public option
we thought reaching across the street across the lines
across the aisle was the manifestation of not a red state
not a blue state but these united states we thought
we could be sure of ourselves in this one way sure
of our human element our basic decency
and if justice was how love showed itself in public then love
was defined by access to care when someone anyone
thought that cough that burned the chest
was probably nothing but who knew that fever
after three days that inability to breathe to sleep
to wake in justice in love we thought
we were ready to be just as good to be better
and despite all the ways we exist alone no one
would be on their own we were ready to take a stab
at a kind of human kind of union we were ready to check-up
to look after in this one way we were ready
to care for each other we were ready to see
our range of possibilities as a precious commodity
to know every other as another to live in the width
of our being and we weren’t ignorant or stupid or naïve
or idealists or socialists or communists or Canadians
we understood the private options would still keep us
alive longer we understood the private options
would treat the disease not the symptoms
the private options meant access to specialists
to privacy to elective procedures to a team of doctors
to radiology imaging to brand-name drugs we understood
the impossibility of real equality but this single shift
toward a national community we thought
despite being founded on genocide and sustained by slavery
in God’s country we thought we were ready
to see sanity inside the humanity we thought
the improbability of the face on capitol hill meant possibility.
At North Farm
by John Ashbery
Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you,
At incredible speed, traveling day and night,
Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents, through narrow passes.
But will he know where to find you,
Recognize you when he sees you,
Give you the thing he has for you?
Hardly anything grows here,
Yet the granaries are bursting with meal,
The sacks of meal piled to the rafters.
The streams run with sweetness, fattening fish;
Birds darken the sky. Is it enough
That the dish of milk is set out at night,
That we think of him sometimes,
Sometimes and always, with mixed feelings?
what really matters, whether or not we adopt a particular [belief system], is to keep alive the questions that life presents to us from moment to moment—that the very source of spirituality does not lay in having the right answers, but in being able to keep alive the most genuine questions.
– Stephen Batchelor recorded in ‘Buddhism Without Beliefs’
and in the face of the abuse and the treachery of many who utter some of the most beautiful words in the language, i still choose to retain the word god. i long to experience that which those who have uttered this word, and still do, have seen, or heard, or felt, or touched, or did, that only this one splendid word, “god”, could possibly describe. they knew that any other word will be in vain. this i know: we experience the truth of the word in the embrace of the neighbor. this we must do: reclaim the word god and protect it and defend it. how do we protect and defend the word god? the only way that god herself can be revealed: with our deeds of compassion.
– hune margulies
The soul can become a reality again only when each of us has the courage to take it as the first reality in our own lives, to stand for it and not just “believe” in it.
– James Hillman
There are so many unsung heroines and heroes at this broken moment in our collective story, so many courageous persons who, unbeknownst to themselves, are holding together the world by their resolute love or contagious joy. Although I do not know your names, I can feel you out there.
– David Abram
THE ARRIVAL OF THE PAST
You wake wanting the dream
you left behind in sleep,
water washing through everything,
clearing away sediment
of years, uncovering the lost
and forgotten. You hear the sun
breaking on cold grass,
on eaves, on stone steps
outside. You see light
igniting sparks of dust
in the air. You feel for the first
time in years the world
electrified with morning.
You know something has changed
in the night, something you thought
gone from the world has come back:
shooting stars in the pasture,
sleeping beneath a field
of daisies, wisteria climbing
over fences, houses, trees.
This is a place that smells
like childhood and old age.
It is a limb you swung from,
a field you go back to.
It is a part of whatever you do.
– Scott Owens
The happiest day I ever had was any day when I woke in the morning when I was a boy and I did not have to go to school or to work. In the morning I was always hungry when I woke and I could smell the dew in the grass and hear the wind in the high branches of the hemlock trees, if there was a wind, and if there was no wind I could hear the quietness of the forest and the calmness of the lake and I would listen for the first noises of morning. Sometimes the first noise would be a kingfisher flying over the water that was so calm it mirrored his reflection and he made a clattering cry as he flew. Sometimes it would be a squirrel chittering in one of the trees outside the house, his tail jerking each time he made a noise. Often it would be the plover calling on the hillside. But whenever I woke and heard the first morning noises and felt hungry and knew I would not have to go to school nor have to work, I was happier than I have ever been.
– Ernest Hemingway
PRELUDE
Waking up is a parachute jump from dreams.
Free of the suffocating turbulence the traveler
sinks toward the green zone of morning.
Things flare up. From the viewpoint of the quivering lark
he is aware of the huge root systems of the trees,
their swaying underground lamps. But above ground
there’s greenery – a tropical flood of it – with
lifted arms, listening
to the beat of an invisible pump. And he
sinks toward summer, is lowered
in it’s dazzling crater, down
through shafts of green damp ages
trembling under the sun’s turbine. Then it’s checked,
this straight-down journey through the moment, and the wings spread
to the osprey’s repose above rushing waters.
The bronze-age trumpet’s
outlawed note
hovers above the bottomless depths.
In day’s first hours consciousness can grasp the world
as the hand grips a sun-warmed stone.
The traveler is standing under a tree. After
the crash through death’s turbulence, shall
a great light unfold above his head?
– Tomas Tranströmer
Long, long ago, before I was a tormented artist, afflicted with longing yet incapable of forming durable attachments, long before this, I was a glorious ruler uniting all of a divided country – so I was told by the fortune-teller who examined my palm. Great things, she said, are ahead of you, or perhaps behind you; it is difficult to be sure. And yet, she added, what is the difference? Right now you are a child holding hands with a fortune-teller. All the rest is hypothesis and dream.
– Louise Glück
I step out and suddenly notice this.
Summer arrives, has arrived, is arriving.
Birds grow less than leaves although they cheep, dip, arc, a call across the tall fence from an invisible neighbor to his child is heard right down to the secret mood and the child also hears.
One hears in the silence that follows the great desire for approval and love which summer holds aloft, all damp leeched from it like a thing floating out on a frail but perfect twig end.
Light seeming to darken in it yet glow.
Please, it says, but not with the eager and need of spring.
Come what may, says summer, smack in the middle I will stand and breathe, the future is a super fluidity I do not taste, no, there is no numbering here, it is a gorgeous swelling, no emotion, as in this love is no emotions, no, also no memory. We have it all now and all there ever was is us now.
– Jorie Graham
The individual is capable of both great compassion and great indifference. We have it within our means to nourish the former and outgrow the latter.
– Norman Cousins
I don’t know why I started writing. I don’t know why anybody does it. Maybe they’re bored, or failures at something else.
– Cormac McCarthy
I know those habits that can ruin your life
Still send their invitations.
– Hafiz
I never tell [students] to try to perfect something because the word ‘perfect,’ like the word ‘gift,’ is a very tricky word, and we don’t really know what those words mean. Shakespeare’s not perfect, and James Joyce is not perfect. So the idea is to have energy and momentum and originality, and a verve and a voice that’s original that people are interested in. Doesn’t have to be perfect. In fact, nobody wants perfection. I think it was Sylvia Plath [who said] perfection has no children.
– Joyce Carol Oates
Islander I brought you here to speak a language you have little care for, to play the pipes, perhaps, or at least to sing, but it is rock you listened to back and forth from school. As you leave I see you belong here in ways I hadn’t thought of: your loyalty to your friends, your inability to sneer or boast, and now your tears, and I am proud.
– Meg Bateman, Transparencies
Be gentle to all, and stern with yourself.
* …
Untilled soil, however fertile it may be, will bear thistles and thorns; and so it is with man’s mind.
*
It is foolish to think that we will enter heaven without entering into ourselves.
*
More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.
*
The closer one approaches to God, the simpler one becomes.
– St Teresa of Avila
The Buddha’s nirvana is not a drive toward death or disintegration as Freud naively assumed; it is an ability to accept death and disintegration without falling apart; without twisting, distorting, or tormenting the mind in response.
– Mark Epstein, M.D.
What is the relation of [contemplation] to action? Simply this. He who attempts to act and do things for others or for the world without deepening his own self-understanding, freedom, integrity, and capacity to love, will not have anything to give others. He will communicate to them nothing but the contagion of his own obsessions, his aggressiveness, his ego-centered ambitions, his delusions about ends and means, his doctrinaire prejudices and ideas. There is nothing more tragic in the modern world than the misuse of power and action.
– THOMAS MERTON
Music, feelings of happiness, mythology, faces worn by time, certain twilights and certain places, want to tell us something, or they told us something that we should not have missed, or they are about to tell us something; this imminence of a revelation that is not produced is, perhaps, ‘the aesthetic event’. …
– Jorge Luis Borges
As a single footstep will not make a Path on the Earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.
– Henry David Thoreau
Sunday Morning Early
by David Romtvedt
My daughter and I paddle red kayaks
across the lake. Pulling hard,…
we slip through the water.
Far from either shore,
my daughter is a young woman
and suddenly everything is a metaphor
for how short a time we are granted:
the red boats on the blue black water,
the russet and gold of late summer’s grasses,
the empty sky. We stop and listen to the stillness.
I say, “It’s Sunday, and here we are
in the church of the out of doors,”
then wish I’d kept quiet. That’s the trick in life—
learning to leave well enough alone.
Our boats drift to where the chirring
of grasshoppers reaches us from the rocky hills.
A clap of thunder. I want to say something truer
than I love you. I want my daughter to know that,
through her, I live a life that was closed to me.
I paddle up, lean out, and touch her hand.
I start to speak then stop.
Responsibility to yourself means that you don’t fall for shallow and easy solutions–predigested books and ideas…marrying early as an escape from real decisions, getting pregnant as an evasion of already existing problems. It means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short…and this, in turn, means resisting the forces in society which say that women should be nice, play safe, have low professional expectations, drown in love and forget about work, live t…hrough others, and stay in the places assigned to us. It means that we insist on a life of meaningful work, insist that work be as meaningful as love and friendship in our lives. It means, therefore, the courage to be “different”…The difference between a life lived actively, and a life of passive drifting and dispersal of energies, is an immense difference. Once we begin to feel committed to our lives, responsible to ourselves, we can never again be satisfied with the old, passive way.
– Adrienne Rich
If you want to know about reincarnation, start by trying to rebirth yourself …
It only takes a moment for metabolism to rearrange itself in response to the thoughts and feelings that inhabit our inner world.
– Marc David
THE HEALTH OF US
– Claudia Rankine, 2009
We heard health care and we thought public option
we thought reaching across the street across the lines…
across the aisle was the manifestation of not a red state
not a blue state but these united states we thought
we could be sure of ourselves in this one way sure
of our human element our basic decency
and if justice was how love showed itself in public then love
was defined by access to care when someone anyone
thought that cough that burned the chest
was probably nothing but who knew that fever
after three days that inability to breathe to sleep
to wake in justice in love we thought
we were ready to be just as good to be better
and despite all the ways we exist alone no one
would be on their own we were ready to take a stab
at a kind of human kind of union we were ready to check-up
to look after in this one way we were ready
to care for each other we were ready to see
our range of possibilities as a precious commodity
to know every other as another to live in the width
of our being and we weren’t ignorant or stupid or naïve
or idealists or socialists or communists or Canadians
we understood the private options would still keep us
alive longer we understood the private options
would treat the disease not the symptoms
the private options meant access to specialists
to privacy to elective procedures to a team of doctors
to radiology imaging to brand-name drugs we understood
the impossibility of real equality but this single shift
toward a national community we thought
despite being founded on genocide and sustained by slavery
in God’s country we thought we were ready
to see sanity inside the humanity we thought
the improbability of the face on capitol hill meant possibility.
AMERICA BEREFT
Oh America
have you buried your true longing
beside Native ancestors…
and broken black slave bodies?
Oh America
has your thirst for the mall
blinded you
to the hunger for soul?
Oh America
has positivity and light
so enchanted you
that you no longer see the treasures below
in the shadow of your exceptionalism?
Oh America
let go of your ambitions today
sit beside the gravestone of your dreams
and grieve.
– David Bedrick
Nothing happens until the pain of remaining the same outweighs the pain of change.’
– Arthur Burt
Respect builds trust, healthy empathy, and moral character; it lends dignity to our human relationships and our relationship with our earth.
– Roshi Joan Halifax
A TRUE TEACHER
If you have made all I have given you your own so that no trace of me is left in them, then you have understood. And I can be silent again, knowing I have done my part.
– from a letter to Lizelle Reymond, author of “To Live Within,” from her teacher Sri Anirvan.
Please be careful in the future to pay attention. Karma can be very subtle and tricky. We might think that something is no big deal, but it may turn out to have… serious consequences. So pay good attention to the karmic process. This is what every practitioner needs to pay attention to — even those with the highest realization.
– Dudjom Rinpoche
The Eros of Thought
Your mind is the double mirror of the outer world and of your inner world. It is always actively making pictures of things. If you lost your mind, you would lose your world as well. Your mind is so precious and vulnerable precisely because it holds your world. Thoughts are the furniture of the mind. They are the echoes and pictures that hold your world together. This is the fascinating adventure of perception. When you become aware of your thoughts and your particular style of thinking, you begin to see why your world is shaped the way it is. It is an exciting and frightening moment to realize your responsibility for your own thoughts. Then you know that you also have the freedom to think differently. Rather than having to travel always along a predetermined track of thought, you now begin to realize the excitement of thinking in new directions and in different rhythms. You see that thinking has something eternal in it. In the Western tradition, thought has been understood as the place within the human person where we are most intimately connected with divinity. Thought is the place of revelation. The dance of thoughts is endless. In his essay on John Donne, T. S. Eliot suggests that a thought to him was an experience as immediate as the scent of a flower.
Thought is a profound form of longing. Much of the thought that cripples us is dried out, dead thought. There is no warmth of longing alive in it. Thought that loses touch with feeling is lethal. This separation is the fracture from which fascism and holocaust emerge. Knowledge is intimacy. This is most evident in the activity of friendship. When the longing awakens between you and a stranger, you want to know that person—to come close. Closeness without knowing can be either a fascination and reverence for mystery or the prostitution of longing. Spiritual longing is what first draws you close to a friend. This desire refines and deepens itself in coming to know him or her. Friendship is one of the most beautiful places in which longing reaches initial fulfillment and is then further deepened, refined, and transfigured. You can also see the longing of thought in the fascination of ideas. When you find yourself in a cul-de-sac in your life and you feel lost and trapped, a new insight or awareness can come to you, enabling you to free yourself.
– John O’Donohue, Echoes of Eternity
Questions are the piety of thought.
– Heidegger
be a scar. do not be ashamed of living through something.
– Nayyirah Waheed
Be a brilliant light,
Even in the darkest of night.
Dazzle like a firefly,
Or sprinkle fairy dust……
Either way, there will be light to trust.
Shine on the earth all around,
And always make a joyful sound.
Believe in peace and love,
So The Now will be like Heaven above.
Honor and trust beautiful life flow,
To make the path forward glow.
Forget not lessons from the past,
And cherish every day until the last.
– Sarah Melby
The individual is capable of both great compassion and great indifference. We have it within our means to nourish the former and outgrow the latter.
– Norman Cousins
Know the ways of the ones who take care of you, so that you may take care of them.
-Introduce yourself. Be accountable as the one who comes asking for life. Ask permission before taking. Abide by the answer.
-Never take the first. Never take the last. Take only what you need.
-Take only that which is given.
-Never take more than half. Leave some for others. Harvest in a way that minimizes harm.
-Use it respectfully. Never waste what you have taken.
-Share.
-Give thanks for what you have been given.
-Give a gift, in reciprocity for what you have taken.
-Sustain the ones who sustain you and the earth will last forever.
– Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass
The Sanctimonious Poets
I’m sick of you hypocrites babbling about gods!
Rationality is what you have, you don’t believe
In Helios, nor the sea being, nor the thunder being;
And the earth is a corpse, so why thank her?
As for you gods, be calm! You are decorations in their poems,
Even though the energy has drained out of you names.
And, Mother of Nature, if a word with immense
energy is needed, people remember yours.
– Friedrich Holderlin
translated by Robert Bly
The point of slowing downwards is stopping in time to catch one’s own rhythm in order to change life from within. Only by stopping time can we find that which is timeless and enduring and able to help us renew our lives and, in time, help the world turn around as well. Whether the issue is a problem in one’s own life or the course of life itself, in order to stop things in time, to make meaningful changes, we must stop time itself.
– Michael Meade
We need the other half of the world, the world of the shadow, the inside of things.
– C. G. Jung, Dream Analysis
I thought my friends were damn fools, because they didn’t know any better way of conducting their lives. Still they conformed better than I to a code. I wanted to conform but I couldn’t so I wrote my poetry.
– William Carlos Williams
We need to strengthen the conviction that we are one single human family. There are no frontiers or barriers, political or social, behind which we can hide, still less is there room for the globalization of indifference.
– Pope Francis
The fact that the word ‘revolution’ originally meant restoration is more than a mere oddity of semantics.
– Hannah Arendt
Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool. To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen. To be led by a liar is to ask to be lied to. To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.
– Octavia E. Butler
Foolish, selfish people are always thinking of themselves and the result is always negative. Wise persons think of others, helping them as much as they can, and the result is happiness. Love and compassion are beneficial both for you and others. Through your kindness to others, your mind and heart will open to peace.
– Dalai Lama
A wise
and wisdom-filled evening to you!
I not only look up to
the Elders and Mentors
I have around me in my life,
I look over to them,
around them,
down to them,
and equally parallel to them.
What makes a mentor
a mentor?
Age, and wisdom, and experience
certainly make for a good mentor.
But when I ask a child
how and why they can be
so full of exorbitant energy
and happiness,
and they give to me
their reasoning,
does that make them my mentor
in that moment?
When I ask my partner
how it is they know how to love
or cook so well,
and they explain to me their answer,
does that make them my mentor
in that moment?
When I ask of my roommate
for advice on a subject
that he happens to have
a lot more knowledge and education on,
regardless of him being younger than me,
does that make him my mentor
in that moment?
And when my neighbor
who is older than me
asks me for consultation
on a remodel project
that he is undertaking on his own,
and since construction is my business
and I happen to know
more about remodeling than he does,
does that make me his mentor
in that moment?
I say the answer
to all of those questions
is YES.
We all,
regardless of age or gender,
have the capacity to be mentors
at any given time
and to any potential person.
Mentorship, in my humble opinion,
is ignited by the person
who seeks to have the knowledge
which is already in possession
by the person being asked.
And a mentor is a person,
any person,
who happens to have the knowledge
and experience sought after,
but who is willing to share it.
Every single one of us
has the capacity and potential
to be a mentor
at any given moment.
And when we ask of others,
we are asking for mentorship.
We are all mentors,
and we are all mentored.
When needed,
may we all be humble
and vulnerable enough
to ask for mentorship.
And when given the opportunity,
may we all be humble
and loving enough
to be a mentor.
It may be a give and take world,
but it is also
a give and ask world.
In other words,
let us love and be loved,
and let us all be in realization
of our need for each other.
Wild be. 🍁
– Leaf Running-Rabbit
Orphans are not people who have no parents: they are people who don’t know their parents, who cannot go to them. Ours is a culture built upon the ruthless foundation of mass migration, but it is more so now a culture of people unable to say who their people are. In that way we are, relentlessly, orphans. Being an orphan culture does not mean that we have no wisdom. But wisdom is being confused in our time with information. Wisdom is an achievement, hard earned and faithfully paid for; it’s not a possession….An orphan wisdom might be the only culture-making thing we can rightly, honourably, or faithfully claim. There is immense grief in knowing this well and going towards it anyway. That grief could be our way of working now, our labour. It could be our beauty, too.
– Stephen Jenkinson, Orphan Wisdom
To search for small things worn by the deep is to be a poet.
– Mark Nepo, The Way Under the Way
Most of us achieve only at rare moments a clear realization of the fact that they have never tasted the fulfillment of existence, that their life does not participate in true, fulfilled existence, that, as it were, it passes true existence by. We nevertheless feel the deficiency at every moment, and in some measure try to find—somewhere—what we are seeking. Somewhere, in some province of the world or of the mind, except (accept? np) where we stand, where we have been set—but it is there and nowhere else that the treasure can be found. The environment which I feel to be the natural one, the situation which has been assigned to me as my fate, the things that happen to me day after day—these contain my essential task and such fulfillment of existence as is open to me. It is said of a certain Talmudic master that the paths of heaven were as bright to him as the streets of his native town. Hasidism inverts the order: It is a greater thing if the streets of a man’s native town are as bright to him as the paths of heaven. For it is here, where we stand, that we should try to make shine the light of the hidden divine life.
– Martin Buber
Unless it is stopped, the dominant culture will kill everything on the planet, or at least everything it can.
Each holocaust is unique. The destruction of the European Jewry did not look like the destruction of the American Indians. It could not, because the technologies involved were not the same, the targets were not the same, and the perpetrators were not the same. They shared motivations and certain aspects of their socialization, to be sure, but they were not the same. Similarly, the slaughter of Armenians (and Kurds) by Turks did not (and does not) look like the slaughter of Vietnamese by Americans. And just as similarly, the holocausts of the twenty-first century will not and do not already look like the great holocausts of the twentieth. They cannot, because this society has progressed.
And every holocaust looks different depending on the class to which the
observer belongs. The Holocaust looked far different to high ranking Nazi officials and to executives of large corporations—both of whose primary social concerns would have been how to maximize production and control, that is, how to most effectively exploit human and nonhuman resources—than it did to good Germans, whose primary concerns were as varied as the people themselves but probably included doing their own jobs—immoral as those jobs may have been from an outside perspective—as well as possible; may have included feelings of relief that those in power were finally doing something about the “Jewish Problem”; and certainly included doing whatever they could to not
notice the greasy smoke from the crematoria (constructed with the best materials and faultless workmanship). The Holocaust then also looked different to
good Germans than it did to those who resisted, whose main concerns may have been how to bring down the system. And it looked different to those who resisted than it did to those who were considered untermenschen, whose main concerns may have been staying alive, or failing that, dying with humanity.
Manifest Destiny looked different to Indians than it did to JP Morgan. American slavery looked different to slaves than it did to those whose comforts and elegancies were based on slavery, and than it did to those for whom free black labor drove down their wages.
What will the great holocausts of the twenty-first century will look like? It depends on where you stand. Look around.
If you’re in group one, one of those in power, your post-modern holocausts will be at most barely visible, and at least a price you’re willing to pay, as Madame Albright said about killing Iraqi children. The holocausts will probably share similarities with other holocausts, as you attempt to maximize production—to “grow the economy,” as you might say—and as when necessary you attempt to eradicate dissent. This means the holocaust will look like a
booming economy beset by shifting problems that somehow always keep you
from ever reaching the Promised Land, whatever that might be. The holocaust will look like numbers on ledgers. It will look like technical problems to be solved, whether those problems are increasing your access to necessary resources, dealing with global warming, calming unrest on the streets, or figuring out what to do about too many unproductive people on land you know
you could put to better use. The holocaust will look like houses with gates, limousines with bullet-proof glass, and a military budget that can never stop increasing.
The holocaust will feel like economics. It will feel like progress. It will feel like technological innovation. It will feel like civilization. It will feel like the way things are.
If you’re in the second group, the good Germans, you will continue to be co-opted into supporting the system that does not serve you well. Perhaps the holocaust will look like a new car. Perhaps it will look like lending your talents to a major corporation—or more broadly toward economic production—so you can make a better life for your children. Perhaps it will look like working as an engineer for Shell or on an assembly line for General Motors. Maybe it will look like basing a person’s value on her or his employability or productivity. Perhaps it will look like anger at Mexicans or Pakistanis or Algerians or Hmong who compete with you for jobs. Perhaps it will look like outrage at environmentalists who want to save some damn suckerfish, even (or especially) if it impinges on your property rights, or if it takes water you need to irrigate, to make the desert bloom, to make the desert productive. Maybe it will feel like continuing to do a job that you hate—and that requires so little of your humanity—because no
matter how you try, you never can seem to catch up. Maybe it will feel like being tired at the end of the day, and just wanting to sit and watch some television.”
– Derrick Jensen
The journey to enlightenment involves shedding not collecting. It’s a continual process of opening and surrender, like taking off layer after layer of clothes, until we’re completely naked, with nothing to hide. But we can’t just pretend, making a big display of disrobing, then putting everything back on when no one’s looking. Our surrender has to be genuine.
– Pema
DEEPER BOND
Scathing tears set and takes no rest in silvery moon
Lit up because their bond was deeper and free it will never touch venom
I will illuminate this world, its inner peace and spirituality lashes of the eyes
The depressed night even more than enough to brighten up my night
Until the morning sun begins to rise and I sing a song
Our love story got backtracked tranquillity
Resting her head,
Freed spirit over this shadow realm surreal
I will let you carry me, as long I can catch your volatile dreams
Wish the illusion of division, you stay your course
And never stray the other side of the moon.
– Dr. Brajesh Kumar Gupta
Be patient with yourself. Self-growth is tender; it’s holy ground. There’s no greater investment.
– Stephen Covey
Do you know what the Sacred is? It is that which serves as your partner in your search for the highest and deepest things.
– Brendan Myers
If we only use the Dharma to judge and look for faults in others, and never in ourselves, it is entirely missing the point of what it’s intended for.
Even if we find just a single fault in our own mind, it will bring us an infinite amount more benefit than doing nothing other than finding all of the faults in others.
– Chamtrul Rinpoche
The planet is sick, in nature and culture, in need of urgent care from each of us.
– Thomas Moore
Friendship is a sheltering tree
– Coleridge
May you in your innocence
Sail through this to that
– Lucille Cliffton
The pith instruction is, Stay. . . stay. . . just stay.
– Pema Chödrön on meditation.
Please, no more!
~ Prayer of a spiritual worrier
Bring it on!
~ Mantra of a spiritual warrior
The lonely child who travels through
The fearful waste and desolate fields,
And listens to their barren tune,
Greets as an unknown and best friend
The terror in him, and he sings
In darkness all the sweetest songs.
– Chögyam Trungpa
Listening by Rumi
What is the deep listening? Sama is
a greeting from the secret ones inside
the heart, a letter. The branches of
your intelligence grows new leaves in
the wind of this listening. The body
reaches a peace. Rooster sound comes,
reminding you of your love for dawn,
The reed flute and the singer’s lips:
The knack of how spirit breathes into
us becomes as simple and ordinary as
Eating and drinking. The dead rise with
the pleasure of listening. If someone
Can’t hear a trumpet melody, sprinkle
dirt on his head and declare him dead.
Listen, and feel the beauty of your
separation, the unsayable absence.
There’s a moon inside every human being.
Learn to be companions with it. Give
more of your life to this listening. As
brightness is to time, so you are to
the one who talks to the deep ear in
your chest. I should sell my tongue
and buy a thousand ears when that
one steps near and begins to speak.
Anything you are not willing to experience and open as, you will repeatedly confront. If you are afraid to feel anger, if you are unwilling to love as anger and dissolve open as anger, then you will continually struggle with anger in yourself and others. If you are afraid to feel, love, and open as insecurity, then you will necessitate threats to your security. Your very recoil will sustain the ripples of that which you fear, necessitating a confrontation with whatever you are unwilling to fully feel, be alive as, and open as.
– David Deida
The positive energy and love we give to others, heals our own wounds.
– Angie Karan
Perhaps that you’re searching far too much? That in all that searching, you don’t find the time for finding?
– Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
Either you look and see beyond language – as a first perception – or you see the world through the filter of your thoughts, by talking to yourself. Everyone knows what it is like to feel things directly. Intense emotions… don’t have a language. They are too intense in the first flash… Synchronizing mind and body is looking and seeing directly beyond language… you can see on the spot with wakefulness. Your eyes begin to open wider and wider, and you see that the world is colorful and fresh and so precise, every sharp angle is fantastic.
– Shambhala Sacred Path of the Warrior pg 41
Let us tenderly and kindly cherish, therefore, the means of knowledge. Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write.
– John Adams
When your mind drifts away from the dharma, that’s the demon. A demon is not something with a large, open mouth and fiery eyes.
If you have no confidence in the dharma, if you do not persevere in the dharma and only think about passing your whole life comfortably, you have a more dangerous demon right in your own mind.
– Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche-Pith I
Some moments in a life, and they needn’t be very long or seem very important, can make up for so much in that life; can redeem, justify, that pain, that bewilderment, with which one lives, and invest one with the courage not only to endure it, but to profit from it; some moments teach one the price of human connection: if one can live with one’s own pain, then one respects the pain of others, and so, briefly, but transcendentally, we can release each other from pain.
– James Baldwin
If boundaries are created
Then brotherhood becomes a mere eleven lettered word
No feelings of belonging remain
When we perceive each other with an air of disdain
And our pride becomes a concrete wall
Dividing us
And poetry dies an untimely death
When segregation sets in..
If my thoughts are mere words
Lost forever in the haze of separate identities
Then my feelings are just worthless rantings of a lonely soul
Forever mocked, laughed at and made fun of
And then poetry dies an untimely death
When segregation sets in…
If we are not able to bridge this gap that we created
And words and feelings take you further away from me
Then I shall write no more
And my poetry dies an untimely death…
– Anita Limbu Moktan
Strive to be uncynical, to be a hope-giving force, to be a steward of substance.
– Maria Popova
What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.
– Otto Rank
IN GRATITUDE FOR SURVIVORS
The most psychologically and morally intelligent people I have met have suffered powerful challenges, hurts, abuse, and dehumanization and have found a way through to their own gifts, humanity, creativity and purpose. I believe these are the teachers we most need today – the ones who can help right the ship. Thank you, thank you, thank you for ever educating me and modeling profound courage.
– David Bedrick
I’m working on the world,
revised, improved edition,
featuring fun for fools,
blues for brooders,
combs for bald pates,
tricks for old dogs.
Here’s one chapter: The Speech
of Animals and Plants.
Each species comes, of course,
with its own dictionary.
Even a simple “Hi there,”
when traded with a fish,
make both the fish and you
feel quite extraordinary.
The long-suspected meanings
of rustlings, chirps, and growls!
Soliloquies of forests!
The epic hoot of owls!
Those crafty hedgehogs drafting
aphorisms after dark,
while we blindly believe
they are sleeping in the park!
Time (Chapter Two) retains
its sacred right to meddle
in each earthly affair.
Still, time’s unbounded power
that makes a mountain crumble,
moves seas, rotates a star,
won’t be enough to tear
lovers apart: they are
too naked, too embraced,
too much like timid sparrows.
Old age is, in my book,
the price that felons pay,
so don’t whine that it’s steep:
you’ll stay young if you’re good.
Suffering (Chapter Three)
doesn’t insult the body.
Death? It comes in your sleep,
exactly as it should.
When it comes, you’ll be dreaming
that you don’t need to breathe;
that breathless silence is
the music of the dark
and it’s part of the rhythm
to vanish like a spark.
Only a death like that. A rose
could prick you harder, I suppose;
you’d feel more terror at the sound
of petals falling to the ground.
Only a world like that. To die
just that much. And to live just so.
And all the rest is Bach’s fugue, played
for the time being
on a saw.
– Wislawa Szymborska
All good poets of the past, almost without exception, were at least bilingual if not trilingual.
– Helen Vendler
In the future, brave men and women will write a Declaration of Interdependence that will be read and honored alongside the Declaration of Independence: proof of our evolution, revolution of our own growth and understanding. The open space of democracy provides justice for ALL living things – plants, animals, rocks, and rivers, as well as human beings. It is a landscape that encourages diversity and discourages conformity.
– Terry Tempest Williams
A person must be highly sensitive to attune to multiple and opposing domains: the nuanced thinker is condemned to walk the razors edge. We become an unemployed Samurai when we swallow both the red pill and the blue pill – the empirical and the mythical, to put it in another way. The unemployed Samurai swallows the whole of life in other words: the good, the bad and the ugly. He is not a social jus…tice warrior particularly: he fights for his own soul. This means must set himself strait before he pretends to set the community strait and decry the injustices of the world. It’s a question of becoming responsible and truthful as an individual, which might mean losing a few friends along the way or spending some time in the wilderness. If you don’t support your friends in their social warrior trip — or conservatism trip or science trip or religion trip or whatever they may be on for that matter — then that ‘friend’ might not have any more use for you. If you are not interested in ‘trips’ but in actual voyages, in deep truth rather than ideology, then you could become a pariah. But it’s worth it, and the alternative is grim.
– Andrew Sweeny
On Compassion
Compassion for others isn’t an abstract feeling you cultivate in your heart out of nowhere.
When I see people speak about compassion in that way i…t’s usually denial, spiritual bypassing and a deep discomfort with being angry. Compassion isn’t a cause. It’s an effect. It’s not a phenomenon. It’s an epiphenomenon. It’s not the seed. It’s the the fruit.
Real compassion never begins with the decision to ‘be compassionate’. Real compassion usually starts with some level of anger or judgment about the actions of another. We see them as a perpetrator. We demonize them. We label them. We write them off. We ask ourselves, “How could they have done that?”
And then comes the learning – almost always unasked for, almost always unwelcome. And what is the learning about? It’s about what they had to go through to get to where they are today. It’s about learning all the ways in which they were victimized by life and defeated by forces and institutions so much bigger than them.
Compassion sounds less like, “I forgive you,” and more like, “Fuck… you never had a chance. My God.” We ask ourselves, “How could they not have done that?”
Self-compassion comes from the same place. It begins with a fierce and burning self-hatred and shame for all the things you’ve done and not done and then, if you’re lucky, you come to realize that, given what was going on in your life, given what happened in the life of your parents and community, given what happened in the lives of your ancestors… you never had a chance either. And that is nothing but heartbreaking to see. You got let down by your culture. But it’s also a relief. You give yourself a fucking break for not being able to, all by yourself, stand up to the evils, poverties and oppressions of your day. This kind of learning is the breaking of the spell of competence (that you should always know what to do and do it well) and self-sufficiency (all by yourself).
Compassion doesn’t come from a decision to be compassionate. That’s where repression comes from. It comes from learning.
In seeing this all, you see what was missing and, in seeing this, the world has a chance to be different. You wake up one day and you see that you might have some role to play in changing those things. You might have a role to play in making sure the next generation has a better shot than you did.
– Tad Hargrave
This is my letter to the world,
That never wrote to me,–
The simple news that Nature told,
With tender majesty.
Her message is committed …
To hands I cannot see;
For love of her, sweet countrymen,
Judge tenderly of me!
– Emily Dickinson
Whoever told people that mind is opinions, thoughts, ideas, and consciousness? No. Mind is roof-tiles, fence-posts, tire-wheels, carriages, rocks, water, and clouds.
– Dogen-zenji, via Gary Snyder
All my ancient twisted karma
From beginningless greed, hate and delusion,
Born of body, speech and mind,
I now fully atone.
– Gatha of atonement, recited each morning and during the Fusatsu ceremony of renewing the precepts, performed on the full moon
To lead a life that goes beyond pettiness and prejudice and always wanting to make sure that everything turns out on our own terms, to lead a more passionate, full, and delightful life than that, we must realize we can endure a lot of pain and pleasure for the sake of finding out who we are and what this world is.
– Pema Chödrön
If you can’t liberate yourself, who else will liberate you?
It you can’t train yourself, who else will train you?
So, pointing your finger at your own heart —
Again and again, train your own three doors in the Dharma!
– Khenpo Ngakchung
I’m lucky enough to occasionally be able to do something I love – write poems – and unlucky enough that what I love confuses and overwhelms me.
– Mary Ruefle
The origins of poetry are clearly rooted in obscurity, in secretiveness, in incantation, in spells that must at once invoke and protect, tell the secret and keep it.
– Mary Ruefle
Words have a love for each other, a desire that culminates in poetry.
– Mary Ruefle
Love that friend, that person, that thing, whatever you like, you’ll be on the right path to knowing more thoroughly, afterwards; that’s what I say to myself. But you must love with a high, serious intimate sympathy, with a will, with intelligence, and you must always seek to know more thoroughly, better, and more.
– Vincent Van Gogh, in a
letter to his brother
I am convinced that the first lyric poem was written at night, and that the moon was witness to the event and that the event was witness to the moon. For me, the moon has always been the very embodiment of lyric poetry.
– Mary Ruefle
There is a world which poets cannot seem to enter. It is the world everybody else lives in. And the only thing poets seem to have in common is their yearning to enter this world.
– Mary Ruefle
Be gentle with yourself. This is a long and difficult journey. Your goals should be reasonable so as not to create frustration and disappointments. Be willing to crawl before you walk. Perfect each skill as you move along on the journey, and forgive yourself when you stumble, or even slide backward. Setbacks are temporary and meant to be instructive. Let yourself slide backward, observe what has occurred, get back on your feet, and move forward. Sliding backward is part of the pattern of growth. Just don’t slide backward and stay there. Don’t ever give up. Progress is made of perseverance. Never lose hope.”
– Swami Rama
To succeed in this task of shaping the future, the will of the more comprehensive self must be functioning. The individual will can function in this capacity only through an acknowledged union with the deeper structure of reality. Even beyond union with the human community must be union with the Earth, with the universe itself in the full wonder of its being. Only the Earth can adequately will the Earth. If we will the future effectively it will be because the guidance and the powers of the Earth have been communicated to us.
– Thomas Berry
I hope to have gathered
To repay your kindness
The willow leaves
Scattered in the garden.
– Matsuo Bashō
The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things– the beauty, the memory of our own past– are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.
Do you think I am trying to weave a spell? Perhaps I am; but remember your fairy tales. Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them. And you and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness which has laid upon us for nearly a hundred years.
– C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory
Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Utopia
by Wislawa Szymborska
Island where all becomes clear.
Solid ground beneath your feet.
The only roads are those that offer access.
Bushes bend beneath the weight of proofs.
The Tree of Valid Supposition grows here
with branches disentangled since time immermorial.
The Tree of Understanding, dazzling straight and simple.
sprouts by the spring called Now I Get It.
The thicker the woods, the vaster the vista:
the Valley of Obviously.
If any doubts arise, the wind dispels them instantly.
Echoes stir unsummoned
and eagerly explain all the secrets of the worlds.
On the right a cave where Meaning lies.
On the left the Lake of Deep Conviction.
Truth breaks from the bottom and bobs to the surface.
Unshakable Confidence towers over the valley.
Its peak offers an excellent view of the Essence of Things.
For all its charms, the island is uninhabited,
and the faint footprints scattered on its beaches
turn without exception to the sea.
As if all you can do here is leave
and plunge, never to return, into the depths.
Into unfathomable life.
Your conscience is the measure of the honesty of your selfishness. Listen to it carefully.
– Richard Bach
Emily Sernaker
I HAVE CONFIDENCE
Before every job interview, I think
of Julie Andrews swinging her suitcase,
singing “I have confidence”
in The Sound of Music.
She really psyches herself up
in that silly hat, clicking her heels
beside a yellow wall; body diagonal
in the air with hope. The Red Cross
lobby had big marble displays,
hands chiseled holding onto each other.
I liked the interviews there, all that
Clara Barton history, plans for unplanned
catastrophes. It was a big change
from the San Francisco start-up.
Oak boardroom table, one
of those rooftop views, vending machines
with Guinness and chocolate milk.
The Bay Area was looking good:
cats named Billie Holiday,
quilts spread over Dolores Park.
Everyone was eating kale, handing me
drinks in mason jars. I had a hotdog
in New York. Sat in the Marc Chagall
conference room of a Refugee Relief Agency.
Because you guys resettled him right?
It was a terrific story. Fifty Americans saved
2,000 artists, intellectuals from the Nazis.
Their board member went on Ed Sullivan,
convinced the public to help more.
That group eventually hired me
but not for a few years and not
in that city. How fast can you input data?
You look like you’re waiting
for the principal’s office. All I trust
I lead my heart to. All I trust becomes
my own. I have confidence
in confidence alone. A bird shit on me
in Manhattan. I wiped it off,
was still wearing a black dress in a big city.
I bought a slice of cheesecake,
used an old student ID for a nosebleed ticket
on Broadway. The audience was full
of student choirs. One boy couldn’t help it:
as we were taking our seats,
he sang a few lines of
“I’ve Been Working on the Railroad.”
He just wanted to hear
what his voice sounded like,
reverberating through a place like that.
I am not really impressed by someone who can turn the floor into the ceiling or fire into water. A real miracle is if someone can liberate just one negative emotion.
– Lerab Lingpa
If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears.
– Cesare Pavese
No matter how far a person can go the horizon is still way beyond you.
– Zora Neale Hurston
Feminist politics aims to end domination, to free us to be who we are – to live lives where we love justice, where we can live in peace. Feminism is for everybody.
– Bell Hooks
You couldn’t handle my undivided attention.
– Dwight K. Schrute
Normally I didn’t see a great deal. I didn’t hear a great deal either. I didn’t pay attention. Strictly speaking I wasn’t there. Strictly speaking I believe I’ve never been anywhere.
– Samuel Beckett
Self-education is the best antidote to boredom,
memory-loss, depression, anxiety, fatigue,
cynicism, alienation, general-awkwardness-in-an
Einsteinian-universe, good vision,
(and a bunch of other pseudo-maladies)
that I have yet found –
Whether it actually has any value –
is another question
– E.M.
One thing I am sure of: courtesy and kindliness and tolerance and humility and fairness are right. Opinions may be mistaken; love never is.
– Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick
With the new day comes new strength and new thoughts.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
Without having ourselves firmly rooted in respect for all beings and ourselves, our world is imperiled.
– Roshi Joan Halifax
Respect is the basis of love, justice, and is an expression of wisdom.
– Roshi Joan Halifax
Maybe you could think of yourself as an erased blackboard, ready to be written on. For by and large, what blocks spiritual teaching is the assumption that we already know, or that we don’t need to know. We have to pray for the grace of beginner’s mind.
― Richard Rohr
Fishing provides that connection with the whole living world. It gives you the opportunity of being totally immersed, turning back into yourself in a good way. A form of meditation, some form of communion with levels of yourself that are deeper than the ordinary self.
– Ted Hughes
There is the inner life of thought which is our world of final reality. The world of memory, emotion, feeling, imagination, intelligence and natural common sense, and which goes on all the time consciously or unconsciously like the heartbeat.
There is also the thinking process by which we break into that inner life and capture answers and evidence to support the answers out of it.
And that process of raid, or persuasion, or ambush, or dogged hunting, or surrender, is the kind of thinking we have to learn, and if we don’t somehow learn it, then our minds lie in us like the fish in the pond of a man who can’t fish.
– Ted Hughes
THE MYSTIC LIFE
“lifetime’s solitary thread”
for Charles Wright
It’s like fishing in the dark,
If you ask me:
Our thoughts are the hooks,
Our hearts the raw bait
We cast the line over our heads,
Past all faith, past all believing,
Into the starless midnight sky,
Until it’s lost to sight.
The line’s long unraveling,
Rising in our throats like a sigh
Of a long day’s weariness,
Soul-searching and revery
ゑ
One thought against the Supreme
Unthinkable.
How about that?
Loony-tunes, fishing in the dark
Out of an empty sleeve
With a mourning band on it.
The fly and the spider on the ceiling
Looking on, brother.
– Charles Simic
Psychologists and psychiatrists are moving from their traditional hostility to ecstasy to an understanding that it’s often good for us. Much of our personality is made up of attitudes that are usually subconscious. We drag around buried trauma, guilt, feelings of low self-worth. In moments of ecstasy, the threshold of consciousness is lowered, people encounter these subconscious attitudes, and are able to step outside of them. They can feel a deep sense of love for themselves and others, which can heal them at a deep level. Maybe this is just an opening to the subconscious, maybe it’s a connection to a higher dimension of spirit – we don’t know . . . Ultimately, there’s something in us that calls to us, that pulls us out the door.
– Jules Evans
But that wasn’t what he had necessarily come looking for. He had never explained to anyone what this place meant to him. If he had had to, he would have said: water mostly, tame rivers, soft rain, mist, coolness, greenery and arbours, shady oaks. Things of refreshment and ease. Poetry, too. Yes. Things that cut the deepest thirst. Peace.”
– Guy Vanderhaeghe
A thrush, because I’d been wrong,
Burst rightly into song
In a world not vague, not lonely,
Not governed by me only.
– Richard Wilbur, On Having Mis-Identified a WIld Flower
I do not care for the body, I love the timid soul, the blushing, shrinking soul …
– Emily Dickinson
I have done nothing all summer but wait for myself to be myself again —
– Georgia O’Keeffe
And it was at that age … Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don’t know, I don’t know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don’t know how or when,
no they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.
I did not know what to say, my mouth
had no way
with names,
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire,
and I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating plantations,
shadow perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire and flowers,
the winding night, the universe.
And I, infinitesimal being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke loose on the wind.
– Pablo Neruda, Poetry
In the dim light of narrowly spaced overshadowing shelves I felt the spiritual and solitary freedom of an inexorable order only chance creates. Quiet articulates poetry. [ …] I had a sense of the parallel between our always fragmentary knowledge and the continual progress toward perfect understanding that never withers away.
– Susan Howe
Heart comes from the Latin cor and points not merely to our emotions but to the core of the self, that center place where all of our ways of knowing converge—intellectual, emotional, sensory, intuitive, imaginative, experiential, relational, and bodily, among others. The heart is where we integrate what we know in our minds with what we know in our bones, the place where our knowledge can become more fully human. Cor is also the Latin root from which we get the word courage. When all that we understand of self and world comes together in the center place called the heart, we are more likely to find the courage to act humanely on what we know.
– Parker J Palmer, Healing the Heart of Democracy: The Courage to Create a Politics Worthy of the Human Spirit
There are three kinds of patriots, said William Sloane Coffin, two bad, one good. The bad are the uncritical lovers and the loveless critics. Good patriots carry on a lover’s quarrel with their country.
It is easy enough to see that all through our lives we are faced with the task of reconciling opposites which, in logical thought, cannot be reconciled. The typical problems of life are insoluble on the level of being on which we normally find ourselves. How can one reconcile the demands of freedom and discipline in education? Countless mothers and teachers, in fact, do it, but no one can write down a solution. They do it by bringing into the situation a force that belongs to a higher level where opposites are transcended—the power of love. – E. F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful
Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal.
– Henry Ford
think our culture doesn’t recognize passion, because real passion has the power to disrupt boundaries.
– Bell Hooks
Without community, there is no liberation.
– Audre Lorde
We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. When the loyal opposition dies, the soul of America dies with it.
– Edward R. Murrow
Prick of God pain
up my heart
I almost surrender
- Cb Crane
The difference between being an ideologue and a true philosopher is that the ideologue dispenses ready-made formulas for action and behaviour. One can easily parrot Marxist or Christian or Pagan or Feminist or New Age or whatever stock ideologies because they are convenient and easy to assemble like Ikea Furniture. Ideologies put reality into convenient boxes; you can use them wily-nily in any discussion and appear to be furnished with intelligence. Upon investigation, ideologies are cheap and flimsy and without character; they fall apart easily when put in the light. However, to the furniture maker of quality, to extend the analogy, or the real philosopher, or the unemployed samurai, they are anathema. Why? Because they are merely conceptual rather than deeply felt or reasoned truths; they do not reach the living world, but rather form a kind of fog over all existence. However, this fog is comfortable for masses of people who prefer to live in a dank pond than in the bright sunlight. And this is why the Unemployed Samurai is alone and without a noble friend. His enemy is bad furniture, verbiage, and spiritual pollution of all kinds.
– Andrew Sweeny
In the next world, I will be the one
forever pushing open
the warped, green shutters to let
the sunlight enter the room …
– Roberta Spear
America
Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,
And sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth,
Stealing my breath of life, I will confess
I love this cultured hell that test[ed] my youth.
Her vigor flows like tides into my blood,
Giving me strength erect against her hate,
Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood.
Yet, as a rebel fronts a king in state,
I stand within her walls with not a shred
Of terror, malice, not a word of jeer.
Darkly I gaze into the days ahead,
And see her might and granite wonders there,
Beneath the touch of Time’s unerring hand,
Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand.
– Claude McKay
Porous memories fuse and interpenetrate. Fragments of song mingle in hot remembered afternoons, mysterious angers return at a flush with a chance forgotten postcard. Such memories were once the motions of old fluids, animal spirits which meandered and rummaged through the pores of the brain. They held experience and history in bodies which were themselves porous, uncertainly coupled across tissues and skin with their air, their ethics, their land. Now they are patterns of activation across vast neural networks, condensing and compressing innumerable possible trajectories into the particular vectors of flashing or torpid memories. Dynamic cognitive systems coevolving with the physiological, environmental, and social systems in which they are embedded need the wishful mixings of absence which interfering traces bring.
– John Sutton
A colorful fish gets into trouble, gets out of it again, then looks at a tree. People love that story. They never get tired of it.
– Kilgore Trout
I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be.
– Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
… Blunders are not the merest chance. They are the results of suppressed desires and conflicts. They are ripples on the surface of life, produced by unsuspected springs. And these may be very deep—as deep as the soul itself. The blunder may amount to the opening of a destiny.
– Joseph Campbell
Inner liberty depends upon being exempt from domination of things as well as from domination of people.
– Abraham Heschel
To seek visions, to dream dreams, is essential, and it is also essential to try new ways of living, to make room for serious experimentation, to respect the effort even where it fails.
– Adrienne Rich
Great crises and impossible tasks can uncover hidden resources and reveal veins of genius that can alter the course of history. The threat of collapse and utter loss can also serve to awaken genius qualities and radical solutions. Each soul desires to be part of something greater, something “larger than life,” for we each harbor within ourselves a larger life and a greater self waiting to become known.
– Michael Meade
The Tent
Naomi Shihab Nye, 1952
When did hordes of sentences start beginning with So?
As if everything were always pending,
leaning on what came before.
What can you expect?
Loneliness everywhere, entertained or kept in storage.
So you felt anxious to be alone.
Easier to hear, explore a city, room,
mound of hours, no one walking beside you.
Talking to self endlessly, but mostly listening.
This would not be strange.
It would be the tent you slept in.
Waking calmly inside whatever
you had to do would be freedom.
It would be your country.
The men in front of me had whole acres
in their eyes. I could feel them cross, recross each day.
Memory, stitched. History, soothed.
What we do or might prefer to do. Have done.
How we got here. Telling ourselves a story
till it’s compact enough to bear.
Passing the walls, wearing the sky,
the slight bow and rising of trees.
Everything ceaselessly holding us close.
So we are accompanied.
Never cast out without a line of language to reel us back.
That is what happened, how I got here.
So maybe. One way anyway.
A story was sewn, seed sown,
this was what patriotism meant to me—
to be at home inside my own head long enough
to accept its infinite freedom
and move forward anywhere, to mysteries coming.
Even at night in a desert, temperatures plummet,
billowing tent flaps murmur to one other.
I wanted to tell you that my whole being opened for you. Since I fell in love with you everything is transformed and is full of beauty… love is like an aroma, like a current, like rain.
– Frida Kahlo
We are all of us, to some degree or another, brainwashed by the society we live in. We are able to see this when we travel to another country, and are able to catch a glimpse of our own country with foreign eyes. There is nothing much we can do about this except to remember that it is so. Every one of us is part of the great comforting illusions, and part illusions, which every society uses to keep up its confidence in itself. These are hard to examine, and the best we can hope for is that a kindly friend from another culture will enable us to look at our culture with dispassionate eyes.
– Doris Lessing
I think reading is very calming. But I think it puts you in touch with—let’s call it life, humanity, in a way you may not be normally. Generally speaking, you’re holding people away from yourself—at least I am—or you become a bit disillusioned with people, but a book acts contra to all that. I think a book gives you a certain sense of worth to read it, even a sense of pride, even though you had nothing to do with its being written. I think you admire a book if you really like it, if it’s a good book. If it’s that sort of book, I think you feel some kind of camaraderie, pride, with the writer.
– James Salter
A friend asked if Utopia is possible, or whether it’s just a silly dream. Here is how I responded:
This is among the very most important of all questions – or perhaps I should amend this to say that the question of what utopia is, of what your utopian vision looks like, is the most important of all questions. Beyond the dreams you have for your life, the utopian vision is the dream you hold for all humanity. Without the utopian dream and the simplest core belief that it’s… possible, we drift aimlessly – we wander in a desert of our own bleak fabrication. Without utopian visions we clunk down a civilizational death spiral and substitute entertainment for sacred work. Utopia isn’t simply the best of all possible worlds, it’s the very deepest expression of our nature in so far as it’s been converted into desiring-production. Even the faintest understanding of utopia is to be watered and nurtured. It is the blueprint of what we are to become, but splintered and seen through millions and millions of eyes. The Kingdom of Heaven is not a fantasy born from religious zealots. It is a utopian blueprint. To hold the Kingdom of Heaven in your heart with great clarity is to be a flower bud that knows it’s going to bloom.
– Joshua Morriston
It is a terrible misunderstanding of the Gospel to think that it offers us salvation while relieving us of responsibility for the life of the world, for the sin and sorrow and pain with which our human life and that of our fellow men and women are so deeply interwoven.
– Lesslie Newbigin
Many are in some strange way business-bitten, or dry rotted with low cares. ‘No time,’ ‘too many duties,’ ‘not strong enough, rich enough,’ etc., are excuses urged [for not getting out into Nature.] In money-getting and mere good-doing, etc. we die and are coffined and hearsed and hidden away in a graveyard, hurried OUT of the world before having got INTO it, got one good look at it.”
– John Muir
All the Hemispheres
– Hafiz (1320 – 1389 C.E.)
Leave the familiar for a while.
Let your senses and bodies stretch out
Like a welcomed season
Onto the meadows and shores and hills.
Open up to the Roof.
Make a new water-mark
on your excitement
And love.
Like a blooming night flower,
Bestow your vital fragrance of happiness
And giving
Upon our intimate assembly.
Change rooms in your mind for a day.
All the hemispheres in existence
Lie beside an equator
In your heart.
Greet Yourself
In your thousand other forms
As you mount the hidden tide and travel
Back home.
All the hemispheres in heaven
Are sitting around a fire
Chatting
While stitching themselves together
Into the Great Circle inside of
You.
Prayer and Art are passionate acts of will. One wants to transcend and enhance the will’s normal possibilities. Art like prayer is a hand outstretched in the darkness, seeking for some touch of grace which will transform it into a hand that bestows gifts. Prayer means casting oneself into the miraculous rainbow that stretches between becoming and dying, to be utterly consumed in it, in order to bring its infinite radiance to bed in the frail little cradle of one’s own existence.
– Kafka
Soulmates aren’t
the people
that make you the
happiest, no.
They’re instead the
ones
who make you feel…
the most
burning like a
star on the edge of
the world
as one night ends
and another
begins.
Radiation and
reactions.
Scientific poetry,
poetic science.
Around and around
in an endless
circle.
They’re pure
elation,
danger, and
ecstasy.
They’re the ones
that can destroy
you.
They’re the only
ones
you long to know.
– Victoria Erickson
Let my history then
be a gate unfastened
to a new life
and not a barrier
to my becoming. …
Let me find the ghosts
and histories and barely
imagined future
of this world,
and let me now have
the innocence to grow
just as well in shadow or light
by what is gifted
in this land
as the one to which I was born.
– David Whyte
In a poem, language remains itself yet is also made to feel different, even sacred, like a spell. How this happens is the mystery of each poem, and maybe its deepest meaning. Coming upon a word, having it rise up out of the preconscious, intuitive dream-state and into the poem, either to begin or somewhere along the way or even, blissfully, at the end, is the special reward of being a poet, and a reader of poetry. By being placed into the machine of a poem, language can become alive again. It is both what it is and what it means, but also something that is greater than the ordinary.
– Matthew Zapruder
You ask me how to pray to someone who is not.
All I know is that prayer constructs a velvet bridge
And walking it we are aloft, as on a springboard,
Above landscapes the color of ripe gold
Transformed by a magic stopping of the sun.
That bridge leads to the shore of Reversal
Where everything is just the opposite and the word ‘is’
Unveils a meaning we hardly envisioned.
Notice: I say we; there, every one, separately,
Feels compassion for others entangled in the flesh
And knows that if there is no other shore
We will walk that aerial bridge all the same.
– Czeslaw Milosz
I have gradually come to one negative conclusion about the good life. It seems to me that the good life is not any fixed state. It is not, in my estimation, a state of virtue, or contentment, or nirvana, or happiness. It is not a condition in which the individual is adjusted or fulfilled or actualized….The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction, not a destination.
– Carl Rogers
she
has
been through
hell.
so believe me when…i say,
fear her when she looks
into a fire and smiles.
– e.corona
The Power of Art – Mark Rothko” by BBC.
When I was a younger man, art was a lonely thing. No galleries, no collectors, no critics, no money. Yet, it was an golden age, for we all had nothing to lose, and the vision, the gain. Today is not quite the same. It is a time of tons of verbiage, activity, consumption. Which condition is better for the world at large I will not venture to discuss. But I do know that many of those who were driven to this life are desperately searching for those pockets of silence where we can root and grow. We must all hope we find them.
May I behold the sun-like Buddha with his signs and marks,
May I savour the nectar of the sun-like Dharma in my heart,
And may the sun-like Sangha accompany me to liberation—
From the light of these three sun-like Supreme Ones, may I never part!
– Aric Parker
When the light off the river paints the roots of that old willow just as you pass, the world is telling you to stop running. Forget what it means, just stop running.
– Mark Nepo, The Way Under the Way
We should know that, just as we may see the buddha without knowing or understanding him, so we may see water and yet not know water, may see mountains and yet not know mountains. The precipitate assumption that the phenomena before one’s eyes offer no further passage is not the study of the buddha.
– Dogen Zenji
Let them call me rebel and welcome, I feel no concern from it; but I should suffer the misery of devils, were I to make a whore of my soul by swearing allegiance to one whose character is that of a sottish, stupid, stubborn, worthless, brutish man.
– Thomas Paine
Is it necessary to believe the stories you tell yourself and others about how and why things could or should be different from what they are? Who would you be, experientially, without these stories?
– Dennis Lewis
Maturity begins with the capacity to sense and, in good time and without defensiveness, admit to our own craziness. If we are not regularly deeply embarrassed by who we are, the journey to self-knowledge hasn’t begun.
– Alain de Botton
Don’t think just now of the trudging forward of thought,
But of the wing-drive of unquestioning affirmation.
It’s summer, you never saw such a blue sky,
And here they are, those white birds with quick wings,
Sweeping over the waves, chattering and plunging,
Their thin beaks snapping, their hard eyes
Happy as little nails
The years to come – this is a promise –
Will grant you ample time
To try the difficult steps in the empire of thought
Where you seek for the shining proofs you think you must have.
But nothing you ever understand will be sweeter, or more binding,
Than this deepest affinity between your eyes and the world.
The flock thickens
Over the rolling, salt brightness. Listen,
Maybe such devotion, in which one holds the world
In the clasp of attention, isn’t the perfect prayer,
But it must be close, for the sorrow, whose name is doubt,
Is thus subdued, and not through the weaponry of reason,
But of pure submission. Tell me, what else
Could beauty be for? And now the tide
Is at its very crown,
The white birds sprinkle down,
Gathering up the loose silver rising
As if weightless. It isn’t instruction, or parable.
It isn’t for any vanity or ambition
Except for the one allowed, to stay alive.
It’s only a nimble frolic
Over the waves. And you find, for hours,
You cannot even remember the questions
That weigh so in your mind.
– Mary Oliver
A Russian cosmonaut and a Russian brain surgeon were once discussing Christianity. The brain surgeon was a Christian, but the cosmonaut wasn’t. ‘I have been in outer space many times,’ bragged the cosmonaut, ‘but I have never seen any angels.’ The brain surgeon stared in amazement, but then he said, ‘And I have operated on many intelligent brains, but I have never seen a single thought.’
– Jostein Gaarder
Throughout the entire history of philosophy, philosophers have sought to discover what man is – or what human nature is. But Sartre believed that man has no such eternal nature to fall back on. It is therefore useless to search for the meaning of life in general. We are condemned to improvise. We are like actors dragged onto the stage without having learned our lines, with no script and no prompter to whisper stage directions to us. We must decide for ourselves how to live.
– Jostein Gaarder
A PLACE IN THE FOREST
On the way there a pair of startled wings clattered up – that was all. You go alone. A tall building that consists entirely of cracks, a building that is perpetually toppling but can never collapse. The thousandfold sun floats in through the cracks. In this play of light an inverted law of gravity prevails: the house is anchored in the sky and whatever falls, falls upward. There you can turn around. There you are allowed to grieve. You can dare to face certain old truths kept packed, in storage. The roles I have, deep down, float up, hang like dried skulls in the ancestral cabin on some out-of-the-way Melanesian islet. A childlike aura circles the gruesome trophies. So mild it is, in the forest.
– Tomas Tranströmer
This was not to say, however, that she did not long, at times, for some greater change, that she did not experience some of those exceptional moments when one thirsts for something other than what is, and when those who, through lack of energy or imagination, are unable to generate any motive power in themselves, cry out, as the clock strikes or the postman knocks, for something new, even if it is worse, some emotion, some sorrow; when the heartstrings, which contentment has silenced, like a harp laid by, yearn to be plucked and sounded again by some hand, however rough, even if it should break them; when the will, which has with such difficulty won the right to indulge without let or hindrance in its own desires and woes, would gladly fling the reins into the hands of imperious circumstance, however cruel.
– Marcel Proust
In my sketchbook of Lonely Moments
there is a figure I draw especially
sustaining, at least for today, for I keep
the book to ponder what other folks do
when life doles out a cul de sac.
– Stephen Dobyns
If only–If only we hadn’t been defeated by humdrum humming present time and missed it, missed ourselves, missed everything.
– Walker Percy
To be true to myself, to be the person that was on the inside of me, and not play games. That’s what I’m trying to do mostly in the whole world, to not bullshit myself and nor anybody else.
– Janis Joplin
Seeing and listening at every pore, I stood in her temple today.
– John Muir
You cannot will intoxication, vertigo, a ravening, or wild / Love.
– Lucie Brock-Broido
When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.
– Ansel Adams
You might be surprised to what extent you can relieve your stressed-out system with a brief, non-essential walk down the hall, a peek out the window at the outer world, or even a seriously deep sigh that engages you right down to the toes. Do anything to interrupt the deadening bond that glues all your attention to what you’re writing, reading, cooking, chopping, building. Truly, the body possesses wisdom that thought doesn’t understand. We can practice listening to it as we expand into reality. That’s where joy lives, in any present moment.
– Patty de Llosa
When you aren’t waiting for anything to happen, there is a natural sinking and deepening into the source of your own being. It’s very quiet, and then, and only then, do you start to sense presence. There is a very palpable presence in this quiet. That is why I said this is not a dead quiet. You can sense an aliveness. It’s a presence that’s inside your body and outside your body. It permeates everywhere. When you are looking for it, you are looking for a gross presence, a heavy presence to hit you over the head. This isn’t going to happen. The true quiet is a brightness. You feel bright. There is an awakeness, a deep sense of being alive.
– Adyashanti
The Desert
The rhythm of the desert
Calls to me
As if it had come foreword
Without hesitation
A full-formed character in the game
I thought I lost
Winds ravish the sweeping hills
Landscapes too beautiful and
Forgone to be forgotten
Those who can survive in its bitter thirst
Are angels from the land
Beyond sorrows who eat and drink
From a wellspring of hope,
buried beyond the reaches
Of the farthest evening
Star, staring like a satyr
Into the dusk
From behind the hills.
And when the hills weep
I weep too, for a land that
Time lost but never forgotten
For rocks that had whittled their
Way down to granite grains
Found their way into gloves
Form a sandman who
Lives on the horizon and eats the stars for
Supper- and how he does it
Walking on the tightrope
Between words of form and
Formlessness, between mind and
No-mind
The edge of the mountains,
An abyss
A cave of deep crystalline soils
I would like to be buried there
When I die.
– Claire Boyce
There is no place for grief in a house which serves the Muse.
– Sappho
The Master of Coca Leaves
There are the chosen ones among us; the ones who lightning
strikes, more than once. The ones who are blinded so that
they can learn to see in the pitch of darkness. The ones who
live in hermitude because the filaments radiating from their
heart are tethered to everything, and it hurts. A body can be
too small to contain a soul. A mountain can be too small to
contain a soul. Mastery comes from continually showing up and
saying, “Yes!” You cannot serve another option. I was blessed to witness you there, lifting your gaze skyward with extended arms, to know you when your life was the offering
for the prayer request
you never made.
– Jamie K. Reaser
For Love
Robert Creeley
for Bobbie
Yesterday I wanted to
speak of it, that sense above
the others to me
important because all
that I know derives
from what it teaches me.
Today, what is it that
is finally so helpless,
different, despairs of its own
statement, wants to
turn away, endlessly
to turn away.
If the moon did not …
no, if you did not
I wouldn’t either, but
what would I not
do, what prevention, what
thing so quickly stopped.
That is love yesterday
or tomorrow, not
now. Can I eat
what you give me. I
have not earned it. Must
I think of everything
as earned. Now love also
becomes a reward so
remote from me I have
only made it with my mind.
Here is tedium,
despair, a painful
sense of isolation and
whimsical if pompous
self-regard. But that image
is only of the mind’s
vague structure, vague to me
because it is my own.
Love, what do I think
to say. I cannot say it.
What have you become to ask,
what have I made you into,
companion, good company,
crossed legs with skirt, or
soft body under
the bones of the bed.
Nothing says anything
but that which it wishes
would come true, fears
what else might happen in
some other place, some
other time not this one.
A voice in my place, an
echo of that only in yours.
Let me stumble into
not the confession but
the obsession I begin with
now. For you
also (also)
some time beyond place, or
place beyond time, no
mind left to
say anything at all,
that face gone, now.
Into the company of love
it all returns.
Musing on strengths & weaknesses:
I shun father and mother and wife and brother when my genius calls me. I would write on the lintels of the doorpost, Whim. I hope it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation.
– Ralph Waldo #Emerson
*
It is often our mightiest projects that most obviously betray the degree of our insecurity.
– W. G. #Sebald
*
My wound existed before me, I was born to embody it.
– Joë #Bousquet
*
And lest I should be exalted above measure through the abundance of the revelations, there was given to me a thorn in the flesh… For this thing I besought the Lord thrice, that it might depart from me. And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities… Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions… for when I am weak, then am I strong. (2 Cor. 12:7-10)
via Yahia Lababidi
I am no longer waiting for a special occasion; I burn the best candles on ordinary days.
I am no longer waiting for the house to be clean; I fill it with people who understand that even dust is Sacred.
I am no longer waiting for everyone to understand me; It’s just not their task
I am no longer waiting for the perfect children; my children have their own names that burn as brightly as any star.
I am no longer waiting for the other shoe to drop; It already did, and I survived.
I am no longer waiting for the time to be right; the time is always now.
I am no longer waiting for the mate who will complete me; I am grateful to be so warmly, tenderly held.
I am no longer waiting for a quiet moment; my heart can be stilled whenever it is called.
I am no longer waiting for the world to be at peace; I unclench my grasp and breathe peace in and out.
I am no longer waiting to do something great; being awake to carry my grain of sand is enough.
I am no longer waiting to be recognized; I know that I dance in a holy circle.
I am no longer waiting for Forgiveness.
I believe, I Believe.
– Mary Anne Perrone
In many tribal cultures, it is said that if the boys were not initiated into manhood, if they were not shaped by the skills and love of elders, then they would destroy the culture.
If the fires that innately burn inside youths are not intentionally and lovingly added to the hearth of community, they will burn down the structures of culture, just to feel the warmth.
– Michael Meade
The warrior’s path is waking up every morning with nothing to prove.
– Cynthia Kneen
Wherever you are, what is given to you is the capacity to tend your own heart and find a freedom of spirit within yourself.
– Jack Kornfield
CONTROVERSIAL RETROGRADES
Tensions extenuate in controversial
Retrogrades that blade and crave
Degrade upgrade downgrade overturn graves
Shake quake shiver and shudder in conceptual
Convulsions agitated and in distress
Disturbed elements fluster
Unsettled orbs muster
Waiting for the eclipse to crest
Are you rattled?
Shocked troubled alarmed?
Planets arm and disarm
Ancient tales prattle
A celestial reshuffle
A restructuring a change
A shakedown to rearrange
A stellar of a hustle
Tremors and delerium
Escapades and interludes
Tremens that delude
Within the ethereal continuum
A quivering upheaval
A makeover and an overhaul
Will you stand tall or be mauled?
Or are you in denial that our world is on trial?
– Eilie Brown
Just understand your mind: how it works, how attachment and desire arise, how ignorance arises, where emotions come from. It is sufficient to know the nature of all that; just that gives so much happiness and peace.
– Lama Thubten Yeshe
Elizabeth Mattis Namgyel ~ “The path starts when we question if things are not quite how they seem to be. This is the spirit of Buddhism.”
To love another is something like prayer and can’t be planned, you just fall into its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.
– Anne Sexton
Nothing beautiful can be summarized.
– Paul Valery
Meditation is another dimension of natural beauty. People talk about appreciating natural beauty – climbing mountains, seeing giraffes and tigers in Africa, and all sorts of things. But nobody seems to appreciate this kind of natural beauty of ourselves. This is actually far more beautiful than flora and fauna, far more fantastic, far more painful and colorful and delightful.
– Chögyam Trungpa
Chilean poet Pablo Neruda (born July 12, 1904) preferred to write in green ink because the color was his personal symbol of hope.
Finding the One Brief Note
by Maxine Kumin
I woke this morning from the uneasy
sleep of a stranger in strange bedsheets
to bogus cardinal, robin trill
off-key, boisterous fake
crow caws, and at intervals
sounds that suggested the air brakes
of huge semis flinging themselves downhill.
In Greensboro, mockingbird capital
of the South, en route to teach a class
in prosody, I meet Delia
encumbered with stopwatch,
graph paper and tape recorder,
capturing the mid-fall melodies
of flocks of year-round mockers.
On a campus hedged with chinaberry trees,
while I am saying poems, she collects
arpeggios, engine music
and vaguely flatted masterpieces.
Delia knows that something good will come
from storing up these plainly suited clones’
repertoires each weekday
and I too haltingly assay
our single-minded still imperfect song.
We eulogize autumn, we long
for a better world, we seek to deliver
a purer hemidemisemiquaver,
the one brief note that says we mean,
roughshod and winged, to last forever.
Yoga
Was watching your mind
Body and Speech
At all times
Yoga was practiced at all times
Throughout the day
The Body was seen as
The main obstacle
to Human happiness
Or Liberation
Austerities were practiced
To show yourself and others
Your mastery over your body
Attachment to the body was
Transcended
Obviously drinking wine,
Eating hamburgers before
Or after Yoga practice
Would not make sense
To a
True Sadhu
Or practitioner.
– True Sadhu
I see the poet as someone who has made a commitment not just to self-expression, but to an active and an eager listening to the world and the voices outside of the self. The poet is willing to be changed by the things that language can reveal—about who we are, how we live, what our impact upon the world and one another is.
– Tracy K. Smith
Criticism and skepticism are not always a sign of intelligence .
– C. G. Jung
Hatred can rot a person’s wisdom and conscience. An enemy mentality will poison the spirit of a nation, destroy a society’s tolerance and humanity, and hinder a country’s advance toward freedom and democracy.
– Liu Xiaobo (Artist, dissident, Nobel Laureate)
A justly celebrated ‘prose poem’ from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick:
“The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic…”
We are healed by those we reject.
– Jean Vanier
Follow the shining ones, the wise, the awakened, the loving, for they know how to forbear. Whoever follows those who follow the way discovers his family, and is filled with joy. Follow them, as the moon follows the path of the stars. Look within. Be still. Free from fear and attachment, know the sweet joy of the way.
– Buddha, The Dhammapada
A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again
– Alexander Pope
The way
to study true zen
is not verbal. Just open
yourself and give up everything.
Whatever happens, study closely…
and see what you find out.
This is the fundamental
attitude.
– Shunryu Suzuki
The Way up the Mountain
1. Pull up the vines that hide the truth.
2. Disentangle your feet.
3. Take the path to the highest point….
4. See the view.
– Karen Maezen Miller
Being passionate about life tends to change your vibration from one of resistance and defense to one of attraction and receptivity. When you love life, life loves you back- so when you dive into it with exuberance and joy, life will reach out and enthusiastically embrace you. The more you love life by fully engaging in what feeds your soul, the more you spread that love around, and in doing so you heal yourself and others.
– Sonia Choquette
A friend is one that knows you as you are, understands where you have been, accepts what you have become, and still, gently allows you to grow.
– William Shakespeare
When we lose people, friendships, health, or we’re dispossessed from a place we loved, we may think it’s a temporary process of mourning that we are in. But maybe loss shows us some basic truth about who we are: we are tied to others and to place. Those bonds form us. It’s not like there is an ‘I’ that exists over here and a ‘you’ over there somewhere. When I lose you, I lose me too. Grief challenges the very notion that we are separate selves. We do not always succeed at be…ing whole. The faces of others, the touch and smell of them, our memories of places we have lived and loved – all of this undoes us. It should. Falling down is necessary for waking up to our shared humanity.
– Michael Stone
What we need to question is bricks, concrete, glass, our table manners, our utensils, our tools, the way we spend our time, our rhythms. To question that which seems to have ceased forever to astonish us.
– Georges Perec
The inner journey is as individual as our thumbprint. We need to guide others on their way and never impose our way upon them.
– Morton T. Kelsey
The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quiet, alone with the heavens, nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature.
– Anne Frank
We walk through half our life
as if it were a fever dream
barely touching the ground
our eyes half open
our heart half closed……
Not saying half we mean
or meaning half we say
we dream ourselves
from birth to birth
seeking some true self.
Until the fever breaks
and the heart can not abide
a moment longer
as the rest of us awakens,
summoned from the dream,
not half caring for anything but love.
– Stephen Levine
The peace, it is there; it grows from her soil.
A few feet beneath her surface, all is always
perfectly calm.
What does she know of any storms then? What
does she hear of any cries of this world, or is…
in any way startled by fear?
Once in a while something stirs a thirst she
had forgotten about;
a divine rain falls on her hills and settles in a
beautiful valley;
there, life’s companion, water, gently reaches
down and touches, awakens her heart.
She begins to reach up with all her strength,
feeling a glorious destiny awaits,
and she keeps stretching out her arms until
they become a sky again and all that is
luminous in it.
Her love shelters then from all angles, above,
below…and to our sides.
Yes, it shelters us, any heart, like an earth,
that knows God.
The peace is always there, just beneath a
particle of our surface.
– Hafiz
Everything in creation has its appointed painter or poet and remains in bondage like the princess in the fairy tale ’til its appropriate liberator comes to set it free.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Denise Levertov: “A partial definition, then, of organic poetry might be that it is a method of apperception, i.e., of recognizing what we perceive, and is based on an intuition of an order, a form beyond forms, in which forms partake, and of which man’s creative works are analogies, resemblances, natural allegories. Such poetry is exploratory.”
Everywhere I look, I see people who don’t want to be here. They don’t want to die, exactly, but they don’t want to be here. And its not only apparent in their addictive patterns, its apparent in very subtle ways: self-distractive tendencies, shallowing of breath and perspective, perpetual positivity, the transcendence bypass etc. There are billions of ways to leave the moment. And so I wonder, what has to happen before we can co-create a world that invites us to be here, truly here? And how can we construct that world if we have already left it? Where is the bridge back to here?
– Jeff Brown
In creative work — creative work of all kinds — those who are the world’s working artists are not trying to help the world go around, but forward. Which is something altogether different from the ordinary.
– Mary Oliver
The planet is
erupting with
Uncomfortable.
The earth is writhing in pain.
Feel her suffering in your blood, your bowels, and…
You will know what you are for.
Taste compassion for the sacrificed,
the slaughtered and
you will love like the Milky Way.
Shatter your old ways, and
show me how
your soul blushes
alive with arousal.
This is what you are for.
Be an unpopular harbinger,
an endangered one;
a tender, firmly sprouted
sentinel of
the rhizome of archaic revival.
Do not take a seat.
She is ready for you.
The soul of the world
will see you now.
What have you come to give her?
– Melissa La Flamme
Feelings come and go like clouds in a windy sky. Conscious breathing is my anchor.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
I consider myself extremely lucky because I get up every morning with a song in my heart.
– Paul Muldoon
Archetype is a term that is both misunderstood and abused. An archetype is not some kind of absolute fixed or ideal form of being, it is a fluid and evolving narrative structure that allows us to describe reality. In some sense, it you can’t go beyond it, it is composed of strict limits. It is the parameters of fate, the larger blueprints which shape us. At the same time, drawing those delineations, outlining a narrative structure creates infinite possibly variation and potential. Archetypes are like musical structures. Once there are rules to the archetypal game, you can begin to play. You can only be free from within the archetype, or the mandala, or the cosmic city, or however you want to describe the underlying metaphysical structure.
… while we circle around the same themes, each exploration reveals a deeper and more refined layer of the story. There is a basic simplicity to the narrative, but it can be told in infinite ways, as long as we don’t lose the thread. And even if you diverged from the story and went into avant guard nether regions, the main path would still be your reference—the archetype would still haunt you. That that is why there can be dissonance and contrast – a counterpoint to harmony. If you destroy the archetype completely you have nothing but white noise. But that doesn’t mean you can go off the main track or fall down into various rabbit holes. In fact, that is also part of the structure of the archetype.
– Andrew Sweeny
I’m not humming the blues
cause I’m sad or depressed
The blues is an underground river
where my soul swims
beneath the din and noise of politics
and the death by 1000 cuts
that bleeds out America’s heart
No, I’m not humming the blues
cause I’m down or out
I simply love the low tones
and rarely trust the warblers
selling wares made of gold and lucre
that have little currency in the commerce of this man’s heart
– David Bedrick
…because the dove is the only one that did not boast, Noah makes the bird his messenger. Commenting that there are more doves in the world today than there are ferocious beasts, Singers says, ‘The dove lives happily without fighting. It is the bird of peace.’
How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?” I carried Meno’s question around with me for years and then, when everything was going wrong, friends came bearing stories, one after another, and they seemed to provide, if not answers, at least milestones and signposts. Out of the blue, May sent me a long passage by Virginia Woolf she’d copied in round black letters on thick unlined paper. It was about a mother and wife alone at the end of the day: “For now she need not think about anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of – to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others. Although she continued to knit, and sat upright, it was thus that she felt herself; and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures. When life sank down for a moment, the range of experience seemed limitless . . . Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by. Her horizon seemed to her limitless.”
That passage from To the Lighthouse echoed something of Woolf’s I already knew, her essay about walking that declared, “As we step out of the house on a fine evening between four and six, we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one’s room . . . Into each of these lives one could penetrate a little way, far enough to give one the illusion that one is not tethered to a single mind, but can put on briefly for a few minutes the bodies and minds of others.
– Rebecca Solnit
EVENING TALK
Everything you didn’t understand
Made you what you are. Strangers
Whose eye you caught on the street
Studying you. Perhaps they were all-seeing
Illuminati? They knew what you didn’t,
And left you troubled like a strange dream.
Not even the light stayed the same.
Where did all that hard glare come from?
And the scent, as if mythical beings
Were being groomed and fed stalks of hay
On these roofs drifting among the evening clouds.
You didn’t understand a thing!
You loved the crowds at the end of the day
That brought you so many mysteries.
There was always someone you were meant to meet
Who for some reason wasn’t waiting.
Or perhaps they were? But not here, friend.
You should have crossed the street
And followed that obviously demented woman
With the long streak of blood-red hair
Which the sky took up like a distant cry.
– Charles Simic
I want you to stop running from thing to thing to thing, and to sit down at the table, to offer the people you love something humble and nourishing, like soup and bread, like a story, like a hand holding another hand while you pray. We live in a world that values us for how fast we go, for how much we accomplish, for how much life we can pack into one day. But I’m coming to believe it’s in the in-between spaces that our lives change, and that the real beauty lies there.
– Shauna Niequist
There are, it seems, two muses: the Muse of Inspiration, who gives us inarticulate visions and desires, and the Muse of Realization, who returns again and again to say “It is yet more difficult than you thought.” This is the muse of form. It may be then that form serves us best when it works as an obstruction, to baffle us and deflect our intended course. It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.
– Wendell Berry
Even in childhood I watched the hours flow, independent of any reference, any action, any event, the disjunction of time from what was not itself, its autonomous existence, its special status, its empire, its tyranny. I remember quite clearly that afternoon when, for the first time, confronting the empty universe, I was no more than a passage of moments reluctant to go on playing their proper parts. Time was coming unstuck from being – at my expense.
– Emil Cioran
A zoologist who observed gorillas in their native habitat was amazed by the uniformity of their life and their vast idleness. Hours and hours without doing anything. Was boredom unknown to them? This is indeed a question raised by a human, a busy ape. Far from fleeing monotony, animals crave it, and what they most dread is to see it end. For it ends, only to be replaced by fear, the cause of all activity. Inaction is divine; yet it is against inaction that man has rebelled. Man alone, in nature, is incapable of enduring monotony, man alone wants something to happen at all costs – something, anything . . . Thereby he shows himself unworthy of his ancestor: the need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla.
– Emil Cioran
Though stingy, the life force is not an absolute miser, and occasionally it allows us to experience a fuller, broader, deeper consciousness. These are our poetic and mystical experiences, the “all is good” feeling that brings a sense of “absurd affirmation.” For some reason, during them, our blinders are temporarily removed and reality is let in. Our doors of perception are opened, but only for a moment. Then they shut again. Yet these moments tell us that reality is not meaningless. In fact it is dripping with meaning, so much meaning that if we experienced it in full, we would most likely blow a psychic fuse; any number of accounts of mystical experiences suggest this. This tells us two things. One is that the world we perceive most of the time is not the world as it really is, but a highly edited version of it. The second is that our doors of perception are not permanently locked. They can open. The question then becomes, how can we open them just enough to allow more reality into consciousness, so we are not taken in by gloomy pronouncements about its meaninglessness, but not so much that we are overwhelmed by it?
– Gary Lachman, Beyond the Robot
Meditation is another dimension of natural beauty. People talk about appreciating natural beauty – climbing mountains, seeing giraffes and tigers in Africa, and all sorts of things. But nobody seems to appreciate this kind of natural beauty of ourselves. This is actually far more beautiful than flora and fauna, far more fantastic, far more painful and colorful and delightful.
– Chögyam Trungpa, Glimpses of Abhidharma
Maturity begins with the capacity to sense and, in good time and without defensiveness, admit to our own craziness. If we are not regularly deeply embarrassed by who we are, the journey to self-knowledge hasn’t begun.
– Alain de Botton
I had reached the stage in life where I identified with cynical villains in a book…I was fifteen years older. But she was smarter.
– Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
Are the days of winter sunshine just as sad for you, too? When it is misty, in the evenings, and I am out walking by myself, it seems to me that the rain is falling through my heart and causing it to crumble into ruins.
– Gustave Flaubert
In a certain sense the past is far more real, or at any rate more stable, more resilient than the present. The present slips and vanishes like sand between the fingers, acquiring material weight, only in its recollection.
– Andrei Tarkovsky
Your dream
moves
summers
inside
my mind.
– Anne Sexton
I know there is a moment when sound slips down the torn lining of itself into silence, is carried unheard and secret in its own pocket. But the crimson birds could find no such escape, no means of slipping beyond themselves between the cracks of color and song to a white undiscovered silence.
– Janet Frame
…I feel my past like an unbearable weight. I feel that it interferes with my present life, that it must be the case for this withdrawal, this closing the doors.
– Anaïs Nin
Listen. This is the noise of myth. It makes
the same sound as shadow. Can you hear it?
– Eavan Boland
[T]hey pause before going in for the night.
They look at the trees and disappearing sky.
What are their thoughts? All the ways
it might have been, all the ways it is.
– Stephen Dobyns
Environmental change is often too gradual to register in people’s consciousness, but photographs can make this change visible and help people explore ‘past scenarios’ as a way of opening up conversations about ‘future prospects.’
– Stephen Daniels and Georgina Endfield
Above all, I could feel in my dream something long forgotten, something that had not happened to me for a long time—the feeling that it was not a dream but real. It is such a powerful sensation that a wave of sadness fills your soul, of pity for yourself, […], as it were an aesthetic way of seeing your own life. When you feel compassion for yourself in that way, it is as if your pain were someone else’s, and you are looking at it from outside, weighing it up, and you are beyond the bounds of what used to be your life.
– Andrei Tarkovsky
Deep in the sun-searched growths the dragonfly
Hangs like a blue thread loosened from the sky …
– D. G. Rossetti
I said, ‘I’ll try to remember as much
As a man caught in Time cannot forget,’
For I carried a headful of summer
– Robert Penn Warren, Far West Once
When I say to you,
I have seen the black floor of the ocean,
you should know better
than to believe me in that moment.
My heart was broken, then,
and my arms were no good
at all. These words are what was left
of my breath. I am
so very tired of time and of waiting
for nothing to change.
– Paul Guest
For day has its loneliness too.
– Robert Penn Warren
The heart grows brutal from feeding on fantasies.
– Robert Pinsky
Blue is the insides of something mysterious and lonely. I’d look at fish and birds, thinking the sky and water colored them. The first abyss is blue. An artist must go beyond the mercy of satin or water–from a gutty hue to that which is close to royal purple. All seasons and blossoms inbetween. Lavender. Theatrical and outrageous electric. Almost gray. True and false blue. Water and oil. The gas jet breathing in oblivion. The unstruck match. The blue of absence. The blue of deep presence. The insides of something perfect.
– Yusef Komunyakaa
It was only a bird call at evening, unindentified,
As I came from the spring with water, across the rocky back-pasture;
But so still I stood sky above was not stiller than sky in pail-water.
Years pass, all places and faces fade, some people have died,
And I stand in a far land, the evening still, and am at last sure
That I miss more that stillness at bird-call than some things that were to fail later.
– Robert Penn Warren
I’m thinking about people and trees and how I wish I could be silent more, be more tree than anything else, less clumsy and loud, less crow, more cool white pine, and how it’s hard not to always want something else, not just to let the savage grass grow.
– Ada Limón
You need this love to be grounded, until there is no difference between you and your love, or what you love or what you are. It’s just the one thing.
– Leonard Cohen
My old teacher told me that the older you get and the lonelier you get, the deeper is your need for love. Like everyone else, I have looked for such deep love. And as you get older, you need this love to be grounded, until there is no difference between you and your love, or what you love or what you are. It’s just the one thing.
– Leonard Cohen
THE WAY OF GENTLENESS
There is the way of gentleness
And the way of the sword.
The way of the sword
Belittles, provokes, judges, mocks
in its search for Truth.
For those who are ready,
The sword will wake them instantly
from their slumber.
But many have been hurt enough by swords
And they will close up even more tightly.
Where is the swordsman
You would trust with your beloved’s life?
In the wrong hands,
Swords only deepens the devastation.
The way of gentleness, however,
Takes its sweet time. It does not rush.
It stays close. Gets under your skin.
Waits, until you feel safe to open.
Then kills you softly.
Without you even noticing.
The modern sword often misses its target,
And leaves its victim paralysed
From the neck down.
But this ancient gentleness
gets everyone in the end.
– Jeff Foster
HAVE YOU EVER WOKEN
Have you ever woken up, after a loss,
and gone outside, and found there such a mist
of morning—of mourning—that you thought you
were somewhere else, that the loss wasn’t lost,
and then you heard a voice from far away
whisper your name, then, vocative, pierce through
the mist and guide you back to what you knew
once, where you were, how things had been? You toss
left, toss right, and wake up again, only
to find there is no mist, no voice, no day,
there is no Is, because there is no We
anymore? You have? I have too, and say
I’m your friend, even if we’ve never met,
here to help you forget, and not forget.
– James B. Nicola
Love is something you and I must have. We must have it because our spirit feeds upon it. We must have it because without it we become weak and faint. Without love our self-esteem weakens. Without it our courage fails. Without love we can no longer look out confidently at the world… But with love, we are creative. With it, we march tirelessly. With it, and with it alone, we are able to sacrifice for others.
– Chief Dan George
If you think you can make up for something later, correct it later, resurrect it later, then you have not understood impermanence and death.
If compassion and wisdom are a theory, something only delicious and enjoyed read, thought and spoken of, but not an energetic experience within the body, then you are not practising compassion and wisdom.
If you have a public face that differs from your private face, you are living dualistically and have not parted from ignorance.
If you are incongruent- saying one thing but doing another- you are not practising dharma.
Guru Rinpoche talked about his care and responsibility being as refined as barley flour, even though his view was vast as the sky.
There is no Dzogchen practice without taking personal responsibility.
If you think that Guru Devotion abdicates you from cleaning up the mess of your own mind and abdicates you from making choices, you have not understood karma or devotion.
If you are reifying a certain ‘lineage’ over another, you are certainly not practising that lineage but simply admiring it from the shore- you are not in its oceanic reality.
No matter how ‘spiritual’ you are, if it is not worked through the body it lacks integrity.
If you are addicted to drama you are not practising Dharma. If you cannot see your addiction to drama through your thoughts, words and life then how can you proceed?
If you propound dharma and yet your ‘personal life’ is a mess and you hide that from others, including teachers, you are a hypocrite.
A title is not a marker of genuine realisation. Retreats are not a marker of realisation. Book learning and memory are not a marker of realisation. Staying strictly to rules is not a marker of realisation.
Kindness is not about being nice to anyone.
– Belle Heywood
Fuck ‘wellness.’ Wellness is capitalism trying to sell you back the sanity it stole from you.
– Gesshin Greenwood
I am Lakota!
Lakota!
Looking at money man,
Diggin’ the deadly quotas,
Out of balance,
Out of hand
We want the land!
Lay down the reeking ore!
Don’t you hear the shrieking in the trees?
Everywhere you touch the earth, she’s sore
Every time you skin her all things weep
Your money mocks us
Restitution, what good can it do?
Kenneled in metered boxes
Red dogs in debt to you
I am Lakota!
Lakota!
Fighting among ourselves
All we can say with one whole heart
Is we won’t sell,
No we’ll never sell
We want the land!
The lonely coyote calls
In the woodlands, footprints of the deer
In the barrooms, poor drunk bastard falls
In the courtrooms, deaf ears, sixty years
You think we’re sleeping–but
Quietly like rattlesnakes and stars
We have seen the trampled rainbows
In the smoke of cars
[Chorus]
I am Lakota
Brave
Sun pity me
I am Lakota
Broken
Moon pity me
I am Lakota
Grave
Shadows stretching
Lakota
Oh pity me
I am Lakota
Weak
Grass pity me
I am Lakota
Faithful
Rocks pity me
I am Lakota
Meek
Standing water
Lakota
Oh pity me
I am Lakota!
Lakota!
Standing on sacred land
We never sold these Black Hills
To the missile-heads,
To the power plants
We want the land!
The bullet and the fence, broke Lakota
The black coats and the booze, broke Lakota
Courts that circumvent, choke Lakota
Nothing left to lose
Tell me grandfather
You spoke the fur and feather tongues,
Do you hear the whimpering waters
When the tractors come?
[Chorus]
Sun pity me
Mother earth
Mother
Moon pity me
Father sky
Father
Shadows
Stretching on the forest floor
Mother earth
Oh pity me
Father sky
Father
Grass pity me
Mother earth
Mother
Rocks pity me
Father sky
Father
Water
Standing in a sacred manner
Mother earth
Oh pity me.
– Joni Mitchell
The Kagyu forefathers said that listening, contemplation and meditation are the way to tame a rough and unruly mind,” the Karmapa told the monks present. “Tibetan nomads have a way to make yak hide supple. First they steep it in water, then they rub butter into it, then they rub it again and again with their hands. Likewise, for our minds, listening is like the water, contemplation is like the butter, and meditation is like rubbing the hide again and again. The result should be that our minds become less rough and suppler. If our minds are becoming tamer and more malleable, it is a sign that our listening, contemplation and meditation is being done effectively.
– the Karmapa speaking at the conclusion of his teachings on ‘100 Short Instructions’ by Mikyo Dorje
The more we tap into our bodies and begin to listen to our bodies, the more we start to realize that a lot of what goes around in this culture is actually insane. Some of the indigenous teachers I’ve worked with have said to me, “modern culture is in a state of social-psychosis” – meaning that our version of reality is completely out of touch with what’s really going on in our selves, in our relationships, in our world.
So, a very important part of the work is to question a lot of things we assume are true. Humans cannot integrate experience that is inconsistent with their belief system. The only way they can do it is by changing what they believe. In Tibetan Buddhism this is called developing the view, and what it means is that we are going to be considering different ways of considering our world, ourselves, how we go about things, and what it means to be human.
– Reggie Ray
That is what I am, pursuit of the wind.
– Marguerite Duras
It was just the same long summer, always, and everything lived and grew at its own pace.
– Tove Jansson
Once in the west I lay down dying
to see something other than the dying stars
so singularly clear, so unassailably there,
they made me reach for something other.
– Christian Wiman
My heart, sometimes singing in the afternoon, the most haunting song of solitude.
– John Geddes
Things Seem Strong
by Jane Hirshfield
Things seem strong.
Houses, trees, trucks—a chair, even. A table.
You don’t expect one to break.
No, it takes a hammer to break one,
a war, a saw, an earthquake.
Troy after Troy after Troy seemed strong
to those living around and in them.
Nine Troys were strong,
each trembling under the other.
When the ground floods
and the fire ants leave their strong city,
they link legs and form a raft, and float, and live,
and begin again elsewhere.
Strong, your life’s wish
to continue linking arms with life’s eye blink, life’s tear well,
life’s hammering of copper sheets and planing of Port Orford cedar,
life’s joke of the knock-knock.
Knock, knock. Who’s there?
I am.
I am who?
That first and last question.
Who once dressed in footed pajamas,
who once was smothered in kisses.
Who seemed so strong
I could not imagine your mouth would ever come to stop asking.
We do compose a soul for ourselves, an inner biography that has this grace of selection.
– Les Murray
Being gay gave a particular edge to my politics, a way of taking politics personally.
– Tony Kushner
Sometimes I think a writer should make up his mind whether he’s going to be a writer or a reader.
– Jessamyn West
I no longer have nightmares at all. Literature has appeased my anxieties.
– Jorge Semprún
A story can be like a mad, lovely visitor, with whom you spend a rather exciting weekend.
– Lorrie Moore
You have to use your imagination a lot.
– Luc Sante
A book can be something of a metaphor for the human body—it has a face, it has a spine.
– Chris Ware
Personality is socially constructed, genetically constructed, linguistically constructed.
– Jonathan Franzen
To be a poet is to be in direct communication with every part of the world’s action.
– J.H. Prynne
The negative ideas of your mind have to be released, not repressed by positive ideas. You have to create a consciousness which is neither positive nor negative. That will be the pure consciousness. In that pure consciousness you will live the most natural and blissful life… You don’t like a person, you don’t like many things; you don’t like yourself, you don’t like the situation you are in. All this garbage goes on collecting in the unconscious, and on the surface a hypocrite is born, who says, “I love everybody, love is the key to blissfulness.” But you don’t see any bliss in that person’s life. He is holding the whole of hell within himself. He can deceive others, and if he goes on deceiving long enough, he can deceive himself too. But it won’t be a change. It is simply wasting life – which is immensely valuable because you cannot get it back. Positive thinking is simply the philosophy of hypocrisy – to give it the right name. When you are feeling like crying, it teaches you to sing. You can manage if you try, but those repressed tears will come out at some point, in some situation. There is a limitation to repression. And the song that you were singing was absolutely meaningless; you were not feeling it, it was not born out of your heart.
– Osho
The Supple Deer
by Jane Hirshfield
The quiet opening
between fence strands
perhaps eighteen inches.
Antlers to hind hooves,
four feet off the ground,
the deer poured through.
No tuft of the coarse white belly hair left behind.
I don’t know how a stag turns
into a stream, an arc of water.
I have never felt such accurate envy.
Not of the deer:
To be that porous, to have such largeness pass through me.
Conventional knowledge is death
to our souls, and it is not really ours.
We must become ignorant
of what we’ve been taught,
and be, instead, bewildered…
Forget safety.
Live where you fear to live.
Destroy your reputation.
Be notorious.
I have tried to prudent planning
long enough. From now
on, I’ll be mad.
– Rumi
I have only now realized that something end- less has broken ground in me, and I have no choice but to live and love until it grows me like a tree.
– Mark Nepo
Tell the story that’s been growing in your heart, the characters you can’t keep out of your head, the tale story that speaks to you, that pops into your head during your daily commute, that wakes you up in the morning.
– Jennifer Weiner
AND THEN COMES MERLIN
A boy child
Lost in the woods
But with magical powers
At his fingertips
Speaking to forest creatures wild
And they gather around you
The mighty and the mild
From lions to the deer and antelope
You a mysterious entity
Merlin
Were you misunderstood maybe
Or held in awe?
You
The silent brooding druid of the woods
An enchanted being
Who
Made a pact with the
Lady of the Lake
A wondrous being
“Give Arthur the Excalibur
And I will forever
Walk this way
Each lonely evening
And share a silent
Communion with you”
“And if he should die in battle
Conquered at last
Then, I promise you
Your sword I will return”
And thus
In the fading shades of an evening
When Arthur wounded in battle lay dying
Merlin honoured the promise
And Arthur with life slowly ebbing
Stumbled to the lake
Touched the cool waters and whispered
“Hail to thee
Beautiful being
Here is your gift
The majestic and mighty
Excalibur!’
And you hand reached out
From the murky depths of the lake
And caught hold of the sword
While evening sunlight glinted
And turned Excalibur
Into burnished gold…
It’s only a temporary turbulence I’m setting myself against. I’m in line with the big flow.
– Gary Snyder
The lure of the distant is deceptive. Do not discount your own place and hour. The great opportunity is where you are now.
– John Burroughs
There is something that happens online, which is nothing new, but has intensified of late: a kind of collective editing process between people who communicate by text. This can be both particularly deadly and damaging, and have great potential for learning.
The danger lurks in the shadow of the collective. When we put our raw thoughts and emotions out into the social sphere, there is feedback: a flurry of support, outrage, affection, complaint — love and hate speech. This could make us entirely cowed as human beings, and terrified to express our individuality; it could progressively turn us into cowards, cowed before social judgment, never raising our voices at all above the mob. Or conversely, we could become aggressively reactionary, constantly attacking and criticizing wily-nily. It’s like we have brought the inquisition into our most intimate space. People are afraid to speak their minds, even if they are talking all the time. On the hand, social networks teach us pretty fast what we should never say in a larger social context.
Feedback on social media, if it is properly filtered, could help us to communicate better, and even how to write, to a certain extent. We don’t need to go to writing workshops anymore if we have intelligent friends, for they will spontaneously correct us. Social networks, for better and worse, will increasingly influence how we speak and present ourselves, as video becomes omnipresent. This is already happening at lightening speed, and will lead to more madness, as chaos and alienation that arises from this very imposing form communication. However, listening and watching to people speak may be even more natural to us as a species than reading, as it is more ancient and primordial, and video learning may replace classrooms soon. Perhaps in the future, talking books will be the dominant form. These talking books will spontaneously update themselves, until they have become perfectly crystalized forms of spontaneous expression.
On the other hand, we don’t want to drink the utopian Kool-aid. The dangers are monumental and the pathologies will be legion. There is a great battle coming and every Samurai will soon be employed.
– Andrew Sweeney
America has a history of utopian experiments. We should never give up our ideal of a perfect human community.
– Thomas Moore
Waking today
just before winter
when I try to name the color of grasses,
how I feel of their beauty,
there is no word.
I think of the time before there were
words
when you would know morning mist
by the feel
of your loved one’s skin and hair,
and when someone came from the forest
of dry leaves
you would know by their scent
even if they carried no wood.
Or the heat of their body skin in summer.
Or it they came the winding way
down from the mountains
they would be covered in cloud
returning to the fold
or if they had gone farther, to the ocean,
you’d know them by their far-seeing eyes,
and when some travelers return
and are shining with light
you know, without saying, that they
have been
in touch with other worlds.
I have no wealth to speak of
other than this,
all this, just to praise the dry grasses
and their color that can’t be spoken
in words.
– Linda Hogan
If you want to catch songs you gotta start thinking like one. And making yourself an interesting place for them to land like birds and insects.
– Tom Waits
All Questions Answered
A man approached the Buddha and asked, “Venerable Sir, how come my mind constantly wanders and yours does not? How come I indulge in gossip and back-biting and you don’t? How come I don’t have patience or compassion for others, while you have? I am filled with such questions. Please guide me.”
The Buddha replied, “Your questions are good, however it appears to me that in twenty four hours you will die.”
The man was shocked to hear this. He immediately got up, ready to leave.
The Buddha asked, “What happened? You came with such enthusiasm and now you seemly utterly dismayed.”
The man said, “Sir, my mother told me that your words are true and are to be held in high regard. Please let me go so that I may meet my family members, friends and others for the last time before I die.”
The Buddha said, “But there are still twenty four hours. Sit, we will talk more.”
The man said, “Sir, please excuse me. I must meet my loved ones before I die.”
So he left and went home. He met his mother and started crying. The word spread. His friends came; other relatives came; neighbors came. Everyone was crying with him. Time flew.
He was busy either crying or counting the hours. When only three hours were left, he got into bed and lay down. Although death had not yet arrived, he was already kind of dead.
When only an hour was left, the Buddha walked in and said to him, “Why are you lying down with closed eyes? Death is still an hour away. That’s a lot of time. Get up, let us talk.”
He replied, “Sir, what is there now to talk about? Please let me die peacefully.”
The Buddha said, “There is still time. Our talk will get over before then.”
“Okay, Sir. Say what you have to say.”
The Buddha asked, “In the past twenty four hours, did your mind wander and think about inconsequential things?”
“How could I think of meaningless things? I was constantly focused on death.”
“In the past twenty four hours, did you think or speak ill of anyone?”
“How could I do that? I was all the time preoccupied with death.”
“In the past twenty four hours, were you mean or hurtful towards anyone?”
“Sir, how can you even ask that? I was only thinking of death, nothing else mattered.”
Finally the Buddha said, “Do not worry. This was a way of teaching you. The truth is we are dying each moment, not just in twenty four hours. No one knows when their time will be up, yet we are inevitably racing towards death. Understanding this truth can be very liberating. All the questions you asked me have been spontaneously answered because of the heightened awareness of death you experienced in these twenty four hours. The difference between you and me is that you were aware of death for a few hours, I am aware of it as a living reality each moment.”
THE BLANKET
We cover ourselves when we sleep with a blanket, comforter, or quilt. Since we are warm-blooded, we generate our own heat, but we conserve and regulate that with the help of clothes and bedcovers.
Please consider the blanket for a moment. It is soft, so it accepts anyone. It has no muscle, so it never moves by itself. It needs nothing extra to do its job. Merely by its presence, it performs its job admirably.
In that, isn’t it perfect in its Tao? And in that, could we not be the same? Could we be soft and accept everyone? Could we never buck against our place in life? And could we fulfill everything needed merely by being ourselves?
– Deng Ming-Dao
Oh! To be an ocean of abyssal silence that laps at the shores of the unknown with little word-wave-ripples, cooing the infinite with sacred hymns and poetry.
– Joshua Morriston
This life is a hospital where every patient is possessed with the desire to change beds; one man would like to suffer in front of the stove, and another believes that he would recover his health beside the window.
– Charles Baudelaire
ANGER by David Whyte
is the deepest form of care, for another, for the world, for the self, for a life, for the body, for a family and for all our ideals, all vulnerable and all, possibly about to be hurt.
Stripped of physical imprisonment and violent reaction, anger points toward the purest form of compassion, the internal living flame of anger always illuminates what we belong to, what we wish to protect and what we are willing to hazard ourselves for.
What we usually call anger is only what is left of its essence when it reaches the lost surface of our mind or our body’s incapacity to hold it, or the limits of our understanding. What we name as anger is actually only the incoherent physical incapacity to sustain this deep form of care in our outer daily life; the unwillingness to be large enough and generous enough to hold what we love helplessly in our bodies or our mind with the clarity and breadth of our whole being.
What we have named as anger on the surface is the violent outer response to our own inner powerlessness, a powerlessness connected to such a profound sense of rawness and care that it can find no proper outer body or identity or voice, or way of life to hold it.
What we call anger is often simply the unwillingness to live the full measure of our fears or of our not knowing, in the face of our love for a wife, in the depth of our caring for a son, in our wanting the best, in the face of simply being alive and loving those with whom we live.
Our anger breaks to the surface most often through our feeling there is something profoundly wrong with this powerlessness and vulnerability; anger too often finds its voice strangely, through our incoherence and through our inability to speak, but anger in its pure state is the measure of the way we are implicated in the world and made vulnerable through love in all its specifics: a daughter, a house, a family, an enterprise, a land or a colleague.
Anger turns to violence and violent speech when the mind refuses to countenance the vulnerability of the body in its love for all these outer things – we are often abused or have been abused by those who love us but have no vehicle to carry its understanding, who have no outer emblems of their inner care or even their own wanting to be wanted. Lacking any outer vehicle for the expression of this inner rawness they are simply overwhelmed by the elemental nature of love’s vulnerability. In their helplessness they turn their violence on the very people who are the outer representation of this inner lack of control.
But anger truly felt at its center is the essential living flame of being fully alive and fully here, it is a quality to be followed to its source, to be prized, to be tended, and an invitation to finding a way to bring that source fully into the world through making the mind clearer and more generous, the heart more compassionate and the body larger and strong enough to hold it.
What we call anger on the surface only serves to define its true underlying quality by being a complete and absolute mirror-opposite of its true internal essence.
From “Standing at the Edge”
Exchanging Self with Other
I have found the practice of “exchanging self with other” to be of great support in deepening respect, and of nurturing wisdom and strengthening resilience when subjected to disrespect.
This practice was outlined by Shantideva, the eighth century Indian Buddhist monk, who wrote “A Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life.”
We begin by first recalling our aspiration to be of benefit to others, and that every single being wants to be free of suffering.
Then we honestly consider how our own selfishness and self-cherishing have not brought us real happiness. What has nourished our well-being has been respecting, loving, and caring for others.
Looking deeply, we should also see that everything that benefits us comes from others, whether our body, the food we eat, the clothing we wear, the house we live in, even the air we breathe.
Then, it is important to understand that from one point of view, there is no difference between self and other, and that all beings and things are totally interdependent and worthy of respect and care.
Although for most of us it is usually ourselves that we are focusing on, now we focus our attention and love on another.
So, for this practice of exchanging our self-cherishing to cherishing others, bring to mind the presence of someone who is suffering. Imagine that you are this person, living their life, enduring their difficulties.
Imagine their suffering as dark smoke and breathe it in. On the outbreath, send all of your good qualities to this one.
After some time has passed doing this practice, return to your own vast heart and let yourself rest in unconditioned presence.
End the practice by dedicating the merit to the wellbeing of others.
This practice is a powerful way for us to cultivate respect for others.
– Joan Halifax
The right way to wholeness is made up of fateful detours and wrong turnings.
– Carl Gustav Jung
We cannot live in a world that is interpreted for us by others. An interpreted world is not a home. Part of the terror is to take back our own listening. To use our own voice. To see our own light.
– Hildegard of Bingen
It has been my experience that the one that families call the “crazy one” is often the sane one. This is particularly true in very dysfunctional families where ideas of healthy functioning are turned upside down. In these families, members often repress their authentic feelings and turn against anyone who reminds them of their unresolved issues and patterns. As a result, the truth-speakers, the ones who refuse to contain their feelings, those who challenge and humanize the toxic status quo, are often scapegoated and vilified, made to feel crazy by those who lack the courage and insight to see beyond the family’s madness. If you have been labeled the ‘crazy one’, take heart. You are truly not alone. Most great creators and paradigm shifters were met with fiery resistance by those afraid to grow. Whatever you do, do not allow your voice to fade away in the face of their messaging. Your voice, your vision, your ways of being, live at the heart of your unique soul’s journey and are the key to collective transformation. No one has the right to bury them under a bushel of shame. No one! And remember- what is crazy to an unconscious person is often brilliantly sane to one who is awakening. Without you, we are lost. Blessed be the ‘crazy’ ones!
– JEFF BROWN
Each one of us is responsible for ALL of humankind. We need to think of each other as true brothers and sisters, and to be concerned with each other’s welfare. We must seek to loosen the suffering of others. Rather than working solely to acquire wealth, we need to do something meaningful, something seriously directed toward the welfare of humanity as a whole.”
– H. H. THE DALAI LAMA
But you can’t be bored, if you get bored we all get bored, if we all get bored and tired we all give it up, then the world falls down and dies!
– Jack Kerouac
In the glare of neon times,
Let our eyes not be worn
By surfaces that shine
With hunger made attractive.
That our thoughts may be true light,
Finding their way into words
Which have the weight of shadow
To hold the layers of truth.
That we never place our trust
In minds claimed by empty light,
Where one-sided certainties
Are driven by false desire.
When we look into the heart,
May our eyes have the kindness
And reverence of candlelight.
That the searching of our minds
Be equal to the oblique
Crevices and corners where
The mystery continues to dwell,
glimmering in fugitive light.
– John O’Donohue
The treasure we seek requires no lengthy expedition, no expensive equipment, no superior aptitude or special company. All we lack is the willingness to imagine that we already have everything we need. The only thing missing is our consent to be where we are.
– Barbara Brown Taylor
It is said that the difference between buddhas and sentient beings is like the difference between the narrowness and the openness of space. Sentient beings are like the space held within a tightly closed fist, while buddhas are fully open, all-encompassing.
– Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche
We need an ego to function in the world, to carry out tasks, to get us to work on time, to do the laundry, and to master new information. But we have a tendency to overvalue its reality, obscuring a more expansive view of the kinds of connection of which we are capable. In Buddhism, we must surrender the ego so that we can feel our connection to the universe. We do not move toward greater separation and individuation in this view; we move toward love and death.
– Mark Epstein, M.D.
The point is not that Jesus was a good guy who accepted everybody, and thus we should do the same (though that would be good). Rather, his teachings and behavior reflect an alternative social vision. Jesus was not talking about how to be good and how to behave within the framework of a domination system. He was a critic of the domination system itself.
– Marcus J. Borg
Hang yourself, poet, in your own words.
Otherwise, you are dead.
– Langston Hughes
Our burdens are here, our road is before us, and the longing for goodness and happiness is the guide that leads us through many troubles and mistakes to the peace which is a true Celestial City.
– Marmee, Little Women
Monastics and hippies and poets… we’re deliberately irrelevant.
– Thomas Merton
Buddha’s Teaching:
Dear ones… There are 2 ways to become a noble one..
1. Keep in mind who helped you.
2. Help them back.
A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.
– Joan Didion
I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that’s what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.
– Joan Didion
To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.
– Arundhati Roy
For a true writer, each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment.
– Ernest Hemingway
things. that should be asked
often. in every type. of
relationship :
how is your heart.
is your breath happy. here.
do you feel free.
– nayyirah waheed
Learn your theories well but put them aside when you confront the mystery of the living soul.
– Carl Jung
my epitaphs and a good poem about roofs.
by hune margulies.
my walk has ceased.
it was wonderful….
i leave behind seven poems.
three children.
and two memories.
i wanted love, fig trees and wine.
i am proud of my wants!
even if pride is shunned by the good cloths.
but i’m mostly proud of the amazing ways i have failed at them!
i so much wanted the sunsets at my childhood beach!
i have a good voice for singing.
if only my old couch would tell!
i dread to even imagine my life without that one song.
and the embrace of urgent loves.
and the fiddler on that rumpled roof.
poems and singings saved me.
but i was never sure of what.
i invented loves.
and i admit some hatreds too.
there are things of youth of which i wish not to speak.
because of needs i made many choices.
but i am at peace with my daring wants.
and i smile at all my errors.
and at my meager wins too.
spring nights are beautiful.
how many names do i deserve to herald?
that answer i may never know.
i made love too.
and i liked that.
and you.
i loved dissidents, dissenters and resisters.
i shared secrets and poems.
i offered my love grapefruits with brandy from latroun.
i still carry with me your nude picture.
a bit discolored by tears and sea salt.
i love breezes and can tell many stories about them.
like the spring one that brought me the taciturn smell of your body.
and the warm rains in the hills with fresh challah and za’atar.
i first learned about peace and love
from purple fireflies with wrinkled noses.
this is not a song of melancholy.
as the poet said: i regret nothing.
except for not celebrating my life enough.
so perhaps i do regret some things.
yes, there is abundance in every face.
this poem may seem too brief for an epitaph.
but please don’t get me wrong.
i made good friends with the autumn moons.
i took my heart with me everywhere.
and i will not forget the smiles i’ve seen.
– hune margulies, in search of lost betweens
Any man who has known real loves, real revolts, real desires, and real will knows quite well that he has no need of any outside guarantee to be sure of his goals; their certitude comes from his own drive.
– Simone de Beauvoir
She was ready to deny the existence of space and time rather than admit that love might not be eternal.
– Simone de Beauvoir
The most painful state of being is remembering the future.
– Søren Kierkegaard
Blest power of sunshine! – genial day,
What balm, what life is in thy ray!
– Thomas Moore
What kind of beast would turn its life into words?
– Adrienne Rich
Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.
– Edward Abbey
if we watch ourselves we are many people. All day long our field of consciousness is entered by autonomous complexes. If you can recognize them as such, you can steer them, either to keep them out of your system, or by going along with it and knowingly putting it aside again. But if you are possessed, so to speak, it means the complexes enter you involuntary and you act them out involuntary.
– Maire Louise Von Franz
MY NAME
I guess you are kind of curious as to who I am, but I am one of those who do not have a regular name. My name depends on you. Just call me whatever is in your mind.
If you are thinking about something that happened a long time ago: Somebody asked you a question and you did not know the answer.
That is my name.
Perhaps it was raining very hard.
That is my name.
Or somebody wanted you to do something. You did it. Then they told you what you did was wrong – “Sorry for the mistake,” – and you had to do something else.
That is my name.
Perhaps it was a game you played when you were a child or something that came idly into your mind when you were old and sitting in a chair near the window.
That is my name.
Or you walked someplace. There were flowers all around.
That is my name.
Perhaps you stared into a river. There was somebody near who loved you. They were about to touch you. You could feel this before it happened. Then it happened.
That is my name.
Or you heard someone calling from a great distance. Their voice was almost an echo.
That is my name.
Perhaps you were lying in bed, almost ready to go to sleep and you laughed at something, a joke unto yourself, a good way to end the day.
That is my name.
Or you were eating something good and for a second forgot what you were eating, but still went on, knowing it was good.
That is my name.
Perhaps it was around midnight and the fire tolled like a bell inside the stove.
That is my name.
Or you felt bad when she said that thing to you. She could have told it to someone else: Somebody who was more familiar with her problems.
That is my name.
– Richard Brautigan, In Watermelon Sugar
Man seeks to escape himself in myth, and does so by any means at his disposal. Drugs, alcohol, or lies. Unable to withdraw into himself, he disguises himself. Lies and inaccuracy give him a few moments of comfort, the trifling feeling of escape experienced at a masked ball. He distances himself from that which he feels and sees. He invents. He transfigures. He mythifies. He creates. He fancies himself an artist. He imitates, in his small way, the painters he claims are mad.
– Jean Cocteau
Place memory was encoded and sedimented or consolidated, for individuals and their groups, through iterative and repetitive activity. Working and walking the land brought deep embodied familiarity not only with particular places but also with the events and stories associated with them at a fine-grained level that may not be easy for many of us to grasp. Through constantly acting in and on the land, early modern people were ‘reading, monitoring and remembering change in the local world down to its most precise details.’
– Andy Wood
All day the blanket snapped and swelled
on the line, roused by a hot spring wind….
From there it witnessed the first sparrow,
early flies lifting their sticky feet,
and a green haze on the south-sloping hills.
Clouds rose over the mountain….At dusk
I took the blanket in, and we slept,
restless, under its fragrant weight.
– Jane Kenyon
There must be a map
in the lush, ever-vernal grace of language
that might help us emerge from the gloom,
though I can’t hear it now. Old sounds: shrouded
whispers, in tongues, the hum between love
and the battered earth’s bruised chorus.
– Sidney Wade
I wrote a series of apologies to a landscape. The geums turned to seed clusters. The face of the stream bank crept into shadow. We avoided trading upon the exposed roots of trees. And walked through this transition as if our arms were streamers. Those things which changed became rocklings. Who will remember which days were exchanged for roots? Leaves may carry a message when circling the body. Sash ideogram.
– Laynie Brown
I feel it in my bones. This secret life
Whose language is the melancholy sound the heart makes
Beating against its cage—
– John Koethe
I searched for you […] every night as I lay sleeping.
– Alice Notley
Unlike our lives, which are as they are.
Unlike our imagined selves, which are as we’ll never become,
Star-like and shining,
Everyone looking up at, everyone pointing there, I there,
Masked and summering in,
each one a bright point, each one a dodged eclipse.
– Charles Wright
All my life I’ve looked for this slow light, this smallish light
Starting to seep, coppery blue,
out of the upper right-hand corner of things,
Down through the trees and off the back yard,
Rising and falling at the same time, now rising, now falling,
Inside the lapis lazuli of late afternoon.
– Charles Wright
It is not down in any map; true places never are.
– Herman Melville
It’s hard to imagine a more “Buddhist” value than fighting for affordable universal healthcare. One of these days, may sanity prevail.
– Ethan Nichtern
Wer zur Quelle will, muss gegen den Strom schwimmen.
One who wishes to get to the source must swim against the current.
– Hermann Hesse
The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour).
– Vladimir Nabokov
I had a great, great fear that I was bent on doing something for which I have no ability, and that took years and years to get rid of…that I was dedicating my life to something I was not fit for.
– Mavis Gallant
Dare not to criticize self, lift yourself up and set the boundaries for your worth. Speak kindly to self and hand your worries over to the wind,if you are here; you are successful already, start believing in your story, the destination will be meaningless if the journeys never been truly lived.
– Nikki Rowe
The world’s body is not our body,
although we’d have it so.
Our body’s not infinite, although
This afternoon, under the underwater slant-shine
Of sunlight and cloud shadow,
It almost seems that way in the wind,
a wind that comes
From a world away with its sweet breath and its tart tongue
And casts us loose, like a cloud,
Heaven-ravaged, blue pocket, small change for the hand.
– Charles Wright, Body and Soul
I used to think the power of words was inexhaustible,
That how we said the world
was how it was, and how it would be.
I used to imagine that word-sway and word-thunder
Would silence the Silence and all that,
That words were the Word,
That language could lead us inexplicably to grace,
As though it were geographical.
I used to think these things when I was young.
I still do.
– Charles Wright, Body and Soul
From the Intro to Robert Graves’ White Goddess:
My thesis is that the language of poetic myth anciently current in the Mediterranean and Northern Europe was a magical language bound up with popular religious ceremonies in honour of the Moon-goddess, or Muse, some of them dating from the Old Stone Age, and that this remains die language of true poetry—’true’ in the nostalgic modern sense of ‘the unimprovable original, not a synthetic substitute’. The language was tam- pered with in late Minoan times when invaders from Central Asia began to substitute patrilinear for matrilinear institutions and remodel or falsify the myths to justify the social changes. Then came the early Greek philosophers who were strongly opposed to magical poetry as threatening their new religion of logic, and under their influence a rational poetic language (now called the Classical) was elaborated in honour of their patron Apollo and imposed on the world as the last word in spiritual illumination: a view that has prevailed practically ever since in European schools and universities, where myths are now studied only as quaint relics of the nursery age of mankind.
Darien
It is a poet’s privilege and fate
To fall enamoured of the one Muse
Who variously haunts this island earth.
She was your mother, Darien,
And presaged by the darting halcyon bird
Would run green—sleeved along her ridges,
Treading the asphodels and heather—trees
With white feet bare.
Often at moonrise I had watched her go
And a cold shudder shook me
To see the curved blaze of her Cretan axe.
Averted her set face, her business
Not yet with me, long—striding,
She would ascend the peak and pass from sight.
But once at full moon, by the sea’s verge,
I came upon her without warning.
Unrayed she stood, with long hair streaming,
A cockle—shell cupped in her warm hands,
Her axe propped idly on a stone.
No awe possessed me, only a great grief;
Wanly she smiled, but would not lift her eyes
(As a young girl will greet the stranger).
I stood upright, a head taller than she.
“See who has come,” said I.
She answered: “If I lift my eyes to yours
And our eyes marry, man, what then?
Will they engender my son Darien?
Swifter than wind, with straight and nut—brown hair,
Tall, slender—shanked, grey—eyed, untameable;
Never was born, nor ever will be born
A child to equal my Darien,
Guardian of the hid treasures of your world.”
I knew then by the trembling of her hands
For whom that flawless blade would sweep:
My own oracular head, swung by its hair.
“Mistress,” I cried, “the times are evil
And you have charged me with their remedy.
O, where my head is now, let nothing be
But a clay counterfeit with nacre blink:
Only look up, so Darien may be born.
”He is the northern star, the spell of knowledge,
Pride of all hunters and all fishermen,
Your deathless fawn, and eaglet of your eyrie,
The topmost branch of your unfellable tree,
A tear streaking the summer night,
The new green of my hope.” Lifting her eyes
She held mine for a lost eternity.
“Sweetheart,” said I, “strike now, for Darien’s sake!”
It is the mind itself that creates this whole delusion, but it is also the mind itself that can let the whole delusion collapse. Besides buddha nature, what else is there to be free from delusion? Buddha nature is the very basis for delusion. It is also that which dissolves the delusion. Please try carefully to understand this! This is something that you can understand!
– Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche
Mirabai:
Listen, my friend, this road is the heart opening,
kissing his feet, resistance broken, tears all night.
If we could reach the Lord through immersion in water,
I would have asked to be born a fish in this life.
If we could reach Him through nothing but berries and wild nuts
then surely the saints would have been monkeys when they came from the womb!
If we could reach him by munching lettuce and dry leaves
then the goats would surely get to the Holy One before us!
If the worship of stone statues could bring us all the way,
I would have adored a granite mountain years ago.
…I call it the loss of the sacred, which is incredibly tragic if you know how precious this substance of the sacred is, how precious it is to human beings, how precious it is to the planet. We are living in very toxic times, it’s jokingly called the post-truth era. The mystic and the Sufis have written a lot about the veils of distortion, and how to see through the veils of distortion, but they are more distorted than ever and it requires an extra special vigilance, attentiveness and mindfulness to stay true to one’s own deepest purpose in this minefield of exploitation, in this minefield of greed in which sadly, even a lot of spirituality has become polluted by profit and loss, by commercialism.
…we reclaim the sacred in our inner life through prayer, through meditation, through devotions, and in our outer life just through being present in the sacred that is all around us, that permeates everything, but for some reason there is this poison, and I deliberately call it poison, in our contemporary culture, that stops us from experiencing it, that veils us from what alone gives real meaning to life.
…This will be a multi-generational story, it won’t be fixed in the next five, 10, even 20 years, maybe in the next 200 years, but we have to be pioneers of consciousness, and this is something the mystic has always been. We push the frontiers of consciousness, we see what is possible within the human being, we dare to live a new story.
A new interview with Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee on “Reconnecting with the World Soul” as part of KOSMOS LIVE PODCAST SERIES: Preparing for Profound Change.
signing off
as the day
seems to say
no one
really matters
and the only monuments
worth saving are carved
in stone, faces
defacing mountains
pitch dark is when
to really care
about someone
like everyone
is too much
save the soul
who finds a friend
on the street
true enough
to wipe the tears
– Megan Hollingsworth
When we sip our tea or coffee, start our car, enter a shop, or exchange greetings with someone while out for a stroll, we are enjoying those experiences as a direct result of interdependence. All these moments bear direct witness to the workings of interdependence. Such daily occurrences are a continuous procession of opportunities to recognize that others are indispensable to our well-being.
– Karmapa, Interconnected
I like friends who have independent minds because they tend to make you see problems from all angles.
– Nelson Mandela
The Way
Nansen: “Make a thorough study of the Buddha Dharma, and broadly benefit the world.”
Tozan: “I have no question about studying the Buddha Dharma, but what is it to broadly benefit the world?”
Nansen: “Not to disregard a single being.”
what if, instead of fighting each other,
we fought for each other?
– Eric C.
There is still a window of time. Nature can win If we give her a chance.
– Dr. Jane Goodall
Love never dies a natural death.
It dies because we don’t know how to
replenish its source.
It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals.
It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of
weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.
– Anaïs Nin
In the story of Buddha’s death, his attendant Ananda
kneels weeping at his side, face contorted in grief,
golden robe darkening with tears. Ananda is an anxious man,
and Buddha strives to calm him. “Past Buddhas
have had good attendants, but none like you, Ananda.”
Buddha lifts his face to the west,
gazing on far rice fields flickering and flaring
in the falling light that
now and forever, world without end
lights the earth. Buddha speaks: “Ananda, have you seen
the golden rice fields stretching out to the horizon? They are
so beautiful.” Ananda pauses, looks westward. “Yes, Lord,
they are beautiful.” Shot through with late sun,
the still air glitters. Buddha’s eyes close, his arms
and legs stiffen, the sun sinks, Ananda’s heart breaks,
but the rice fields remain. The night wind rises,
runs blue fingers through their hair, as
now and forever, world without end
I am traveling home this evening, caught
at a lonely crossing by a passing train.
I pause, look westward to see twilight’s first red rays
set fire to fields of wild grass around me.
The night wind rises, runs blue fingers through my hair.
Rushes whisper in the distance, many-tongued,
tattered birches gleam whitely, their leaves like flames
flickering and flaring in the falling light that
now and forever, world without end
lights my eyes, and once again I know there is
no other world. Here are the all the fallen
stars of heaven, here are all the fires of hell. Here are bodies
burning in time and blazing with sun, here is the heart
borne through millions of skies in its chariot of bones.
The train roars past, disappearing into the openness
of an opal sky which remains, stretching out
to the horizon and beyond, curving its arms
now and forever over this world without end.
-Thade Correa
You are a potent person and you possess immense possibilities, so you do not have to get external help. You may be screwed up and confused, like a little seed that has dried up, but once you plant that particular seed and begin to water it and nurture it with substances like manure, it will grow. Just like the seed, you begin to realize yourself. You begin to develop from within.
Excerpted from: Milarepa: Lessons from the Life and Songs of Tibet’s Great Yogi by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche
Old spirit, in and beyond me,
keep, and extend me. Amid strangers,
friends, great trees and big seas breaking,
let love move me. Let me hear the whole music,
see clear, reach deep…
After such luck, however late, give me to give to
the oldest dance …. Then to good sleep,
and – if it happens – glad waking.
– Philip Booth
Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something.
– Judith Butler
The highest good is like water.
Water give life to the 10,000 things
and does not strive.
It flows in places men reject
and so is like the Tao.
In dwelling, be close to the land.
In meditation, go deep in the heart.
In dealing with others, be gentle and kind.
In speech, be true.
In ruling, be just.
In daily life, be competent.
In action, be aware of the time
and the season.
No fight: No blame.
– Lao Tsu,
Tao Te Ching, verse 8
Something ancient in us bends us toward the origins of the whole thing. We either drown in the splits and confusions of our lives, or we surrender to something greater than ourselves. The water of our deepest troubles is also the water of our own solution. In surrender, we descend down to the bottom of it and back to the beginning of it; down into what is divided in order to get back to the wholeness before the split. Healing, health, wealth, wholeness: all hail from the same roots. To heal is to make whole again; wholeness is what all healing seeks and what alone can truly unify our spirit.
– Michael Meade, The Genius Myth
I went to sleep somewhat sad. But I awoke happy, purely animal. When I opened the bedroom windows and looked out onto the cool, calm garden in the first rays of sunlight, I was certain there was nothing to do but live.
– Clarice Lispector
You too have nothing to lose but spend
much of your time telling yourself you do.
In fact, it seems the point of society is to
make people think they have something to lose
until a man [or woman] goes through life as nervously
as if he [or she] were carrying a teetery
stack of plates up a dark flight of stairs.
– Stephen Dobyns
I wanted to drift out above that olive-colored land / until my body broke apart like cloud or spring rain.
– Stephen Dobyns
Weakness of memory for details and the course of one’s own comprehension of the world—a very bad sign. Only fragments of a totality. How are you going [to even] touch the greatest task, how are you going [to even] sense its nearness, even dream its existence, even plead for its dream, dare to learn the letters of the plea, if you cannot collect yourself in such a way that, when the decisive moment comes, you hold the totality of yourself collected in your hand like a stone to be thrown, a knife for the kill? However: there is no need to spit on one’s hands before clasping them.
– Franz Kafka
If I covered the ground with pearls,
would you notice what was on the ground? Or would you think it was concrete and walk as you always have?
If I said our love is the upaya, would you know what I meant and would you uphold it?
Do you see I clear the air with my hand?
It is something that could be easily missed, it happens so fast,
no fanfare.
Can you see the light like diamonds sparkling in the leaves this morning?
My back is too sore for prayers made by others.
What will heal me and you
is speaking
our own
words.
– Belle Heywood
Bringing your ego into the light of your self-reflection is the first step in renunciation. See how it is an impediment in your spiritual path, your social life, your family life and at work. It will make a tremendous difference in terms of being able to have real, genuine human contact filled with goodness, once you have renounced your ego.
– Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche
Stuff your eyes with wonder, he said, live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.
– Ray Bradbury
There is beauty and adventure in the commonplace for those with eyes to see beyond.
– Jonathan Lockwood Huie
You will not know this for some time, but the longing for something–for someone–is vastly superior to possession. The strain of desire is the greatest sensation, the ultimate folly of God. I believe this is why we are always dissatisfied with art and life and people and experience: nothing can compete with our imaginations and our strength of desire. It is wise to always desire something, to keep something of a flame, an energy, to one’s life and heart.
– Tennessee Williams
The waves of mind demand so much of Silence. But She does not talk back does not give answers nor arguments. She is the hidden author of every thought every feeling every moment. Silence. She speaks only one word. And that word is this very existence. No name you give Her touches Her captures Her. No understanding can embrace Her. Mind throws itself at Silence demanding to be let in. But no mind can enter into Her radiant darkness Her pure and smiling nothingness. The mind hurls itself into sacred questions. But Silence remains unmoved by the tantrums. She asks only for nothing. Nothing. But you won’t give it to Her because it is the last coin in your pocket. And you would rather give her your demands than your sacred and empty hands. *** Everything leaps out in celebration of mystery, but only nothing enters the sacred source, the silent substance. Only nothing gets touched and becomes sacred, realizes its own divinity, realizes what it is without the aid of a single thought. Silence is my secret. Not hidden. Not hidden.
– ADYASHANTI
my focus now is on the cultivation of a civil society, cultures of respect and kindness, and the valuing of courage and discernment.
– Joan Halifax
Yield
there is only a need to yield to whatever we are engaged in
fully yield
be that
surrender fully yield to that in each moment
opening dusty boxes I surrender to each box and the entire contents
filtering ghosts
papers poems and photos
a heaviness in my chest
My insides feel inside out
does that even make sense?
Some say surrender, grace yield, purity, spirit, god all the same
yes, especially today
A powerful day today
Captured by mementos
Of both birth and death
that kind of time/day
allowing the inside to be on the outside
I am moving from a known place into the unknown.
It’s a daunting role and with each box comes a memory or memento.
Milestones and dead ends
Poignant stars all woven into the same. blanket
It’s a potent elusive force that fills my chest, intense and heavy.
The dusty pictures and old love letters have turned me inside out.
So i yield and surrender to this cathartic moment.
And keep what speaks to me for my travels and burn or gift the rest.
– Tom Sheldon
We think we tell stories, but stories often tell us, tell us to love or hate, to see or to be blind. Often, too often, stories saddle us, ride us, whip us onward, tell us what to do, and we do it without questioning. The task of learning to be free requires learning to hear them, to question them, to pause and hear silence, to name them, and then become the story-teller.
– Rebecca Solnit
A heavy and scorching summer with hot, blistering days and warm, sensual nights had arrived. Every day was like the one before, every night like the one just past. Time stood still, and they were alone. They concentrated only on each other, and the forest, the lake, and the small house was their world. A sultry sensuousness enveloped them, and they forgot to think.
– Arthur Schnitzler
Knowledge without deep comprehension, imagination and compassion is just a more complex form of ignorance. We need to shift paradigms, to grow wiser, all of us, especially the dominant cultures and civilizations. We are good at building machines, because we have learned to think mechanistically. Such thinking got us to the moon, but it’s never going to solve the social and ecological problems that it helped to create.
– Christopher Chase
Were it not for the leaping and the twinkling of the soul, man would rot away in his greatest passion—idleness.
– Carl Jung
Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration — it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done.
– Tim Kreider
We’re being summoned by the world itself to make many urgent
changes to the human project, but most central is a fundamental re-visioning and reshaping of ourselves, a shift in consciousness. We must reclaim and embody our original wholeness, our indigenous human nature granted to us by nature itself. And the key to reclaiming our original wholeness is not merely to suppress psychological symptoms, recover from addictions and trauma, manage stress, or refurbish dysfunctional relationships but rather to fully flesh out our multifaceted, wild psyches, committing ourselves to the largest story we’re capable of living, serving something bigger than
ourselves. We must dare again to dream the impossible and to romance the world, to feel and honor our kinship with all species and habitats, to embrace the troubling wisdom of paradox, and to shape ourselves into visionaries with the artistry to revitalize our enchanted and endangered world.
– Bill Plotkin
You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.
– Henry David Thoreau
… remember that sometimes, the way you think about a person isn’t the way they actually are.
– John Green
hang on / keep your silence /
until the words / ripen
– Pablo Neruda
Dawn Revisited
BY RITA DOVE
Imagine you wake up
with a second chance: The blue jay
hawks his pretty wares
and the oak still stands, spreading
glorious shade. If you don’t look back,
the future never happens.
How good to rise in sunlight,
in the prodigal smell of biscuits –
eggs and sausage on the grill.
The whole sky is yours
to write on, blown open
to a blank page. Come on,
shake a leg! You’ll never know
who’s down there, frying those eggs,
if you don’t get up and see.
Don’t sleep on the side project. The best work I’ve ever done is due largely to a lot of glorious wanderings in between.
– Amber Sparks
The more light you allow within you, the brighter the world you live in will be.
– Shakti Gawain
GROWTH
Deep within every life, no matter how dull or ineffectual it may seem from the outside, there is something eternal happening. This is the secret way that change and possibility conspire with growth. John Henry Newman summed this up beautifully when he said, “To grow is to change and to be perfect is to have changed often.” Change, therefore, need not be threatening; it can in fact bring our lives to perfection. Perfection is not cold completion. Neither is it avoidance of risk and danger in order to keep the soul pure or the conscience unclouded. When you are faithful to the risk and ambivalence of growth, you are engaging your life. The soul loves risk; it is only through the door of risk that growth can enter.
– John O’Donohue
Poor, deluded Shawondasee!
‘Twas no woman that you gazed at,
‘Twas no maiden that you sighed for,
‘Twas the prairie dandelion
That through all the dreamy Summer
You had gazed at with such longing,
You had sighed for with such passion,
And had puffed away forever,
Blown into the air with sighing.
Ah! deluded Shawondasee!
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Having thus internalized the nature of all that is,
Sit upright on a comfortable seat, with the body at ease,
And cultivate bodhicitta, concerned with the needs of beings.
Don’t dwell on the past or fantasize about the future,
Don’t engineer this natural ongoing presence.
Don’t direct the mind, or draw it within,
Just let it settle without distraction,
Resting without grasping or conceptually structuring this open clarity
That is vivid, quiet, lucid, illuminating.
This is the wisdom intent of the buddhas of the three times.
Other than settling, easily relaxed
In the innate experience of the way your mind abides —
There’s nothing you need to contemplate.
So, you can release the effort it takes to engineer it,
For it is not an object of conceptual elaboration —
It can’t be conceived of or investigated.
Yet, it is the wisdom intent of all the buddhas.
Therefore, to quiet the tangled mess of thought,
All you need to do is look into the intimately peaceful nature of mind.
At the end of the session, dedicate without reifying the three spheres.
– A selection from Longchenpa’s “Song of the Enchanting Wildwoods”
You will never have a greater or lesser dominion than that over yourself…the height of a man’s success is gauged by his self-mastery; the depth of his failure by his self-abandonment. …And this law is the expression of eternal justice. He who cannot establish dominion over himself will have no dominion over others.
– Leonardo da Vinci
We should every night call ourselves to an account;
What infirmity have I mastered today?
What passions opposed? What temptation resisted? What virtue acquired? Our vices will abort of themselves if they be brought every day to the shrift.
– Seneca
The books we need are of the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that makes us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide, lost in a forest remote from all human habitation.
– Franz Kafka
i hardly imagined i would learn so much from studying Nothing!
– Andrew Hagel
No wonder we cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from the horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.
– David Foster Wallace
All I ask is that you turn to the child
inside, those words dreaming and changeless
as love’s last chance—let them be said
against whatever, crying in the night,
we still think may be stopped,
– Dave Smith
Can you punctuate yourself as silence? You will see the edges cut away from you, back into a world of another kind—back into real emptiness
– Anne Carson
It was Epicurus who said “vain is the word of the philosopher that doesn’t heal the suffering of man.” The Stoics would agree, but took it further: Believing that philosophy was in the works not the words. It’s why they held up Cato as the ultimate example of Stoic philosophy, because of how he lived, not how he spoke or wrote.
In France last week, the philosopher Anne Dufourmantelle died while rushing into the water to save two young children who were in danger. In her writing, Anne spoke often of risk—saying that it was impossible to live life without risk and that in fact, life was risk. It is in the presence of danger, she once said in an interview, that we are gifted with the “strong incentive for action, dedication, and surpassing oneself.”
What Dufourmantelle thought of Stoicism is not well-known, but it is undeniable that she was the kind of philosopher they would have admired. She earned the honor for eternity on that beach in Saint-Tropez. Her words had long been provocative and interesting and rightfully earned her admission to the finest schools and to the Académie française, but it was her works—what she did in a moment of danger and risk—that made her a true philosopher.
And so we ought to follow her lead, all of us who study any school of philosophy and life.
Reach back pull them forward
Reach down lift them up
Reach out bring them in
Reach in for the love that you can give
– Chant by Agu and Jami Sieber
OPPORTUNITIES FOR REAL REST
Don’t miss the opportunities you have to sit down, without having to worry or think about doing anything. Lay down your burdens, your worries, and your projects. Just sit and feel that you are alive. Sit with your son, your daughter, your partner, your friend. That’s enough to be happy.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
Pity the nation whose people are sheep,
and whose shepherds mislead them.
Pity the nation whose leaders are liars, whose sages are silenced,
and whose bigots haunt the airwaves.
Pity the nation that raises not its voice,
except to praise conquerors and acclaim the bully as hero
and aims to rule the world with force and by torture.
Pity the nation that knows no other language but its own
and no other culture but its own.
Pity the nation whose breath is money
and sleeps the sleep of the too well fed.
Pity the nation — oh, pity the people who allow their rights to erode
and their freedoms to be washed away.
My country, tears of thee, sweet land of liberty.
– Lawrence Ferlinghetti
YOU DID YOUR BEST
by Jeff Foster
You did your best.
You did all you could do.
You had no choice.
Considering what you believed at the time, what powerful or subtle feelings were moving through you, how connected you were to your breath, your body, your truth, your path, how rooted you were in the present moment, how clearly you saw or did not see, how much pain you were in, how open and raw your wounds were, how much resistance you felt, how narrow or wide your perspective was, how caught up you were in your personal story, you could not have acted or spoken any differently.
You did your best, given the level of consciousness you were acting from.
Is this an excuse? No. It’s about taking full responsibility for what happened. Yet losing the guilt, “giving up the hope of a better past”.
Is this a cop-out? No. It’s about forgiving yourself. Letting go of ‘what could or should have been’, and aligning with ‘what is’, grounding yourself in the Now, the only place from which true change can happen, new answers can appear, healing can begin.
Grieve over the past, of course.
Learn your lessons, of course.
Listen to others sharing their pain. Feel everything deeply. Make amends as much as you can. Say sorry, if it’s appropriate.
But do not for one moment think that the past could have been any different.
Do not for one moment believe that the Universe went wrong.
You are where you are, Now. It is a new day, a new beginning.
Armed with new insight, new perspective, a more humble and forgiving heart, a more curious attitude, move into the future, grounded in this loving presence, open to possibility.
Changes in societal structure and in art would possess more credibility if they had their origins in the soul and spirit.
– Marc Chagall, The angel with the sword
a person cannot approach the divine by reaching beyond the human. to become human is what this individual person has been created for.
– Martin Buber
The supply of human rights is inexhaustible; there is enough to go around. Those who consider another’s rights interfere with theirs are confusing, purposely or otherwise, dominance or exploitation or benefitting from inequality with rights.
– Rebecca Solnit
Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is.
– Ernest Hemingway
The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with him as a person, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil.
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer, anti-Nazi German Theologian
Right, off to bed. So as not to sleep. To listen to the darkness, the silence, the solitude and the dead.
– Samuel Beckett, a letter to Mania Peron
Until I found you,
I wrote verse, drew pictures,
And, went out with friends
For walks …
Now that I love you,
Curled like an old mongrel
My life lies, content
In you …
– Kamala Das, Love, Summer in Calcutta
Only the fireflies light up / Our porch, only the silence tells me that I must / Stay
– Kamala Das, No Moon at My Village Home
So many versions of just one memory, and yet none of them were right or wrong. Instead, they were all pieces. Only when fitted together, edge to edge, could they even begin to tell the whole story.
– Sarah Dessen, from Just Listen
The mind I love most must have wild places, a tangled orchard where dark damsons drop in the heavy grass, an overgrown little wood, the chance of a snake or two, a pool that nobody fathomed the depth of, and paths threaded with flowers planted by the mind.
– Katherine Mansfield
Even those who are exceptionally clever in finding the means to wealth are seldom perplexed by the fact that the end goal to which all their intelligence is directed is precisely the same goal the least intelligent aim at.
– Peter Capofreddi
The most important tool the artist fashions through constant practice is the faith in his ability to produce miracles when they are needed. Pictures must be miraculous; the instant one is completed, the intimacy between the creation and the creator is ended. He is an outsider. The picture must be for him, as for anyone experiencing it later, a revelation, an unexpected and unprecedented resolution of an eternally familiar need.
– Mark Rothko
Music is the language of the angels, and every person has an angel in the prison of his heart. So music tries to find a key to release the angel. And the angels don’t have political disagreements, wars, greed, and their language is music. So what we’re trying to do is to connect people.
– Teodor Currentzis
Poetry is words that are empowered, that make your hair stand on end, that you recognize instantly as being some form of subjective truth that has an objective reality to it, because somebody has realized it. Then you call it poetry later.
– Allen Ginsberg
What a strange thing this zazen is. When we practice it, distracting ideas, irrelevant thoughts–in short delusions, which ordinary people are made of, suddenly seem to feel an irresistible temptation to arise and appear at the surface. Then there is the desire to drive these thoughts away, an irresistible desire to which our complete effort is added. Those who don’t do zazen know nothing about this. Why is it when we practice, deluded thoughts continue to surface one after …the other? The reason, which we learn from zazen, is that each one of us, from prince to beggar, is an ordinary (deluded) person. The attempt to drive these deluded thoughts away–delusion being so much nonsense (interfering, with the happiness of oneself and others)–is also something brought home to us through zazen. We tentatively call this zazen that guides us in this way, ‘Buddha.’
– Sodo Yokoyama Roshi
The cup of suffering is overflowing everywhere. So please don’t transform your unhappiness into aggressiveness
– Paulo Coelho
In this Strangely Autumnal Light
This Isn’t T. S. Eliot
Everyone is so fucking tediously mindful….
How about some mindlessness?
Let breath run wild
eyeballs, ears, mouth
run free
Opened Released Unmonitored
Kill the observer
Join breath
of
toe tree intestine dream
Don’t hold tight
Let all run fee.
Let soft and kind gentle
bird and bee sound
rest as cool breeze
speaks
goosebumps
Light and shadow play
word and sound, color and hope
car horn blare
not across;
just play.
Is this now?
Who the fuck knows?
The soles of feet
balls arch heel
feeling
difference.
Just the harmonics of light
air sun sky leaf dream
helicopter.
So generous the entirety
Open
dream so clear
nothing to change
control or reign in
Eustachian tube sensation
jaw cheek knee gonad palm
a
tail to snout
Experience
Gate, gate, paragate, parasamgate…
Far fucking out.
– John Bailes
It’s time to start living the life you’ve imagined.
– Henry James
Actions speak louder than words.
It seems the year that I am really meant to be learning that at every step.
I used to be so swayed by nice words, poetic words, mystical words, exalted words, promises, declarations……
pfft.
Really, ‘acts of service’ and actual real presence are my primary love languages.
Not words. Certainly now, more than ever.
So many people are well-versed and use words as spells. But they have absolutely NO mudra behind it.
Not interested.
– Belle Heywood
Low Swamplands Produce Flowers
What is the meaning of Buddhism? Simple: “Winter is cold and summer is hot, night is dark and day is light. It’s just that you vainly set up meaning where there is no meaning, create concern where there is no concern, impose ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ where there is no inside or outside, and talk endlessly of this and that where nothing exists. Be totally without knowledge and understanding, as before, like a three-year-old child. It is the mud of the low-lying marshlands that produces these flowers.
– Ta Hui, Swampland Flowers
If you have one teapot
And can brew your tea in it
That will do quite well.
How much does he lack himself
Who must have a lot of things?
– Sen no Rikyū
Our apparitions, the things you know us by, are simply childish. Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by.
– Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
Brook! whose society the Poet seeks,
Intent his wasted spirits to renew.
– William Wordsworth
It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.
– Wendell Berry
Alone by Maya Angelou
Lying, thinking
Last night
How to find my soul a home
Where water is not thirsty
And bread loaf is not stone
I came up with one thing
And I don’t believe I’m wrong
That nobody,
But nobody
Can make it out here alone.
Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.
There are some millionaires
With money they can’t use
Their wives run round like banshees
Their children sing the blues
They’ve got expensive doctors
To cure their hearts of stone.
But nobody
No, nobody
Can make it out here alone.
Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.
Now if you listen closely
I’ll tell you what I know
Storm clouds are gathering
The wind is gonna blow
The race of man is suffering
And I can hear the moan,
‘Cause nobody,
But nobody
Can make it out here alone.
Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.
It cannot be that the people should grow in grace unless they give themselves to reading. A reading people will always be a knowing people.
– John Wesley
How much of this truth can I bear to see and still live
unblinded?
How much of this pain
can I use?
– Audre Lorde
If we fall, we don’t need self-recrimination or blame or anger — we need a reawakening of our intention and a willingness to re-commit, to be whole-hearted once again.
– Sharon Salzberg
Sleep’s where my mind’s a slow moving river
With the algae on the pebbly floor
– Jaz Allen-Sutton
I don’t care what you believe~
I only want to experience your
compassion and kindness~
– Ari Annona
Listen! Or your tongue will make you deaf.
– Cherokee wisdom
I draw from the absurd three consequences, which are my revolt, my freedom, and my passion.
– Albert Camus
…They hear how
the artery of my soul has been severed
and soul is spurting out upon them,
bleeding on them,
messing up their clothes, …
dirtying their shoes.
And God is filling me,
though there are times of doubt
as hollow as the Grand Canyon,
still God is filling me.
He is giving me the thoughts of dogs,
the spider in its intricate web,
the sun
in all its amazement,
and a slain ram
that is the glory,
the mystery of great cost,
and my heart,
which is very big,
I promise it is very large,
a monster of sorts,
takes it all in–
all in comes the fury of love.
– Anne Sexton
And then those shadowy ancestors had lost all their hold over her. And that, too, had happened ever so gradually. Some summer or winter morning she had realized that her venerated dead belonged to the gazillions of those who were no longer present, having seeped into the ground since the dawn of time, crumbled, or blown away to the four corners of the earth, never to be recalled, never to be brought to life by any love whatsoever, irrecoverable for all eternity. They still t…urned up now and then in dreams, but only as part of a crowd, under the heading of ‘also present’: this ‘now and then’ no longer had the meaning it had once possessed of ‘all sacred times.’
And this second death of her ancestors was also fine with her, like the small and large birth country that had earlier slipped away from inside her. In the meantime she had come to see has delusory the type of strength she had long derived less from the entire country than from little pockets in that country, less than from the wholly successful life of an ancestor (to be sure, there was not even one life that fit the description) than from misfortune and a lonely death (which was the lot of all her forebears). Such strength, she wondered: Did it not make one tyrannical and ruthless? Did it not add to the burdens of those with whom one now passed time, lived, worked, had dealings, in the present? Such strength was accompanied by a kind of arrogance, was it not, which could thwart, even harm, even destroy the days as well as the nights of one’s contemporaries, those who somehow or other got close to one? Once free of her ancestor worship, did she become receptive to other kinds of strength? Impulses? No, in spite of everything, it was not perfectly fine with her when the ancestors grew meaningless and dim. It was more a question of her letting it happen, with a bitter aftertaste, and not only on her tongue.
– Peter Handke, Crossing the Sierra de Gredos
In moments, I clutched at the notion of some larger ‘me’ that could contain and justify my contradictory behavior, but more often I simply felt like the scene of two irreconcilable visions, two different people, one unerringly loyal and faithful, the other treacherous and greedy.
– Jennifer Egan, Look at Me
The need for rites of passage at various points in the life cycle is not just a desire to celebrate change. Self generated rites of passage invest the change with meaning it would not otherwise have. Human beings can handle even deeply traumatic experiences if these events are given socially supported positive meaning .
– Virgina Hines
Joy doesn’t betray but sustains activism. And when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated and isolated, joy is a fine act of insurrection.
– Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark
May I never get too busy in my own affairs that I fail to respond to the needs of others with kindness and compassion.
– Thomas Jefferson
I have begun to think that God is small
like a wren, a piece of blue
beach glass
shining in the wet
of sea and sky, that double exposure. Every day
…
the huge sun, the blue vault brimming
with invisible stars.
Each night the echoing expanse
of dark and always God in the palm of my hand,
fluttering, gleaming like the soul
with sweetness, with a vast
reluctance to change us or give us
anything but that sweetness, despised
by the world
because it is so small.
– Christopher Howell
One of the ways that we have been kept down, is being led to feel like we are “too much” whenever we allow ourselves to embody and express our fullness. When in…ternalized at an early age, this shaming and repressive message imprisons us and prevents us from developing and humanifesting all that we are. We close down energetically, and organize our lives around a smaller, less visible version of us. If this has been your experience, I encourage you to work it through so that you are no longer trying to cram your magnificence into a tiny little space. You are meant for so much more than that. They may not be able to hear it, but there is nothing “too much” about your experience or expression. I am convinced that if we were all able to cut through the silencing shame and speak our truths, we would be standing in the middle of the street screaming and outpouring millions of unsaid memories and unexpressed feelings. And the divine gifts that got buried below the ‘too much’ messaging, would finally get opened.
– Jeff Brown
Why, if we are as pragmatic as we claim, don’t we begin to ask ourselves seriously: Where does our real future lie?
– Sogyal Rinpoche
If you feel the need to judge a person you do not know, have not met, have never truly engaged with or researched…. Chances are you’re mud-slinging on the basis of your own projections and insecurities. Chances are that your perception of the situation reinforces the wound and the construction of ego-self that goes with it…chances are you’ll hate reading this message.
It’s barely half past six in the morning and already I’m getting reports about this kind of behavior. Kinda thinking I should have slept in…
Stay to the core of who you are. If you’ve got a different opinion, that’s fine. But casting aspersions on another’s character is… bang out of line….
And frankly, an energetic waste of time. Remember that people cannot be reduced to single values or positions….and that it is tempting and all to easy to reduce someone who disagrees with you into a dehumanised caricature of themselves.
That, my friends is one of the most dangerous rhetorical devices there is. And what truly separates and factionalizes the human race.
– Bairavee Balasubramaniam
You need only claim the events of your life to make yourself yours. When you truly possess all you have been and done, which may take some time, you are fierce with reality.
– Florida Scott Maxwell
God never shouts or spouts. The rocks and sublime canyons, and waters and winds, and all life structures – animals and ouzels, meadows and groves, and all the silver stars – are words of God, and they flow smooth and ripe from his lips.
– John Muir
Nothing is harder / on the soul / than the smell of dreams / while they evaporate.
– Mahmoud Darwish
When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.
– Louise Erdrich
The azure blue, the heavenly hue,
The first created realm of blue;
And over its radiance divine
My soul does pour its love sublime.
…
My heart that once with joy did glow
Is plunged in sorrow and in woe,
But yet it thrills and loves anew
To view again the sapphire blue.
I love to gaze on lovely eyes
That swim in azure from the skies;
The heavens lend this color fair,
Arid leave a dream of gladness there.
Enamored of the limpid sky,
My thoughts take wing to regions high,
And in that blue of liquid fire
In raptured ecstasy expire.
When I am dead no tears will flow
Upon my lonely grave below,
But from above the aerial blue
Will scatter over me tears of dew.
The mists about my tomb will wind
A veil of pearl with shadows twined;
But lured by sunbeams from on high
Twill melt into the azure sky.
– Nikolov Baratashvili
At my age, after you’re done—or ruefully think you’re done—with the nagging anxieties and complications of your youth, what is there left for you to confront but the great simplicities? I never tire of birdsong and sky and weather. I want to write poems that are natural, luminous, deep, spare. I dream of an art so transparent that you can look through and see the world.
– Stanley Kunitz
Tell me where the big people are, please. The big, reckless, brilliant people who believe passionately in doing something good and noble and inventive. I’ll rest in their shadow or I’ll help them balance their weight. I pray that they’ll hire me or teach me. I’m so tired of small people and small things. It doesn’t have to be a small world.
– Jeanne Moreau
It’s all I have to bring today
Emily Dickinson, 1830 – 1886
It’s all I have to bring today—
This, and my heart beside—…
This, and my heart, and all the fields—
And all the meadows wide—
Be sure you count—should I forget
Some one the sum could tell—
This, and my heart, and all the Bees
Which in the Clover dwell.
If you wish
to enjoy the fruits
of enlightenment, abandon
regard for the conventional and
the communal. The Way is a path …
for one. Then it narrows
until there’s not even
space for you
anymore.
– Wei wu Wei Ching, Chapter 51
Peter Capofreddi:
You’re making it seem complicated. It is really very simple. Plato spells it out for you. No one acts honestly in the administration of states. Saint Paul spells it out for you. The rulers of this world are corrupt. They are coming to nothing. Kant spells it out for you. Use your own understanding without the guidance of another. If we didn’t have our heads so far up our Ivy League asses, we might think they were all trying to tell us something.
Stop obeying. Start thinking.
Perfection is inhuman. Human beings are not perfect. What evokes our love — and I mean love, not lust — is the imperfection of the human being. So, when the imperfection of the real person, compared to the ideal of your animus or anima, peaks through, say, This is a challenge to my compassion. Then make a try, and something might begin to get going here.
—Joseph Campbell, Pathways to Bliss
For fifteen years I’ve embraced and tried to cultivate a spirituality of imperfection—one that does not overly invest mental/emotional energy towards a hope and expectation that if I think or do just the right thing I will be saved through transcendence from this body, this life, this world, these emotions, feelings, and relationships — with the hope of a just reward for my spiritual heroics and mental hygiene. It is a humanizing effort of sobriety of mind while making room for muddy thoughts. It is a human need for calm equanimity while making room for the storms and ecstasies of Dionysius and the pathos of Eros. I am beholden to recognize my inner child needs co-parenting (by my adult self) while my literal flesh and bones child needs a ‘good enough’ father who moves onwards best as he can despite his shortcomings.
There’s no idyllic trouble-free place I need to travel towards in order to arrive at perfection — perfection is the simple act of living in this fallible body with this astounding gift of life, in and of this beautiful and ugly world, with these poignant and fiery emotions, thoughts, feelings, and relationships. This does not mean that I don’t have hopes, passions, aspirations, or desires to assuage life’s travails — rather it is an exercise of whole-being maturation: checking for and working against the seductive (American) pull toward naivety (puerile victimization) while maintaining a modicum of vitalizing innocence, and softening and chipping off the calcifications of cynicism that time and culture deposit in my psyche. \
My spirituality of imperfection is a quest of individuation—riddled with bumps, cracks, blind spots, injustices, suffering, grief and traps — but this is also an alchemical journey where I, the first-person host, takes in all of it (failures and mistakes) into a crucible of transformation cooking this vital stuff of life, looking for what’s precious in value while burning off the dross.
The alchemical Outcome is the shining Golden Heart:
Love, joy, beauty, gratitude, empathy, mirth, imagination, awe, and compassion
And when the experiment fails,
as it must,
I clean up and start again
— always, we begin again
– Andrew Hagel
never again .
you may not speak to me that way –
I am not a dump for your wasted life ∙
…
nor an incinerator where you burn your rage ∙
nor a pit where you bury your smoldering angst –
not a library where you stuff great books
you never read or understood,
your easy lies are toxic ∙
I must unlearn each lie you tell ∙
remember that ∙ remember that
before you “teach” me ∙
I’m not yours to manipulate,
intimidate or suppress ∙
to command, control or punish ∙
to soothe with untruths ∙ fantasy
and entertainments sick with selling ∙
to indoctrinate or to “raise”
to be a “good” whatever ∙
I am not yours –
am I to be a repository of your unrealized dreams?
your absurd and pretty delusions?
will you live your life through me
and force me to be what you never could be?
I refuse –
I was free ∙ born to be free ∙
this room full of cute junk is not love ∙
you cannot buy happiness for me, and
my heart is not for sale –
mother—father ∙ I need ∙
I need real food ever again.
you may not speak to me that way –
I am not a dump for your wasted life ∙
nor an incinerator where you may burn your rage ∙
nor a pit where you bury your smoldering angst –
I am not a library where you stuff great books
you never understood yourself,
or even read ∙
your easy lies are toxic to me ∙
I must unlearn every lie you tell ∙
remember that ∙ remember that
before you “teach” me ∙
I am not yours to manipulate,
intimidate or suppress ∙
to command ∙ control or punish ∙
to soothe with untruths ∙ fantasy and entertainments ∙
to indoctrinate or to “raise” to be a “good” whatever ∙
I am not yours —
am I to be a repository of your unrealized dreams
and pretty delusions?
will you live your life through me
and force me to be what you never could be?
I refuse –
I was free ∙ born to be free ∙
this room full of cute junk is not love ∙
you cannot buy happiness for me ∙
my heart is not for sale –
mother—father ∙ I need ∙
I need real food ∙∙∙
why do you feed me salt-sweet plastic?
you know what is right—don’t you?
have you forgotten so much?
the television is making me sick ∙
the films ∙
I’m already an addict –
I am not an object for your obsessive “love”
nor an answer to your loneliness ∙
nor a thing you may touch for your pleasure
or in your ever-present pain ∙
or to display proudly as an ornament ∙
you know what is right—don’t you?
don’t you?
or have you forgotten so much?
you may not speak to me in that way ∙
I owe you nothing ∙
I am the gift ∙
you may not speak to me that way ever again —
– E.M.
I hate endings. Just detest them. Beginnings are definitely the most exciting, middles are perplexing and endings are a disaster. … The temptation towards resolution, towards wrapping up the package, seems to me a terrible trap. Why not be more honest with the moment? The most authentic endings are the ones which are already revolving towards another beginning. That’s genius.
– Sam Shepard
If you really want to hold space for someone through their deepest healing, you have to be ready for them to vomit, and shake, and cry, and sweat, for their teeth to chatter, for death to visit more than twice before the dawn. You have to be willing to hold them through ALL of it – but not so closely that you are their band-aid or their fix – just hold them so fiercely and lovingly and eternally in their sovereignty, and let them feel ALL of it; a kind of merciless tenderness….
They will flail and wiggle and do anything to “escape” it, including pretending that you are their captor. That’s okay. If they can make it through to the other side – if they have the vast courage and the will – through the horror and the loathing and confusion and the darkest night to find the diamond, they will be free. And you will be there smiling, gently, your heart swelling, because you knew and saw and loved them from eternity. If you want to hold space.
– Sara Sophia Eisenman
A CHARM AGAINST THE LANGUAGE OF POLITICS
by Veronica Patterson
Say over and over the names of things,
the clean nouns: weeping birch, bloodstone, tanager,…
Banshee damask rose. Read field guides, atlases,
gravestones. At the store, bless each apple
by kind: McIntosh, Winesap, Delicious, Jonathan.
Enunciate the vegetables and herbs: okra, calendula.
Go deeper into the terms of some small landscape:
spiders, for example. Then, after a speech on
compromising the environment for technology,
recite the tough, silky structure of webs:
tropical stick, ladder web, mesh web, filmy dome, funnel,
trap door. When you have compared the candidates’ slippery
platforms, chant the spiders: comb footed, round headed,
garden cross, feather legged, ogre faced, black widow.
Remember that most short verbs are ethical: hatch, grow,
spin, trap, eat. Dig deep, pronounce clearly, pull the words
in over your head. Hole up
for the duration.
Like a sun, every godlike mountain seems to radiate beams of beauty that reach and touch us with mysterious influence like loving hands; and we are awed with the sense of infinite space.
– John Muir
What is the meaning of life? That was all – a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.
– Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
I become each day more reckless,
too impatient for summer, the unbearable heat,
the calm that comes with it. There are no hills here,
not one, and I’m bored with the stillness
of the yellow field outside my window. And you,
who cannot keep still, who can never
look back, where will you go next?
How will I find you?
Can you feel the world pull
apart, the seams loosen?
What, tell me, will keep it whole,
if not you? if not me?
Send a postcard, picture, tell me
how you’ve been.
– Blas Falconer
from Dear Friend
A Question of Gravity and Light
I feel a mysterious presence in a thousand coy hiding things.
– John Muir
May my heart be kind. May my mind be fierce. May my spirit be brave.
– Kate Forsyth
To climb the mountain is an ancient act of ceremony. It requires stepping across the boundary of the ego, surrendering plans, objectives and goals. It means humbly placing one foot in front of the other, walking along the trail as it presents itself, not knowing where it may lead. It entails placing alters along the way, making offerings to the gods, asking permission to go a little further, a little higher, a little deeper, and turning back, wisely, when the danger becomes too great. And, more than anything, to climb the mountain necessitates gratitude and joy for every gift that is discovered along the way— the sweet scent of the Cedar, the cool stream, the grassy meadow, the wild blueberries, the brilliant stars. Incredible gifts! Precious as gold.
– Betsy Perluss
But what could you do? Only keep going. People kept going; they had been doing it for thousands of years. You took the kindness offered, letting it seep as far in as it could go, and the remaining dark crevices you carried around with you, knowing that over time they might change into something almost bearable.
– Elizabeth Strout
Anyone who tells you what Buddhism must mean for everyone is overstepping their boundaries. I practice, study and teach a secular and psychological approach to Shambhala Buddhism. If you want something more supernatural, go for it. Many different lineages, teachers, and students have many different interpretations. The only thing that really matters is what works and whether we commit to a path wholeheartedly. In my humble opinion, if your practice is making you kinder to yourself and more available to help others in a crazy and cynical world, you are on the right track, and you can call it whatever you like.
– Ethan Nichtern
We live in two landscapes, as Augustine might have said,
One that’s eternal and divine,
and one that’s just the back yard.
– Charles Wright, Indian Summer II, Appalachia
In order to be free you simply have to be so, without asking permission of anybody. You have to have your own hypothesis about what you are called to do, and follow it, not giving in to circumstances or complying with them. But that sort of freedom demands powerful inner resources, a high degree of self-awareness, a consciousness of your responsibility to yourself and therefore to other people.
– Andrei Tarkovsky, The artist’s responsibility
I am a country
of such tender lust. A place where birds
deliriously beat their wings, where golden
fish tremble in a lake of tongues.
– Jeremy Radin, Koi
Keep awake, keep awake, artist,
Do not give in to sleep …
You are eternity’s hostage
And prisoner of time.
– Boris Pasternak
One day you are like an animal.
You have a routine.
There are certain places that attract you
and others that repel you
and the next you are a kite
at the mercy of every slight tide of wind
forced into quick decisions,
your string attached to the hand of a stranger
your body moving wildly, your heart batted around
by the fastest notes of indecision
and the sky and the world still, unbreakabke,
a gray grinning calmness
from which you can get nothing to wake.
– Joshua Beckman, Purple Heart Highway
And I watch my words from a long way off.
They are more yours than mine.
They climb on my old suffering like ivy.
– Pablo Neruda, So that You Will Hear Me
I lie awake all night long.
And as I drowse in the dawn,
The swallows stir in the eaves,
And wake me weeping again.
– Kenneth Rexroth, The Dragon and the Unicorn
We need more poetry that reveals what the heart is ready to recognize.
– Joseph Campbell, Living in the Sacred
Love, this wood can support our passion, though leaves
Are not enough death
To balance what we must act out. Let me double down
My autumn raincoat near the summer pit
Where the unknowable woman was riding proudly
The high crest of June, her pink shirt open-throated,
– James Dickey, Sustainment
a-quiet-green-agreement
Sometime you’ll walk all night. You’ll
come where the sky bends down. You’ll turn
aside at a fold in the earth and
be gone from the day.
When the sky turns light again
the land will stare blank for miles
at itself. You won’t be there
to see any more.
Back where you lived, for those
who remember well, there will come
a glass face, invisible but still and real,
all night outside in the rain.
– William Stafford, A Glass Face in the Rain
Do you know the flowing hair that wrote the wind? The glances that ran parallel with time? The silence that understood itself?
– Odysseus Elytis
For we know
nothing
of each other’s night
of each other’s darkness
of each other’s stars
shimmering darkly.
– Göran Sonnevi, Mozart’s Third Brain
To Sylvia Plath
Sleepwalking she prepared breakfast
for her still dreaming children, before
breaking fast, to satisfy her appetite
no fire needed, she all-consuming flame
bravely cowered on the kitchen floor
and slaked an antique thirst on vapor
laying her dream-tormented head to rest
she took premature or belated leave, set
out to sea, having found no harbor here.
– Yahia Lababidi
Gradually, we begin to realize that to come out is not to become something or someone we were not, but to become what we already are, what we always have been. Coming out is the armor falling, the butterfly emerging from the cocoon, the bud becoming the full-blown rose … the act of coming out may be viewed as an act of creation by way of deciphering or excavating and then manifesting and personalizing an already embodied, perhaps, archetypal, form.
– Randy P. Conner
On the Day When You Are Too Busy
by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
for all the busy people
that’s when I hope you remember
the skylark, not so much the bird,
though that, too—how it sings
even while being chased by hunters,
though it increases its chances
of being caught.
But more, I hope you will think
of Johnny Mercer who struggled
a year to write the words
to the tune by Hoagy Carmichael.
By the time he finished Skylark,
Carmichael had forgotten
all about the song.
Sometimes, it takes a long,
long time before the words
come out right. Sometimes,
the moment just isn’t ripe. Sometimes
there’s just too much to do.
But perhaps amidst the meetings
and the plans, a snatch of song
will come to you, something
that won’t be ignored.
Perhaps between the papers
and the rush, you will feel it,
winging. Perhaps, as you fly off
toward the always what’s next,
you won’t stop yourself
from singing.
It is not just our grasping, aversion, or ignoring, but our desire to solidify these feelings into some kind of ongoing drama that creates karma.
– David Nichtern
Patti Smith on Sam Shepard, from “The New Yorker”:
“Sam promised me that one day he’d show me the landscape of the Southwest, for though well-travelled, I’d not seen much of our own country. But Sam was dealt a whole other hand, stricken with a debilitating affliction. He eventually stopped picking up and leaving. From then on, I visited him, and we read and talked, but mostly we worked. Laboring over his last manuscript, he courageously summoned a reservoir of mental stamina, facing each challenge that fate apportioned him.
“Going over a passage describing the Western landscape, he suddenly looked up and said, “I’m sorry I can’t take you there.” I just smiled, for somehow he had already done just that. Without a word, eyes closed, we tramped through the American desert that rolled out a carpet of many colors—saffron dust, then russet, even the color of green glass, golden greens, and then, suddenly, an almost inhuman blue. Blue sand, I said, filled with wonder. Blue everything, he said, and the songs we sang had a color of their own.”
I am only trying to call attention to a fact; the fact that this year, or this month, or, more likely, this very day, we have failed to practise ourselves the kind of behaviour we expect from other people.
– C.S. Lewis
Whatever it is you’re seeking
won’t come in the form you’re expecting.
– Haruki Murakami
What is important is to keep our mind high in the world of true understanding, and returning to the world of our daily experience to seek therein the truth of beauty. No matter what we may be doing at a given moment, we must not forget that it has a bearing upon our everlasting self which is poetry.
– Matsuo Bashō
It’s the noticing that cracks us open, lets something in.
Shows we’re in use.
Uses us.
Right now.
Right this minute.
– Lia Purpura
All was gone in a flowering of what is best.
All was gone as if a great thinning flattened all the worst feelings into a reddened
Furling, the way joy can be defensive, or the way fire can be tinkered into flame.
– Leah Umansky
In landscape, each rock, each river, each tree has its individual history. A river’s history, a tree’s, is the sum of all its dialogues, nothing less but nonthing more; the contain no emotion, no moral. Human cultures embellish these stories in gardens, buildings, and towns. Stories humans tell have a plot, often with beginning, middle, and end, a deliberate narrative: stories of survival, identity, power, success, and failure. Like myths and laws, landscape narratives organize reality, justify actions, instruct, persuade, even compel people to perform in certain ways. Landscapes are literature in the broadest sense, texts that can be read on many levels.
– Anne Whiston Spirn
I love the short form of you, though no one keeps / time anymore
– Paul Nemser
The world was hers for the reading.
– Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
I can never keep my pen perfectly sober when it gets into the bounce and hurrah of cascades.
– John Muir
The mind wants to live forever, or to learn a very good reason why not. The mind wants the world to return its love, or its awareness; the mind wants to know all the world, and all eternity, even God. The mind’s sidekick, however, will settle for two eggs over easy. The dear, stupid body is as easily satisfied as a spaniel. And, incredibly, the simple spaniel can lure the brawling mind to its dish. It is everlastingly funny that the proud, metaphysically ambitious, clamoring mind will hush if you give it an egg.
Further: While the mind reels in deep space, while the mind grieves or fears or exults, the workaday senses – in ignorance or idiocy, like so many computer terminals printing our market prices while the world blows up – still transcribe their little data and transmit them to the warehouse in the skull. Later, under the tranquilizing influence of fried eggs, the mind can sort through all of these data.
– Annie Dillard
We die inside when we silence our rightful expressive inheritance. We die inside when we let fear of judgment obscure our knowing. We die inside when we shame and bypass our feelings. We die inside when we choose a path that isn’t ours to walk. We die inside when we forget our magnificence, encoded within us from the beginning. I am so tired of the little deaths of self-diminishment. Better to live true.
– Jeff Brown
Eventually we’ll have to stop separating an inward psychology from art, dream, work and culture. It’s all one.
– Thomas Moore
I want a life that sizzles and pops and makes me laugh out loud. And I don’t want to get to the end, or to tomorrow, even, and realize that my life is a collection of meetings and pop cans and errands and receipts and dirty dishes. I want to eat cold tangerines and sing out loud in the car with the windows open and wear pink shoes and stay up all night laughing and paint my walls the exact color of the sky right now. I want to sleep hard on clean white sheets and throw parties and eat ripe tomatoes and read books so good they make me jump up and down, and I want my everyday to make God belly laugh, glad that he gave life to someone who loves the gift.
– Shauna Niequist
Neither Buddhism nor Zen is a free-for-all, make-it-up-as-you-go-along, anything-goes philosophy
– Brad Warner
Travel and tell no one. Live a true love story and tell no one. Live happily and tell no one. People ruin beautiful things.
– Khalil Gibran
Any god who is mine but not yours, any god concerned with me but not with you, is an idol.
– Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel
…I have never learned to tread quietly here
where sounds are always rushing on the beach
or upward with the gulls,
on an open beach
a voice can be tenacious in the wind…
and the chest heaves to snatch a breath
and cry again.
For today I have no wisdom but that of sand
heaving from some dream that sleeps beneath the tide
until I come with my voice bellowing
and my small child’s heart
and I walk through the sea-spume
like a man walking through sparks
or an intense fire where the heart ignites
and explodes leaving nothing
not an ember of wisdom to warm me
It is all consumed in the moment
the dazzling
upward
flame of pure presence.
– David Whyte
Letter to Someone Living Fifty Years from Now
by Matthew Olzmann
Most likely, you think we hated the elephant,
the golden toad, the thylacine and all variations…
of whale harpooned or hacked into extinction.
It must seem like we sought to leave you nothing
but benzene, mercury, the stomachs
of seagulls rippled with jet fuel and plastic.
You probably doubt that we were capable of joy,
but I assure you we were.
We still had the night sky back then,
and like our ancestors, we admired
its illuminated doodles
of scorpion outlines and upside-down ladles.
Absolutely, there were some forests left!
Absolutely, we still had some lakes!
I’m saying, it wasn’t all lead paint and sulfur dioxide.
There were bees back then, and they pollinated
a euphoria of flowers so we might
contemplate the great mysteries and finally ask,
“Hey guys, what’s transcendence?”
And then all the bees were dead.
Yes, there is a Nirvanah; it is leading your sheep to a green pasture, and in putting your child to sleep, and in writing the last line of your poem.
– Kahlil Gibran, Sand and Foam
Water is Love
by Debbi Brody
Water is love
whirled and vibrating
in succulent green.
…
Love is water
run wild in
fluted hearts.
Water is love,
immerse a dormant garden
in its cauldron.
Love is water
spritzing laughter
from dry throats.
Water is love,
a gossamer leaf
fragrant and red.
Love is water
tricking wall-paper
into falling from the wall.
Water gives fire its smolder,
fog enfolds and curls
on love.
Love is water,
dripping from the crevasse
glazing the cliff.
Water is love
in stony tundra,
veined in pumiced frost.
Water is love,
fetuses float fluid before
birth and release to cold air.
The Right Place
Some know what they want. Yes, maybe it is to be among the trees. Or, to be in a garden in some place where a garden is an act of defiance of so…mething.
You advise: Try to find the right place for yourself.
But, I don’t think that’s it. I think we want to be found. I think we need to be found. That’s harder than finding, don’t you agree? To be found, you have to be still. You have to be vulnerable to something that wants you. It could be dangerous. You’re lucky if it is.
People are not alone, but they are lonely. The body has forgotten what it is made of. So has the spirit. I watched a meteor shower last night. I’m not going to go into the details, but that’s some of the stuff.
Here is a good place to be, especially when I take notice of the fact that I’m breathing and muster the gratitude for it. When was the last time you heard your breath? We were given ways of knowing that we are alive and well.
When I talk to the gods, they don’t say much. Why utter lies? I think they are well aware that we are not yet ready for the truth. It’s an interesting thought, that.
The experts say that when you are lost, you should just stay put. Sit. Wait. I haven’t been particularly good at waiting. Maybe that’s because, up until now, I hadn’t really realized what I was waiting for.
– Jamie K. Reaser
Society will develop a new kind of servitude which covers the surface of society with a network of complicated rules, through which the most original minds and… the most energetic characters cannot penetrate. It does not tyrannise but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people..
– Alexis de Tocqueville
These mountain fires that glow in one’s blood are free to all.
– John Muir
Jung’s anima and animus, vitality and order, soul and spirit need each other’s influence so as not to become extreme.
– Thomas Moore
FIREFLIES
It was that evening with fireflies
while we were waiting for the bus to Velletri
that we saw two old people kissing
under the plane tree. It was then
you said, half to the air
half to me:
Whoever loves for years
hasn’t lived in vain.
And it was then I caught sight of the first
fireflies in the darkness, sparkling
with flashes of light around your head.
It was then.
– Rolf Jacobsen
Each of us is already the mandala of our own liberation.
– Mark Epstein
Away, away, from men and towns,
To the wild wood and the downs, –
To the silent wilderness,
Where the soul need not repress
Its music.
– Percy Bysshe Shelley
The way is long only
because you delay to start on it;
one single step
would bring you to Him:
become a slave,
and you will become a king
…
Whatever befalls you, misfortune or fortune,
is unalloyed blessing;
the attendant evil
a fleeing shadow.
…
No more nonsense! Lose yourself,
and the hell of your heart becomes a heaven.
Lose yourself, and anything can be accomplished.
Your selfishness is an untrained colt
…
Apply yourself, hand and foot,
to the search;
but when you reach the sea,
stop talking of the stream.
…
And if, my friend, you ask me the way
I’ll tell you plainly, it is this:
to turn your face towards the world of life,
and turn your back on rank and reputation;
and, spurning outward prosperity, to bend
your back double in his service;
to part company with those who deal in words,
and take your place in the presence of the wordless
…
When the eye is pure
it sees purity.
Unself yourself…
– Hakim Sanai
Since beginningless time and into the never-ending future, men have loved women without telling them…
– Jack ~ Tristessa
Ocean people are different from land people. The ocean never stops saying and asking into ears, which don’t sleep like eyes….Sometimes ocean people are given to understand the newness and oldness of the world; then all morning they try to keep that boundless joy like a little sun inside their chests. The ocean also makes its people know immensity.
– from CHINA MEN (1980) by Maxine Hong Kingston
[If you] travel far enough, you meet yourself.
– David Mitchell
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known―
– Alfred Lord Tennyson
Everything that you are going through is preparing you for what you asked for.
– Simdha Getul Rinpoche
love doesn’t follow rules, doesn’t
have limitations….. you’re thinking
of fear. fear often masquerades as
love.
– Eric C.
I write about the power of trying, because I want to be okay with failing. I write about generosity because I battle selfishness. I write about joy because I know sorrow. I write about faith because I almost lost mine, and I know what it is to be broken and in need of redemption. I write about gratitude because I am thankful – for all of it.
– Kristin Armstrong
The best time is late afternoon
when the sun strobes through
the columns of trees as you are hiking up,
and when you find an agreeable rock
to sit on, you will …be able to see
the light pouring down into the woods
and breaking into the shapes and tones
of things and you will hear nothing
but a sprig of birdsong or the leafy
falling of a cone or nut through the trees,
and if this is your day you might even
spot a hare or feel the wing-beats of geese
driving overhead toward some destination.
But it is hard to speak of these things
how the voices of light enter the body
and begin to recite their stories
how the earth holds us painfully against
its breast made of humus and brambles
how we who will soon be gone regard
the entities that continue to return
greener than ever, spring water flowing
through a meadow and the shadows of clouds
passing over the hills and the ground
where we stand in the tremble of thought
taking the vast outside into ourselves.
– Billy Collins
Future Moments
The time of the future
Like the condor
Has arrived…
For a fresh meal
A rabbit has expired from toxic poisoning
The body of which the vulture consumes
The scavenger bird is immune to the toxicity of man
Then it flies away
Never to return
For man’s love of nature
Has arrived
The meal of blackberries is breathtaking
Taking man’s breath to the new era
Of lifeforce providing life
Waste material of the past
Is not wasted
But frequency modulated
By the alchemic mastery of man
To precious new moments
Of diamond rings
And golden weddings
The immunity of man is prevention
A condor appears as a white dove
For there’s nothing to defend
And it grooms the groom with peace
As pure as the sight he breathes
There’s a song in the church yard
The rabbit has returned in a music note
And lives for the moment
Of the bridal waltz
She dances alone
Her husband is romancing their future
She holds the vision in her movements
Until the romantic future arrives
And dances with his wife
The ceremony has a memory
Lost to the past world
It manifests as a gift
It’s from God
Their prayers are answered
She is with child
Of the one they saw before her birth
A first breath is taken
As pure as the heavenly garden
From where the whisper came
She’s arrived at age seventeen
And in love with the lifeforce
Who asks her for a kiss
With silent lips
He wears the colors of a preventer
Nothing can defend her
For she’s immune to offense
He is the knight of her nights
Yet they sleep alone
Their love reaches the other
With eyes closed in the inner sanctuary
Of everlasting touch
Their parents touch their dreams
Momentarily bringing back the past
Where they remember the twinkle in their father’s eyes
And love in their mother’s wombs
The compliment the treasured moments
Then flying between earth and heaven
A white stork arrives with their future
It’s not folklore
It’s a baby girl
Lovemaking
Has made love in form
Invited to the garden party
Are fairies
Who attracts the baby’s smile to their wings
Of fairy floss and angel’s wishes
And gnomes
Who tell folklores of the past
Without a word of a lie
Their stories have grown into the future
Is that our little girl
Her lifeforce is strong
In the condor and the rabbit
Look at them now
Changing form in her mind
– Ron W. Anderson
As long as you make an identity for yourself out of pain. you cannot be free of it.
– Eckhart Tolle
Nothing stands up more free from blame in this world than a tree.
– Henry David Thoreau
Sow an act, reap a habit;
sow a habit, reap a character;
sow a character, reap a destiny.
– Damien Keown
We need to outgrow our desire for retributive justice. We need to grow into restorative justice. These two assertions from neuroscientists – (1) that our default brain setting is karmic retributive justice, and yet (2) that restorative justice works – attest to the biblical fall into corruption (including a corrupted mind!) and our need for redemption. We now know what is best for us, and yet something in our very brains resists doing the good we know. Even sinners reciprocate good for good and evil for evil. But Jesus actively loves his enemies and seeks their highest good: their restoration to himself so we can be the people God always intended us to be. And he calls us to share in his love so that we might become people of grace and truth, kind reconciliation and firmly rooted integrity.
– Roger Wosley
The world is a budding transcendence. The contradiction between spirituality and technology is a Gordian knot of tension, but it’s resolution is a launch into higher planes of existential creation. To whole hog it into transhumanism without engaging in “spiritual” illumination of our inter-subjective world is to get lost in the myriad of trinkets we use to distract ourselves from the deep and real questions about the nature of our existence. On the other hand, nipping our technological innovation in the bud is essentially the same thing as aborting the pantheistic God we might mature into in it’s fetal stage. Our species would live the rest of it’s pathetic existence with the guilt and shame of having murdered it’s opportunity to strive for greatness. Not a good recipe for peace. We work on both sides contemporaneously and let the bulbs of contradiction plume into flowers of awesome realization.
– Josh Morriston
I am my silence. I am not the busyness of my thoughts or the daily rhythms of my actions. I am not the stuff that constitutes my world. I am not my talk. I am not my actions. I am my silence. I am the consciousness that perceives all things.
– Richard Wagamese
both moses and siddhartha felt they had to leave their homes if they wished to find liberation. but this is the essential dichotomy: moses’ desert was different from siddharta’s forest, for moses did not leave alone and did not leave his child behind. moses left with all the people, with all the families, and with all the animals. moses knew this well: as long as one person is not free, no one is. as long as one person is not happy, we are all trapped within the bondages of dukkha. if one person remains behind in egypt, we will never reach the land of promise. and siddharta, as the buddha, came to understood this too. for he left his tree behind and went to the marketplace to meet the people. and this is the concept of prophet and the concept of bodhisattva.
– hune margulies
There’s not much to the Buddha Dharma, but it’s always hard to find capable people.
– Ta Hui
The mystic’s experience of the indescribable and ineffable finds expression in the language of myth, ritual, poetry and theater. Myth happens out of time. The s…tory takes on a life of its own and becomes the re-enactment of a cosmic mystery play. The stories contain their own meaning, never to be confused with historical events. To understand them we need to shift beyond religious beliefs, academic understanding of the words and the need to prove a particular point. Story and art resonate with something formless, revealing beyond them an encounter with the transforming power of the moment, a mystical insight that at its most profound level we call gnosis.
– Rosamonde Ikshvàku Miller
Humans are tuned for relationship. The eyes, the skin, the tongue, ears, and nostrils – all are gates where our body receives the nourishment of otherness. This landscape of shadowed voices, these feathered bodies and antlers and tumbling streams – these breathing shapes are our family, the beings with whom we are engaged, with whom we struggle and suffer and celebrate.
– David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous
STAND WITH YOUR LOVER ON THE ENDING EARTH
stand with your lover on the ending earth –
and while a (huge which by which huger than
huge) whoing sea leaps to greenly hurl snow
suppose we could not love, dear; imagine
ourselves like living neither nor dead these
(or many thousand hearts which don’t and dream
or many million minds which sleep and move)
blind sands, at pitiless the mercy of
time time time time time
– how fortunate are you and i, whose home
is timelessness: we who have wandered down
from fragrant mountains of eternal now
to frolic in such mysteries as birth
and death a day (or maybe even less)
– E. E. Cummings
Hills haven the last cloud. However white. From brightest blue
Spills glitter of afternoon, more champagne than ever
Summer. Bubble and sparkle burst in
Tang, taste, tangle, tingle, delicious
On tongue of spirit, joyful in eye-beam. We know
This to be no mere moment, however brief,
However blessèd, for
Moment means time, and this is no time,
Only the dream, untimed, between
Season and season.
– Robert Penn Warren
I talk to myself and look at the dark trees, blessedly neutral. So much easier than facing people, than having to look happy, invulnerable, clever. With masks down, I walk, talking to the moon, to the neutral impersonal force that does not hear, but merely accepts my being.
– Sylvia Plath
Summer has run out. I am alone again. I am caught by the refraction from some deep, dark, and tender mirror that deflects the personal toward the universal. Within these inflections lies the range of my sensitivity.
– Anne Truitt
so many stories
end with a man
watching a trail
of bread crumbs
disappear and not
knowing how to feel.
– Amorak Huey
Do you think it’s an accident that you were born at a time when the culture that gave you life is failing? I don’t think it is. I think you were born of necessity with your particular abilities, with our particular fears, with your particular heartaches and concerns… I think if we wait to be really compelled by something… something big, well… we’re going to wait an awful long time and I don’t know if the state of our world can tolerate our holding out until we feel utterly compelled by something. I think it’s more like this, that we have to proceed now as if we’re utterly needed given the circumstances. That takes almost something bordering on bravado, it could be mistaken for megalomania easily, though I don’t think it is. It had a certain amount of nerviness in it or boldness for sure, something that’s not highly thought of in the culture I was born into unless you’re a star or something… regular people aren’t supposed to have those qualities. I say they are of course. That’s what we’ve got to bring to the challenges at hand, not waiting to be convinced that we’re needed but proceeding as if we are. Your insignificance has been horribly overstated… Consider the possibility that being born in a troubled time is not an affliction but a sign that you’re needed.
– Stephen Jenkinson
questions to ask yourself before you sleep:
did I do or say anything that really mattered
today?
did I take the time to listen, and hear?
did I help anyone today?
did I say thank you today?
did I stand up today when it was needed?
did I work today, or make excuses?
did I love today, or just pretend?
did I live today, or waste my time?
– Eric C.
Where are the peacemakers, the ones who can resolve conflicts before they flare up, who don’t need an enemy to feel like somebody?
– Thomas Moore
…What hurts
the soul? To live
without tasting the water of its own essence. People
focus on death and this
material earth. They have doubts about soul-water.
Those doubts can be
reduced! Use night to wake your clarity. Darkness
and the living water are
lovers. Let them stay up together. When merchants eat their big meals and
sleep
their dead sleep, we night thieves go to work.
– Rumi
We have gone astray for too long from life in community. The prevailing immoral American individualism is destroying the soul, common decency, and the kindness of our people.
– Carlos Malavé
broken, lost, scared to death, the Spanish adolescent drank again and again the sunshine from the fresh well of incantations from the American bard, ecstatics re-minders, re-heartening him.
years later, broken, lost, but strangely full of hope and a kind of fierce joy, the middle-aged man knew he could do one thing: to allow the sun-rise from his chest irradiate throught the streets of Seville…
Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sun-rise would kill me, if I could not now and always send sun-rise out of me.
– Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
It always troubled me that the truth doesn’t fit into one heart, into one mind, that truth is somehow splintered. There’s a lot of it, it is varied, and it is strewn about the world.
– Svetlana Alexievich
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: For them the whole thing was a sacred place, do you see? But most of our action is economically or socially determined, and does not come out of our life. I don’t know whether you’ve had the experience I’ve had, but as you get older, the claims of the environment upon you are so great that you hardly know where the hell you are. What is it you intended? You’re always doing something that is required of you this minute, that minute, another minute. Where is your bliss station, you know? Try to find it. Get a phonograph and put on the records, the music, that you really love. Even if it’s corny music that nobody else respects, I mean, the one that you like or the book you want to read, get it done and have a place in which to do it. There you get the “thou” feeling of life. These people had it for the whole world that they were living in.
I didn’t go to bookshops to buy. That’s a little bourgeois. I went because they were civilized places. It made me happy there were people who sat down and wrote and wrote and wrote and there were other people who devoted their lives to making those words into books. It was lovely. Like standing in the middle of civilization.
– Jerry Pinto
The Opposite of Virtue
by Yahia Lababidi
One might say, a vice is a vise
never mind if metal or moral,
it’s basically the same device
with cunning moveable jaws
designed to fix us in place
and cheat us of a chance at grace
Impervious to all advice, habit
hotly whispers false reassurance
while tightening its iron grip
It takes no effort to slip into vice,
but virtue is trickier to stick to
like the back of a bucking bronco.
Somehow this madness must cease.
We must stop now. – MLK
Basically, we are just impacting each other continuously. We are entraining with each other continuously. We are gaining and benefiting, losing and benefiting from our interaction continuously. It’s all energetic. So, when we start vibrating at a higher frequency in this dense matrix of humankind, you are shifting the vibration of the field, of not only your personal field, but people who you are connected to, karmically connected to. It goes down the channel of affinity, it goes the channel of past relationship, and it starts lifting it. So there is really anything to do, but to discover this Current and to nurture it in yourself… You are going to either meet the Current or resist the Current.
– Sat Shree
When the country goes temporarily to the dogs, cats must learn to be circumspect, walk on fences, sleep in trees, and have faith that all this woofing is not the last word. What is the last word, then? Gentleness is everywhere in daily life, a sign that faith rules through ordinary things: through cooking and small talk, through storytelling, making love, fishing, tending animals and sweet corn and flowers, through sports, music and books, raising kids — all the places where the gravy soaks in and grace shines through. Even in a time of elephantine vanity and greed, one never has to look far to see the campfires of gentle people.
– Garrison Keillor
the world just ended…
did you notice?
or were you too busy
mowing the grass,
washing the dishes,
watching tv
or arguing politics,
hating those
you deem different,
locking your doors,
making withdrawals,
or working your shift…
for almost enough money
to barely survive?
the world just ended,
did you notice?
your cat wetp!
– Eric C.
Callings
Do you hear yourself being called
to places that are far away,
beckoned by landscapes
intimately known and unimaginable?
Does it feel as if only strangers
can speak your name?
You must leave home.
You must leave HOME!
Escape the walls of your
upbringing any way you
can.
Caterpillars do it.
Travel far and wide,
get lost,
be robbed,
over and over again,
realize that the world is big,
you are small.
Forget who you believed
yourself to be,
who you thought
others thought you were.
Become someone who can’t
answer simple questions like,
“What do you do?”
Fail.
Totally and completely fail
to reach your intended destination,
though carrying a map and compass.
You are where you need to be
the moment after you
give up on all the landmarks.
Sit down and cry out
all of your laments.
Cry out the laments
all your ancestors
feared to cry.
You are indeed walking
in circles,
downward,
inward,
along a path marked
“Grief and Despair”
that leads directly
to soul.
You have arrived.
Arrived at the place
you began,
that it killed you to leave.
There is no entrance,
nor exit.
Never was.
When people ask you to tell the
story of your travels,
your journey,
of the road you have taken,
do so by living your life,
Ecstatically.
Now you are human.
– Jamie K. Reaser
People feel panicky at the thought that we might all have something in common, that they are giving up some exclusive hold on the truth. It is something like discovering you are a Frenchman and a human being at the same time. That is exactly the challenge that the great religions face in the Space Age.
– Joseph Campbell, Thou Art That
We have a memory cut in pieces. And I write trying to recover our real memory, the memory of humankind, what I call the human rainbow, which is much more colorful and beautiful than the other one, the other rainbow.
– Eduardo Galeano
Summer sings its long song, and all the notes are green.
But there’s a click, somewhere in the middle
of the month, as we reach the turning point, the apex,
a Ferris wheel, cars tipping and tilting over the top,
and we see September up ahead, school and schedules
returning. And there’s the first night you step outside
and hear the katydids arguing, six more weeks
to frost, and you know you can make it through to fall.
Dark now at eight, nights finally cooling off for sleep,
no more twisting in damp sheets, hearing mosquitoes’
thirsty whines. Lakes of chicory and Queen Anne’s lace
mirror the sky’s high cirrus. Evenings grow chilly,
time for old sweaters and sweatpants, lying in the hammock
squinting to read in the quick-coming dusk.
A few fireflies punctuate the night’s black text,
and the moonlight is so thick, you could swim in it
until you reach the other side.
– Barbara Crooker
Summer is the season of motion, winter is the season of form. In summer everything moves save the fixed and inert. Down the hill flows the west wind, making wavelets in the shorter grass and great billows in the standing hay; the tree in full leaf sways its heavy boughs below and tosses its leaves above; the weed by the gate bends and turns when the wind blows down the road. It is the shadow of moving things that we usually see, and the shadows are themselves in motion. The shadow of a branch, speckled through with light, wavers across the lawn, the sprawling shadow of the weed moves and sways across the dust.
– Henry Beston
I am not interested in anything that doesn’t have a genuine heart to it. You’ve got to have soul in the hole. If that isn’t there, I don’t see the point.
– Nick Cave
Both the ancient tradition of Buddhist psychology and the modern one of psychotherapy recognize that recovering the capacity to feel is crucial to their disciplines. There can be no wholeness without an integration of feelings.
– Mark Epstein, M.D.
If you learn to respond as if it’s the first day in your life and the very last day, then you will have spent this day very well.
– David Steindl-Rast
All great spirituality teaches about letting go of what you don’t need and who you are not. Then, when you can get little enough and naked enough and poor enough, you’ll find that the little place where you really are is ironically more than enough and is all that you need. At that place, you will have nothing to prove to anybody and nothing to protect.
That place is called freedom. It’s the freedom of the children of God. Such people can connect with everybody. They don’t feel the need to eliminate anybody . . .
– Richard Rohr
HAVING A PRACTICE
Whatever you do in your life, have a practice. It doesn’t have to be qigong, or Taijiquan, or Taoism. It can be mathematics, music, art, writing, knitting, cooking, hiking, or nearly anything.
The wonderful thing about having a practice is that it is optimistic. You’re trying to get better. You’re working on improving yourself. You’re working to be free of your shortcomings. You’re trying to get answers to questions. When you reach a new level, it’s exhilarating.
And then you go on. And that’s optimistic too. If you simply attained mastery and then had nothing else to do, it would be awful. You would have the drudgery of repeating yourself and reaching the same moment, only to have no new possibilities afterward.
So have a practice and be thankful that it has stages, but no end. Then the thrill of practice will be with you year after year.
You aren’t supposed to learn that dedicated, committed effort can bring about significant changes of consciousness and understanding. That’s a very dangerous idea, and therefore it’s been wiped out of history.
– Noam Chomsky
Egalitarian democracy was a banquet table to which everyone was invited, but from the outset of the idea and the feast, the minority in power in the USA prevented the rest of us from partaking. And women rose up, and Black people rose up, and immigrants rose up, and queer people rose up, and Native Americans rose up, and Jews rose up, for ourselves and each other (and of course some of us belonged to multiple excluded categories), and we claimed our places at the table.
And some of the white men complained that there was not enough room for all these people they had earlier blocked from access (and some of the white women stuck with them, though lots didn’t). They were hungry because they wouldn’t sit down with us, and they attempted to smash the table, poison the food, weaponize the silver.
And then everyone else rose up again, weary that the battle wasn’t over, but committed to its goals. It’s our feast, and we’ll do our best to seat everyone who believes in the principles that prevail at this table. This table of plenty for all.
– Rebecca Solnit
No one has any answers, boy –
look for those with the best questions,
then get to work.
.
– E.M.
If my theory of relativity is proven successful, Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare me a citizen of the world. Should my theory prove untrue, France will say that I am a German, and Germany will declare that I am a Jew.
– Albert Einstein
Here’s the real question: how do you share a society with people who don’t even believe in society?
– Ethan Nichtern
Some of my most neurotically fierce bitterness is the result of realizing how untrue people have become.
– Jack Kerouac
How does a man decide in what order to abandon his life?
– Cormac McCarthy
And so I have had to deal with wild
intractable people all my days
and have been led astray in a world
of shattered moonlight and beasts and trees
where no one ever curtsies anymore
or has an understudy.
– Mary Ruefle
From the standpoint of the Kabbalist path and the Sufi path, working on oneself is not a matter of liberating oneself; rather, it is a matter of helping God live, helping God manifest in the world. … The more we see that the true nature of the world is harmony and love, the less there will be general suffering and the more God will live consciously through everyone. When you see this, you see that the theistic and the Buddhist approaches are working toward the same thing: Whether you talk about the enlightenment of all sentient beings or God existing consciously through all sentient beings, you are talking about all the eyes of the universe seeing the same harmony.
– A. H. Almaas, Facets of Unity
In a racist society it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be antiracist.
– Angela Davis
People are different from each other, it is astonishing how few respectable conceptual tools we have for dealing with this self-evident fact.
– Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
There’s an old social justice saw that goes like this: your first thought is your social conditioning. Experiencing somatic-intellectual echoes and resonances isn’t always an indicator that truth is in the room. It can indicate that an idea is consistent with our internalized oppression and therefore easily integrated.
– Kelly Diels
If we were all alike; if we were millions of people saying do, re, mi, in unison, one poet would be enough and Hesiod himself would do very well. Everything he said would be in no need of expounding or would have been expounded long ago. But we are not all alike and everything needs expounding all the time because, as people live and die, each one perceiving life and death for himself, and mostly by and in himself, there develops a curiosity about the perceptions of others. This is what makes it possible to go on saying new things about old things. The fact is that the saying of new things in new ways is grateful to us.
– Wallace Stevens
the space all around you, the space between your eyes and the screen, that space is alive and awake. And that space is really listening and watching..it’s not your little mind that is really watching this, the whole space around you is watching you, watching this. …we can FEEL the Presence in the space around us, here, now and the reason we can feel that…it’s not just stillness, it is ALIVE…it’s your own, unbounded, unlimited wakefulness, unbounded consciousness that has been all along, but it’s been covered up by our identification with the bodymind and all the objects of experience…it’s not that the bodymind and the perceptions out here are a complete illusion, it’s not that. really it’s experiencing it in its true reality, that’s what’s been missing all along, the experience of Life in its true Reality.
– Lorne Hoff
AN EXCURSION
Plunging over Niagara you hold
this picture in your hand: a summer day
arranging itself serenely onward, a lawn,
daisies, roses, a single pine in the sky
with a crow flying and a flicker calling, then
all stopped in the camera, one tremendous
instant that the world will never achieve again.
Now you own that, just for the cost of reading
this page. Assemble yourself and go on.
Don’t worry about it. No, I didn’t
mean you really plunge over Niagara.
– William Stafford
If everyone helps to hold up the sky, then one person does not become tired.
– Askhari Johnson Hodari
The banality of evil. (On Charlottesville, VA)
You know what worries me? It’s not that a group of racist idiots lit some tiki torches and decided to have a rally.
I worry that on Monday they’ll go back to their job in human resources and decide who gets hired and who gets fired.
They’ll put their uniform back on and ‘serve and protect.’
They’ll sit on a jury and decide the fate of a young person of color.
They’ll teach in a kindergarten class.
They’ll sit across from a couple, who came to this country, worked hard and saved, and have the power to approve or deny them a loan to purchase their first home.
They’ll decide an insurance claim.
They’ll give an estimate to repair the brakes on a mother’s only mode of transportation to get to work each day.
I don’t stay up lamenting the fact that racists feel emboldened to parade in the street. I stay up because racists have, do, and will apply their racist beliefs in their daily lives and, by extension mine, and they don’t do it carrying a banner to distinguish themselves.
It isn’t the theatrical that worries me. It’s the practical.
– source currently unknown
It wasn’t only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you.
– Ian McEwan
Men profess to be lovers of music, but for the most part they give no evidence in their opinions and lives that they have heard it.
– Henry David Thoreau
That is the purpose of stories, that no matter where we walk in the world, we walk twice: once in the warm sunshine, and once in the silvery light of every tale we have ever heard, seeing each thing as it is, and also as it was.
– Catherynne M. Valente
Education must begin with the solution of the teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers *and* students.
– Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Still the finest Scottish political long poem by euros, Iain Crichton Smith’s ‘Chinese Poem’. This is no 4.
Today I read five books.
I watched Macleod weaving a fence
to keep the eagles from his potatoes.
A dull horse is cobwebbed in rain.
When shall our land consider itself safe
from the assurances of the third rate mind?
We lack I think nervous intelligence.
Tell them I shall serve in any capacity,
a field officer, even a private,
so long as I can see the future
through uncracked field glasses
When we can understand animals, we will know the change is halfway.
When we can talk to the forest, we will know that change has come.
– Andrew Joe, Skagit Tribe, Washington
If you’ve wondered what you would’ve done during slavery, the Holocaust, or Civil Rights movement…you’re doing it now.
– Aditi Juneja
Living differently day by day. Don’t ever let anyone tell you this isn’t resistance. I’m talking about the people who make us believe that it is possible to live differently, precisely because they themselves live differently.
– Sharon Blackie
What the really great artists do is they’re entirely themselves. They’re entirely themselves, they’ve got their own vision, they have their own way of fracturing reality, and if it’s authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings.
– David Foster Wallace
All of us are on trial in this troubled hour.
– Martin Luther King Jr. (1968)
We need to transform every experience into the subtle stuff of the soul through stories, poems, dreams and deep conversations.
– Thomas Moore
She showed a way to penetrate mystery; which means, not to flood darkness with light so that darkness is destroyed, but to enter into darkness, mystery, so that it is experienced.
– poet and author, Denise Levertov, speaking of the poet Hllda Doolittle
The very cave you are afraid to enter turns out to be the source of what you are looking for. The damned thing in the cave that was so dreaded has become the center. You find the jewel, and it draws you off. In loving the spiritual, you can not despise the earthly. The purpose of the journey is compassion. When you have come past the pairs of opposites, you have reached compassion. The goal is to bring the jewel back to the world, to join the two things together.
– The Joseph Campbell Companion
I will always be on the side of those who have nothing and who are not even allowed to enjoy the nothing they have in peace.
– Federico Garcia Lorca
You start off irresistible, and then you become resistable then you become transparent not exactly invisible but as if you are seen through all plastic and then; this is the most amazing transformation, you become repulsive but that’s not the end of the story and at the end of the story you become cute and that’s where I am.
– Leonard Cohen
At this critical juncture, one’s individual calling will be interwoven with the fate of the earth and the collective destiny of all of humankind. The age of elitist narcissists is drawing to a close. The time for dreamers, visionaries and activist has arrived, and their time of arrival is long past due.
– Phil Rockstroh
We all have weaknesses and deficiencies, and these limitations of ours play a most important part in all our lives. It is because of them that we need others and others need us. We are not all weak in the same spots, and so we supplement and complete one another, each one making up in himself or herself for the lack in another.
– Thomas Merton
The world is sacred.
It can’t be improved.
If you tamper with it, you’ll ruin it.
If you treat it like an object, you’ll lose it.
…
– Lao Tzu [Tao Te Ching, chapter 29]
We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.
– Charles Bukowski
The gigantic catastrophes that threaten us today are…psychic events. To a quite terrifying degree we are threatened by wars and revolutions which are nothing other than psychic epidemics.
– C.G.Jung (1932)
Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.
– Alan W. Watts
Is there another Life? Shall I awake and find all this a dream? There must be we cannot be created for this sort of suffering.
– John Keats
All that is best in the great poets of all countries is not what is national in them, but what is universal.
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
A midnight cup of sake, a strange solitude. Is this all I’ve become? Old and alone, bending over a poem written in loneliness by some old Chinese bag of bones more than a thousand years ago.
– Sam Hamill
Aldous Huxley:
The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. “Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does.” They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.
As long as you derive inner help and comfort from anything, keep it.
– Mahatma Gandhi
Would you rather know all the mysteries of the universe or know every outcome of every choice you make?
– Sally Taylor
The voice of the feminine, whether spoken by man or woman, speaks on behalf of life.
– Anne Baring
The moon did not become the sun.
It just fell on the desert
in great sheets, reams
of silver handmade by you.
The night is your cottage industry now,
the day is your brisk emporium.
The world is full of paper.
Write to me.
– Agha Shahid Ali
Time becomes restless in us. The human heart is full of quickening. Each pulse beat draws us towards new frontiers. In every moment we see and feel more than we can ever know. If we were to live everything, we would be too much for ourselves. Yet the life within us calls out for expression. This is what creativity serves. It endeavours to bring some of our hidden life to expression in order that we might come to see who we are. When we are creative, we help the unknown to become known, the visible to be seen and the rich darkness within us to become illuminated.
– John O’Donohue
Thank you for the music, the songs I’m singing. Thanks for all the joy their bringing. Who can live without it, I ask in all honesty? What would life be? Without a song or a dance, what are we? So I say thank you for the music, for giving it to me.
– Abba
Where is this river
whose turbulence
carries my words and tears
my outrage and fragility?
What is this wind
that lifts me toward the firmament
until even angels fall
reminding me of gravity?
Where is this heart
whose blood flows
with democratic ideal
and a justice that feels like love?
What is this earth
that embraces my descent
taking me into the darkness
blotting out the light
revealing the mystery
that guides my path?
– David Bedrick
….something had broken and mushroomed in the wet winter earth of Lowell, ice cracking on the Concord, winds blew with a greeny freight of hope over excited trees-it seemed the earth was being reborn.
– Jack~Maggie Cassidy
sometimes
I feel as though all of the things
that I spent my life discovering
and feel are important to share
just get buried under so much crap…
sometimes
I feel as though none of it really matters anyway…
the world will go on the way it always has,
the millions of voices will
continue to clamor,
and in the end,
only the few significant friendships
and familial relationships
that manage to remain intact for me
will be all that ever really mattered…
– Ari Annona
But maybe the soul unfolds
like morning glories
when the world is easiest,
forgetful of its own fear.
– Amy Meng
Love is what carries you, for it is always there, even in the dark, or most in the dark.
– Wendell Berry
We thank thee, Father, for these strange minds that enamor us against thee.
– Emily Dickinson
The undulating hours shaped like longing in
Extinction that yet still chants its
Song
– Roger Santiváñez (translated by Elsa Costa)
The Big Loser
BY MAX RITVO
The guardian angel sits in the tree
above the black lip of street
the man walks down.
He calls the man Cargo.
The angel sees a pinewood box in place of the man,
and the street he walks is a boat,
the hull like a coal crater.
Somewhere in the real world there is such a boat and box.
The angels call these overlays dreams,
and believe they crop up because angels
can’t sleep but want to —
space falls apart when you have unlimited time.
•
The cargo is rattling in the boat.
Maybe it’s just the waves, maybe it’s rats.
What’s the difference? Either way: it’s the box.
The angel sends the man
a happy vision from his past — the time
he fed birthday cake
to his goldfish
after an unsuccessful party.
The angel thinks he’s applying lemon oil
to the creaky, wounded wood of the box.
He knows it’s palliative, but it’s beautiful.
•
The man reaches the end of the street. He’s a sick man
and he starts to ponder death
as he often does these days:
All of death is right here
— the gods, the dark, a moon.
Where was I expecting death
to take me if everywhere it is
is on earth?
At life’s close, you’re like the child whose parents
step out for a drive —
everyone else out on a trip,
but the child remains in the familiar bed,
feeling old lumps like new
in the mattress — the lights off —
not sleeping, for who can sleep
with the promise of a world beyond the door?
•
That night the child dreams
he’s inside the box.
It’s burning hot, the heat coming
from bugs and worms
raping and devouring one another.He starts the hard work
of the imagination,
learning to minister to the new dream.
Perhaps all that’s needed is a little rain —
for everyone to drink and have a bath.
Outside: a car humming,
somewhere, his mother’s singing.
My body’s work to break the world
into bricks and sticks
has turned inward.
– Max Ritvo
I hope it is true that a man can die and yet not only live in others but give them life…
– Jack Kerouac
I am hurt
I am scared
I want to live
I want to die
I don’t know
Where to turn
In the Void
And when
To cut
Out
– Jack Kerouac
I’m
all thru playing the American
Now I’m going to live a good quiet life
– Jack Kerouac
Roam this city—
Unhappiness my middle name
I want to be saved,-
Sunk—can’t be
Won’t be
– Jack Kerouac
But maybe the soul unfolds
like morning glories
when the world is easiest,
forgetful of its own fear.
– Amy Meng
When I look at the world—I have to admit that the majority still want Good, even if timidly.
– Jonas Mekas
So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that a farther shore
Is reachable from here.
– Seamus Heaney
Everything has changed, except our way of thinking.
– Albert Einstein
I use the words you taught me. If they don’t mean anything any more, teach me others. Or let me be silent.
– Samuel Beckett
The clock! That twelve-figured moon skull, that white spider belly! How serenely the hands move with their filigree pointers, and how steadily! Twelve hours, and twelve hours, and begin again! Eat, speak, sleep, cross a street, wash a dish! The clock is still ticking. All its vistas are just so broad – and regular. (Notice that word.) Every day, twelve little bins in which to order disorderly life, and even more disorderly thought. The town’s clock cries out, and the face on every wrist hums or shines; the world keeps pace with itself. Another day is passing, a regular and ordinary day. (Notice that word also.)
Say you have bought a ticket on an airplane and you intend to fly from New York to San Francisco. What do you ask the pilot when you climb aboard and take your seat next to the little window, which you cannot open but through which you see the dizzying heights to which you are lifted from the secure and friendly earth?
Most assuredly you want the pilot to be his regular and ordinary self. You want him to approach and undertake his work with no more than a calm pleasure. You want nothing fancy, nothing new. You ask him to do, routinely, what he knows how to do – fly an airplane. You hope he will not daydream. You hope he will not drift into some interesting meander of thought. You want this flight to be ordinary, not extraordinary. So, too, with the surgeon, and the ambulance driver, and the captain of the ship. Let all of them work, as ordinarily they do, in confident familiarity with whatever the work requires, and no more. Their ordinariness is the surety of the world. Their ordinariness makes the world go around.
I, too, live in this ordinary world. I was born in it. Indeed, most of my education was intended to make me feel comfortable within it. Why that enterprise failed is another story. Such failures happen, and then, like all things, are turned to the world’s benefit, for the world has a need of dreamers as well as shoe-makers. (Not that it is so simple, in fact – for what shoemaker does not occasionally thump his thumb when his thoughts have, as we would say, “wandered”? And when the old animal body clamors for attention, what daydreamer does not now and again have to step down from the daydream and hurry to market before it closes, or else go hungry?)
And this is also true in creative work – creative work of all kinds – those who are the world’s working artists are not trying to help the world go around, but forward. Which is something altogether different from the ordinary. Such work does not refute the ordinary. It is, simply, something else. Its labor requires a different outlook – a different set of priorities. Certainly there is within each of us a self that is neither a child, nor a servant of the hours. It is a third self, occasional in some of us, tyrant in others. This self is out of love with the ordinary; it is out of love with time. It has a hunger for eternity.
Intellectual work sometimes, spiritual work certainly, artistic work always – these are forces that fall within its grasp, forces that must travel beyond the realm of the hour and the restraint of the habit. Nor can the actual work be well separated from the entire life. Like the knights of the middle ages, there is little the creatively inclined person can do but to prepare himself, body and spirit, for the labor to come – for his adventures are all unknown. In truth, the work itself is an adventure. And no artist could go about this work, or would want to, with less than extraordinary energy and concentration. The extraordinary is what art is all about.
Neither is it possible to control, or regulate, the machinery of creativity. One must work with the creative powers – for not to work with is to work against; in art as in spiritual life there is no neutral place. Especially at the beginning, there is a need of discipline as well as solitude and concentration. A writing schedule is a good suggestion to make to young writers, for example. Also, it is enough to tell them. Would one tell them so soon the whole truth, that one must be ready at all hours, and always, that the ideas in their shimmering forms, in spite of all our conscious discipline, will come when they will, and on the swift upheaval of their wings – disorderly; reckless; as unmanageable, sometimes, as passion.
No one yet has made a list of places where the extraordinary may happen and where it may not. Still, there are indications. Among crowds, in drawing rooms, among easements and comforts and pleasures, it is seldom seen. It likes the out-of-doors. It likes the concentrating mind. It likes solitude. It is more likely to stick to the risk-taker than the ticket-taker. It isn’t that it would disparage comforts, or the set routines of the world, but that its concern is directed to another place. Its concern is the edge, and the making of a form out of the formlessness that is beyond the edge.
Of this there can be no question – creative work requires a loyalty as complete as the loyalty of water to the force of gravity. A person trudging through the wilderness of creation who does not know this – who does not swallow this – is lost. He who does not crave that roofless place eternity should stay at home. Such a person is perfectly worthy, and useful, and even beautiful, but is not an artist. Such a person had better live with timely ambitions and finished work formed for the sparkle of the moment only. Such a person had better go off and fly an airplane.
There is a notion that creative people are absent-minded, reckless, heedless of social customs and obligations. It is, hopefully, true. For they are in another world altogether. It is a world where the third self is governor. Neither is the purity of art the innocence of childhood, if there is such a thing. One’s life as a child, with all its emotional rages and ranges, is but grass for the winged horse – it must be chewed well in those savage teeth. There are irreconcilable differences between acknowledging and examining the fabulations of one’s past and dressing them up as though they were adult figures, fit for art, which they never will be. The working, concentrating artist is an adult who refuses interruption from himself, who remains absorbed and energized in and by the work – who is thus responsible to the work.
On any morning or afternoon, serious interruptions to work, therefore, are never the inopportune, cheerful, even loving interruptions which come to us from another. Serious interruptions come from the watchful eye we cast upon ourselves. There is the blow that knocks the arrow from its mark! There is the drag we throw over our own intentions. There is the interruption to be feared!
It is six a.m., and I am working. I am absent-minded, reckless, heedless of social obligations, etc. It is as it must be. The tire goes flat, the tooth falls out, there will be a hundred meals without mustard. The poem gets written. I have wrestled with the angel and I am stained with light and I have no shame. Neither do I have guilt. My responsibility is not to the ordinary, or the timely. It does not include mustard, or teeth. It does not extend to the lost button, or the beans in the pot. My loyalty is to the inner vision, wherever and howsoever it may arrive. If I have a meeting with you at three o’clock, rejoice if I am late. Rejoice even more if I do not arrive at all.
There is no other way work of artistic worth can be done. And the occasional success, to the striver, is worth everything. The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave it neither power nor time.
– Mary Oliver
Of Power and Time
WAITING FOR GOD
This morning I breathed in. It had rained
early and the sycamore leaves tapped
a few drops that remained, while waving
the air’s memory back and forth
over the lawn and into our open
window. Then I breathed out.
This deliberate day eased
past the calendar and waited. Patiently
the sun instructed the shadows how to move;
it held them, guided their gradual defining.
In the great quiet I carried my life on,
in again, out again.
– William Stafford
We do not always proclaim loudly the most important thing we have to say. Nor do we always privately share it with those closest to us, our intimate friends, those who have been most devotedly ready to receive our confession.
– Walter Benjamin
The river bed’s silent
The autumn rains still haven’t come
– Jaz Allen-Sutton
Most of us find it difficult to know what we are feeling about anything. In any situation it is almost impossible to know what is really happening to us. This is one of the penalties of being human and having a brain so swarming with interesting suggestions and ideas and self-distrust.
– Ted Hughes
Well, the terrible fact is that though we are all more or less thinking of something or other all the time, some of us are thinking more and some less. Some brains are battling and working and remembering and puzzling things over all the time and other brains are just lying down, snoring and occasionally turning over.
– Ted Hughes
HOW TO BREATHE WHEN YOU CANNOT BREATHE
And then there are the days
where you cannot breathe
because
everything has turned to beauty
and iridescence.
Because
you are a witness to this ordinary world.
This ordinary burning world
that lays itself out for you effortlessly,
in all its absurdity and sanctity,
in its sorrow and its light,
in its compassion and its terror.
All One. All Art.
And you are a Doorway today.
You are a Magic Theatre
where the heart plays
its paupers and its princesses
and pretends to fluff its lines.
Do you remember.
Do you remember.
His first day at school?
How he slipped through your fingers then?
So eager to leave, and did he know?
The frosted spider webs
clinging to the office bins
when you went out for a quick cigarette
and how they cracked you open
without warning and how they broke you open
without warning and how you couldn’t
tell a soul.
You had a secret with the spiders.
And then mother’s courage.
Her snow white hair tumbling out in your hands.
Her translucence in the last light.
Where you held her.
She had become see-through.
Some days.
Some days.
You try to form words but none will come.
You try to write but the pen won’t move.
You try to speak but the silence silences.
Some days are see-through too.
It matters not how much money you have.
Your status in this world.
The strength of your immune system.
The number of weeks you have left.
It matters how completely you inhabit this life.
How deeply you let the days penetrate.
And crack you.
And make you beg
for more
for less
for more
for less
for more.
Don’t be ashamed to break down today!
To weep. To laugh. To snort. To dribble.
To not know. To admit all your mistakes.
All your damn mistakes.
To begin again.
To be a puddle of nothing on the ground.
To be translucent and soft.
Awakening is not a hobby, friend.
It’s a radical reframing of your entire existence.
It’s the devastation of the dreamer.
And in the rubble,
such intensity.
Such ferocity.
Such light.
In the devastation
we can truly meet.
And knit with the spiders at dawn.
Giggle with the afternoon crows.
Play hide-and-seek
with the grown ups;
make them forget their melancholy,
if only for a moment.
Sing star-mantras with the wolves.
And live the days.
Somehow live through the days.
Where the beauty is just too relentless.
Where we haven’t got the strength to stand.
Where we cannot breathe ourselves.
And so Love breathes us instead.
And warms us from the inside.
And fills us with new hope
under an iridescent sky.
– Jeff Foster
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
Write, for example,’The night is shattered
and the blue stars shiver in the distance.’
– Pablo Neruda
The usual idea we have is that meditation is to enlighten us, make us better, give us peace, or whatever. But for these people, meditation is not for oneself. It is an act of service for the sake of the cosmos. The purpose wasn’t to get something out of it. It was to attune oneself to the cosmos for the sake of the cosmos. I suspect that in traditional shamanic cultures this is implicit. But in the West, we’ve somehow become so individualized that we think it’s for us. It is for the sake of the cosmos and it has to do with the senses. It all comes back to the senses.
– Peter Kingsley
Science is not only a disciple of reason but, also, one of romance and passion.
– Stephen Hawking
Certain people think they will feel good if certain things happen… The trick is : you have to feel good for no reason.
– Richard Bandler
Music cleanses the understanding; inspires it, and lifts it into a realm which it would not reach if it were left to itself.
– Henry Ward Beecher
Art can transform lives. It gives us the power to question, to confront, to explore, and to challenge how we think about the world.
– Lucy Liu
There is in souls a sympathy with sounds: And as the mind is pitch’d the ear is pleased With melting airs, or martial, brisk or grave; Some chord in unison with what we hear Is touch’d within us, and the heart replies.
– William Cowper
Between the two of us the promise of a moonlit night is still alive.
The wind silently says in whispers: one dream is still alive.
– Noshi Gilani
An unsuitable friend is one who is fond of distractions, totally immersed in ordinary worldly activities, and who does not care in the least about achieving li…beration—a friend who has no interest or faith in the Three Jewels. The more time you spend with such a person, the more the three poisons will permeate your mind. Even if you do not initially agree with their ideas and actions, if you spend a lot of time with unsuitable friends, you will eventually be influenced by their bad habits. Your resolve to act positively will decline, and you will waste your life. Such people will prevent you from spending any time studying, reflecting, and meditating—which are the roots of liberation. And they will make you lose whatever qualities you may have developed, especially compassion and love—which are the very essence of the teachings of the Great Vehicle. An unsuitable friend is like a bad captain who steers his ship onto the rocks. Such people are your worst enemy. You owe it to yourself to stay away from them. In contrast, being with people who embody or aspire to gentleness, compassion, and love will encourage you to develop those qualities so essential to the path. Inspired by their example, you will become filled with love for all beings, and come to see the inherent negativity of attachment and hatred. Authentic spiritual friends are those who have received teachings from the same teacher as yourself and, detached form worldly concerns, are devoting themselves to practice in secluded places. In the company of such friends, you will naturally be influenced by their good qualities, just as birds flying around a golden mountain are bathed in its golden radiance.
– Kyabje Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche
When anything has become habitual to the soul it soon grows natural,
and when it has grown natural it becomes a veil.
– Al Hujwiri
In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits…
– Walter Pater
Buddhism is “just a bunch of true stuff that’s hard to apply but really helpful if you just try to practice it a little.”
– Ethan Nichtern
Challenge your Weltanschauung once in a while. Change!
– Hannah Hennebert
THROUGH A WINDOW,
by Jane Goodall
There are many windows through
which we can look out into the…
world, searching for meaning …
… Most of us, when we ponder on the
meaning of our existence,
peer through but one of these
windows onto the world.
And even that one is often misted over
by the breath of our finite humanity.
We clear a tiny peephole and stare through.
No wonder we are confused by the
tiny fraction of a whole that we see.
It is, after all, like trying to
comprehend the panorama of the
desert or the sea through
a rolled-up newspaper.
I was no longer an intellectual-but-nervous twenty-year-old. Older now, I had grown tired of using the life of the mind to absent myself from a reality that kept me scared and inwardly running. I wanted to fully inhabit my life, the laughter and the ecstasy of it as well as the equally holy times of sorrow and anxiety and frustration. Having put aside spiritualist metanarratives and exotic cosmologies, I was now more interested in tasting the vitality of the actual life I was living—an embodied life full of laughter and pain and particularity and sacredness and uncertainty—rather than keeping myself safe from finitude and sadness by holding all experiences at arm’s length.
– James H. Reho
The idea of one side suffering defeat while the other side triumphs is out of date. Instead we have to develop dialogue. We have to make an effort if we want a peaceful, more compassionate world. It requires education, based on patience, tolerance and forgiveness. Too often violence results from greed, so we also need contentment and self-discipline.
– The Dalai Lama
SPIRITUALITY & DIVERSITY
Don’t get me wrong, I believe in a deep spirituality, an essence inside of everything that is beyond our conflicts and all diversity. However, when I am able to reside in that place and look upon the living faces that make up our planet, I don’t become blind to that diversity; actually, I see it even more clearly. I see the flowering and nurturing of our diversity as part of the magnificence of the universe and I am called to savor it, protect it, and love it, not dismiss it or deny it in favor of a muted oneness.
– David Bedrick
Only what is really oneself has the power to heal.
– C.G. Jung
Blossoms at night,
and the faces of people
moved by music.
– Kobayashi Issa
You cannot make yourself feel something you do not feel, but you can make yourself do right in spite of your feelings.
– Pearl Buck
Ask yourself: Do I want to continue being a great practitioner of ignorance, anger, and desire? Or do I want to become a great practitioner of wisdom and compassion instead?
Do not waste your precious human rebirth by making the wrong decision.
– Chamtrul Rinpoche
Delusions are inexhaustible. Transform them with every breath that you bring into the body and every breath that you give away. Realize that you are YOU.
– Roshi Joan Halifax
Our trait of sensitivity means we will also be cautious, inward, needing extra time alone. Because people without the trait (the majority) do not understand that, they see us as timid, shy, weak, or that greatest sin of all, unsociable. Fearing these labels, we try to be like others. But that leads to our becoming overaroused and distressed. Then that gets us labeled neurotic or crazy, first by others and then by ourselves.
– Elaine N. Aron
Mythologies serve as flexible conduits between sacred experiences and the human capacity to articulate these experiences. In the process of expanding consciousness (achieved partially as a result of syncretism), a situation is created where the former paradigm of consciousness, which always becomes a less effective mode, threatens, through the process of enantiodromia, to turn upon itself in a collecti…ve experience of ‘annihilation of self/annihilation of other’ before it can transform itself. Enantiodromia, the instant and complete reversal of an existing situation or truth, is enacted by the archetypal character of the trickster, who moves between realities and worlds seamlessly, mediating polarities. During any kind of a radical shift, ideas and alliances move back and forth between these often conflicting poles of perspective, until some kind of new equilibrium is established.
Gebser asserts that these radical shifts in consciousness that he calls mutations are most easily recognized in a culture’s stories and visual imagery. These changes in imagery often have to do with expanding perspectives that reflect a changing awareness of space and time relationships. Gebser asserts that while biological mutations and consciousness mutations share certain features (like hereditary traits and new potentialities,) biological mutations lead to a specialization (or reduction) of function within a particular environment, what he refers to as a minus mutation, while consciousness mutations do the opposite, they involve expansion. Each phase of a rising mutational consciousness “unfolds toward overdetermination: toward a structural enrichment and dimensional increment” and this radical and unavoidable shift in consciousness results in an efficient “plus mutation” aspect elicited by a spiritual principle (38). Each rising, or efficient phase of consciousness (creative aspect) necessarily results in a corresponding deficient phase (destructive aspect) of the old paradigm. These “consciousness mutations do not assume or require the disappearance of previous potentialities and properties,” instead they are “immediately integrated into the new structure and overdetermined” (39). The creative sphere is the realm where mutations are re-imaged; “Creativity is not bound to space and time, and its truest effect can be found in mutation, the course of which is not continuous in time but rather spontaneous, acausal, and discontinuous” (313).
– Ari Annona
Sometimes you have to be that uncomfortable voice in the crowd. The one that doesn’t get liked, shared or even understood. That’s the truth teller.
– Bairavee Balasubramaniam
This body that you have now, like the bridle used to direct a horse, is the pivot on which your destiny turns. It is now up to you to decide between happiness and suffering.
– Khenpo Ngawang Palzang
Stop worrying about your identity and concern yourself with the people you care about, ideas that matter to you, beliefs you can stand by, tickets you can run on. Intelligent humans make those choices with their brain and hearts and they make them alone. The world does not deliver meaning to you. You have to make it meaningful, and decide what you want and need and must do. It’s a tough, unimaginably lonely and complicated way to be in the world. But that’s the deal: you have to live; you can’t live by slogans, dead ideas, clichés, or national flags. Finding an identity is easy. It’s the easy way out.
– Zadie Smith
It is remarkable that mind enters into our awareness of nature on two separate levels. At the highest level, the level of human consciousness, our minds are somehow directly aware of the complicated flow of electrical and chemical patterns in our brains. At the lowest level, the level of single atoms and electrons, the mind of an observer is again involved in the description of events. Between lies the level of molecular biology, where mechanical models are adequate and mind appears to be irrelevant. But I, as a physicist, cannot help suspecting that there is a logical connection between the two ways in which mind appears in my universe. I cannot help thinking that our awareness of our own brains has something to do with the process which we call “observation” in atomic physics. That is to say, I think our consciousness is not just a passive epiphenomenon carried along by the chemical events in our brains, but is an active agent forcing the molecular complexes to make choices between one quantum state and another. In other words, mind is already inherent in every electron, and the processes of human consciousness differ only in degree but not in kind from the processes of choice between quantum states which we call “chance” when they are made by electrons.
– Freeman Dyson
A common misconception is the belief that thinking is the creation of thought. Rather, it is the reception of thought from a source which has no name and from a place that cannot be found. Since one can’t decide to think nor can one decide thoughts’ contents, why does one claim their ownership? Is every sound Wu Hsin’s because he can hear them?
– Wu Hsin
LINES LOST AMONG TREES
These are not the lines that came to me
while walking in the woods
with no pen
and nothing to write on anyway.
They are gone forever,
a handful of coins
dropped through the grate of memory,
along with the ingenious mnemonic
I devised to hold them in place –
all gone and forgotten
before I had returned to the clearing of lawn
in back of our quiet house
with its jars jammed with pens,
its notebooks and reams of blank paper,
its desk and soft lamp,
its table and the light from its windows.
So this is my elegy for them,
those six or eight exhalations,
the braided rope of syntax,
the jazz of the timing,
and the little insight at the end
wagging like the short tail
of a perfectly obedient spaniel
sitting by the door.
This is my envoy to nothing
where I say Go, little poem –
not out into the world of strangers’ eyes,
but off to some airy limbo,
home to lost epics,
unremembered names,
and fugitive dreams
such as the one I had last night,
which, like a fantastic city in pencil,
erased itself
in the bright morning air
just as I was waking up.
– Billy Collins
No, this was not mere rain.
Knowing it wouldn’t end, mothers pulled whole lives to rooftops
and wailed for light, wept a blue note we won’t know. A tear? Rain?
Still they are there, gasping for new sky,
– Patricia Smith
If you’re going to be really brutally honest with yourself, it takes more discipline than you can ever imagine it takes. I’ve taken my typewriter to the hospital with me for kidney infections. I have taken it on camping trips, and the sand has gotten in the keys. It is just like the most fierce habit you can imagine. You can’t get it off your back. It is there, and it stares at you like a conscience.
– Erma Bombeck
A true vocation requires shedding anything that would impede or obscure the call. A true pilgrimage requires letting go of the very things most people try to hold onto. In seeking after what the soul desires we become pilgrims with no home but the path the soul would have us follow. As the old proverb says, “Before you begin the journey, you own the journey. Once you have begun, the journey owns you.” After all, what good is a dream that doesn’t test the mettle of the dreamer? What good is a path that doesn’t carry us to the edge of our capacity and then beyond that place? A true calling involves a great exposure before it can become a genuine refuge.
– Michael Meade
We are looking for a way to feel more real, but we do not realize that to feel more real we have to push ourselves further into the unknown.
– Mark Epstein
We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.
– Margaret Atwood
A Speed of Soul Thought
Somewhere someone needs help.
If you cant get there yourself.
Take a deep breath, breathe in.
Hold that someone in your heart.
Lighten the weight of their troubles,
Breathe out.
Open your heart.
Release what you cannot change.
Send calm and courage
And human connection.
For the nights can be filled with shadows,
And sometimes the waters rise.
Someone Somewhere needs help.
Send love.
It matters.
– Carrie Newcomer
…I’m taking off
on my own two feet. I’m going
to clear my head…
to listen to trees and silence,
to see if I can still breathe.
I’m going to be alone with
myself, to feel how it feels
to embrace what my feet
tell my head, what wind says
in my good ear. I mean to let
myself be embraced, to let go
feeling so centripetally old.
Do I know where I’m going?
I don’t. How long or far
I have no idea. No map. I
said I was going to take
a walk. When I’ll be back
I’m not going to say.
– Philip Booth
Health comes not only from eating good food, but from thinking good thoughts and having a healthy attitude.
– Marc David
Nothing contributes so much to tranquilize the mind as a steady purpose—a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye.
– Mary Shelley
Man’s status in the natural world is determined, therefore, by the quality of his thinking.
– Manly P. Hall
Unless you viciously carve out time to work on yourself it’s not going to happen. If your mind is always busy then you have no sense of the world you live in. Because there is no communication, there is no space within which to see what we are doing and you may not realize what you have given up until you are on your deathbed. By being busy you are basically giving away your human existence.
– Reggie Ray
Write gently but precisely, with the relaxation of a tired craftsperson newly excited by beauty. Sketch your heart. Detail a story helpful to all those who read it. The most helpful thing of all is catharsis; no more and no less than the truth—and this helps you, too.
– Waylon Lewis⠀
PROVISION
All morning with dry instruments
The field repeats the sound
Of rain
From memory
And in the wall
The dead increase their invisible honey
It is August
The flocks are beginning to form
I will take with me the emptiness of my hands
What you do not have you find everywhere
– W. S. Merwin
I am writing the story of yesterday, not because there was something remarkable about yesterday, or anything, to put it better, that one might call remarkable, but because I have long wanted to tell the internal side of one day of life.
– Leo Tolstoy
Stay deep within yourself and stay alone there–that is where your poems come from, and that has nothing to do with audience. You are the audience.
– Stanley Plumly
Before the katydids did what they do,
serenading nightly their lady loves
& leaving my ears ringing like a buzz-saw,
or, later, the crickets began ticking off
the seconds to the end of summer, the air
fell quiet as the calm between breaths held
while listening for an oriole, the early
evening as cool & sweet as orange sherbet.
The lawn lay at my feet, as flat & brownish
green as the nearby Atlantic at low tide,
in what should have been my fiftieth summer
passed swimming in the incomparable
Aegean & translating into English
the ancient world there, but at this late hour
I must get used to loving summer here
where I will spend forever, starting now.
– Randy Blasing, Summer Evening in New England
I too have an old ache that doesn’t quite
go away. I stand at the kitchen window
looking up at the emptying branches. If I
could brighten whatever is tinted blue
with sadness in the world tonight,
I’d give up the cool side of my pillow.
I’d wade through streets filled with water
to bear away who I could in my arms.
– Luisa A. Igloria
Some people are more certain of everything than I am of anything.
– Robert Rubin
You once said that you would like to sit beside me while I write. Listen, in that case I could not write at all. For writing means revealing oneself to excess; that utmost of self-revelation and surrender, in which a human being, when involved with others, would feel he was losing himself, and from which, therefore, he will always shrink as long as he is in his right mind … That is why one can never be alone enough when one writes, why there can never be enough silence around one when one writes, why even night is not night enough,
– Franz Kafka, letter to a fiancée
Loneliness clarifies.
– Philip Larkin
Like great works, deep feelings always mean more than they are conscious of saying.
– Albert Camus
Here
by Philip Larkin
Swerving east, from rich industrial shadows
And traffic all night north; swerving through fields
Too thin and thistled to be called meadows,
And now and then a harsh-named halt, that shields
Workmen at dawn; swerving to solitude
Of skies and scarecrows, haystacks, hares and pheasants,
And the widening river’s slow presence,
The piled gold clouds, the shining gull-marked mud,
Gathers to the surprise of a large town;
Here domes and statues, spires and cranes cluster
Beside grain-scattered streets, barge-crowded water,
And residents from raw estates, brought down
The dead straight miles by stealing flat-faced trolleys,
Push through plate-glass swing doors to their desires –
Cheap suits, red kitchen-ware, sharp shoes, iced lollies,
Electric mixers, toasters, washers, driers –
A cut-price crowd, urban yet simple, dwelling
Where only salesmen and relations come
Within a terminate and fishy-smelling
Pastoral of ships up streets, the slave museum,
Tattoo-shops, consulates, grim head-scarfed wives;
And out beyond its mortgaged half-built edges
Fast-shadowed wheat-fields, running high as hedges
Isolate villages, where removed lives
Loneliness clarifies. Here silence stands
Like heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken,
Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken,
Luminously-peopled air ascends;
And past the poppies bluish neutral distance
Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach
Of shapes and shingle. Here is unfenced existence;
Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.
Martin Shaw:
We are each a strange container of unique experience, a castle full of erotic chambers, dust-filled cupboards of old bones, great halls with unending feasting, small towers of arcane literature, and balconies where heart broken lovers hurl themselves into the moat. All this is going on inside us all the time.
The patterning of crows over a winter field is an oracular thought of the mud, sky and bird; the elegant procession of the reindeer across a spring meadow is part of some epic train of imagination that has been running for tens of thousands of years. The swift dive of a killer whale is a new vision from an ancient sea.
when the cities are gone and all the ruckus has died away. when sunflowers push up through the concrete and asphalt of the forgotten interstate freeways. when the Kremlin & the Pentagon are turned into nursing homes for generals, presidents, & other such shit heads. when the glass-aluminum sky scraper tombs of Phoenix, AZ barely show above the sand dunes. why then, by God, maybe free men & wild women on horses can roam the sagebrush canyonlands in freedom…and dance all night to the music of fiddles! banjos! steel guitars! by the light of a reborn moon!
– Edward Abbey
Hear the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor, who suffer most from the ecological imbalances.
– Pope Francis Aug. 31, 2017
It is no secret that, for many, intimate relationship is one of the great amplifiers of the unlived life. We can count on our partners to relentlessly illuminate everything that is unresolved within us. Not because they have some agenda to do so, but simply by the nature of the crucible that is formed when we allow another to truly matter to us.
We come to our relationships with an already-existing patterning that formed long ago. While this template longs to be updated, until reconfiguration it looms over us and colors our perception. It functions by way of a time machine where, when activated, it is as if we have left the “here and now,” crossed the liminal, and found ourselves back in the “there and then.”
There are aspects of ourselves that are aching to come out of the shadows and into the warmth of holding awareness. Not to harm, but as emissaries of wholeness. There is nothing like a close relationship to remind us of the orphaned feelings and vulnerable parts that have lost their way in the tangle of somatic and psychic pathways. They are exhausted from a long voyage to reach us, but have not given up.
The reminder of this truth can at times be a bit agonizing, as the other seems to have extraordinary powers to open the raw, tender, and naked dimensions of our being. But this achiness is sacred. Inside the ache is a jewel. Go there.
Please be kind to your partners and the inevitable conflict that will arise as you make this journey together. Training ourselves to harness the energy of conflict – and engage it directly, skillfully, and with an open heart – is the activity of inner and outer revolution, and requires the encoding of new circuitry.
The transformative art of rupture and repair is one that is endlessly profound, revealing that relationships of vast depth and meaning are *not* those free of conflict, but ones where working through conflict is embraced as path, where the participants are transformed into an alive vessel of purification, love, and healing.
This is a difficult realization to come by, and one that is unfortunately not all that popular in a world that has forgotten the gold buried in the dark. But here we are. It is up to us to bring these fruits into the collective.
– Matt Licata
Everyone has a different role to play in the world and each role brings a different perspective. Some roles are working in the muck of humanity, some from the skies, some from the void, some from the hidden not-so-nice realms, and so on. And we will never all agree on anything because different roles require different understandings and articulations.
That being said, even if you disagree with the philosophy a person takes – and I know I’ve been pushing major buttons – love them anyway. Suss out their energy and see where their vibration is at. If they come from a place of discernment and compassion – and so do you – really the words do not matter and the energy is one and the same. ❤
That way discernment is no longer conflated with judgement and shame. One energy seeks clarity and accountability, the other seeks to shut you down and paralyse your access to your own gifts. Sometimes we feel shame when we realize we have not accounted for something and that is a natural human reaction. Course correct and all’s good.
And sometimes we are way too attached to what we think we know and feel. This equally needs to be said. A challenge to your truth should only make you reflect upon the truth of your perception. Defensiveness does not cut it, clarity does.
One who seeks to shame isn’t interested in your growth. And just wants you to crumble. Has nothing to do with clarity, or love.
Move past the need to agree on all things at a superficial level and look at the energy level. Ripping that mask off will bring much clarity. And much more peace.
That being said, it is equally time to tear the sheepskin off the wolves that wear the mask for Love but do not carry its energy. ( #notallwolves ) Also look at the gap between philosophy and direct experience.
Choose friends and teachers who will hold the mirror of truth up to you. It might not be a pleasant experience, but one will love you even if you see the world differently, the other will try to break you down if you differ because your disagremeent invalidates their very fragile sense of self. Your challenge is to tell the two apart.
A third type of shadow-bone teacher will break the pieces that are broken (often the bits that tell you they are fine….but are not) and realign them with love so deep that it appears like the blackest of the shadow and yet it brings out the gold. It takes a certain type of life and perspective to do that work with depth, integrity and detached compassion.
Some love is cuddly and nurturing and sweet, some love rages and roars like a cosmic fire-tiger from the heart of the void. And some love will simply freak you out till you get it.
– Bairavee Balasubramaniam
Who has not sat before his own heart’s curtain? It lifts: and the scenery is falling apart.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Against Science Fiction
Imagine, if you will, a planet.
A people who dream of traveling in space.
They dig up all the minerals from the earth.
They poison all their rivers and streams.
Then they die.
Sentient life does not last
unless it understands
its limitations.
Suppose there was once life on other planets.
They faced two options.
Shall we perish in the urge for infinity?
Or shall we understand our finitude and live?
I think they, too, will have perished
in the urge for infinity,
or understood their finitude,
and lived.
Dreams of spacefaring
lead to premature extinction.
– Peter Capofreddi
One of the challenges in perception is knowing whether what you are seeing or hearing is actually what is there. The more sensitive you become, the more privy you are to such distortions. Which is why I don´t find the unhealthy aspects of ego or shadow to be the worst thing to ever befall a seeker. It makes the possibility of misperception higher, but often there are external factors at play.
And when you look at the larger picture … ego-games look to be the least of your problems. Maintaining a healthy relationship with ego and shadow makes misinterpretation far less likely, but does not erase the possibility.
There is a a great deal of resistance to those who are highly attuned at this time. And even when they are clear, those who seek to read their fields encounter obstacles in truly seeing them for what they are. The causes of these are numerous. I particularly enjoy Bernhard Guenther´s work in explicating these sources in a way that allows the seeker to understand better, rather than to be caught up in fear.
In short:
It pays to question yourself. Question if what you are seeing is true, whether it is in yourself or in another person. This is not the same thing as self-doubt but is the basis of sound energetic hygiene. Especially in times of great distortion.
– Bairavee Balasubramaniam
So, you want to know how I handle Trump? I wake in the middle of the night, trembling with fear, dread and powerlessness, until dawn comes and I catch sight of you good people.
– Karen Maezen Miller
We in the “developed” world seem to have many auditory strategies that insulate us from the presence of silence, simplicity, and solitude. When I return to Wes…tern culture after time in desert, mountain or forest, I discover how we have filled our world with a multiplicity of noises, a symphony of forgetfulness that keeps our won thoughts and realizations, feelings and intuitions out of audible range.
– Joan Halifax
Courage is continuing to perform your daily tasks, and being hopeful despite the odds, not inflicting your fears on others, and remaining sensitive to their needs and expectations, and also not supposing, because you’re dying, nothing matters any more.
– Leonard Michaels
You can never know anyone as completely as you want. But that’s okay, love is better.
– Mary Oliver
Language is not the lowborn, gawky servant of thought and feeling; it is need, thought, feeling, and perception itself. The shape of sentences, the song in its syllables, the rhythm of its movement, is the movement of the imagination.
– William Gass
The quality I would most like to magnify is empathy. It bring us together in a peaceful, loving state.
– Stephen Hawking
Happiness, then, is the confidence that pain and disappointment can be tolerated, that love will prove stronger than aggression. It is release from the attachment to pleasant feelings, and faith in the capacity of awareness to guide us through the inevitable insults to our own narcissism.
– Mark Epstein, M.D.
It is the way of dreams to give us more than we ask.
– Carl Gustav Jung
Until you perfect the view, do not count your practice in years or months. But instead decide to dedicate the whole remainder of your life to Dharma practice. This is the approach of the very best practitioners.
– Yangthang Rinpoche
It’s midsummer night. The light is skinny;
a thin skirt of desire skims the earth.
Dogs bark at the musk of other dogs
and the urge to go wild.
I am lingering at the edge
of a broken heart, striking relentlessly
against the flint of hard will.
It’s coming apart.
And everyone knows it.
So do squash erupting in flowers
the color of the sun.
So does the momentum of grace
gathering allies
in the partying mob.
The heart knows everything.
I remember when there was no urge
to cut the land or each other into pieces,
when we knew how to think
in beautiful.
There is no world like the one surfacing.
I can smell it as I pace in my square room,
the neighbor’s television
entering my house by waves of sound.
Makes me think about buying
a new car, another kind of cigarette
when I don’t need another car
and I don’t smoke cigarettes.
A human mind is small when thinking
of small things.
It is large when embracing the maker
of walking, thinking and flying.
If I can locate the sense beyond desire,
I will not eat or drink
until I stagger into the earth
with grief.
I will locate the point of dawning
and awaken
with the longest day in the world.
– Joy Harjo
I find the people strangely fantasied;
Possess’d with rumors, full of idle dreams,
Not knowing what they fear, but full of fear…
– King John
I am suggesting that the radical of poetry lies not in the resolution of doubts but in their proliferation.
– C.D. Wright
A lot of times we think commitment is all on my side; I’m going to commit to this marriage, and I’m gonna sign on to it, and I’m gonna do it–and if I change my mind I can just leave. Actually, in the olden times in all the cultures, commitment is partly you, but it’s also the way in which reality changes when you make a commitment. Reality actually comes in and it takes you at your word. That’s the idea of sacred bond.
– Reggie Ray
Via Matthew Fox:
TO BE A POET
How ludicrous, – impossible!…What divine madness!
Such wonder! Such sweetness!
You want to be a poet? – Listen to this:
A poet is a sculptor of liquid language;
Witness of spirit made flesh;
Keeper of experience of feeling – held still for an instant,
Then turned to blood.
To be a poet, make a friend of darkness,
Let the sun catch fire.
Ah! But you sit at your daily tasks
Assigned by the voices of mothers and fathers
and lovers of systems.
You must quit your squalid hut – this temporary footed shelter.
Rise up and become the Voices Ear,
The Dancers Dance.
Throw off the chain of circumstance:
Step into the shadow of night, into the certainty of illusion,
The wisdom of uncertainty.
The sun dawns in the darkness –
Untold treasures just for the speaking.
I began to cry, and you to laugh.
– Federico Garcia Lorca
The very spring and root of honesty and virtue lie in good education.
– Plutarch
What’s the furthest corner? Because that’s where I want to be, alone with the only thing that I love.
– Federico Garcia Lorca
We live in a world in which poets are the weirdest of us. We look at the tiny most elemental thing between us and act like…
words mean everything.
– Amy King
So much that happens happens in small ways
That someone was going to get around to tabulate, and then never did,
Yet it all bespeaks freshness, clarity and an even motor drive
To coax us out of sleep and start us wondering what the new round
Of impressions and salutations is going to leave in its wake…
This time. And the form, the precepts, are yours to dispose of as you will,
As the ocean makes grasses, and in doing so refurbishes a lighthouse
On a distant hill, or else lets the whole picture slip into foam.
– John Ashberry
The Mother not only governs all from above but she descends into this lesser triple universe. Impersonally, all things here, even the movements of the Ignorance, are herself in veiled power and her creations in diminished substance, her Nature-body and Nature-force, and they exist because, moved by the mysterious fiat of the Supreme to work out something that was there in the possibilities of the Infinite, she has consented to the great sacrifice and has put on like a mask the soul and forms of the Ignorance. But personally too she has stooped to descend here into the Darkness that she may lead it to the Light, into the Falsehood and Error that she may convert it to the Truth, into this Death that she may turn it to godlike Life, into this world- pain and its obstinate sorrow and suffering that she may end it in the transforming ecstasy of her sublime Ananda. In her deep and great love for her children she has consented to put on herself the cloak of this obscurity, condescended to bear the attacks and torturing influences of the powers of the Darkness and the Falsehood, borne to pass through the portals of the birth that is a death, taken upon herself the pangs and sorrows and sufferings of the creation, since it seemed that thus alone could it be lifted to the Light and Joy and Truth and eternal Life. This is the great sacrifice called sometimes the sacrifice of the Purusha, but much more deeply the holocaust of Prakriti, the sacrifice of the Divine Mother.
– Sri Aurobindo,”The Mother” with “Letters on the Mother”
The magnitude of the love that lay at the font of creation was beyond description. To awaken to this love was to remember a primordial decision that I had somehow participated in. It was part of my spiritual genetic make-up, something I had inherited along with everything else that I had not understood about my life. Remembering choices made before matter and time even existed, I reconnected with the divine love that had inspired these choices. This experience completely shattered my heart, and I wept deeply.
From this perspective, I experienced all the suffering that humanity had endured as taking place not outside this love but inside it. I realised that all the suffering inherent in evolution was noble beyond words. It was all part of a cosmic plan that had been entered into freely by all participants, however unconscious of this fact we had become along the way. The nobility of great suffering voluntarily shouldered in the name of Divine Love, suffering that would stretch across millions of years, suffering that would become so utterly inscrutable that it would be used as evidence that the universe itself was devoid of compassion, this was the nobility of humanity’s gift to the Creator. All of the suffering that humanity had endured and would continue to endure, especially the suffering of forgetfulness itself, was part of a consciously chosen creative process, a process that had not yet come to full fruition.
I saw that out of the seething desires of history, out of the violent conflicts and of the scheming of individuals and nations, there was now driving forward a new awareness in human consciousness. Its birth in us no less difficult or violent than the birth of a new continent through volcanic upheaval. It drives upward from the floor of our being, requiring a transposition of everything that has gone before to make room for its new organisational patterns.
The great difficulty I have is describing the enormity of what is being birthed. The true focus of this creative process is not individuals but all humanity. It is actually trying to reawaken the entire species. What is emerging is a consciousness of unprecedented proportions, the entire human species integrated into a unified field of awareness. The species reconnected with its fundamental nature.
– Christopher Bache, Dark Night, Early Dawn
in the face of the terrifying prospects that open up to humanity, we see even better that peace is the only fight worth taking. It is no longer a prayer, but an order that must raise peoples to governments, the order to choose definitively between hell and reason.
– Albert Camus
Dropping the ball is the most human thing there is. But you learn the most about people, their courage, their intentions, their awareness of their consequence in the world from everything they do and do not do – in what comes after. Sometimes all you can do is wait and watch and let them reveal themselves to you – for better or for worse – in ways you couldn’t have seen before the dropping. There are few things more beautiful than seeing the ball picked up again and handled with more care and fewer things more heartbreaking than to see them lying there days later untended to.
– Tad Hargrave
Our ecological problems are evidence of a deeper, spiritual problem whereby we keep shrinking our circle of compassion; whereby we, feeling empty, use everything up in an attempt to fill ourselves; whereby we, feeling insignificant and ephemeral, mark up the Earth in order to feel important and lasting; whereby we, feeling incomplete, break apart anything that is whole.
– Mark Nepo
The segments of the trip swing open like an orange.
There is light in there and mystery and food.
Come see it.
*
The way music passes, emblematic
Of life and how you cannot isolate a note of it
And say it is good or bad.
You must
Wait till it’s over.
– John Ashbery
Yolanda Rommel:
and after the big rain at night in the desert…
standing in front of you
old
mother earth in the breaking of a new day
morning
and a sound of awakening life
fresh as if the first ray of a sunlight
ever
greated her with its warmth and
softenes
mother earth
bathed in the dew of a new day
fresh as a maiden
showing her face for the first time
to any one
to you opening up like a flower
gently
please walk gently on this earth
and gather flowers
gently offered for the first time
to you…
You may say, “I must do something this afternoon,” but actually there is no “this afternoon.” We do things one after the other. That is all.
– Shunryū Suzuki
Everybody’s looking for the job in which you never have to pay anyone their pound of flesh. Self-employed nirvana. A lot of artists like to think of themselves as uncompromising; a lot of management consultants won’t tell you what they do until they’ve sunk five pints. I don’t think anybody should give themselves air just because they don’t have to hand over a pound of flesh every day at 5pm, and I don’t think anyone should beat themselves with broken glass because they do. If you’re an artist, well, good for you. Thank your lucky stars every evening and dance in the garden with the fairies. But don’t fool yourself that you occupy some kind of higher moral ground. You have to work for that. Writing a few lines, painting a pretty picture – that just won’t do it.
– Zadie Smith
We’re all walking around believing the necessary fictions we’ve created so that we can stand our own lives. Sometimes it’s time to let them go. Sometimes it’s time to let the stories of others thread you open to an unknown self.
– Lidia Yuknavitch
Today education means hard facts and skills. We need a softer approach with art, depth psychology and the spiritualities.
– Thomas Moore
Every setback, challenge and disaster can make you a better person, if you let it reframe your thinking and your values.
– Thomas Moore
There is a black hole in our galactic heart. It not only explains the tragic sense of life, and the harsh reality of our love lives, it reminds us that there is as much chaos and disorder as order and beauty – infected calls us to embrace brokenness as part of beauty. It says “entropy happens.” It calls us to embrace our essential pain and our sacred wounds. And it invites us to integrate disintegration into our lives.
– Roger Wolsey
Lunar Beauty by W.H. Auden
This lunar beauty
Has no history
Is complete and early,
If beauty later
Bear any feature
It had a lover
And is another.
This like a dream
Keeps other time
And daytime is
The loss of this,
For time is inches
And the heart’s changes
Where ghost has haunted
Lost and wanted.
But this was never
A ghost’s endeavor
Nor finished this,
Was ghost at ease,
And till it pass
Love shall not near
The sweetness here
Nor sorrow take
His endless look.
What is hard to remember is that the body lags three seconds behind the mind. All our technological gizmos and the speed of our lives are so fast our poor bodies never have a chance to catch up. Why not learn to be a little body-kind by making mini stops often? In those stops we can gentle our breaths, really exhale a number of times, and let our bodies feel that we are in solidarity with them.
– Gunilla Norris
Martín Espada, 1957
For Chile
In the republic of poetry,
a train full of poets
rolls south in the rain
as plum trees rock
and horses kick the air,
and village bands
parade down the aisle
with trumpets, with bowler hats,
followed by the president
of the republic,
shaking every hand.
In the republic of poetry,
monks print verses about the night
on boxes of monastery chocolate,
kitchens in restaurants
use odes for recipes
from eel to artichoke,
and poets eat for free.
In the republic of poetry,
poets read to the baboons
at the zoo, and all the primates,
poets and baboons alike, scream for joy.
In the republic of poetry,
poets rent a helicopter
to bombard the national palace
with poems on bookmarks,
and everyone in the courtyard
rushes to grab a poem
fluttering from the sky,
blinded by weeping.
In the republic of poetry,
the guard at the airport
will not allow you to leave the country
until you declaim a poem for her
and she says Ah! Beautiful.
Human beings can withstand a week without water, two weeks without food, many years of homelessness, but not loneliness. It is the worst of all tortures, the worst of all sufferings.
– Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes
Numb the dark and you numb the light.
– Brené Brown
And when, I ask,
was the last time
words filled sentences
and brimmed in you?
– Elisa Gonzalez
I know I live half alive in the world/ I know half my life belongs to the wild darkness.
– Galway Kinnell
Oh, if loss and failure really could
be turned into rainfall douses instead
– Elise Hempel
Words are inconsequential
as flies. Dumb luck.
– Corey Marks
Writing is a sustaining thing.
– John McPhee
The trick is to live life as a conscious dream, alert to the dreamlike symbols the world gives us at every turning, aware that how we use – or fail to use – our imagination shapes the reality we inhabit.
– Robert Moss
…most of the time we were alone and mixing up our souls ever more and ever more till it would be terribly hard to say good-by.
– Jack Kerouac
nayyirah waheed:
what can i do
when the night comes
and
i break into stars.
– osmosis
Once I was walking through the woods with a friend. She asked me if I would be nervous teaching in the presence of my teachers. I checked within. What came was, “No, I won’t be nervous. I’d probably be more alert!
My teachers taught me to trust myself. They made me independent of them. They set me free. For that I am deeply grateful. They live in me, through me, as me.
As for me, I’m less and less interested in projecting myself as a teacher. More and more keen on simply being as I am. Relating without the distortions of labels.
Gratitude on Teacher’s Day.
– Nithya Shanti
We face all sorts of problems, many of them of our own making. Why? Because we are swayed by emotions like anger and fear. However, I believe we can learn to tackle such emotions. And one of the most effective remedies for dealing with destructive emotions is to cultivate loving-kindness on the basis of the oneness of all 7 billion human beings.
– Dalai Lama
It is easy to love the things (people) we are not really close to because
we don’t have to deal with their particularities.
Loving particularities
is much, much,
harder,
and
much, much,
more real.
– Ari Annona
We’re all fools, said Clemens, all the time. It’s just we’re a different kind each day. We think, I’m not a fool today. I’ve learned my lesson. I was a fool yesterday but not this morning. Then tomorrow we find out that, yes, we were a fool today too. I think the only way we can grow and get on in this world is to accept the fact we’re not perfect and live accordingly.
– Ray Bradbury
Everything that is sacred and that wishes to remain so must envelop itself in mystery.
– Stephane Mallarme
My feelings of grief had become unbearable, and I attempted to pull off the road. But as suddenly as the wailing began, it ceased, and everything was transformed. Looking at the landscape around me through the window of my parked car, I wondered at first if I might be dreaming. Every rock, every sagebrush, every lofty pine and blazing aspen, as well as the mountain itself, was bathed in a yellowish-gold light connected to luminous threads. I felt as if I were enveloped in soft down.
“This is not a vision,” I said to myself. “I am seeing the world as it really is!”
…The mysterious glow surrounding everything seemed to emanate from within all things…more accurately, perhaps, from within the earth, herself. The threads of light were even more extraordinary. Unlike the visible spectrum of light, these felt alive. It seemed that each strand of this “living light” was self-aware and also aware of the whole. I felt that I perceived, on an energetic level, the very essence of the earth – perhaps the nature of Creation itself. I also felt that for a brief, timeless moment, I perceived the “flow” of things, for these luminous threads of light seemed fluid, shimmering, and eternal. These threads of light were connected to all things, thus forming the impression of a vast living web. There were also strands, which extended upward as if connecting this web to some greater whole. Perhaps they reached into Infinity itself. My heartwrenching anguish had been transformed into utter bliss. It was then that I heard an inner voice telling me that one must know the sufferings of the world before bliss is possible… …When my perception returned to normal, I thought of the Navaho [Diné] deity, Spider Woman, who wove the web of the Universe. I remembered the opening verse to an ancient East Indian account of Creation, “Father, Mother, spin a web, whose web is the Universe”.
I felt that my eyes had been opened. For the first time I understood what these ancient people must have known through direct experience. For the next half hour while standing on that mountain pass, I continued observing the glow of our world with its luminous threads. I knew that the goddess of our world had shared with me both her anguish and her bliss. Through a spontaneous shift in awareness, I had perceived her energetic configurations, while experiencing a joyous and ecstatic union with this great being – the Earth Mother – in her Gaia, or planetary, form.
– Peter Calhoun
you don’t deserve this pain, this terrible search for something that’s not even real. you deserve so much more, and you deserve the space within you to be filled with love. to be filled with kindness so deserving that only the ones with a broken heart understand. because you’ve earned it. make today the kind of day that starts and ends with you.
– r.m. drake
You can call me crazy
if you want but
I’ve nothing to wish for –
nothing to wait for –
nothing to hope for –
I’m already drunk
with what is here.
In the present moment
everything is wildly alive,
sacred and
precious.
– Guthema Roba
INSTRUCTIONS FOR TRIMMING YOUR ROOMMATE’S BANGS
Maybe it’s August. Maybe the birds
are still learning to see green.
Starlings and wrens, each bone a secret.
In the kitchen with the dishwasher running
and bees zapping against the screen,
go slowly, right to left.
Her lips taste like rain like salt like
bruised pears. Let the ends fall on her skin.
Like twilight. Like cotton straps.
What was the first thing that was only like itself?
– Adriana Cloud
Loving Working
Naomi Shihab Nye, 1952
“We clean to give space for Art.”
Micaela Miranda, Freedom Theatre, Palestine
Work was a shining refuge when wind sank its tooth
into my mind. Everything we love is going away,
drifting – but you could sweep this stretch of floor,
this patio or porch, gather white stones in a bucket,
rake the patch for future planting, mop the counter
with a rag. Lovely wet gray rag, squeeze it hard
it does so much. Clear the yard of blowing bits of plastic.
The glory in the doing. The breath of the doing.
Sometimes the simplest move kept fear from
fragmenting into no energy at all, or sorrow from
multiplying, or sorrow from being the only person
living in the house.
This is the time to be slow,
Lie low to the wall
Until the bitter weather passes.
Try, as best you can, not to let
The wire brush of doubt
Scrape from your heart
All sense of yourself
And your hesitant light.
If you remain generous,
Time will come good;
And you will find your feet
Again on fresh pastures of promise,
Where the air will be kind
And blushed with beginning.
– John O’Donohue, To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings
….Oh be inspired for the flame
in which a Thing disappears and bursts into something else;
the spirit of re-creation which masters this earthly form
loves most the pivoting point where you are no longer
yourself.
– Rilke
Take care you don’t know anything in this world
too quickly or easily. Everything
is also a mystery and has its own secret aura in the moonlight,
its private song…
– Mary Oliver
Like a great film or play everyone should see,
BEHOLD THYSELF.
Hints of your beauty the mountains have.
The enchanting complexions of the coral reefs
are pale to a golden candle in our heart.
What moves in any ocean moves through us.
A thousand kinds of music play every hour
that you orchestrate.
Let the next ticket you buy help seat you in
Front of . . . your soul.
– A Year with Hafiz
Shavasana
by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Once again, the field rehearses how to die.
Some of the grass turns golden first. Some
simply fades into brown. Just this morning,
I, too, lay in corpse pose, practicing
how to let myself be totally held by the earth
without striving, how to meet the day
without rushing off to do the next necessary
or beautiful thing. Soon, the grass will bend
or break, molder or disintegrate. Every year,
the same lesson in how to join
the darkness, how to be unmade, how quietly
we might lean into the uncertainty
of whatever comes next.
Much learning does not teach understanding.
– Heraclitus
There is no “thing” that makes you stressed or burnt out or anxious–it’s how we relate to anxiety. In Tibetan Buddhism they say if you’re barefoot, you can try to pave the entire world in soft leather–or you can put soft leather shoes on.
– Waylon Lewis
The problem is that for most of us we have to be in trouble before we remember what’s essential.
– John O’Donohue
I’ve been accused of having a death wish but I think it’s life that I wish for, terribly, shamelessly, on any terms whatsoever.
– Tennessee Williams, Sweet Bird of Youth
Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.
– Angela Carter
You don’t get cool hanging around ‘cool people’. You don’t get cool sitting before cool teachers. You don’t get cool when you live in a cool town. You don’t get cool when you sleep with cool people. You get cool when you go deeper into your own individuation. You get cool when you actualize your particular uniqueness. You get cool when you don’t give a shit about being cool. Because what is cool is not an external reflection. It’s not the chasing of cool. It’s the surrender to your uniqueness. It’s the embodying of your own remarkable self. It’s the empowerment of your ideosyncratic voice. And it’s the not caring one iota what others think about you because you are so deeply ‘you’ that external judgments are meaningless. You want to be cool? Be fully who YOU are. Now, that’s cool.
– Jeff Brown
The True Path
Just before Ninakawa passed away the Zen master Ikkyu visited him.
“Shall I lead you on?” Ikkyu asked.
Ninakawa replied: “I came here alone and I go alone. What help could you be to me?” Ikkyu answered: “If you think you really come and go, that is your delusion. Let me show you the path on which there is no coming and no going. “With his words Ikkyu had revealed the path so clearly that Ninakawa smiled and passed away.
I Dream of a Quiet Man
by Wendell Berry
I dream of a quiet man
who explains nothing and defends
nothing, but only knows
where the rarest wildflowers
are blooming, and who goes,
and finds that he is smiling
not by his own will
For nothing is fixed, forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born. And we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.
– James Baldwin
The physical body does not make you as tired as the mind does. Work doesn’t make you as tired as your desires do. So what is important is for you to become CONTENT.
– Sri Sri Ravi Shankar
In the preface to Iwaszkiewicz’s Diaries, the author cites a marvelous aphorism taken from the critic Karol Irzykowski: “Anything can be lived through to the end, nothing can be thought through to the end.
– Adam Zagajewski
Say you have seen something. You have seen an ordinary bit of what is real, the infinite fabric of time that eternity shoots through, and time’s soft-skinned people working and dying under slowly shifting stars. Then what?
– Annie Dillard
In the middle of work
we start longing fiercely for wild greenery,
for the Wilderness itself, penetrated only
by the thin civilization of the telephone wires.
The moon of leisure circles the planet Work
with its mass and weight. – That’s how they want it.
When we are on the way home the ground pricks up its ears.
The underground listens to us via the grass-blades.
Even in this working day there is a private calm.
As in a smoky inland area where a canal flows:
THE BOAT appears unexpectedly in the traffic
or glides out behind the factory, a white vagabond.
One Sunday I walk past an unpainted new building
standing before a grey wet surface.
It is half finished. The wood has the same light color
as the skin on someone bathing.
Outside the lamps the September night is totally dark.
When the eyes adjust, there is faint light
over the ground where large snails glide out
and the mushrooms are as numerous as the stars.
– Tomas Tranströmer
though I have not been here long,
I can look up at the sky at night and tell
how things are likely to go for
the next hundred million years:
the universe will probably not find
a way to vanish nor I
in all that time reappear.
– A. R. Ammons
It is the greatest mistake to think that man is always one and the same. A man is never the same for long. He is continually changing. He seldom remains the same even for half an hour.
– George Ivanovich Gurdjieff
All I know is a door into the dark.
– Seamus Heaney
The anvil must be somewhere in the centre,
Horned as a unicorn, at one end square,
Set there immoveable: an altar
Where he expends himself in shape & music.
– Seamus Heaney
adamantseal:
what are these lies
I tell myself
but truths angled
sharp into my neck
I am hostage
to my own dark
narrative of broken days
how days become years
so fluidly
as rain waters rivers
and rushes into the sea
I am already ancient
when I rise again
the sky knows
my secret name
the one I have already forgotten
in the cycle of dreaming
and waking
I hear the ghost of it
in your voice
quiet syllabic
familiar in the gloaming
Then love comes, like a sudden flight
of birds from earth to heaven after rain. Your kiss,
recalled, unstrings, like pearls, this chain of words.
– Carol Ann Duffy
God picks up the reed-flute world and blows.
Each note is a need coming through one of us, a passion, a longing pain.
Remember the lips where the wind breath originated, and let your note be clear.
Don’t try to end it.
Be your note.
I’ll show you when it’s enough.
Go up on the roof at night, in this city of the soul.
Let everyone climb on their roofs and sing their notes!
Sing loud!
– Rumi
If you are discouraged, as I am, by the vulgarity in modern life, you can respond with your own beauty and thoughtfulness.
– Thomas Moore
The Man Watching
I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can’t bear without a friend,
I can’t love without a sister
The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.
What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.
When we win it’s with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestler’s sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.
Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.
– Trans. by Robert Bly
Yolanda Rommel:
Grief, I’ve learned, is really love. It’s all the love you want to give but cannot give. The more you loved someone, the more you grieve. All of that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes and in that part of your chest that gets empty and hollow feeling. The happiness of love turns to sadness when unspent. Grief is just love with no place to go.
And it grows as you continue living… as long as you take a risk of loving and losing … again and again…
God is the great companion, the fellow sufferer who understands.
– Alfred North Whitehead
Finally on my way to yes
I bump into
all the places
where I said no
to my life…
all the untended wounds
the red and purple scars
those hieroglyphs of pain
carved into my skin, my bones,
those coded messages
that send me down
the wrong street
again and again
where I find them
the old wounds
the old misdirections
and I lift them
one by one
close to my heart
and I say holy
holy.
– Pesha Joyce Gertler, The Healing Time
YOU CAN DO THIS
by Gregg Krech
You can do this.
The voice in your head that tells you it’s hopeless
tells you to just lie down and not get up
“It’s too hard.”
“You’re too tired.”
“Just give up.”
that voice is just a stream of thoughts.
There’s a part of you that is much stronger.
Much wiser.
Find that voice.
It’s softer. Sometimes it’s hard to hear
but it’s there.
You’re most likely to find it
in silence
and in the spaces
between the other thoughts.
There seems to be no end to doing things wrong, messing things up all the time. We are sort of trapped in that kind of negative “oy vey” situation. On the other hand, very interestingly, there is lots of room to make mistakes. That’s true, absolutely true. But such room for mistakes cannot be created unless there is surrendering, giving, some kind of opening. If we can give away our aggression or attempt to give it away, if we attempt to open up and to strip away our territoriality and possessiveness — then there is lots of room for making mistakes.
– Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche
start seeing everything as god, but keep it a secret.
– hāfez
We withdraw not to disappear, but to find another ground from which to see; a solid ground from which to step, and from which to speak again, in a different way, a clear, rested, embodied voice we begin to remember again as our own.
– David Whyte
May what I do flow from me like a river,
no forcing it and no holding back,
the way it is with children.
Then in these swelling and ebbing currents,
these deepening tides moving out, returning,
I will sing you as no one ever has,
streaming through widening channels
into the open sea.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
When the world appears to be most insane, we can’t go inside and hide and let the jackals eat up the orchards. We have to respond as humans, which is to say with kindness and wit and caring.
– Tennessee Williams
It’s a universal law – intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education. An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility.
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Community begins in the individual stretching beyond self-interest and lack of trust, in cracking the heart open.
– Thomas Moore
…Last night as I was sleeping I dreamt a marvelous illusion
that there was a fiery sun here in my heart.
It was fiery because it gave warmth as if from a hearth
And it was sun because it gave light and brought tears to my eyes.
Last night as I was sleeping I dreamt a marvelous illusion
that there was God here in my heart.
God, is my soul asleep?
Have those beehives who labor by night stopped, and
the water wheel of thought, is it dry?
The cup’s empty, wheeling out carrying only shadows?
No! My soul is not asleep! My soul is not asleep!
It neither sleeps nor dreams, but watches, its clear eyes open,
far off things, and listens, and listens
at the shores of the great silence.
It listens at the shores of the great silence.
– Antonio Machado
You can tell your story. You can re-tell your story. You can un-tell your story. You can even sell your story of re-telling and un-telling your story. Just remember that you are not your story.
– Nithya Shanti
The true birthplace is that wherein for the first time one looks intelligently upon oneself; my first homelands have been books.
– Marguerite Yourcenar
The only / way to listen to what can never / be said is to quiet our need / to steer the plot.
– Mark Nepo
Effort and grace are two sides of the same moment and this is not to be feared.
– Mark Nepo, The One Life We’re Given
The more one has suffered, the less one demands. To protest is a sign one has traversed no hell.
– Emile M Cioran
When I encounter people who are OBSESSED with purity- pure water, pure air, pure food, pure consciousness, pure colons- I find myself both celebrating their good sense and simultaneously wondering what unresolved toxicity they are trying to avoid from deep within their psyches. You can clean your body, mind and environment all you want, but it won’t mean a thing if you still have a muddy heart.
– Jeff Brown
What cowards we become
When we give up our own mind and autonomy to authority, we give up our capacity to learn and literally expand in self awareness.
In our giving up of self we now have someone to blame, mistakes are no longer stepping stones and the arousal of determination to learn goes by the way side to boot lick the imagined authority who only exist out of our own self denial.
– Dino Delano, Cool Zen
I do not believe that a violent imitation of the horrors of our times is the concern of poetry. Horrors are taken for granted. Disorder is ordinary. People in general take more and more “in their stride”—hides grow thicker. I long for poems of an inner harmony in utter contrast to the chaos in which they exist. Insofar as poetry has a social function it is to awaken sleepers by other means than shock.
– Denise Levertov, The Poet in the World
(New Directions, 1960)
To experience poetry is to see over and above reality. It is to discover that which is beyond the physical, to experience another life and another level of feeling. It is to wonder about the world, to understand the nature of people and, most importantly, to be shared with another, old or young, known or unknown.
– Ai Weiwei
Because our greatest gifts and deepest wounds reside in the same area; because the resurrection of old pains can be so fearful and painful, people need to be reminded in diverse ways that the inner dream of life, the wise word set within and the psychic gold are the natural inheritance of each human soul. Because it is so easy to forget what we so desperately need to remember; old stories talk of golden treasures and great dreams that call us to undertake adventures and pilgrimages that in the end reveal what was within us all along.
– Michael Meade
alterum orbem terrarum eam appellant
They call it the other world
– Gaius Plinius (Pliny the Elder) AD23-79
MORNING IN A NEW LAND
In trees still dripping night some nameless birds
Woke, shook out their arrowy wings, and sang,
Slowly, like finches sifting through a dream.
The pink sun fell, like glass, into the fields.
Two chestnuts, and a dapple gray,
Their shoulders wet with light, their dark hair streaming,
Climbed the hill. The last mist fell away,
And under the trees, beyond time’s brittle drift,
I stood like Adam in his lonely garden
On that first morning, shaken out of sleep,
Rubbing his eyes, listening, parting the leaves,
Like tissue on some vast, incredible gift.
– Mary Oliver
Eternity is non evident. There’s this endless rotation of the
sun in the skull, the stillness outside, and a storm within.
At least a river is always flowing in some part of the country.
Winds, always gathering speed, shatter the order of things.
– Etel Adnan
Do you know the legend about cicadas? They say they are the souls of poets who cannot keep quiet because, when they were alive, they never wrote the poems they wanted to.
– John Berger
[L]ike a piece of drift wood
settling in weeds, my dreams were filled
with talking frogs, giant crickets,
godly flies, with the yellow, brooding eyelid of the moon
flickering at me sensuously.
– Jimmy Santiago Baca
Have you remembrances, the glimmering arches that span the summits of the mind?
– Kahlil Gibran
In poems I am trying to find my bearings through a world that at times feels remote and inchoate and struck blank with noise. I would like to place myself in a field of deep attention, and out of that attention come to feel and regard with more acute understanding what is there. I write to be less hopelessly myself, to sense something more expansive than where I speak from.
– Joanna Klink
You seem to be carrying the morning on your shoulders. / What are you going to ask the moon as it floats away?
– Richard Jackson
If God has been good enough to give you a poet / Then listen to him [or her].
– Robinson Jeffers
Words or wax, no end
to our self-shaping, our forlorn
awareness at the end of which
is only more awareness.
Was ever truth so malleable?
Arid, inadhesive bits of matter.
What might heal you? Love.
What make you whole? Love. My love.
– C. K. Williams
so we blessed each other
in a language we invented,
more silent than thought,
each word backlit as in a dream
– D. Nurske
How many nights must it take
one such as me to learn
that we aren’t, after all, made
from that bird that flies out of its ashes,
that for us
as we go up in flames, our one work
is
to open ourselves, to be
the flames?”
– Galway Kinnell
That the branches of poetry are silence and wound.
– Paisley Rekdal
Language is the first site of loss and our first defense against it.
– Paisley Rekdal
I look for you beyond the wait
Beyond myself
And I love you so much that I no longer know
Which one of us is absent.
– Paul Éluard
Literature is not high school and it’s not actually necessary to know what everyone around you is wearing, in terms of style, and being influenced by people who are being published in this very moment is going to make you look just like them, which is probably not a good long-term goal for being yourself or making a meaningful contribution. At any point in history there is a great tide of writers of similar tone, they wash in, they wash out, the strange starfish stay behind, and the conches. Check out the bestseller list for April 1935 or August 1978 if you don’t believe me. Originality is partly a matter of having your own influences: read evolutionary biology textbooks or the Old Testament, find your metaphors where no one’s looking, don’t belong. Or belong to the other world that is not quite this one, the world from which you send back your messages.
– Rebecca Solnit
Hope is with you when you believe
The earth is not a dream but living flesh,
That sight, touch, and hearing do not lie,
That all things you have ever seen here
Are like a garden looked at from a gate.
…
…Some people say we should not trust our eyes,
That there is nothing, just a seeming,
These are the ones who have no hope.
They think that the moment we turn away,
The world, behind our backs, ceases to exist,
As if snatched up by the hands of thieves.
– Czeslaw Milosz
The fact is, that I have broken with the past. I have decided, coolly and calmly, as I believe, that it is necessary to my success, or, at any rate, to my happiness, to abjure for a while my conventional self, and to assume a simple, natural character.
– Henry James
I often try to answer back to what’s just been spoken to me, when I feel someone is trying to reach me.
– Joanna Klink
I will be your poet, I will be more to you than to any of the rest.
– Walt Whitman
Consider these three instructions of the Buddha:
1. Abstain from games and shows.
2. Guard the eyes from the seduction of visual pleasure.
3. Sit alone in a quiet place. Imagine a mind-made body. Withdraw the mind-made body from the body the way a sword is withdrawn from its sheath, or the way a snake sheds its worn out skin. View the world from the perspective of the mind-made body. Imagine the mind-made body looking down upon the body, thinking, “This is impermanent. See how it suffers. Soon it will die.” Now imagine the mind-made body traveling around the universe seeing stars and planets, thinking, “These are impermanent. They will soon decay into dark, dead matter.”
How many hours of beautiful imaginings can be conjured from just these short texts? How many beautiful self-created images can be created from these succinct instructions?
What kind of mind requires a machine to present images to it? Has it lost the capacity to create its own images? Has it become so devoid of imagination that it can no longer dream its own dreams, and must have prefabricated dreams reproduced by machine?
Those who profit from selling us food would like us to forget food comes from the ground. They want us to believe food comes in cellophane packages. They want us to rely on them to make our food for us, so we forget how to grow food for ourselves.
Those who profit from selling us dreams would like us to forget dreams come from minds. They want us to believe dreams come on cellophane reels. They want us to rely on them to make our dreams for us, so we forget how to make dreams for ourselves.
Don’t buy the manufactured dreams. Dream your own.
It is on this moment of balance I must end:
The strange moment when spirituality rejects ethics,
when happiness springs from the absence of hope,
when the mind finds its justification in the body.
If it is true that every truth carries its bitterness within,
it is also true that every denial contains a flourish of affirmations.
And this song of hopeless love born in contemplation may also seem the most effective guide for action.
– Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays
Denying, believing, and doubting are to men
what running is to horses.
– Blaise Pascal
Your spiritual beliefs are no more or less sacred to me than your favorite color.
– Ron Harper
I have sung over so many abysses,
And lived in so many mirrors.
– Anna Akhmatova
first thought after seeing you smile
by Warsan Shire
come with every wound
and every woman you’ve ever loved
every lie you’ve ever told
and whatever it is that keeps you up at night
every mouth you’ve ever punched in
all the blood you’ve ever tasted
come with every enemy you’ve ever made
and all the family you’ve ever buried
and every dirty thing you’ve ever done
every drink that’s burnt your throat
and every morning you’ve woken
with nothing and no one
come with all your loss
your regrets, sins
memories
black outs
secrets
come with all the rot in your mouth
and that voice like needle hitting record
come with your kind eyes and weeping knuckles
come with all your shame
come with your swollen heart
i’ve never seen anything more beautiful than you.
We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.
– Plato
I want my writing to take care of me. I want to live in my world. I want to carry my world with me like a shell. I want a home. It’s always been like a dream, in the way that everyone says, ‘Ooh, I wish I was a writer, I really have stories.’ They just imagine you sitting in some place all the time having this incredible life. We have such messy lives, writers, and it’s so unstable, but I think we do it because we want to create a reality on some level. At some point, the more it grows you realize this has made me comfortable, this has given me a self, this has given me a place in the world, this has given me esteem and respect and money, if you’re lucky. It is my home, it is my place. It even makes me comfortable. The things that I might have wanted to do anyway, I now have a reason or an excuse or a way of doing that. You just evolve a style of being a writer that makes it possible to say the things you need to say in the way you need to say them. Suddenly you’ve managed to live in your time.
– Eileen Myles
Perhaps everything lies in knowing what words to speak, what actions to perform, and in what order and rhythm; or else someone’s gaze, answer, gesture is enough; it is enough for someone to do something for the sheer pleasure of doing it, and for his pleasure to become the pleasure of others: at that moment, all spaces change, all heights, distances; the city is transfigured, becomes crystalline, transparent as a dragonfly.
– Italo Calvino
In fact, it is the speaking-being that has created this universe, even if language excludes him from it. This means that we are deprived through words of an authentic intimacy with what we are, or with what the Other is. We need poetry, not to regain this intimacy, which is impossible, but to remember that we miss it and to prove to ourselves the value of those moments when we are able to encounter other people, or trees, or anything, beyond words, in silence.
– Yves Bonnefoy
Oh, wonderfully bright at 6 a.m., yes, wonderfully clear for an hour. But the shorter the days, the longer the nights, the darker the house, the easier it is, the easier it is, the easier it is, to mistake a shadow for the writing on the wall, the sound of overland footsteps for the distant crack of thunder, and the midnight chime of a New Year clock for the bell that tolls the end of the world.
– Zadie Smith
History is nothing more than a thin thread of what has been remembered stretched out over an ocean of what has been forgotten.
– Milan Kundera
We measure an individual’s intelligence to the amount of uncertainty he can bear.
– Immanuel Kant
Use what you have, use what the world gives you. Use the first day of fall: bright flame before winter’s deadness; harvest; orange, gold, amber; cool nights and the smell of fire. Our tree-lined streets are set ablaze, our kitchens filled with the smells of nostalgia: apples bubbling into sauce, roasting squash, cinnamon, nutmeg, cider, warmth itself. The leaves as they spark into wild color just before they die are the world’s oldest performance art, and everything we see is celebrating one last violently hued hurrah before the black and white silence of winter.
– Shauna Niequist
The whole time I was hoping my silence would fit yours and exclamation marks would gently float across time and space so that boundaries would be crossed; the whole time I was praying you would read my eyes and understand what I was never able to understand. See, we were never about butterflies. We’ve always been about burning stars. All about us is unearthly and radiant.
– Anna Akhmatova
the poet dogen said: “handle even a single leaf of green in such a way that it manifests the body of the buddha. this in turn allows the buddha to manifest through the leaf”. in other words, we actualize our awakening in our relationship with the ten thousand things. this is similar to what the kotzker rebbe said: “god is there where we let him in”. that is to say, we come to the presence of god in the relationship with the neighbor. irrespective of how each of these poets has chosen to name the essence of being, be that buddha or god, both dogen and the kotzker agree on the essential dialogical nature of the liberated life. dogen added: “the color of the mountains is buddha’s body; the sound of running water is his great speech.” the poet is saying that the world itself, and all its beings, when celebrated as a thou, becomes the presence and the body. as martin buber said, “all real life is meeting”. we can say that all real meeting is dharma. the beauty of being is enacted in the relationship, for we go toward the within by going toward the between.
– hune margulies
Truthfully, it is the lure of the other fields, of other forces which draw me into a poem, not the techniques of a self-conscious poetics. A book like The Secret Life of Plants would have more influence on my poetry, add more in explaining and understanding the other systems of poetry, than would certain texts.
– Frank Stanford
I have discarded clarity as worthless. Working in darkness, I have discovered lightning.
– André Breton
She is working now, in a room
not unlike this one,
the one where I write, or you read.
Her table is covered with paper.
The light of the lamp would be
tempered by a shade, where the bulb’s
single harshness might dissolve,
but it is not; she has taken it off.
Her poems? I will never know them,
though they are the ones I most need.
Even the alphabet she writes in
I cannot decipher. Her chair–
let us imagine whether it is leather
or canvas, vinyl or wicker. Let her
have a chair, her shadeless lamp,
the table. Let one or two she loves
be in the next room. Let the door
be closed, the sleeping ones healthy.
Let her have time, and silence,
enough paper to make mistakes and go on.
– Jane Hirshfield, The Poet
Lifting a brush, a burin, a pen, or a stylus is like releasing a bite or lifting a claw.
– Gary Snyder
He may actually have been existing in the past and approximating a conceivable future. And thus he couldn’t say that he truly existed right now and in this moment, but instead it seemed more rational to assume that he simply existed and nothing more.
– Ashim Shanker
Maybe I Am Traveling
by Rainer Maria Rilke
translated from the German by Paul Weinfield
Maybe I am traveling, like some secret ore,
through the hard veins of a mountain, alone.
And I’m in so deep that I see no door
and no distance: nothing but a single core
that draws in all things and changes them to stone.
I don’t have much wisdom about misery.
The darkness has made me smaller, it’s true.
Are you the one solid enough? Come, break through,
so that all of your touch might happen to me,
and all of my tears might happen to you
I think that for those of us who come from oppressed backgrounds and who do our work in marginalized communities, recovering our innocence is one of the most important acts of self-liberation and de-colonization. Not letting the requirement that we adapt to impossible circumstances and unconscionable crimes leave us shackled to the kind of cynicism and armor such that we can’t breathe and laugh and magnetize to ourselves all the genius and love and support that we need to transform the situation. That’s probably the biggest challenge, is to recover our innocence.
– Van Jones
The Heat of Autumn
by Jane Hirshfield
The heat of autumn
is different from the heat of summer.
One ripens apples, the other turns them to cider.
One is a dock you walk out on,
the other the spine of a thin swimming horse
and the river each day a full measure colder.
A man with cancer leaves his wife for his lover.
Before he goes she straightens his belts in the closet,
rearranges the socks and sweaters inside the dresser
by color. That’s autumn heat:
her hand placing silver buckles with silver,
gold buckles with gold, setting each
on the hook it belongs on in a closet soon to be empty,
and calling it pleasure.
Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love.
– Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
I don’t know why—it may be the time of year—but the days are growing more severe in color, darker and blacker. It seems as if one were looking at the world through black glasses. The landscape is now like the bottom of an enormous aquarium full of watery ink. Trees, people, and houses merge, swaying like underwater plants against the background of the inky deep.
– Bruno Schulz
Is it true we forget most of what has happen to us? Isn’t it more likely that a portion of the past serves as a seed, an unnamed incentive for setting out again toward a destiny we had foolishly abandoned?
– Álvaro Mutis
…the great autumn light begins, a time of change in the inner world.
– May Sarton, from Journal of a Solitude
When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard or welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still afraid. So it is better to speak.
– Audre Lorde
But what could you do? Only keep going. People kept going; they had been doing it for thousands of years. You took the kindness offered, letting it seep as far in as it could go, and the remaining dark crevices you carried around with you, knowing that over time they might change into something almost bearable.
– Elizabeth Strout, Amy and Isabelle
When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard or welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still afraid. So it is better to speak.
– Audre Lorde
But what could you do? Only keep going. People kept going; they had been doing it for thousands of years. You took the kindness offered, letting it seep as far in as it could go, and the remaining dark crevices you carried around with you, knowing that over time they might change into something almost bearable.
– Elizabeth Strout, Amy and Isabelle
The art of living… is neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging to the past on the other. It consists in being sensitive to each moment, in regarding it as utterly new and unique, in having the mind open and wholly receptive.
– Alan Watts
We are all philosophers because our condition demands it. We live every moment in a universe of seemingly eternal thoughts and ideas, yet simultaneously in the constantly churning and decaying world of our bodies and their humble situations. We are graced with a godlike ability to transcend time and space in our minds but are chained to death. The result is a nagging need to find meaning.
– Russell Shorto
Ignorance is not innocence but sin.
– Robert Browning
To wish you were someone else is to waste the person you are.
– Simdha Getul Rinpoche
It is not infrequent to hear men declaim loudly upon liberty, who, if we may judge by the whole tenor of their actions, mean nothing else by it but their own liberty — to oppress without control, or the restraint of laws, all who are poorer or weaker than themselves.
– Samuel Adams
Is it a stillness
Or the shhhh of a flowing river
Nestled in my ear
That captures my spirit here?
Here by the rock
That waits Oregon shore-side for my seasonal return.
Here by the Australian tree
That once asked me to read it poetry.
Here by the ocean
That dropped then lifted me
Under a Jamaican moon.
Shhhh
It’s the mystic’s song I hear.
– David Bedrick
Authenticity is a collection of choices that we have to make every day. It’s about the choice to show up and be real. The choice to be honest. The choice to let our true selves be seen.
– Brené Brown
How sad that people ignore the near
And search for truth afar:
Like someone in the midst of water
Crying out in thirst…
Boundless and free is the sky of Samádhi,
Bright the full moon of wisdom!
Truly, is anything missing now?
Nirvana is right here, before our eyes,
This very place is the Lotus Land,
This very body, the Buddha.
– Zen Master Hakuin: Song of Zazen
There is no insurmountable solitude. All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are. And we must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence in order to reach forth to the enchanted place where we can dance our clumsy dance and sing our sorrowful song -but in this dance or in this song there are fulfilled the most ancient rites of our conscience in the awareness of being human and of believing in a common destiny.
– Pablo Neruda
I think we are ready to create a more human-centered belief system. I realize I sound like an advocate for science and technology, and maybe I am because we are now in a techno-scientific age. I see no way out of the problems that organized religion and tribalism create other than humans just becoming more honest and fully aware of themselves. Right now we’re living in what Carl Sagan correctly termed a demon-haunted world. We have created a Star Wars civilization but we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. That’s dangerous.
I think we ought to have another go at the Enlightenment and use that as a common goal to explain and understand ourselves, to take that self-understanding which we so sorely lack as a foundation for what we do in the moral and political realm. This is a wonderful exercise. It is about education, science, evaluating the creative arts, learning to control the fires of organized religion and making a better go of it.
– E. O. Wilson
At night, autumn arrives
for the harvest, yellow, ripe for flame.
There are, I know, not one
but at least four realities,
intersecting
like the Gospels.
I know I’m alone, but linked
firmly to you, painfully, gladly,
I know only the mysteries are immortal.
– Adam Zagajewski
All objects in this world have hidden meanings. All of them–people, animals, trees, stars,–are hieroglyphics. Bravo, and also woe, to whoever begins to divine what they say and give them voice. The moment you see these objects, you fail to comprehend; you believe that they are just people, animals, trees, stars. It is only years later, much too late, that you approach the hidden meanings.
– Nikos Kazantzakis
The language of poetry specializes in doubt. Without the doubters, everyone is cut off at the first question. Poetry does not presume to know, but is angling to get a glimpse of what is gradually coming into view; it aims to rightly identify what is looming; it intends to interrogate whatever is already in place. Poetry, whose definition remains evasive by necessity, advocates the lost road; and beyond speech — waiting, listening, and silence.
– C.D. Wright
It is due to feeling alone that a thing becomes freed from abstraction and becomes something individual and concrete.
– Simone Weil
If you love, he wrote, or wish to love, do not dream.
– Franz Wright
To care for what we know requires
care for what we don’t, the world’s lives
dark in the soil, dark in the dark.
Forbearance is the first care we give
to what we do not know. We live
by lives we don’t intend, lives
that exceed our thoughts and needs, outlast
our designs, staying by passing through,
surviving again and again the risky passages
from ice to warmth, dark to light.
Rightness of scale is our second care:
the willingness to think and work
within the limits of our competence
to do no permanent wrong to anything
of permanent worth to the earth’s life,
known or unknown, now or ever, never
destroying by knowledge, unknowingly,
what we do not know, so that the world
in its mystery, the known unknown world,
will live and thrive while we live.
– Wendell Berry
In fierceness, in heat, in longing, in risk, I find something of love’s nature. So when you ask me why I cannot love you more calmly, I answer that to love you calmly is not to love you at all.
– Jeanette Winterson
Elizabeth Mattis Namgyel ~ I appreciate my mind most when it’s open and engaged and responding to the world. This can be done without skepticism and doubt but with great respect.… Questioning makes us a vessel of learning. I feel this kind of reflection is at the heart of the tradition.
If we want people to engage with the living world, we should stop using such constipated terms to describe our relationship to it…
Rather… professional ecologists should recruit poets and cognitive linguists and amateur nature lovers to help them find the words for what they cherish. Here are a few ideas. Please improve and add to them.
If we called protected areas “places of natural wonder”, we would not only speak to people’s love of nature, but also establish an aspiration, that conveys what they ought to be. Let’s stop using the word environment, and use terms such as “living planet” and “natural world” instead, as they allow us to form a picture of what we are describing. Let’s abandon the term climate change and start saying “climate breakdown”. Instead of extinction, let’s adopt the word promoted by the lawyer Polly Higgins: ecocide.
– George Monbiot
Some of you believe that what is not pretty is not of God. Tell that to the snake in the grass. Tell that to the spider or the bat. Because you have vilified them, you have put them out of the light. But they are as joyful in their expression as anything can be. The same is true for your neighbor. Know him as who he is outside of what has been prescribed for him, and you may know God.
– Paul Selig, The Book of Freedom, A Channeled Text
Hymn Despite
the world is ending,
light disperses, into tiny sparks,
that kneel beneath pebbles,
twigs, and blades of grass.
the river runs, though long and silent,
grasshoppers pray, to ancestors forgotten.
a child is born, in a nuclear stable,
no stars remain, sheep follow wolves.
the old man’s eyes, dim and heavy,
bear the weight of a thousand sins.
the lover sleeps, the soldier grieves.
the fields are barren, the barn ablaze.
holiness drinks, in a corner cafe,
rain falls, on empty graves.
and all that is, and all that was,
hides beneath what should have been.
fingers pledge, breathing soft….
as if perhaps, another dawn.
hallelujah!
– Eric Cockrell
Breaking the Spell of Time
In the strange way that life can reverse itself over time, myth has come to mean something false or illusionary. Meanwhile history, which is always being rewritten and proven to be wrong, has come to be considered the true story. Myths are timeless tales that remain separate from history, which changes based upon who is telling the tale. Myths narrate the sacred dramas that take place before time begins, in the beginning that is also secretly present throughout time. They are intended to reveal the sacred and essential stories that are not altered by the passing of time. Myths are not something of the past. Rather, they keep the present open to the possibilities of another world nearby, a transcendent realm of archetypal forms—paradigms for all human actions and the sacred realities that underlie the limits of the common world.
The history of the past as well as news of the current day concerns the exoteric or external elements of the world of facts and figures. Under the rule of literalism the outer aspects of the world can seem to be the only meaningful elements of life. The esoteric or inner levels that shape the outer world and define the individual life can be underestimated and even dismissed when viewed from the limited perspective of the march of history. Myths are not intended to simply explain things that happened at the origins of time, but to evoke the presence of original things at this time. Mythic tales are vehicles of imagination that can reconnect the passing moment with the eternal ground from which all of time arises.
“Living myths are always nearby waiting to be rediscovered. They are able to reveal truths that shed light upon the past as well as illuminate the present moment in time. Myths are intended to break the spell of time and release us from the immediate pressures and limitations of daily life.”
The great narratives of the eternal dramas of life are intended to dispel the blindness created by the rapid passing of things at the surface of the world. Myth speaks to the esoteric parts within us that are also the extraordinary things about us. The archetypal dramas that constitute mythic narrations are living vehicles of creation intended to reconnect us to that which is most noble and imaginative within our souls.
Hearing or reading a mythic story awakens the myth already living inside each one of us. As the story enters us, we enter the timeless territory of myth. Being in such a mythic condition allows us to reconnect to the core imagination at the center of our soul. We become mythic again, a knowing participant in our own story and a seeker of the greater knowledge found near the source of all stories, at the ever-present origins of life.
The modern world requires that most things be sacrificed in service of linear time; yet in order to touch timeless things and become renewed, time is exactly what must be sacrificed. Only when time becomes broken can the “once upon a time” realm of renewable potentials appear again. Then, creation becomes not a thing of the past, not even a sacred history of religion, but something capable of erupting into each passing moment. The creative aspect of our soul would have us touch the esoteric ground where creation remains ongoing and life renews itself from within. Creation wishes to continue, yet can only work through the souls of those who are alive and awake at a given time.
– Michael Meade, “Why the World Doesn’t End”
Our survival adaptations are so tough, but our wounds are so delicate. To heal, we have to lift the armor carefully- it saved our lives, after all. It’s like moving your best friend off to the side of the path. You don’t trample on her, you don’t hit him with a sledgehammer. You honor her presence like a warm blanket that has kept you safe and sound during wintry times. And then, when the moment is right, you get inside and stitch your wounds with the thread of love, slowly and surely, not rushing to completion, nurturing as you weave, tender and true. The healing process has a heart of its own, moving at its own delicate pace. We are such wondrous weavers…
– JEFF BROWN
Rub your hands together and make them warm. Place them over your heart. Press in lightly and slowly make gentle circles. Think of them as circles of solidarity with your essence. Let yourself settle in and gently down.
– Gunilla Norris
Most of us hoped to be able to trust. When we were little we did not yet know the human invention of the lie – not only that of lying with words but that of lying with one’s voice, one’s gesture, one’s eyes, one’s facial expression. How should the child be prepared for this specifically human ingenuity: the lie? Most of us are awakened, some more and some less brutally, to the fact that people often do not mean what they say or say the opposite of what they mean. And not only “people,” but the very people we trusted most – our parents, teachers, leaders.
– Erich Fromm
George Gorman:
Inundated,
oppressed with miracles,
we starve, because
we have not the sacraments.
Can’t even remember
that we have forgotten something.
We have forgotten that it takes great
daredevil feats of imagination
to dream what we desire.
For this we need sacraments.
We have forgotten that it takes
awesome eruptions of impulse
to impel those arrows of dream.
For this we need sacraments.
And we have forgotten that it takes
flawless jewels of ageless patience
and quiet remembrance
to sharpen those arrows
and to bend those bows.
For this, above all,
we need sacraments
All the old sacraments
sit like empty masks
in the fearful windows
of this time.
Science smirks,
religion frowns,
industry slavers,
art leers.
There are no sacraments
to make the new sacraments,
except the maskless, ageless
sacrament of raw experience
loving being here.
He who hates does not know God.
– Martin Luther King Jr. (1966)
Magical living is simply having the ability to see the magnificent shining through the mundane.
– Lisa Marie Rosati
My days
Pass quietly and at night
I reassemble them in
dreams.
– John Koethe
Rapids
Fall’s leaves are redder than
spring’s flowers, have no pollen,
and also sometimes fly, as the wind
schools them out or down in shoals
or droves: though I
have not been here long, I can
look up at the sky at night and tell
how things are likely to go for
the next hundred million years:
the universe will probably not find
a way to vanish nor I
in all that time reappear.
– A. R. Ammons
I genuinely believe that the various parts of life, logistical and creative, are not forces in opposition but can speak to each other in weirdly generative ways.
– Leslie Jamison
But it is possible that there are situations that exist beyond your logic, beyond your system of thinking. That is not an impossibility. In fact it is highly possible.
– Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche
Every day, consciously give yourself a moment wherein you are doing nothing—nothing but appreciating a beautiful view or favorite spot. Appreciate your life even momentarily, and the rest of our busyness will flower into well-being.
– Waylon Lewis
Remodeling the Bathroom
by Ellen Bass
If this were the last
day of my life, I wouldn’t complain
about the shower curtain rod
in the wrong place, even though
it’s drilled into the tiles.
Nor would I fret
over water marks on the apricot
satin finish paint, half sick
that I should have used semigloss. No.
I’d stand in the doorway
watching sun glint
off the chrome faucet, breathing in
the silicone smell. I’d wonder
at the plumber, as he adjusted the hot
and cold water knobs. I’d stare
at the creases behind his ears and the gray
flecks in his stubble. I’d have to hold
myself back from touching him. Or maybe
I wouldn’t. Maybe I’d stroke
his cheek and study
his eyes the amber of cellos, his rumpled
brow, the tiny garnet
threads of capillaries, his lips
resting together, quiet as old friends—
I’d gaze at him
as though his were the first
face I’d ever seen.
I stood for a time, overlooking the calm sea. Under the bright morning sun, it looked like hammered blue metal. A very light breeze came off it and stirred my hair. I felt as if someone had spoken words aloud to me and I echoed them. “Time for a change.”
– Robin Hobb
Ah, Catylast, can it be that you do not see all the changes you have made? Some by your resignation and acceptance of circumstance, some by your wild struggles. You say that you hate change, but you *are* change.
– Robin Hobb
Instructions on Not Giving Up
Ada Limón
More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.
Walk away quietly in any direction and taste the freedom of the mountaineer . . . Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.
– John Muir
What counts? Love, death, dreams, ambition, growing up, coming to terms with your own and other people’s limitations.
– Raymond Carver
Acts of deep generosity, not just financial, can open your heart and help you discover your place in life, your route to fulfillment.
– Thomas Moore
We need to move beyond boutique, self-satisfying spirituality to a transcendent and sublime vision and approach to actual life.
– Thomas Moore
Don’t confuse the brain for the soul. The soul is made up of meaningful experiences of hope, fear, love, desire, anger….
– Thomas Moore
The best solution to personal emotional problems is to become more dedicated to the needs of the world. The self is too small.
– Thomas Moore
Don’t try to become a Buddha.
Just be yourself.
That is the Buddha.
– Mooji
It is a simple garment, this slipped-on world.
We wake into it daily – open eyes, braid hair –
a robe unfurled
in rose-silk flowering, then laid bare.
And yes, it is a simple enough task
we’ve taken on,
though also vast:
from dusk to dawn,
from dawn to dusk, to praise, and not
be blinded by the praising.
To lie like a cat in hot
sun, fur fully blazing,
and dream the mouse;
and to keep too the mouse’s patient, waking watch
within the deep rooms of the house,
where the leaf-flocked
sunlight never reaches, but the earth still blooms.
– Jane Hirshfield
Home is so Sad
by Philip Larkin
Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft
And turn again to what it started as,
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:
Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
The music in the piano stool. That vase.
We are unraveling our navels so that we may ingest the sun.
We are not afraid of the darkness.
We trust that the moon shall guide us.
We are determining the future at this very moment.
We know that the heart is the philosopher’s stone.
Our music is our alchemy.
– Saul Williams
Not just any talk is conversation; not any talk raises consciousness. Good conversation has an edge: it opens your eyes to something, quickens your ears. And good conversation reverberates: it keeps on talking in your mind later in the day; the next day, you find yourself still conversing with what was said. That reverberation afterward is the very raising of consciousness; your mind’s been moved. You are at another level with your reflections.
– James Hillman
Childhood was terrifying for me. You’re three feet tall, flat broke, unemployed, and illiterate.
– Mary Karr
A man is born gentle and weak.
At his death he is hard and stiff.
Green plants are tender and filled with sap.
At their death they are withered and dry.
Therefore the stiff and unbending
is the disciple of death.
The gentle and yielding
is the disciple of life.
A tree that is unbending is easily broken.
The hard and strong will fall.
The soft and weak will overcome.
– Lao Tsu, Tao Te Ching
And What if I Spoke of Despair
by Ellen Bass
And what if I spoke of despair—who doesn’t
feel it? Who doesn’t know the way it seizes,
leaving us limp, deafened by the slosh
of our own blood, rushing
through the narrow, personal
channels of grief. It’s beauty
that brings it on, calls it out from the wings
for one more song. Rain
pooled on a fallen oak leaf, reflecting
the pale cloudy sky, dark canopy
of foliage not yet fallen. Or the red moon
in September, so large you have to pull over
at the top of Bayona and stare, like a photo
of a lover in his uniform, not yet gone;
or your own self, as a child,
on that day your family stayed
at the sea, watching the sun drift down,
lazy as a beach ball, and you fell asleep with sand
in the crack of your smooth behind.
That’s when you can’t deny it. Water. Air.
They’re still here, like a mother’s palms,
sweeping hair off our brow, her scent
swirling around us. But now your own
car is pumping poison, delivering its fair
share of destruction. We’ve created a salmon
with the red, white, and blue shining on one side.
Frog genes spliced into tomatoes—as if
the tomato hasn’t been humiliated enough.
I heard a man argue that genetic
engineering was more dangerous
than a nuclear bomb. Should I be thankful
he was alarmed by one threat, or worried
he’d gotten used to the other? Maybe I can’t
offer you any more than you can offer me—
but what if I stopped on the trail, with shreds
of manzanita bark lying in russet scrolls
and yellow bay leaves, little lanterns
in the dim afternoon, and cradled despair
in my arms, the way I held my own babies
after they’d fallen asleep, when there was no
reason to hold them, only
I didn’t want to put them down.
I insist that the object of all true education is not to make men carpenters; it is to make carpenters men.
– W. E. B. DuBois
When we walk, holding stories in us, do they touch the ground through our footprints? What is this power of metaphor, by which we liken a thing we see to a thing we imagine or have seen before – the granite crag to an old crystalline heart – changing its form, allowing animation to suffuse the world via inference? Metaphor, perhaps, is the tame, the civilized, version of shamanic shapeshifting, word-magic, the recognition of stories as toothed messengers from the wilds. What if we turned the old nursery rhymes and fairytales we all know into feral creatures once again, set them loose in new lands to root through the acorn fall of oak trees? What else is there to do, if we want to keep any of the wildness of the world, and of ourselves?
– Sylvia Linsteadt
OFF A SIDE ROAD NEAR STAUNTON
Some nothing afternoon, no one anywhere,
an early autumn stillness in the air,
the kind of empty day you fill by taking in
the full size of the valley and its layers leading
slowly to the Blue Ridge, the quality of country,
if you stand here long enough, you could stay
for, step into, the way a landscape, even on a wall,
pulls you in, one field at a time, pasture and fall
meadow, high above the harvest, perfect
to the tree line, then spirit clouds and intermittent
sunlit smoky rain riding the tops of the mountains,
though you could walk until it’s dark and not reach those rains –
you could walk the rest of the day into the picture
and not know why, at any given moment, you’re there.
– Stanley Plumly
I’m impatient with the wind
But I’m waitin’ here for somethin’
– Tom Petty
Restorative nostalgia ‘stresses nostos and attempts a transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home’ while reflective nostalgia thrives in algia, the longing itself, and delays the homecoming—wistfully, ironically, desperately. Restorative nostalgia does not think of itself as nostalgia, but rather as truth and tradition. Reflective nostalgia dwells on the ambivalences of human longing and belonging and does not shy away from the contradictions of modernity. Restorative nostalgia protects the absolute truth, while reflective nostalgia calls it into doubt.’
– Svetlana Boym
I liked to imagine you roving / through poetry’s mountains, seeking the spot / where silence suddenly erupts in speech.
– Adam Zagajewski
To all mystical lineages, peace and more peace.
But I have to say that I’ve found -at least- equal amount of mystical insights in the best science-fiction and “fantasy” authors that I read in my adolescence as in versicles and sutras.
Winged hearts with no affiliation known, no vested interests in systems, but a devotion to Freedom.
– José Luis G. Soler
The actions, thoughts, and words of each of us are important. All of us together are making the world. So we have to ask ourselves: “How am I living? What kind of actions am I taking? Am I a force for good in the world or am I just another person doing nothing to help and therefore making things worse?
– Norman Fischer, Training in Compassion: Zen Teachings on the Practice of Lojong
All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.
– Leo Tolstoy
The contemplative life should liberate and purify the imagination which passively absorbs all kinds of things without our realizing it; liberate and purify it from the influence of so much violence done by the bombardment of social images. There is a kind of contagion that affects the imagination unconsciously much more than we realize. It emanates from things like advertisement and from all the spurious fantasies that are thrown at us by our commercial society. The contemplative life should liberate us from that kind of pressure, which is really a form of tyranny. Perhaps the best way to do this is in the midst of Nature. You need access to the woods, or to the sea. Get out in those hills and really be in the midst of Nature a little bit! The woods and Nature should be a part of your solitude . . .
– Thomas Merton
Would anything change, if we suddenly woke up to the fact that ALL THIS is a work of our own collective minds?
– Yolanda Rommel
Both of them have rare talents, are
drenched in human gravy, and both
have meant a great deal to me in
friendship and inward experience.
– Zora Neale Hurston
What we once enjoyed we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes part of us.
– Helen Keller
Brìghde,
You are a woman of peace.
You bring harmony where there was conflict.
You bring light to the darkness.
You bring hope to the downcast.
May the mantle of your peace cover those who are troubled and anxious, and may peace be firmly rooted in our hearts and in our world.
Inspire us to act justly and to have reverence for all creation.
Brìghde, you are a voice for the wounded and the weary.
Strengthen what is weak within us.
Calm us into a quietness that heals and listens.
May we grow each day into greater wholeness in mind, body and spirit.
– Willow Ravenna
To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control, that can lead you to be shattered in very extreme circumstances for which you were not to blame. That says something very important about the condition of the ethical life: that it is based on a trust in the uncertain and on a willingness to be exposed; it’s based on being more like a plant than like a jewel, something rather fragile, but whose very particular beauty is inseparable from that fragility.
– Martha Nussbaum
If you comprehend it, it is not God.
– St. Augustine
Walk. The drum begins. Follow it. Follow the drums of thunder. Follow the sun. Follow the stars at night, follow the lightning and the open road. Follow your compulsion. Follow your calling. Follow anything except orders and habit. Follow the fire-fare-forwards of life itself. Go where you will, burn your bridges if you must, leave the paving stones smoldering and singe the gate as you leave, drop an incendiary device by The Wall, and scorch your way across the land. I dare you.
– Jay Griffiths
If religion is the opiate of the people, tradition is an even more sinister analgesic, simply because it rarely appears sinister. If religion is a tight band, a throbbing vein, and a needle, tradition is a far homelier concoction: poppy seeds ground into tea; a sweet cocoa drink laced with cocaine; the kind of thing your grandmother might have made.
– Zadie Smith
It’s a universal law—intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education. An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility.
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
To see something is to remember it; otherwise there’s no seeing.
– Etel Adnan, from Night
When reeds are dead and a straw to thatch the marshes,
And feathered pampas-grass rides into the wind
Like aged warriors westward, tragic, thinned
Of half their tribe, and over the flattened rushes,
Stripped of its secret, open, stark and bleak,
Blackens afar the half-forgotten creek,—
Then leans on me the weight of the year, and crushes
My heart. I know that Beauty must ail and die,
And will be born again,—but ah, to see
Beauty stiffened, staring up at the sky!
Oh, Autumn! Autumn!—What is the Spring to me?
– The Death Of Autumn – Edna St. Vincent Millais
SAY
by Melissa La Flamme
Someone has to name
the unnameable,
be wildly
unpopular, hint
at the tracks
we made to the places
we’ve hidden
all our good words,
our broken heart,
our chapters of old lies,
our tender, healing touch,
our ferocious
compassion,
our courage
to embody fiercely
being alive.
Someone has to say
we have been warned
so that together
we shake down lies,
open the heart,
the mouth,
free the words,
the touch,
ground
the grief, the power,
the healing tears,
the strength to
provoke the uncomfortable
in our self,
and in other’s at the edges
of our longing,
show one another
how to assassinate
those invisible patterns
of our own
Undoing,
throw our self naked,
beautifully prostituted
to the silky
Unknown.
Bare, tender,
centered,
we come on
like a thief famished
for soul,
hungry enough
to muster
how to steal back
from the Machine,
or from our mother,
our father,
from our own
clandestine maneuvers
to unconsciously collude
for the approval
of the ones pulling on our levers,
we become whores for the old familiar,
selling our Selves for
what smells like love,
trading out our own
true nature
to belong
in the wrong places.
We are here to
unapologetically
say the unsayable,
make all our relations
intimate,
compassionate,
real,
free
from easy answers,
from heavy slumber,
free from birth
Until we say
what is not right,
do
something
to stop it.
Until we say
the unsayable.
Relentless,
we point out lies,
ours and others’,
ruin our names
and take sides,
argue
for the earth,
fight
for each other,
risk ridicule,
stand
for ruthless compassion,
for tender intelligence,
for the ceaseless
provocation
of love.
The other day I fell back in a pit of shame. Feeling miserable, I sat in the supermarket with a book in my hands. A person I know from family constellations came by. I was stunned: her face was radiant! The energy coming through her uplifted me in an instant. Thank you, thank you.
The next Buddha may be instant sanghas, everywhere, everywhen.
– José Luis G. Soler
The heart learns the scales of love, never knowing when the work will be turned into song.
– Mark Nepo, The One Life We’re Given
Tired
by Langston Hughes
I am so tired of waiting,
Aren’t you,
For the world to become good
And beautiful and kind?
Those who speak of our culture as dead or dying have a quarrel with life, and I think they cannot understand its terms, but must endlessly repeat the projection of their own desires.
– Muriel Rukeyser
Humanity is a very, very hostile creature, an animal that is cruel and competitive to its own kind and all other life, and the only thing that can heal this blind loyalty to ‘My’ tradition and my group- many conveniently forget but this also includes your family, the loyalty and love only for your own tribe- while all outside are the devils, is experience of the open heart; a reevolution of defrosting and alighting of that deeper and collective level of the human heart, and realization that before we were educated out of it by ‘the authority’ we are all, no exceptions, born perfect and God already; the immanent in us all ‘consciousness and energy of life’s light’. Hence, we don’t need more education revolutions, economic revolutions, we don’t need more social revolutions or political revolutions, what we desperately need is open heart revolution that transforms us from animal human fighting with others for our conditioned beliefs, fighting for survival and local resources, to human human, outgrowing hording, progeny and power, and finally living as a ‘Light unto yourself’, which says, ‘the Spirit that burns in your heart is the same Spirit that burns in mine.
The true crisis in our world is not social, political, or economic, our crisis is the crisis of consciousness: an inability to directly experience our true nature, an inability to recognize this nature in everyone and in all things.
– Daniel Schmidt
And perhaps truth is in life, not away from life, not in books and some ideas, but truth is where we are, and how we live that life.
– J. Krishnamurti
…the planet doesn’t have any problems except people. What we are experiencing, the global crisis, is really reflecting somehow the level of consciousness evolution in the species. And if we could have our heads and hearts in a different place, you know, the planet could look very, very different.
– Stanislav Grof
…we have, I think, for the last forty thousand years have been developing individuality. And the whole development of ego is necessary in order for us to become individuals, not imbedded in nature, just purely children of god. So out of that we have individuated right up to the edge of individualisation now destroying us. Now, the way we become multicellular, the way we join together, is first of all, by individuals feeling the need to find that divine Self within, because you can’t really join as an ego to ego.
– Barbara Marx Hubbard
THE HUNKERING
In October the red leaves going brown heap and
scatter
over hayfield and dirt road, over garden and circular
driveway,
and rise in a curl of wind dishevelled as
schoolchildren
at recess, school just starting and summer done,
winter’s
white quiet beginning in ice on the windshield, in
hard frost
that only blue asters survive, and in the long houses
that once
more tighten themselves for darkness and
hunker down.
– Donald Hall
But when fall comes, kicking summer out on its treacherous ass as it always does one day sometime after the midpoint of September, it stays awhile like an old friend that you have missed. It settles in the way an old friend will settle into your favorite chair and take out his pipe and light it and then fill the afternoon with stories of places he has been and things he has done since last he saw you.
– Stephen King
I am a weak, ephemeral creature made of mud and dream. But I feel all the powers of the universe whirling within me.
– Nikos Kazantzakis
If autumn is a time of tears and courage
as the Chinese believe,
then let us hitch ourselves to ruin,
give ourselves wholly to the harrowed heart,
get drunk on the whiskeyed light.
– Susan Elbe
Did you think you could soften the sorrow of yesterday with tomorrow?
– Steve Young
Memory, and time, both immaterial, are rivers with no banks, and constantly merging. Both escape our will, though we depend on them. Measured, but measured by whom or by what? The one is inside, the other, outside, or so it seems, but is that true? Time seems also buried deep in us, but where? Memory is right here, in the head, but it can exit, abandon that head, leave it behind, disappear. Memory, a sanctuary of infinite patience.
– Etel Adnan
If you think about why any story moves us, it’s because of a quaking moment of recognition. It’s never the shock of the new, it’s the shock of the familiar.
– Joshua Oppenheimer
It would seem nature gets lonely for moving life.
– Barry Hannah
Solastalgia is a term coined by Glenn Albrecht, an Australian academic. He defines it as the distress that results when people are subject to environmental change in the place they currently call home. Albrecht makes the point that solastalgia differs from the more familiar ‘nostalgia,’ which implies melancholy for where one used to live.
– Nicola Ross
I’m writing for a much blander universe than when I first started writing. I’m writing for people who are less patient with the word, who don’t give a damn about English, who find it just a vehicle. I mean, I started out in the days when Jim Dickey was hitting the road and lighting up audiences with his poetry. I believed in that stuff and still do. And now you’ve got a much lazier, more passive reader who has to be fed more.
– Barry Hannah
To express the truth. With a chisel. A word. With silence. With life.
– Anna Kamieńska
Water brings energy the way memory creates identity.
– Etel Adnan
There may be a great fire in our soul, yet no one ever comes to warm himself at it, and the passers-by see only a wisp of smoke.
– Vincent van Gogh
Always, on the inside of our hardness and shyness and numbness is the face of compassion through which we can reclaim our humanity. Our compassion waits there to revive us. When opened, our heart can touch the Oneness of things we are all a part of. Then, we can stand firmly in our being like a windmill of spirit: letting the cries of the world turn us over and over, until our turning generates a power and energy that can be of use in the world.
– Mark Nepo
Meg Hutchinson:
At the end of my Theology and Trauma class this summer we had to create a “180 second hope statement” here’s mine:
———–
There is a quote by a great Buddhist master,
“Because the thought of abandonment and achievement is not possessed, the absence of the harm of hope and fear is amazing.”
I had never thought of hope as something that could cause harm!
But the more I sat with those words the more true they started to feel.
***
Hope can close the story in. Hope can interfere with grief or sadness when applied too soon.
We use hope to tidy up a diagnosis, we use hope to turn away from our own mortality.
We hope that good things won’t ever change.
We hope for something that hasn’t happened yet.
But in the midst of our hoping for something else— often the present moment slips quietly right through the center of our lives… unnoticed, uninhabited.
This is how hope can haunt us.
***
So I’m learning to think of hope in a new way.
What does hope feel like if we get beyond “the thought of abandonment and achievement?”
Hope is starting to feel more like a resonance, a frequency.
****
Music and mental illness are woven together through the generations of my family.
I’ve inherited my grandmother’s guitar and my uncle’s guitar.
I’m left with the question of how to work with these genes?
How to work with the suffering of my ancestors in a way that can do some healing?
****
People say that the longer you play an instrument, the more resonant the tone becomes. It “opens up” over time.
Year after year the music is slowly changing the very structure of the wood.
If this wood can change, then my body can change also.
I feel that resonance when I’m singing and when I’m sitting still.
I get a glimpse of a space beyond both hope and fear, beyond achievement or abandonment.
****
Maybe there is such a thing as being “empty” with hope.
It takes sound and emptiness for the music to happen.
As my teacher always says, “where there is emptiness, everything is possible.”
I am thus far a Quaker, that I would gladly agree with all the world to lay aside the use of arms…
– Thomas Paine, 1775
I worship you, but I loathe marriage. I hate its smugness, its safety, its compromise and the thought of you interfering with my work, hindering me; what would you answer?
– Virginia Woolf
If you touch the fear instead of running from it, you find tenderness, vulnerability, and sometimes a sense of sadness. This tender-heartedness happens naturally when you start to be brave enough to stay present, because instead of armoring yourself, instead of turning to anger, self-denigration, and iron-heartedness, you keep your eyes open…Becoming more in touch with ourselves gives birth to enormous appreciation for the world and for other people. It can sound corny, but you feel grateful for the beauty of the world. It’s a very special way to live. Your heart is filled with gratitude, appreciation, compassion, and caring for other people. And it all comes from touching that shakiness within and being willing to be present with it.
– Pema Chodron
Even the Gods
by Nicole Sealey
Even the gods misuse the unfolding blue. Even the gods misread the windflower’s nod toward sunlight as consent to consume. Still, you envy the horse that draws their chariot. Bone of their bone. The wilting mash of air alone keeps you from scaling Olympus with gifts of dead or dying things dangling from your mouth—your breath, like the sea, inching away. It is rumored gods grow where the blood of a hanged man drips. You insist on being this man. The gods abuse your grace. Still, you’d rather live among the clear, cloudless white, enjoying what is left of their ambrosia. Who should be happy this time? Who brings cake to whom? Pray the gods do not misquote your covetous pulse for chaos, the black from which they were conceived. Even the eyes of gods must adjust to light. Even gods have gods.
What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness?
– Jean Jacques Rousseau
He drew a circle that shut me out- Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle and took him In!
– Edwin Markham
What we love doesn’t seem to matter. It’s all a holy excuse to love the world and ourselves back together.
– Mark Nepo, Things That Join the Sea and the Sky
Put your heart, mind, and soul into even your smallest acts. This is the secret of success.
– Swami Sivananda
ELEGY FOR THOSE NOT YET DEPARTED
This much I’m sure. It is hard to believe
in another morning’s gift now that the evening
lawn has learned to grieve. Tonight moonlight
keeps sending its condolences, as if forgotten
whites on the line at the far end of the yard
can no longer bear a body’s absence, and
that faint slant of lost light from a kitchen
window is not enough to bring anyone back.
Yet no one has left to forget that familiar way
home, those simple names of neighborhood streets:
Elm, Oak & Maple. Outside this window empty trees
keep rehearsing a sadness I wish I could ease.
Restless curtains ghost about as if they have some
other place to go. The once sure shadows have
now grown weary of their own quiet visits. Still
this room tries to hold onto everything it can.
Dresser mirror shines. Full moon shifts
to leave itself upon the polished floor – spent soul
too tired to find its body. But this is not a scene
where the sheet is slowly drawn over the head, or
the doctor helplessly closes his black leather bag.
The lawn has no reason for its plain, dark suit,
this solemn night – its one pale chrysanthemum.
Soon daylight will slip between the limbs,
begin to soften the lonesome, walled sorrow
of shadows. Even the last geese
that shall rise across this endless, gray longing
will not make much of what they leave behind –
no winter song for lifeless trees
nor grief given nights in the glove-quiet
that a pallbearer wears, finding
what it’s like to touch & not feel.
– Gregory Sellers
The wild. I have drunk it, deep and raw, and heard it’s primal, unforgettable roar. We know it in our dreams, when our mind is off the leash, running wild. ‘Outwardly, the equivalent of the unconscious is the wilderness: both of these terms meet, one step even further on, as one,’ wrote Gary Snyder. ‘It is in vain to dream of a wildness distinct from ourselves. There is none such,’ wrote Thoreau. ‘It is the bog in our brains and bowls, the primitive vigor of Nature in us, that inspires the dream.’
And as dreams are essential to the psyche, wildness is to life.
We are animal in our blood and in our skin. We were not born for pavements and escalators but for thunder and mud. More. We are animal not only in body but in spirit. Our minds are the minds of wild animals. Artists, who remember their wildness better than most, are animal artists, lifting their heads to sniff a quick wild scent in the air, and they know it unmistakably, they know the tug of wildness to be followed through your life is buckled by that strange and absolute obedience. (‘You must have chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star,’ wrote Nietzsche.) Children know it as magic and timeless play. Shamans of all sorts and inveterate misbehavers know it; those who cannot trammel themselves into a sensible job and life in the suburbs know it.
What is wild cannot be bought or sold, borrowed or copied. It is. Unmistakable, unforgettable, unshameable, elemental as earth and ice, water, fire and air, a quintessence, pure spirit, resolving into no constituents. Don’t waste your wildness: it is precious and necessary.
– Jay Griffiths, Wild: An Elemental Journey
WHAT THE WIND SAYS
The wind says, “I am the voice beside you,
a leaf against the curb, a name you whisper
for the way it haunts you. You can hear
whatever the mind wants. I am still
holding a breath, the ghost beneath a sheet,
some lost moment a hinge finds. Open
the gate and walk away: you wish to turn
the porch light off and never look back
to the row of identical houses, your years
mortgaged with the familiar acts
of habits. Try to forget each hour spent
lying awake trying to forget, for regret
remembers regret, which is why
I never sweep the same place twice.
Often this voice is mistaken
for someone else. I remind others
of who they are, or wish to be. I know desires
better than any wildfire knows me.
So what do you wait for? A whim, a promise,
some dream? Think how dust settles
upon the shelf, how a tornado always loses
its funnel, how tomorrow becomes another day.
Think how capricious I am, for what
I bring to you, for what I take away.
– Greg Sellers
In a world where we are left to renegotiate our traumas again and again, we have to find empathetic, patient witnesses. My grandmother used to say : Some people in your life need to be mirrors and show you who you are from time to time. Some people in your life need to be blankets and embrace everything you are from time to time. Keep your mirrors clean and bright. Keep your blankets soft and close.
– Scherezade Siobhan
THE HUNKERING
In October the red leaves going brown heap and
scatter
over hayfield and dirt road, over garden and circular
driveway,
and rise in a curl of wind dishevelled as
schoolchildren
at recess, school just starting and summer done,
winter’s
white quiet beginning in ice on the windshield, in
hard frost
that only blue asters survive, and in the long houses
that once
more tighten themselves for darkness and
hunker down.
– Donald Hall
Laurence Overmire:
Though we may have our differences from issue to issue, I consider everyone with a good heart to be my ally in creating a better, more peaceful world. I daresay that includes most of humanity. It’s time we come together to do what’s right for the sake of all.
Jeff Brown:
This is a very fragile time. People don’t need to hear that they don’t exist, that there is no self, that none of this is real. That’s not a good message to communicate to people on the brink. Better yet, lets make a point of reminding people that they do exist, and that they really do matter. It’s okay to help them to understand that there is something beyond their misidentified self, but only if you also remind them that there is a beautiful, authentic self at the core of their being. To deny the self altogether, and then to offer them little more than a float into nothingness, is a grave, irresponsible error. One that may well lead them to the grave, before their time. Fragmented, traumatized individuals are already struggling with the meaning of all of this. Let’s not invite them so far away from the self, that they no longer have anything, or any one, to come home to.
I think that one’s art is just one’s effort to wed oneself to the universe, to unify oneself through union.
– Robert Motherwell (1951)
At a certain point, you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening. After a time you hear it: there is nothing there. You feel the world’s word as a tension, a hum, a single chorused note everywhere the same. .. The tension, or lack of it, is intolerable. The silence is not actually suppression: instead, it is all there is.
– Annie Dillard
I HAVE FIVE THINGS TO SAY
First, when I was apart from you this world did not exist.
Second, whatever I was wanting was always you.
Third, why did I learn to count to three?
Fourth, my cornfield is burning.
Five–five stands for wisdom and confusion.
Is weeping speech?
What shall I do with all this love?
– Rumi
I wondered how it could be that people could love God and hate one another.
– Julie Orringer, How to Breathe Underwater
A thing, until it is everything, is noise, and once it is everything, is silence.
– Antonio Porchia
love is not a destination,
but a journey.
not the view from a mountaintop,
but from the belly
of a whale.
not the answer,
but the celebration
of questions.
not a diamond,
but a splinter.
not the storm,
but the stillness that follows.
not hands washed,
but hands dirty.
not a candlelit dinner,
in an exclusive restaurant…
but a lifetime of meals shared,
on pajama couches,
in unmade beds,
driving down the road,
as if each moment,
were eternity.
– Eric Cockrell
But what would that be like
feeling the tide rise
out of the numbness inside
toward the place to which we go
washing over our worries of money,
the illusion of being ahead,
the grief of being behind,
our limbs young
rising from such a depth?
What would that be like
even in this century
driving toward work with the others,
moving down the roads
among the thousands swimming upstream,
as if growing toward arrival,
feeling the currents of the great desire,
carrying time toward tomorrow?
Tomorrow seen today, for itself,
the sea where all the rivers meet, unbound,
unbroken for a thousand miles, the surface
of a great silence, the movement of a moment
left completely to itself, to find ourselves adrift,
safe in our unknowing, our very own,
our great tide, our great receiving, our
wordless, fiery, unspoken,
hardly remembered, gift of true longing.
– David Whyte
There never did, there never will, and there never can, exist a Parliament, or any description of men, or any generation of men, in any country, possessed of the right or the power of binding and controlling posterity to the “end of time,” or of commanding for ever how the world shall be governed, or who shall govern it; and therefore all such clauses, acts or declarations by which the makers of them attempt to do what they have neither the right nor the power to do, nor the power to execute, are in themselves null and void. Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself in all cases as the age and generations which preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies. Man has no property in man; neither has any generation a property in the generations which are to follow.
– Thomas Paine, Rights of Man: Part 1, 1791
I’ve often thought of the forest as a living cathedral, but this might diminish what it truly is. If I have understood Koyukon teachings, the forest is not merely an expression or representation of sacredness, nor a place to invoke the sacred; the forest is sacredness itself. Nature is not merely created by God; nature is God. Whoever moves within the forest can partake directly of sacredness, experience sacredness with his entire body, breathe sacredness and contain it within himself, drink the sacred water as a living communion, bury his feet in sacredness, touch the living branch and feel the sacredness, open his eyes and witness the burning beauty of sacredness.
– Richard Nelson, The Island Within
Nobody speaks to me. People fall in love with me, and annoy me and distress me and flatter me and excite me and – and all that sort of thing. But no one speaks to me. I sometimes think that no one can.
– Edna St. Vincent Millay
Years of meditation, studying and reflection have led me to believe that the Buddha Siddhattha Gotama was what I can only call a humanist and skeptic of the first order.
He had no time for the religion of his day or the eternally inconclusive debate as to whether or not there is a creator God.
His question wasn’t why are we here, but ‘here we are — now what?’
Clearly, he saw philosophy as a way of life to be put to use, not as an emotional crutch or a merely conceptual structure.
– Stephen Schettini
It’s remarkable to me how many Buddhists reflexively deny the conspicuously religious dimensions of Buddhism. Cannonical Buddhist orthodoxy incontrovertibly asserts existstance of supernatural beings such as demons, devas, and celestial realms of special heavens & hells… these are are accretions from its ancient Brahmanical roots. Buddhist orthodox doctrine even designates a special hell for apostates who deny the veracity of their supernatural tenants, namely karma and rebirth.
I gather the important thing is not hope, faith, or belief in these religious trappings, but earnest dedication to a dhamma and ethos that embraces the four noble truths and follows the suggested eightfold path.
– Andrew Hagel
Just Now
W. S. Merwin
In the morning as the storm begins to blow away
the clear sky appears for a moment and it seems to me
that there has been something simpler than I could ever believe
simpler than I could have begun to find words for
not patient not even waiting no more hidden
than the air itself that became part of me for a while
with every breath and remained with me unnoticed
something that was here unnamed unknown in the days
and the nights not separate from them
not separate from them as they came and were gone
it must have been here neither early nor late then
by what name can I address it now holding out my thanks
The holes in your life are permanent. You have to grow around them, like tree roots around concrete; you mold yourself through the gaps.
– Paula Hawkins
Our job is to be an awake people…utterly conscious, to attend to our world.
– Louis Owens, Choctaw, Cherokee, Irish-American
I am sad because this world seems to be full of ‘wisdom’ that tells us to reject ourselves, to be something other, something better. I am sad because our culture demands palm oil, plastic, speed, sex…without regard for compassion, for love, for justice.
I am sad because we have heard all this before, and our reaction is to escape, to relax into depression instead of relaxing into cheerfulness, into doing something about it. I am sad because “People watch Netflix more than t…hey hang out with their friends, exercise, and read—combined.” But, yet, I am heartened because community still matters. I have so many friends who show up and speak with passion, yet kindness. I am heartened because I—tired and defeated as I am, sometimes—will rise again tomorrow, and greet the day, and work hard again. I am heartened because there is so much kindness, and gentleness, and honesty, in so many corners of this world where greed and environmental aggression have not yet made their way.
I am heartened because of you. You who care enough to read, and contemplate, and learn, and write, and share, and lead lives of mindful bravery. Good luck out there, sweethearts!
– Waylon Lewis
Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.
– Marcus Aurelius
Traditional elders often become dream interpreters and keepers of life-enhancing visions. Elders become “agents of the weird.” Thereby, they are able to bring the wisdom of the eternal to both the need for survival and the necessity to sustain the great imagination that allows culture to continually renew and revitalize itself. The wisdom of the elders connects survival with creation so that sustainability depends upon true creativity. If more people become weird enough to become wise, it becomes more likely that solutions for the great dilemmas that plague both nature and culture might be envisioned.
– Michael Meade, Fate and Destiny
Music is probably the only real magic I have encountered in my life. There’s not some trick involved with it. It’s pure and it’s real. It moves, it heals. It communicates and does all these incredible things.
– Tom Petty
If all I had was half a heart
Half a heart to give
I would tear it from my breast…
Just so you could live
I would pray to every god
Below and high above
Just to show you that my heart
Was safe for you to love
No one can predict the fear
That rises to the top
Like a train that blows its horn
Not knowing when to stop
I would buy a ticket on that train
To god knows where
Just to show you that my love
Was more than just a prayer
Your name is the only name
That tumbles from my lips
Your face is the only face
My heart would ever miss
I would trade five thousand friends
And all misunderstandings
I would take this lovers leap
With faith in softer landings
I would trade five thousand hearts
With every promise fleeting
Just to give you all my heart
Just to keep yours beating
– Cary Cooper
Why is it easier for people to imagine a planet without clean water and air than a planet without capitalism?
– Peter Capofreddi
May you not search for—in me what I am not
And may I not search in you—what you aren’t.
– Gulzar
It is sweet to think that I was a companion in an expedition that never ends.
– Czesław Miłosz
You can’t improve the things you love if you never allow them to be imperfect. Thinking in this way, if you looked hard enough so that you saw every flaw in every example, you would soon find that nothing matched your expectations or deserved your definitions, and the membership of every group and category you hold dear would drop to zero. To match the complexity of your conscious experience and your unconscious processing, to deal with the constant confusion bombarding your senses and the noisy chatter of the agencies within your mind, you’ve developed the ability to knit everything together into something simpler and less accurate, something less informative but more entertaining, and most times more useful.
– David McRaney
These are the things I prize And hold of dearest worth: Light of the sapphire skies, Peace of the silent hills, Shelter of the forests, comfort of the grass, Music of birds, murmur of little rills, Shadows of cloud that swiftly pass, And, after showers, The smell of flowers And of the good brown earth,- And best of all, along the way, friendship and mirth.
– Henry Van Dyke
The noise of the mind never dies. It can only be put in perspective, quieted until we can hear the more ancient voices that give us life.
– Mark Nepo,Things That Join the Sea and the Sky
so those nights where you have the perfect playlist and the stars start to come out while walking down darkened streets and every thing seems incrediblely alive and brilliantly clear? it’s like that.
– Christine Elbert
Human character evermore publishes itself. The most fugitive deed and word, the mere air of doing a thing, the intimated purpose, expresses character. If you act, you show character; if you sit still, if you sleep, you show it. You think, because you have spoken nothing when others spoke, and have given no opinion on the times, on the church, on slavery, on marriage, on socialism, on secret societies, on the college, on parties and persons, that your verdict is still expected with curiosity as a reserved wisdom. Far otherwise; your silence answers very loud. You have no oracle to utter, and your fellow-men have learned that you cannot help them; for, oracles speak. Doth not wisdom cry, and understanding put forth her voice?
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
MUM IS THE WORD
The League of Quiet Persons meets
monthly. Its quarters are a cavernous
warehouse away from traffic. Its
business is not to discuss business.
Minutes are read silently and tacitly approved.
Members listen to rain argue with corrugated
iron, a furnace with itself. Glances
are learnéd. It is not so much refuge
from noise the members seek in such company
as implicit permission not to speak,
not to answer or to answer for,
not to pose, chat, persuade, or expound.
Podium and gavel have been banned,
indeed are viewed as weaponry.
A microphone? The horror.
Several Quiet Persons interviewed
had no comment. A recorded voice
at the main office murmured only, “You
have reached the League of Quiet
Persons. After the tone, listen.
– Hans Ostrom
Let Us Believe in the Beginning of Cold Season
Forough Farokkhzad
I am cold,
I am cold, and it would appear
that I will never be warm again…
I am cold and I know
that nothing will be left
of all the red dreams of one wild poppy
but a few drops of blood.
I shall give up lines
and give up counting syllables too.
and I will seek refuge from the mob
of finite measured forms
In the sensitive planes of expanse.
I am naked, naked, naked,
I am naked as silence between words of love,
and all my wounds come form love,
from loving…
will I once again
comb my hair with wind?
will I ever again plant pansies in the garden
and set geraniums in the sky
outside the window?
will I ever again dance on wine glasses
will the doorbell call me again
toward a voice’s expectation?
I said to Mother, It’s all over now.
I said, Things always happen before one thinks;
we have to send condolences
to the obituary page.
We need the tonic of wildness…At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.
– Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods
POWER TO ACT
by Melissa La Flamme
Someone has to
say the unsayable.
Someone has to
be wildly
unpopular with the in crowd
make meaningful
distinctions
to suss out the tracks
to the places
we’ve hidden
our power to act.
Someone has to
carry
home transformative words pounding
in our broken heart,
open and clear chapters of old lies,
deliver
compassion and courage
to embody fiercely
being alive
and doing good.
Someone has to say
we have been warned
so that together
we act
to shake down fact,
open the heart,
the mouth
to free the medicine-words,
let loose the centering
touch to ground
the grief, the power,
the strength to act
as we provoke the uncomfortable
in our self,
and in others too far
from the edges,
show one another
how to assassinate
the invisible patterns
of our own
undoing,
throw our self naked,
beautifully prostituted
to the silky and ready
unknown.
Resilient,
someone has to
come on like a thief hungry
for soul,
muster the power
to steal back
from the Machine,
or from our mother,
our father,
our partner,
from our own
clandestine maneuvers
to unconsciously collude
for the approval
of anyone we let
pull on our levers,
make us whores for the old familiar,
sell our Selves for
what only looks like
love, trading out our
true nature
for false belonging
in the too small but comfortable
soul-wrong places
we settle into, lost
like loose change
in an expensive sofa.
We are here, aren’t we,
to unapologetically
say the unsayable,
make all our relations
intimate,
ethical,
held together by
gravity and bravery,
free from the paralysis
of convenience
and easy answers,
from slumber,
free from birth
until we say
what is not right,
do
something
to stop it.
Until we say
the unsayable.
Relentless,
we flush out lies,
ours and others’,
ruin our names
and take sides
arguing for rights,
the earth’s and ours,
unbridled by toxic privilege
we lavishly risk ridicule,
stand responsible
for ruthless
compassion,
tender and liberating
intelligence,
for the ceaseless
provocation
of love.
Respect yourself more than others, respect your demands, even respect what is bad within you – for the love of God, don’t expect to make of yourself into a perfect person – don’t copy any ideal, copy your very self – that is the only way to live.
– Clarice Lispector
The pleasure of all reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.
– Katherine Mansfield
LET us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question …
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.
– T.S. Eliot
I still had this idea that there was a whole world of marvelous golden people somewhere, as far ahead of me as the seniors at Rye when I was in the sixth grade; people who knew everything instinctively, who made their lives work out the way they wanted without even trying, who never had to make the best of a bad job because it never occurred to them to do anything less then perfectly the first time. Sort of heroic super-people, all of them beautiful and witty and calm and kind, and I always imagined that when I did find them I’d suddenly know that I belonged among them, that I was one of them, that I’d been meant to be one of them all along, and everything in the meantime had been a mistake; and they’d know it too. I’d be like the ugly duckling among the swans.
– Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road
Our search for meaning isn’t limited to thoughts that were created to be meaningful and packaged in verse or easily extractable chunks. We can find meaning in everything – and everything is fair game. Your brain is, in fact, the ultimate commonplace collection, and everything you’ve ever read is in there somewhere, ready to come back into your consciousness when you want or need it.
– Will Schwalbe
I think that my job is to observe people and the world, and not to judge them. I always hope to position myself away from so-called conclusions. I would like to leave everything wide open to all the possibilities in the world.
– Haruki Murakami
Zen is very simple. Dishwashing time, just wash dishes; sitting time, just sit; driving time, just drive; talking time, just talk; walking time, just walk. That’s all. Not special. When you’re doing something, just do it. No opposites. But don’t hold. Thinking is ok. Checking is ok. Only holding is a problem. Don’t hold. If your mind is not holding anything, it is clear like space. This space is never broken.
– Zen Master Seung Sahn
We’re in an era of great breakdown, environmentally and socially and psychologically. And when systems break down, the ones who have the resilience to actually repair themselves, they move to a higher order of organization. And I think that this is characterized by something the complexity theorists call ‘robustness,’ that we can anticipate both a time of great robustness, which we’re in, with tremendous potential to wake up and take responsibility. And, at the same time, we’re in a lot of difficulties and we need resilience to make our way through this change.
– Roshi Joan Halifax
If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.
– Loren Eiseley
Where on the face of the earth can we find a spot, on which close investigation will not discover signs of that endless cycle of change, to which this earth has been, is, and will be subjected?
– Charles Darwin
Wallace J Nichols:
Sharing this poem by Natalie Wise in support of the ongoing efforts of my daughters, wife, mothers, sisters, aunts, cousins, nieces, grandmothers, friends and colleagues who are bravely speaking up and the boys and men who are paying attention and joining the conversation. #metoo
The trees can hardly breathe in November
They heave and ho in wind and weather
Just let me be, just let me go
But a pink sky helps heavy burdened hearts
Wake from slumber, seek warmth
Open eyes, lift them skyward
We are all fragile in fall
Seeking familiar faces and places
Burrowing and begging to borrow bravery
We walk home weary-wounded
Wishing a welcome that makes us alright
A place we belong, at least for the night
This sight, it lifts the saddest soul
A table laden with abundance of wealth
Rosy cheeks, ruffled hair, warm hands, health
Thanksgiving is here and not a day too soon
To lift the fog, to lift the gloom
I bow my head to pray, to praise
The trees, they see the light and cheer
Can’t help but whisper, soft but clear
I’ll stay, I’m here.
Me too. Me too.
Three Blank Pages
By John Flynn
They handed him an envelope from his pride and joy
Addressed to a number and sent by his little boy
But what was folded up inside it left him feeling down
For he opened that envelope and in it all he found were
Three blank pages
Not a single word
Just three blank pages
Now It had been a whole year since that man had seen his son
Because he had to do his bit but carrying a gun
Doesn’t make you stronger and it sure don’t make you tough
He’d stretch out on his bunk each night and try to make sense of
Three blank pages
Not a single word
Just three blank pages
He learned in a phone call with his wife a few weeks later
The boy hoped that his dad would write
And thought he might need paper
Three blank pages
Stained by a father tears
Just three blank pages
Three blank pages
Saying more than words
Just three blank pages
There is a pagan fertility whose power unites the alchemical and the political in the truly revolutionary – it is called art.
– t.k.
You must be ready to accept the possibility that there is a limitless range of awareness for which we now have no words; that awareness can expand beyond range of your ego, your self, your familiar identity, beyond everything you have learned, beyond your notions of space and time, beyond the differences which usually separate people from each other and from the world around them.
– Walter Evans-Wentz
A person’s life consists of a collection of events, the last of which could also change the meaning of the whole, not because it counts more than the previous ones but because once they are included in a life, events are arranged in an order that is not chronological but, rather, corresponds to an inner architecture.
– Italo Calvino
There is something in me maybe someday to be written; now it is folded, and folded, and folded, like a note in school.
– Sharon Olds
This soul layers blue
upon a snow’s quilt
of quiet. Still, the moon
takes credit for the pale lit
loneliness, dispenses more
light upon a dark counter
where a few caplets wait,
little tombstones without epitaphs,
bitter palmful of promises
for when days feel like clichés,
when nothing else comes to mind
except some recurring dream
dreamt in gray–
– Greg Sellers
The struggle to emerge out of the past, clean of memories; the inadequacy of our hearts to cut life into separate and final portions; the pain of this constant ambivalence … the struggle against diffusion, new beginnings …
– Anaïs Nin
The darkness grew dense. Glutinous. Pushing through it became an effort. Like swimming underwater.
– Arundhati Roy
And tell the imagination it is wrong
Till, lest it be undone,
it spin a lie
So fresh, so pure, so rare
As to possess the air.
– Richard Wilbur
If there’s any deity to me, it’s language.
– Joseph Brodsky
Let mind be more precious than soul; it will not
Endure. Soul grasps its price, begs its own peace,
Settles with tears and sweat, is possibly
Indestructible. That I can believe.
– Geoffrey Hill
Who can become lost in a narrative,
if all he can think of is the end?
– Mark Doty
The wound can have (should only have) just one proper name. I recognize that I love — you — by this: you leave in me a wound I do not want to replace.
– Jacques Derrida
It was at that time, that the silence was largest / And longest, the night was roundest, / The fragrance of the autumn warmest, / Closest and strongest.
– Wallace Stevens
Take me to your trees. Take me to your breakfasts, your sunsets, your bad dreams, your shoes, your nouns. Take me to your fingers.
– Margaret Atwood
I thou
this that
here there
now then
what we do
– Andrew Hagel
Now we grieve waving fuzzy
avatars in the clotted air, virtual
mourners lining up to testify to
a glimpse of a wisp of your hair.
A bunch of phonies, you might say,
where were you when the fox got
stumbling drunk on mulberry wine,
when the cat caught and released
that woodpecker onto the crooked
ladder of my spine? Ham and
cheese on a hillock where before us
Mohawks and mountain lions
and countless freshmen and maybe
a few freedmen once sled. Some
soggy children, a lost Spiritualist
or two, late to the orgy, their donkey
having taken a wrong turn early on,
but you know what they say about
all paths winding up the same hill.
Overcomplicated, the hooks and latches
on this brassiere, by which I mean
embrace. Beloved nobodies, deranged
neighbors, doppelgängers every one,
who among us is willing to look
with proper awe at the gossamer fawn
newly pushed from its flesh palace
into the wrong season’s brisk air?
Snowflake, turn out that blue light.
Somehow we’ve ended up in the yard
again counting turkeys by hindsight.
Saintly, they’ll be martyred beneath
the paling sun. Come on, we whisper
to the near disappeared. Come on,
come out, come up. Okay then, we say,
go on, some boats are made for one.
– LISA OLSTEIN
If we can stay with the tension of
opposites long enough —sustain it,
be true to it—we can sometimes
become vessels within which the
divine opposites come together and
give birth to a new reality.
– Marie-Louise von Franz
We should invest in people, not ideas. A good idea is often destroyed by bad people, and good people can always make a bad idea better.
– Simon Sinek
We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend.
– Robert Louis Stevenson
All I know is that I’ve wasted all these years looking for something, a sort of trophy I’d get only if I really, really did enough to deserve it. But I don’t want it anymore, I want something else now, something warm and sheltering, something I can turn to, regardless of what I do, regardless of who I become. Something that will just be there, always, like tomorrow’s sky. That’s what I want now, and I think it’s what you should want too. But it will be too late soon. We’ll become too set to change. If we don’t take our chance now, another may never come for either of us.
– Kazuo Ishiguro, When We Were Orphans
Embody the reality you would like to exist, until it comes without effort.
– Jane Hirshfield
For what it’s worth: it’s never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be. There’s no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you’re proud of. If you find that you’re not, I hope you have the courage to start all over again.
– Eric Roth
Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture,
not even the best,
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valvèd voice.
– Walt Whitman
But mostly I live here in the capricious present
Writing down one thing, then the next.
Autumn passes like empty freight cars—
Some doors open, some doors closed—
Light flickers and flashes through the cracks.
The trees are a thousand species of fires.
– Eric Pankey
I take my books and go,
living in the shade of my heart,
weaving from my verse’s silk
a new heaven…
– Adonis
And if I have hoped for more
it is only the whole of loneliness
swept away by understanding
– Joanna Klink
As a rule, the nagging, idiosyncratic, self-referential, persistent voice of the Muse takes a poet beyond imperfect and perfect unions alike, beyond utter disasters and paroxysms of happiness—at the expense of reality, with or without a real, reciprocating girl in it. In other words, the pitch gets higher for its own sake, as if the language propels a poet, especially a romantic, whence it came, wherein the beginning there was a word, or a discernible sound. Hence many a broken marriage, hence many a lengthy poem, hence poetry’s metaphysical affinities, for every word wants to return to where it came from, if only as an echo, which is the mother of rhyme.
– Joseph Brodsky
I am still that fond lament.
– Carmen Giménez Smith
The Muse, therefore, is not an alternative to the beloved but precedes her. In fact, as an “older woman,” the Muse, née language, plays a decisive part in the sentimental development of a poet. She is responsible not only for his emotional makeup but often for the very choice of his object of passion and the manner of its pursuit. It is she who makes him fanatically single-minded, turning his love into an equivalent of her own monologue. What amounts in sentimental matters to obstinacy and obsession is essentially the dictate of the Muse, whose choice is always of an aesthetic origin and discards alternatives. In a manner of speaking, love is always a monotheistic experience.
– Joseph Brodsky
Your battles inspired me – not the obvious material battles but those that were fought and won behind your forehead.
– James Joyce
FINISHING UP
I wonder if I know enough to know what it’s really like
to have been here: have I seen sights enough to give
seeing over: the clouds, I’ve waited with white
October clouds like these this afternoon often before and
taken them in, but white clouds shade other white
ones gray, had I noticed that: and though I’ve
followed the leaves of many falls, have I spent time with
the wire vines left when frost’s red dyes strip the leaves
away: is more missing than was never enough: I’m sure
many of love’s kinds absolve and heal, but were they passing
rapids or welling stirs: I suppose I haven’t done and seen
enough yet to go, and, anyway, it may be way on on the way
before one picks up the track of the sufficient, the
world-round reach, spirit deep, easing and all, not just mind
answering itself but mind and things apprehended at once
as one, all giving all way, not a scrap of question holding back.
– A. R. Ammons
…Sometimes it takes
a great sky
to find that
small, bright and indescribable wedge of freedom in your own heart.
Sometimes with
the bones of the black
sticks left when the fire
has gone out
someone has written
something new
in the ashes of your life.
You are not leaving
you are arriving.
– David Whyte
Our hearts are thirsty black handkerchiefs
flying through the trees at night, soaking up
the darkest beams of moonlight, the music
of owls, the motion of wind-torn branches.
And now our hearts are thick black fists
flying back to the glove of our chests.
We have to learn to trust our hearts like that.
We have to learn the desperate faith of sleep-
walkers who rise out of their calm beds
and walk through the skin of another life.
We have to drink the stupefying cup of darkness
and wake up to ourselves, nourished and surprised.
– Edward Hirsch
All you continentals of Asia, Africa, Europe, Australia, indifferent of place!
All you on the numberless islands of the archipelagoes of the sea!
All you of centuries hence when you listen to me!
All you each and everywhere whom I specify not, but include just the same!
Health to you! Good will to you all, from me and America sent!
Each of us is inevitable,
Each of us is limitless –
Each of us with his or her right upon the earth,
Each of us allow’d the eternal purports of the earth,
Each of us here as divinely as any is here.
– Walt Whitman
OF ALL IT TAKES
by Melissa La Flamme
Maybe you don’t really know what to trust
anymore. Your intuition
under siege,
rattled to the core
by trauma and the loss of the way
you thought it was supposed to be here.
Maybe your soul gave you the slip,
went so deep undercover
your True Name got lost,
you don’t even know who you really love,
what you’re really hungry for.
So you’re searching,
bone-tired and free from hope.
When you’re weary like that,
maybe even a wide open heart
seems like a trap set
for a rare creature,
but the one they call
radical empathy
is a threshold to freedom,
a breed of fierce compassion
crossed with decades of digging
through the rubble
of all it takes
just to be here.
You know what I mean.
You know about the rubble.
But maybe after all
your eyes have seen,
the raw terrain
of an open, authentic heart
is uncomfortably unfamiliar to you now,
leaves you feeling undeserving somehow,
reminds you that the force of love itself
can feel like an invasion
born of unknowable, strangely
penetrating forces
delivered by a mythic Midwife they call,
‘The Fascination of The Gods,’
and in that impossible place —
you learn the anima, animal
Tao
of your own soul;
your own Way
to lick life alive again,
to reclaim
one,
real,
reliable
refuge
in a world like this.
– Melissa La Flamme
I have been shifting positions all my life. I like changing my mind.
– Danny Kahneman
And I would be the wind, whispering through the tangled woods, running airy fingers over the island’s face, tingling in the chill of concealed places, sighing secrets in the dawn. And I would be the light, flinging over the island, covering it with flash and shadow, shining on rocks and pools, softening to a touch in the glow of dusk. If I were the rain and wind and light, I would encircle the island like the sky surrounding earth, flood through it like a heart driven pulse, shine from inside it like a star in flames, burn away to blackness in the closed eyes of its night.
– Richard Nelson
UTOPIA
Island where all becomes clear.
Solid ground beneath your feet.
The only roads are those that offer access.
Bushes bend beneath the weight of proofs.
The Tree of Valid Supposition grows here
with branches disentangled since time immemorial.
The Tree of Understanding, dazzlingly straight and simple,
sprouts by the spring called Now I Get It.
The thicker the woods, the vaster the vista:
the Valley of Obviously.
If any doubts arise, the wind dispels them instantly.
Echoes stir unsummoned
and eagerly explain all the secrets of the worlds.
On the right a cave where Meaning lies.
On the left the Lake of Deep Conviction.
Truth breaks from the bottom and bobs to the surface.
Unshakable Confidence towers over the valley.
Its peak offers an excellent view of the Essence of Things.
For all its charms, the island is uninhabited,
and the faint footprints scattered on its beaches
turn without exception to the sea.
As if all you can do here is leave
and plunge, never to return, into the depths.
Into unfathomable life.
– Wisława Szymborska
translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh
Memory now a braid of autumn smoke
Unraveling into some gauzed darkness,
Years like leaves in a pile beneath old oaks,
Early stories archived in fire.
– Greg Sellers
how small the day is
the time of colors
the rush of brightness
– W.S. Merwin
This is the light of autumn; it has turned on us.
Surely it is a privilege to approach the end
still believing in something.
– Louise Glück, October
The exceeding brightness of this early sun
Makes me conceive how dark I have become.
– Wallace Stevens, The Sun This March
The present age is essentially… devoid of passion, flaring up in superficial,
short-lived enthusiasm and prudentially relaxing in indolence.… [W]e must say
of the present age that it is going badly.
– Kierkegaard
The heart of man is made to reconcile the most glaring contradictions.
– David Hume
Once you let people know anything about what you think, that’s it, you’re dead. Then they’ll be jumping about in your mind, taking things out, holding them up to the light and killing them, yes, killing them, because thoughts are supposed to stay and grow in quiet, dark places, like butterflies in cocoons.
– Helen Oyeyemi
I once saw a popular spiritual teacher addressing a recently bereaved woman. He said, “Your heartbreak is illusory and only the activity of the separate self. One day the separate self will vanish, along with all suffering.
And in that moment, I saw a deep, deep sickness and inhumanity at the heart of contemporary spirituality. The invalidation of trauma, the false promises, the power games, the suppression of the feminine. And I vowed to bow to that fucking broken heart as if it were God Herself.
Until the end of time.
– Jeff Foster
Sometimes an abyss opens between Tuesday and Wednesday but twenty-six years could pass in a moment. Time is not a straight line, it’s more of a labyrinth, and if you press close to the wall at the right place you can hear the hurrying steps and the voices, you can hear yourself walking past on the other side.
– Tomas Tranströmer
ON THE IDEA OF POETIC RESPONSIBILITY
I want to call in sick today
and stay home and write poetry.
I am sick, after all,
sick of clock-watching and making a living.
sick of dry-erase boards
and overstuffed books of overread literature.
sick of Frost and students,
not that any of them have done anything wrong.
I love Frost, and on any other day
I might want nothing more than to be with my students
and hear how they too have promises to keep,
and help them see the slipperiness of Frost.
But today there are more important things to do.
There is reverie and reflection.
There is memory to be pursued.
There are trails diverging in my mind.
There is this poem, and there is you
waiting for all the promises to be filled.
– Scott Owens
Give to every other human being every right that you claim for yourself – that is my doctrine.
– Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason
One bird out there
can’t get over his song. To repeat
is to remember. To remember is to go
on and on.
– Marianne Baruch
And who more full of nature,
Broad, human nature,
Who more indwelling
Than you or that loud poet
Out in the fields of feeling?
– Jean Garrigue
Sure, still am [lonely]. Always. And it’s not by choice, it’s just de facto. It just happens, I think. Like the nature of always needing to go out and write more songs. And always needing to go out and read. I read like a maniac. When I think about what I do for fun, it tends to be go but a book of poetry and read it in a day. Or two days. And I’ve gone from buying a single book to buying these huge anthologies, because I need something that challenges me. Like I really need 10,000 pages to work through and read and read. And I’ve always had more company with musicians and artists and writers, and people who are out creating and stuff. I like to be around those people and not really talk about what we do. […] I like to acknowledge that I’m bordering on some sort of an average normal person, but there’s a certain safety in knowing that I can go home and just write more songs, you know?
– Jason Molina
I listen to dark October just over the hill,
I listen to what the weeds exhale,
and the pines echo,
Elect in their rectitude:
The idea of emptiness is everything to them.
– Charles Wright, A Journal of One Significant Landscape
—October’s a kind time.
The rain lying like loose bandages over the ground,
The white bounty of mushrooms thrusting their flesh up,
The comforting slide of darkness
edging like deep water
Back through the afternoon.
– Charles Wright, A Journal of English Days
If we can recognize that change and uncertainty are basic principles, we can greet the future and the transformation we are undergoing with the understanding that we do not know enough to be pessimistic.
– Hazel Henderson
First we have to see. Or first we have to be taught to see. We have to be taught to see here, because here is everywhere, related to everywhere else, and if we don’t see, hear, taste, smell and feel in this place – not only will we never know anything but the world of sense will be by that much diminished everywhere.
– William Carlos Williams
…I know all about the ways of the heart – how it wants to be alive.
Love so needs to love
that it will endure almost anything, even abuse,
just to flicker for a moment. But the sky’s mouth is kin,
its song will never hurt you, for I
sing those words.
What will our children do in the morning
if they do not see us
fly?
– Rumi
Life will eventually bring you to your knees.
Either you’ll be on your knees cursing the universe and begging for a different life…
…. or you’ll be brought your knees by gratitude and awe, deeply embracing the life you have been given, too overwhelmed by the beauty of it all to stand or even speak.
Either way,
they’re the same knees.
– Jeff Foster
Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all.
– Ray Bradbury
You do not question or worry about your wisdom. You just do whatever is required. The situation you are facing is itself profound enough to be regarded as knowledge. You do not need secondary resources of information. You do not need reinforcement or guidelines for action. Reinforcement is provided by the situation automatically. When things must be conducted in a tough manner, you just do it because the situation demands your response. You do not impose toughness; you are an instrument of the situation.
The open path is a matter of working purely with what is, of giving up altogether the fear that something may not work, that something may end in failure. One has to give up the paranoia that one might not fit into situations, that one might be rejected. One purely deals with life as it is.
– Chögyam Trungpa
Be like a seed
Buried
In the deep of the underworld
Bloom
– Robert Kaplan
We’re working longer hours than ever before, and as our employment conditions continue to worsen, they’re simply repackaged into a new version of normal in an effort to make the truly pathological state of many of our workplaces appear acceptable. And despite the fact that the very best evidence we have about the causes of work stress and burnout point to factors present in the workplace rather than in us, the stress reduction industry and the helping professions’ focus on individual self-care strategies is at an all-time high. […]
No amount of multivitamins, yoga, meditation, sweaty exercise, superfoods or extreme time management, as brilliant as all these things can be, is going to save us from the effects of too much work…the insidious culture of overwork is deafening and the only way we can really feel better is if we can find a way to make it stop.
– Zoë Krupka
Learn to work harder on yourself than you do on your job. If you work hard on your job you’ll make a living, if you work hard on yourself you can make a life.
– Jim Rohn
To enter into a treaty with extra-human life rather than simply possess it involves a deep psychological reorientation. It’s an individual transformation of a relationship in the world and with nature, but also it’s a social one. If an individual asserted, “I’ve signed a treaty with salmon,” that’d be bonkers. … These transformations have to be collective and social.
– Chris Winters interviews Raj Patel
What I do you cannot do; but what you do, I cannot do. The needs are great, and none of us, including me, ever do great things. But we can all do small things, with great love, and together we can do something wonderful.
– Mother Teresa
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.
Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.
As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny ‘failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.’ In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure.
In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.
– Nell Postman
The ancient Druids are said to have taken a special interest in in-between things like mistletoe, which is neither quite a plant nor quite a tree, and mist, which is neither quite a rain nor quite air, and dreams, which are neither quite waking nor quite sleep. They believed that in such things as those they were able to glimpse the mystery of the two worlds at once.
– Frederick Buechner
You were within, but I was without. You were with me, but I was not with you. So you called, you shouted, you broke through my deafness, you flared, blazed, and banished my blindness, you lavished your fragrance, and I gasped.
– St. Augustine
augury.
there may come a day when loss
transforms into a field of swaying lavender
her backdrop a storm far out at sea
bravery bending down at the helm
pressing soaked against the wind
accepting forgiveness from the moon
pain is comprised of memories
the language of flowers decaying in a vase
dropping petals on the kitchen counter
cotton sheets and a softly bent arm
reaching for you to the patterns of
rain outside of the opened window
love is woven through everything
the skin on his cheek where
your finger traced while he slept
the intersection where you stood
when you realized you were hopelessly lost
and the moment you could again
– heather brager
Tad Hargrave:
Culture Makes Food:
“Whoever blasphemes against the father will be forgiven, and whoever blasphemes against the son will be forgiven, but whoever blasphemes against the holy spirit will not be forgiven either on earth or in heaven.” – Gospel of Thomas (44)
I’ve been thinking about this line from the Gospel of Thomas for a while and what it might mean. Surely, it might mean many things and, I am only working with the English translation.
But some cursory etymological research led me to understand that the word used for Father could also mean ‘ancestor’ and the word used for son could also mean ‘descendant’. And, what if the holy spirit referred to that which gives us life and allows us to live and that this might be understood as a certain kind of village-mindedness, a shared culture, the depth and strength of the relationships that exist between us in our human community and between us and the non-human and unseen world?
If that were so, it might read in this way:
“Whoever blasphemes against their ancestors will be forgiven, and whoever blasphemes against their descendants will be forgiven, but whoever blasphemes against village-mindedness will not be forgiven either on earth or in heaven.”
And so, could it be this: if you speak ill of or hurt those from whom you came, they will forgive you your madness and find some way to reach through to you from their world. Perhaps they would find you, a scribe of the Church, contending with the voices of your own old timers and their stories as they contend with the new voices of this new religion, and whisper to you some words that might appear in your texts like breadcrumbs for those hundreds of years to come in the future. Perhaps they might find some way to keep the culture alive inside of you so that those to come might have a chance. They may yet plant some yearnings inside of your heart that will tether you to them and lead you to some needed place.
If you speak ill of or hurt those to come, they may come to forgive you. They may yet shape the meaning of your life, however carelessly spent, in some finer way. “Yes,” they will say. “Those from whom I came were troubled. But I come from them. And I claim them as my own and I will, by the way I live, redeem the meaning of their life because without them, you would not have me and I will be sure that you are glad of my presence and those who come from me and surround me.” And others will see that it was too soon to cast judgment on your old timers. They will begin to see the longer story. You might behave badly, but those who come after you might yet write another chapter on the story you’d imagined over.
But, if by word or deed you manage to shatter the spirit of kinship that lives and breathes amongst us, there will be no ‘us’ left to forgive you. You will have destroyed the source of your own forgiving. When a community is fractured too deeply, the capacity for restorative justice goes into retreat and the need for punitive justice steps forward.
Perhaps this is why traditional communities have always been so strong on the understanding of what theft does to a village and how, if it is not contended with quickly and well, it can erode the trust amongst people, prompt the desire for revenge and escalate all too quickly into an out of control spiral that little will walk away from unscathed.
If you, like the missionaries of the world, hellbent on conversion, sow seeds of dissent against the elders, mockery on the old stories and ways of knowing, if you strike at this root of shared understanding, it may die and, in its dying, be unable to bring the healing that culture brings to the world.
This is one of the deep and unspoken consequences of too many of our actions in these modern times, instead of feeding culture, they kill it.
Traditional cultures from all around the world have known the deep importance of culture.
In most traditional diets you will find cultured foods (e.g. kefir, yoghourt, kimchi, sauerkraut, kombucha etc.). They understood that this mysterious culture that lives inside of us must be fed and that, in feeding it, it keeps us strong. They strains of bacteria they used were prized and passed on from generation to generation. The sticks they used to stir their concoctions, kept in family lines.
We like to think that its all of our effort in chewing that digests the food but it’s not.
Like the culture in our guts, that lives within us without being a part of us, that digests our food and turn it into nourishment we can use, outer culture is that which we live within with is constantly, just by being itself, eating up all of the messes and problems we bring to it. Every dance moving stress from our bodies. Every song we sing, bringing healing to us. Every story we hear, helping us find ourselves in the world.
It is a stunning thing to realize that instead of needing to isolate every nutrient you need (e.g. fats, proteins, vitamins, minerals etc.) one can simply eat well and make sure one’s gut flora is strong and that gut flora will extract the nutrition you need from the food much more efficiently than you could isolate it and ingest it. We are only now coming to understand how vital this living culture inside of us is.
Individualism is like trying to take a pill for every nutrient. Individualism leaves us all to contend with our troubles alone – troubles that the culture would help us metabolize on its own. Simply by living in a deeply wrought culture, many of our troubles are met and turned into food for ourselves and others.
Consider it:
Without culture, we metabolize almost none of our food. Food must go through the medium of culture in order to nourish us.
Without culture, we metabolize almost none of our troubles. Our troubles must go through the medium of human culture in order to become food for us and the world.
“Whoever blasphemes against their ancestors will be forgiven, and whoever blasphemes against their descendants will be forgiven, but whoever blasphemes against village-mindedness will not be forgiven either on earth or in heaven.”
Not only will you not be forgiven, neither will others.
So many of us live unforgiven for the messes we have made; not because there isn’t the desire and not because you don’t deserve it but because there isn’t the capacity anymore.
As we swallow the anti-biotic notions of this culture, the bitter pills of individualism, heroism, punitive justice, essentialism, private property and the whole ungodly cabinet full of pills we are told to take and the pills we are told to take to deal with the symptoms of the first pills, there isn’t the capacity to digest those dodgier foods we maybe shouldn’t have eaten or even the healthiest ones; not because we don’t want to digest it or we don’t deserve the nourishment but because there isn’t the capacity anymore.
Culture eats what the sharp, teeth of our mouths can not.
Culture is the life giver and if, like an antibiotic, we speak in such a way that the living culture between us itself is killed off, we, in the end will be starved too as the food of our troubles rots inside the guts of the village giving us none of its nourishment.
And so perhaps one of the most pressing questions before us today is: what feeds culture and what kills it? And how might we live our days that something that is not us, and yet that grants us our days, might flourish?
To stay on your own path you have to trust developments in life and read them deeply.
– Thomas Moore
Authentic humanism, in Pierre Furter’s words, “consists in permitting the emergence of the awareness of our full humanity, as a condition and as an obligation, as a situation and as a project.”
– Paulo Freire – Pedagogy of the Oppressed
A poem is a terrible hiding place.
– Erin Belieu
The virtue of deep metaphysics is that it liberates you from identification with all forms of ideology: be it liberal or conservative, socialist or capitalist. There is no need to identify with any particular ‘team’ in the culture war, but rather to think deeply on each proposition as it arises — to regard people as souls, not as ciphers of identity. Of course, this means that one will be a heretic to the shallow ‘revolutions’ or ‘reactions’, to the rising and falling of empires of illusion – and therefore the recipient of unconscious attacks of darkness. But so be it. One has to risk something for the truth.
– Andrew Sweeny
There’s always an antagonism
Between body and soul:
They cannot endure.
– Alda Merin
Avoid attachment to all things that are not proven paths to virtue.
– Peter Capofreddi
To a Young Poet
BY MAHMOUD DARWISH
TRANSLATED BY FADY JOUDAH
READ THE TRANSLATOR’S NOTES
Don’t believe our outlines, forget them
and begin from your own words.
As if you are the first to write poetry
or the last poet.
If you read our work, let it not be an extension of our airs,
but to correct our errs
in the book of agony.
Don’t ask anyone: Who am I?
You know who your mother is.
As for your father, be your own.
Truth is white, write over it
with a crow’s ink.
Truth is black, write over it
with a mirage’s light.
If you want to duel with a falcon
soar with the falcon.
If you fall in love with a woman,
be the one, not she,
who desires his end.
Life is less alive than we think but we don’t think
of the matter too much lest we hurt emotions’ health.
If you ponder a rose for too long
you won’t budge in a storm.
You are like me, but my abyss is clear.
And you have roads whose secrets never end.
They descend and ascend, descend and ascend.
You might call the end of youth
the maturity of talent
or wisdom. No doubt, it is wisdom,
the wisdom of a cool non-lyric.
One thousand birds in the hand
don’t equal one bird that wears a tree.
A poem in a difficult time
is beautiful flowers in a cemetery.
Example is not easy to attain
so be yourself and other than yourself
behind the borders of echo.
Ardor has an expiration date with extended range.
So fill up with fervor for your heart’s sake,
follow it before you reach your path.
Don’t tell the beloved, you are I
and I am you, say
the opposite of that: we are two guests
of an excess, fugitive cloud.
Deviate, with all your might, deviate from the rule.
Don’t place two stars in one utterance
and place the marginal next to the essential
to complete the rising rapture.
Don’t believe the accuracy of our instructions.
Believe only the caravan’s trace.
A moral is as a bullet in its poet’s heart
a deadly wisdom.
Be strong as a bull when you’re angry
weak as an almond blossom
when you love, and nothing, nothing
when you serenade yourself in a closed room.
The road is long like an ancient poet’s night:
plains and hills, rivers and valleys.
Walk according to your dream’s measure: either a lily
follows you or the gallows.
Your tasks are not what worry me about you.
I worry about you from those who dance
over their children’s graves,
and from the hidden cameras
in the singers’ navels.
You won’t disappoint me,
if you distance yourself from others, and from me.
What doesn’t resemble me is more beautiful.
From now on, your only guardian is a neglected future.
Don’t think, when you melt in sorrow
like candle tears, of who will see you
or follow your intuition’s light.
Think of yourself: is this all of myself?
The poem is always incomplete, the butterflies make it whole.
No advice in love. It’s experience.
No advice in poetry. It’s talent.
And last but not least, Salaam.
What if our religion was each other?
If our practice was our life?
If prayer was our words?
What if the Temple was the Earth?
If forests were our church?
If holy water—the rivers, lakes and oceans?
What if meditation was our relationships?
If the Teacher was life?
If wisdom was self-knowledge?
If love was the center of our being.
– Ganga White
Surely we cannot take an open question like the supernatural and shut it with a bang, turning the key of the madhouse on all the mystics of history. You cannot take the region of the unknown and calmly say that, though you know nothing about it, you know all the gates are locked. We do not know enough about the unknown to know that it is unknowable.
– G. K. Chesterton
That’s it. The lover writes, the believer hears,
The poet mumbles and the painter sees,
Each one, his [or her] fated eccentricity,
As a part, but part, but tenacious particle,
Of the skeleton of the ether, the total
Of letters, prophecies, perceptions, clods
Of color, the giant of nothingness, each one
And the giant ever changing, living in change.
– Wallace Stevens
The heat. I think that’s the way the whole thing began. There’s a lot of landscape that I never would have described if I hadn’t been homesick. If I hadn’t wanted to remember. The impulse was nostalgia. It’s not an uncommon impulse among writers.
– Joan Didion
Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.
– William Wordsworth
[This] mode of thinking, of landscape as a mnemonic map, is still current in Ireland. I once had the privilege of accompanying the late Paddy Tunney on a car journey through his native County Fermanagh. Known as ‘The Man of Songs’, Tunney was a living thesaurus of stories, songs, poems and recitations, and as we drove through this townland or that, passing by otherwise unremarkable farmsteads or small hedgy fields or stretches of bog, by this lake or that river or wellhead, he would relate their history, lilt an accompanying reel or jig, or sing snatches of the songs that sprang from that source, and tell stories of the remarkable characters who once dwelt there. I have no idea how many thousands of words were thus encompassed in that extraordinary memory of his, but I do know that for him place, story and song were intimately and dynamically connected, and that his landscape spoke volumes.
– Ciarán Carson
I spent winters
summers trying to see
– Joanna Klink
The world itself, all I read, the people, the art, the weather I encounter, they all belong in a poem that I am not writing, a poem that contains me too, a poem that slowly reveals its generous and surprising connections. I think I cannot write that poem. I can only live in it.
– Heather Christle, Crying in the Library
Love For This Book
Pablo Neruda, 1904 – 1973
In these lonely regions I have been powerful
in the same way as a cheerful tool
or like untrammeled grass which lets loose its seed
or like a dog rolling around in the dew.
Matilde, time will pass wearing out and burning
another skin, other fingernails, other eyes, and then
the algae that lashed our wild rocks,
the waves that unceasingly construct their own whiteness,
all will be firm without us,
all will be ready for the new days,
which will not know our destiny.
What do we leave here but the lost cry
of the seabird, in the sand of winter, in the gusts of wind
that cut our faces and kept us
erect in the light of purity,
as in the heart of an illustrious star?
What do we leave, living like a nest
of surly birds, alive, among the thickets
or static, perched on the frigid cliffs?
So then, if living was nothing more than anticipating
the earth, this soil and its harshness,
deliver me, my love, from not doing my duty, and help me
return to my place beneath the hungry earth.
We asked the ocean for its rose,
its open star, its bitter contact,
and to the overburdened, to the fellow human being, to the wounded
we gave the freedom gathered in the wind.
It’s late now. Perhaps
it was only a long day the color of honey and blue,
perhaps only a night, like the eyelid
of a grave look that encompassed
the measure of the sea that surrounded us,
and in this territory we found only a kiss,
only ungraspable love that will remain here
wandering among the sea foam and roots.
– from The House in the Sand by Pablo Neruda.
For Fall:
Those places left unplanted will be cultivated by another, by others. Looking back it will seem good.
– John Ashbery, Singalong
Nature inspires my everything…She lifts me upon her welcoming wings and soars me through the sky of possibilities. She colors my day, brightens my soul, and calms my nights. She is fierce and beautiful, strong and delicate — an unrelenting Queen so generous of advice and never weary of new beginnings. In spring a colorful maiden, in winter a wise old lady, in autumn a looking-glass to my falling-leaf self, and summer a warm blossomed benefactor, comrade to the sun. A constant companion — sometimes indifferent, sometimes nuzzling me with her genial breezes and raining drops of heaven onto me. To close my windows and shut her out is error and melancholy.
– Terri Guillemets
Most of us think of our ourselves as rather inconsequential people. We don’t take our own power very seriously. Maybe we think the president is important or the mayor is important or the Nobel Prize winner is important, the pop star is important, the Buddhist master is important, but we are not important. But this is not so. The actions, words, and thoughts of each one us are important. All of us together are making the world. So we have to ask ourselves: ‘How am I living?What kind of actions am I taking? Am I a force for good in the world or am I just another person doing nothing to help and therefore making things worse?’ And, if we ask these questions seriously, we will have to conclude that we can do much, much better and that we have to do better — that there is no excuse not to and that to do better is an urgent necessity.
– Norman Fischer’s “Training In Compassion, Zen Teachings on the Practice of Lojong.”
We do not need major initiation rites, long periods of pilgrimages, aestheticism, or trials in order to become magicians in our own lives.
All we must do is open ourselves to the possibilities.
When we can engage with the presence of possibility— that, perhaps, nothing is set is stone, nothing is irreparable, nothing is truly lost— does not all of life become infused with magic? And is not magic, in its essence, the recognition of limitless possibilities?
…
If we want to change the world, we must first shift our minds to perceive a wider, more fluid reality. One that is steeped in possibility.
Change your perception, change the world.
– Asia Suler
I have learned things in the dark that I could never have learned in the light, things that have saved my life over and over again, so that there is really only one logical conclusion. I need darkness as much as I need light.
– Barbara Brown Taylor
Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted.
– Edward Said
ENOUGH
It’s a gift, this cloudless November morning
warm enough to walk without a jacket
along your favorite path. The rhythmic shushing
of your feet through fallen leaves should be
enough to quiet the mind, so it surprises you
when you catch yourself telling off your boss
for a decade of accumulated injustices,
all the things you’ve never said circling inside you.
The rising wind pulls you out of it,
and you look up to see a cloud of leaves
wheeling in sunlight, flickering against the blue
and lifting above the treetops, as if the whole day
were sighing, Let it go, let it go,
for this moment at least, let it all go.
– Jeffrey Harrison
Masquerades disclose the reality of souls. As long as no one sees who we are, we can tell the most intimate details of our life. I sometimes muse over this sketch of a story about a man afflicted by one of those personal tragedies born of extreme shyness who one day, while wearing a mask I don’t know where, told another mask all the most personal, most secret, most unthinkable things that could be told about his tragic and serene life. And since no outward detail would give him away, he having disguised even his voice, and since he didn’t take careful note of whoever had listened to him, he could enjoy the ample sensation of knowing that somewhere in the world there was someone who knew him as not even his closest and finest friend did. When he walked down the street he would ask himself if this person, or that one, or that person over there might not be the one to whom he’d once, wearing a mask, told his most private life. Thus would be born in him a new interest in each person, since each person might be his only, unknown confidant.
– Fernando Pessoa
Of Age
by Amit Majmudar
You’ve come of age in the age of migrations.
The board tilts, and the bodies roll west.
Fanaticism’s come back into fashion,
come back with a vengeance.
In this new country, there’s no gravitas,
no grace. The ancient Chevys migrate
west and plunge like maddened buffalo
into a canyon. Where the oil-slick geese go,
no one knows—maybe the Holland Tunnel
because they take it for the monstrous turbine
promised them in prophecy. I brought you
to this world, and I do not regret it.
The sky’s still blue, for now. I want to show you
an island where the trees are older than redwoods
ever since Prospero turned them
into books. You’ll meet him when you’re ready.
For now, though, study this list of endangered
species: it’s incomplete, of course, since all
species are in some danger nowadays.
This is the country I bequeath to you,
the country I bequeath you to. You’ve come
of age, and you’re inheriting the whole house,
busted pipes and splintered deck and all.
This is your people, this, the mythic West
your grandparents wished to reach, and reached.
The oceans surge, but the boat is up on blocks.
There’s no America to sail to anymore.
A Mind of Winter by Martha Kapos
for Wallace Stevens in March
Silenced and sent outside
as if the world was a child
he wanted out of the room
the view from the window showed
only those cold thoughts
that tended to comply with white
a glaring region where his mind
took hold of trees and bent
their shoulders until they sighed
made them sag knee-deep
here and there like melted candles
stuck to a table in an empty house
and glowing like a pearl
placed a hard white sun low
in a windswept sky imagining his own
small face on a pillow in a new-made bed
then becoming one white quiet thing
draped thick blankets across his knees
so that the book he held
lightly in his hand was spread
open to a page where the icy
scene was set pitiless and horizontal
until his footprint gaping open in the snow
became a shape he no longer recognized
letting through a patch of green
and it was like a holiday
he’d been looking forward to for months
and a keyhole to the heart.
DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME
time was
light shone from above
by grace alone
blazed and twinkled
glowing and fading
through long winter nights
long summer days
we patiently waited
for each season
for each sunrise
it is no longer standard
in our time
to reverently tend the flame
through the long winter
now machines enslave the light
like a firefly in a jar
it works long hours
locked in a dark factory
that never closes
we seem to have forgotten
we can’t save daylight like a coupon
we can’t hoard these sunlight hours
for some future rainy day
once upon a time,
each moment was precious.
today the currency of the sun
has fallen to such a low, is so devalued,
we watch the sunrise
like we kick a penny down the sidewalk
now this golden gift
rising in the east
that saves us
every day
most times
goes unnoticed
as we check our clocks.
– Dana L.W. Fox
What is the source of our first suffering?
It lies in the fact that we hesitated to speak.
It was born the moment we accumulated silent things within us.
– Gaston Bachelard
I never violate an inner rhythm. I loathe to force anything… I listen to it and I stay with it. I have always been this way. I have regards for the inner voice.
– Lee Krasner
THE HALF-FINISHED HEAVEN
Despondency breaks off its course.
Anguish breaks off its course.
The vulture breaks off its flight.
The eager light streams out,
even the ghosts take a draught.
And our paintings see daylight,
our red beasts of the ice-age studios.
Everything begins to look around.
We walk in the sun in hundreds.
Each man is a half-open door
leading to a room for everyone.
The endless ground under us.
The water is shining among the trees.
The lake is a window into the earth.
– Tomas Tranströmer
translated by Robin Fulton
Week after week, year after year, after art class I walked the vast museum, and lost myself in the arts, or the sciences. Scientists, it seemed to me as I read the labels on display cases (bivalves, univalves; ungulates, lagomorphs), were collectors and sorters, as I had been. They noticed the things that engaged the curious mind: the way the world develops and divides, colony and polyp, population and tissue, ridge and crystal. Artists, for their part, noticed the things that engaged the mind’s private and idiosyncratic interior, that area where the life of senses mingles with the life of the spirit: the shattering of light into color, and the way it shades off round a bend. The humble attention painters gave to the shadow of a stalk or the reflected sheen under a chin, or the lapping layers of strong stokes, included and extended the scientists’ vision of each least thing as unendingly interesting. But artists laid down the vision in the form of beauty bare – Man Walking – radiant and fierce, inexplicable without the math.
It all got noticed: the horse’s shoulders pumping; the sunlight warping the air over a hot field; the way the leaves turn color, brightly, cell by cell; and even the splitting, half-resigned feeling you have when you notice you are walking on the earth for a while now – set down for a spell – in this particular time for no particular reason, here.
– Annie Dillard
Ari Annona:
The Divine Feminine
walks besides us
everyday
as the closest
dance companion
to life
One never knows
when that tap
on the shoulder
will come
calling us
out of this dream forever~
a terrible car crash
a mass shooting
a retaliation
from an angry beloved
My heart
and eyes
take this all in
the cat
curled up
by the fireplace,
yesterday’s work
strewn
across the desk
I sip my coffee now
and watch sun splashes
moving through the trees
…Let us thank the Earth
That offers ground for home
And holds our feet firm
To walk in space open
To infinite galaxies.
Let us salute the silence
And certainty of mountains:
Their sublime stillness,
Their dream-filled hearts.
The wonder of a garden
Trusting the first warmth of spring
Until its black infinity of cells
Becomes charged with dream;
Then the silent, slow nurture
Of the seed’s self, coaxing it
To trust the act of death.
The humility of the Earth
That transfigures all
That has fallen
Of outlived growth.
The kindness of the Earth,
Opening to receive
Our worn forms
Into the final stillness.
Let us ask forgiveness of the Earth
For all our sins against her:
For our violence and poisonings
Of her beauty.
Let us remember within us
The ancient clay,
Holding the memory of seasons,
The passion of the wind,
The fluency of water,
The warmth of fire,
The quiver-touch of the sun
And shadowed sureness of the moon.
That we may awaken,
To live to the full
The dream of the Earth
Who chose us to emerge
And incarnate its hidden night
In mind, spirit, and light.
– John O’Donohue
Think of your body as a servant or a thing to carry you about,
Do not allow it to rest in idleness for a single moment.
Use it well, push your body, speech and mind to virtue.
– Chatral Rinpoche
Mindfulness is the very simple process of actively noticing new things. When you actively notice new things, that puts you in the present, makes you sensitive to context. As you’re noticing new things, it’s engaging. And it turns out, after a lot of research, that we find that it’s literally, not just figuratively, enlivening.
– Ellen Langer
I will listen deeply to you, yes, but I will never try to fix you, save you, mend you, stop you feeling what you are feeling or give you second-hand, memorized answers. I will never pretend to be ‘the one who knows’, ‘the enlightened one’, ‘the guru’ or some missionary for a conceptual truth so far removed from real-time, immediate, first-hand present experience. I will not indulge and feed your stories and mental conclusions and projections, I will not get into drama with you, I will not mistake you for my story about you, my dream of who you are.
But friend, I will speak the truth to you, even if the truth triggers great pain. I will not spare our love from truth. I will meet you in the fires of hell. I will hold your hand there, I will walk with you as far as I can walk with you today, and bless you as we part. For in the deepest recesses of our experience we are intimately each other, and we cannot pretend otherwise.
Love is not a dream, love is not even a promise, it is the willingness to burn the false, the courage to meet in the fire.
– Jeff Foster
When people talk about poetry as a project, they suggest that the road through a poem is a single line. When really the road through a poem is a series of lines, like a constellation, all interconnected. Poems take place in the realm of chance, where the self and the universal combine, where life exist. I can’t suggest to you that going through a line that is more like a constellation than a road is easy—or that the blurring of the self and the universal doesn’t shred a poet a little bit in the process. The terrain of a poem is unmapped (including the shapes of the trees along the constellation-road). A great poet knows never to expect sun or rain or cold or wind in the process of creating a poem. In a great poem all can come to the fore at once. It would be worse yet, if none are there at all.
– Dorothea Lasky
We cannot live in an interpreted world. An interpreted world is not a home. Part of the terror is to take back our own listening. To use our own voice. To see our own light.
– Hildegard of Bingen
The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
To all that is brief and fragile
superficial, unstable,
To all that lacks foundation
argument or principles;
To all that is light,
fleeting, changing, finite
To smoke spirals,
wand roses,
To sea foam
and mists of oblivion…
To all that is light in weight
for itinerants on this transient earth
Somber, raving
with transitory words
and vaporous bubbly wines
I toast in breakable glasses.
– Maria Eugenia Baz Ferreira
We should tackle reality in a slightly humorous way;
otherwise, we miss its point.
– Lawrence Durrell
Love me more and differently from others.
– Marina Tsvetaeva, from a letter to Rainer Maria Rilke, December 1927
The Quiet World
by Jeffrey McDaniel
In an effort to get people to look
into each other’s eyes more,
and also to appease the mutes,
the government has decided
to allot each person exactly one hundred
and sixty-seven words, per day.
When the phone rings, I put it to my ear
without saying hello. In the restaurant
I point at chicken noodle soup.
I am adjusting well to the new way.
Late at night, I call my long distance lover,
proudly say I only used fifty-nine today.
I saved the rest for you.
When she doesn’t respond,
I know she’s used up all her words,
so I slowly whisper I love you
thirty-two and a third times.
After that, we just sit on the line
and listen to each other breathe.
If you realize what the real problem is—losing yourself, giving yourself to some higher end, or to another—you realize that this itself is the ultimate trial. When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness. And what all the myths have to deal with is transformations of consciousness of one kind or another. You have been thinking one way, you now have to think a different way.
– Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth
Ninth century Irish poem
Toward Winter (Four Fragments)
Sliab Cua, dark and broken, is full of wolf packs.
The wind sweeps down its glens,
wolves howl about its dykes,
the fierce dark deer bellows
across is in the Autumn,
and the crane cries out across its rocks.
***
The night is cold on the Great Bog.
The storm is lashing–no small matter.
The sharp wind is laughing at the groans
echoing through the cowering wood.
***
We are shattered, battered, engulfed,
O King of clear-stared Heaven!
The wind has swallowed us like twigs
swallowed in red flame out of Heaven.
***
Want and Winter are upon us.
The lake-side is flooded.
Frost has shriveled the leaves.
The pleasant wave has started muttering.
– Anonymous
I remember a phrase that came from an Indian teacher: ‘It’s not desire that’s the problem, it’s that your desires are too small.
– Mark Epstein, M.D.
Zen is a way of liberation, concerned not with discovering what is good or bad or advantageous, but what is.
– Alan Watts
Hold fast, with both hands, to that royal love
Which alone, as we know certainly, restores
Fragmentation into true being.
– Robert Graves
Black drinks the sun and draws all colours into it.
I am bleached white, my truant love. Come back,
and stain me with the intensity of black.
– Robert Graves
Isn’t it wonderful to be alive?
You know, you can forget all about it.
Then suddenly you remember, and think of all the things you can do. Here I am. I can walk around. I can talk. I can see things and remember things.
I am alive.
How wonderful.
– Sophia Loren
It means for us simply that we must be careful with our lives, for Christ’s sake, because it would seem that they are the only lives we are going to have in this puzzling and perilous world, and so they are very precious and what we do with them matters enormously.
– Frederick Buechner
Reflection is a good reminder of the truth! You may turn your eyes away from the truths, but the reflections will remind them to you! And anything which describes a truth well is a reflection of that truth! Turn your eyes away from the Moon, then the lake will remind the Moon to you, the shadows of the wolves howling against the Moon will remind the truth to you, even in the eyes of a frog, you shall see the Moon! Thus, if you turn your face away from the truth, it will never work! Because the reminders of truth are everywhere and they are as strong as the truth itself!
– Mehmet Murat ildan
May a good vision catch me
May a benevolent vision take hold of me, and move me
May a deep and full vision come over me, and burst open around me
May a luminous vision inform me, enfold me.
May I awaken into the story that surrounds,…
May I awaken into the beautiful story.
May the wondrous story find me;
May the wildness that makes beauty arise between two lovers
arise beautifully between my body and the body of this land,
between my flesh and the flesh of this earth,
here and now,
on this day,
May I taste something sacred.
– David Abram (Writer/Activist/Ecologist)
JEFF BROWN:
It’s up to you- its always up to you. You can deny, repress, distort, and bury your unresolved wounds all you want. You can re-frame them, pseudo-positivity them, detach from them, spiritual bypass them. You can re-name yourself, hide away in a monastery, turn your story around. And you can spend all your money on superficial healing practices and hocus-pocus practitioners. But it won’t mean a damn thing, if you don’t do the deeper work to excavate and heal your primary wound…s. Because the material is still there, right where you left it, ruling your life and controlling your choices. This is the nature of unhealed material- it is alive, and one way or the other, it will manifest itself in your lived experience. It will language your inner narrative. It will obstruct your path and limit your possibilities. It lives everywhere that you live. And so you have to decide- excavate it and bring it into consciousness where it can be worked through and integrated, or repress it and watch it rule your life. It’s one of the hardest truths we have to face: If we don’t deal with our stuff, it deals with us. There is no way around this. Choose.
The difference between you and her
(whom I to you did once prefer)
Is clear enough to settle:
She like a diamond shone, but you
Shine like an early drop of dew…
Poised on a red rose petal.
The dew-drop carries in its eye
Mountain and forest, sea and sky,
With every change of weather;
Contrariwise, a diamond splits
The prospect into idle bits
That none can piece together.
– Robert Graves
Every small, unselfish action nudges the world into a better path. An accumulation of small acts can change the world.
– Robin Hobb
Joy is the what and the jazz of unscripted living is the how.
– Mark Nepo, Things That Join the Sea and the Sky
If a word for religion they don’t believe in is magic
so be it, let us have magic.
– Emily Jung-min Yoon
Turning Madness Into Flowers #1
by Alice Walker.
If my sorrow were deeper
I’d be, along with you, under…
the ocean’s floor;
but today I learned that the oil
that pools beneath the ocean floor
is essence
residue
remains
of all our
relations
all
our ancestors who have died and turned to oil
without our witness
eons ago.
We’ve always belonged to them.
Speaking for you, hanging, weeping, over the
water’s edge
as well as for myself.
It is our grief
heavy, relentless,
trudging
us, however resistant,
to the decaying and rotten
bottom of things:
our grief bringing
us home.
When we learn to move beyond mistaken concepts and see clearly, we no longer solidify reality. We see waves coming and going, arising and passing. We see that life, composed of this mind and body, is in a state of continual, constant transformation and flux.There is always the possibility of radical change. Every moment – not just poetically or figuratively, but literally – every moment we are dying and being reborn, we and all of life.
– Sharon Salzberg
Sea of Love – The National
Will you say you love me Jo?
How am I supposed to know?
When you go under the waste… What am I supposed to say?
I see people on the floor
They’re slidin’ to the sea
Can’t stay here anymore
We’re turning into thieves
If I stay here trouble will find me
If I stay here I’ll never leave
If I stay here trouble will find me
I believe
Jo I’ll always think of you
As the kind of child who knew
This was never gonna last
Oh Jo you fell so fast
Hey Jo sorry I hurt you, but they say love is a virtue don’t they?
Hey Jo sorry I hurt you, but they say love is a virtue don’t they?
Hey Jo sorry I hurt you, but they say love is a virtue don’t they?
Hey Jo sorry I hurt you, but they say love is a virtue don’t they?
I see people on the floor
They’re slidin’ to the sea
Can’t stay here anymore
We’re turning into thieves
I see you rushing now
Tell me how to reach you
I see you rushing now
What did Harvard teach you?
I see you rushing now
Tell me how to reach you
I see you rushing now
What did Harvard teach you?
I see you rushing now
Tell me how to reach you
I see you rushing now
What did Harvard teach you?
I see you rushing now
Tell me how to reach you
I see you rushing now
What did Harvard teach you?
Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there were still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason.
– George Orwell, 1984
From Alasdair MacIntyre:
The barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time.
From within or from behind, a light shines through us upon things, and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ari Annona:
life is about being ALIVE… in ALL of its complexities. the beauty, the terror, the joy, the sadness, the ease, the strife.
Moving to a mechanized existence with the expectation of avoiding everything that presents a challenge is the equivalent of seeking death.
…
BE ALIVE, and recognize that BEing ALIVE is a precious gift and experience. ALL of it.
Do you want me to tell you something really subversive?
Love is everything it’s cracked up to be. That’s why people are so cynical about it. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don’t risk anything, you risk even more.
– Erica Jong
Everything is plundered, betrayed, sold,
Death’s great black wing scrapes the air,
Misery gnaws to the bone.
Why then do we not despair?
By day, from the surrounding woods,
cherries blow summer into town;
at night the deep transparent skies
glitter with new galaxies.
And the miraculous comes so close
to the ruined, dirty houses —
something not known to anyone at all,
but wild in our breast for centuries.
– Anna Akhmatova
Impossible friendships
for example, with someone who no longer is, who exists only in yellowed letters. Or long walks beside a stream, whose depths hold hidden porcelain cups – and the talks about philosophy with a timid student or the postman. A passerby with proud eyes whom you’ll never know. Friendship with this world, ever more perfect (if not for the salty smell of blood). The old man sipping coffee in Saint-Lazare, who reminds you of someone. Faces flashing by in local trains – the happy faces of travelers headed perhaps for a splendid ball, or a beheading. And friendship with yourself – since after all you don’t know who you are.
– Adam Zagajewski
Why We Are Truly a Nation
William Matthews
Because we rage inside
the old boundaries,
like a young girl leaving the Church,
scared of her parents.
Because we all dream of saving
the shaggy, dung-caked buffalo,
shielding the herd with our bodies.
Because grief unites us,
like the locked antlers of moose
who die on their knees in pairs.
Trust what your heart tells you. This is the only way out. These systems of division can never bring happiness and flourishing. These systems serve a different purpose; they don’t serve Life.
– Love Letters From Mother Earth
OUT IN THE OPEN
1.
Late autumn labyrinth.
A discarded bottle lies at the entrance to the wood.
Walk in. The forest in this season is a silent palace of abandoned
rooms.
Only a few, precise sounds: as if someone were lifting twigs with
tweezers;
as if, inside each tree-trunk, a hinge was creaking quietly.
Frost has breathed on the mushrooms and they’ve shrivelled up;
they are like the personal effects of the disappeared.
It is almost dusk. You need to leave now,
find your landmarks again: the rusted implements out in the field
and the house on the other side of the lake, red-brown
and square and solid as a stock-cube.
2.
A letter from America set me off, drove me out
on a white night in June through the empty suburban streets
among built blocks, cool as blueprints, too new to have memories.
The letter in my pocket. My unquiet raging stride a kind of prayer.
Where you are now, evil and good really do have faces.
Here, it’s mostly a struggle between roots, numbers, transitions of
light.
Those that run messages for death don’t shy from daylight.
They govern from glass offices. They swell in the sun.
They lean over their desks and look at you askance.
Far away from that, I find myself in front of one of the new
buildings.
Many windows merging into one window.
The light of the night sky and the swaying of the trees are caught
there:
in this still mirror-lake, up-ended in the summer night.
Violence seems unreal
for a while.
3.
The sun is scorching. The plane comes in low,
throwing a shadow in the shape of a giant cross, rushing over the
ground.
A man crouches over something in the field.
The shadow reaches him.
For a split-second he is in the middle of the cross.
I have seen the cross that hangs from cool church arches.
Sometimes it seems like a snapshot
of frenzy.
– Tomas Tranströmer
translated by Robin Robertson
Really what I’m concerned with is the question of how we experience the universe. My proposal–and this is why a cosmological worldview is so important–is that a cosmological order is what might be called the great liturgy. The human project is validated by ritual insertion into the cosmological order. Our job is to participate in the great hymn of praise that is existence.”
– Thomas Berry (2000)
We are constantly generating agendas, logic, options, theories, personal history, longing, planning, worrying, aspirations, explorations, falling in and out of love, learning, disappointment, irritation, victory, defeat, opportunities, setbacks. Our mind is usually very very busy!
Meditation might be very challenging but it can also be a big relief.
– David Nichtern
Passionate and free thinking women have never been deeply appreciated by the great religions [or any other societal institution] of the world. Because passionate, free thinking women raise passionate, free thinking children. And passionate, free thinking children grow up to be passionate, free thinking adults. And passionate, free thinking adults are very difficult to manipulate and almost impossible to control.
– Marianne Williamson
To sit and look at light-filled leaves
May let us see, or seem to see,
Far backward as through clearer eyes
To what unsighted hope believes . . .
Time when the Maker’s radiant sight
Made radiant every thing He saw.
And every thing He saw was filled
With perfect joy and life and light.
– Wendell Berry
YOU have no name.
We have wrestled with you all
day, and now night approaches,
the darkness from which we emerged
seeking; and anonymous
you withdraw, leaving us nursing
our bruises, our dislocations.
For the failure of language
there is no redress. The physicists
tell us your size, the chemists
the ingredients of your
thinking. But who you are
does not appear, nor why
on the innocent marches
of vocabulary you should choose
to engage us, belabouring us
with your silence. We die, we die
with the knowledge that your resistance
is endless at the frontier of the great poem.
The Combat
by R. S. Thomas (1913-2000)
What makes an elder, a heartfelt spirit, a clear mind, a talented heart, one who is young while old and old while young, an activist for the Soul? Is it formulae, schemas, lexicons? It could be. But also, and often more so, I think it is very like the flowering of the trees in the forest, as we gather more years: we straggle and stride onward in our better learned ways to give out even more seeds for new life, and to blossom wildly in so doing for self and others.
– Clarissa Pinkola Estés
The difficult task of knowing another soul is not for young gentleman whose consciousness is chiefly made up of their own wishes.
– George Eliot
Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.
– Anne Lamott
Yolanda Rommel:
And some of us are simply locked
behind the bars
of our minds
peering through in the moments
of rare
sanity invisible to others
desperate in our loneliness
with voices muted silenced
to others
cries helpless sounds
distortred by the prison bars
of our own
minds
Books are meat and medicine and flame and flight and flower steel, stitch, cloud and clout, and drumbeats on the air.
– Gwendolyn Brooks
Art hurts. Art urges voyages – and it is easier to stay at home.
– Gwendolyn Brooks
The desire to possess, if it is redirected–from a desire to possess power, people and things–to a desire to possess wisdom, virtue, awareness, insight, kindness and love–will bless the one who has it.
– Peter Capofreddi
Everyone has a a story or poem to tell, everyone is interested in reading, something besides newspapers or waiting to turn off the set. Refine the senses through colorful vivid language. Use the imagination. The hell realms of planet earth are versions of egomaniacal power mad hungry ghosts! It’s bad poetry! It’s land grabs, fossil fuel driven, genocides of all kinds that need our limber-witted poetic attention and muscle. Jump in, turn it around.
– Anne Waldman
Tad Hargrave:
There are two poverties in this world. The first is having nothing to give. The second is having so much to give but having no one to give it to. I don’t know which poverty is worse.
FRIENDS
by Sonja-Maria Teufel-Schmarsli
friends are precious and rare
like jewels on a mystical island that you are sometimes searching for in your clear dreams.
when you cry or feel sad and low out of the blue
friends cannot help but get up from their cushion and take you in their arms
to comfort you and make you feel shine again like sparkling rainbow lights.
when your mind circles tirelessly around yourself
entangled with the same old stories that hinder you from being happy and relaxed
friends cannot help but gently and with no doubt tell you to loosen the knots
of your selfmade tensions once and for all times.
when you sink deeply into moaning and lamentation
friends cannot help but show you the brighter sides of your life.
be sure –
there is always a brilliantly shining sun behind the darkest clouds
that will break through a heavy grey sky lightening up the spheres.
when you look gloomy and with melancholia into your ever same days
they give you a smile and tell you stories of wisdom and insight of their own experiences
as a hint for you to find back to your inner eternal knowledge of great bliss.
when you create mental concepts of yourself nourished by illusory apparitions
friends cannot help but show you who you really are and always have been to them
a wonderful and unique magical being since you were little and even before.
because you have always been perfect to them
because you have always been divine and precious to them
because they see you from their pure perception.
friends cannot help but love you –
as you in your natural beauty perfectly enriched with translucent stains and spots
are a reflection of their own virgin view.
appreciate your friends and be enchanted by their splendid gifts
be sure –
you cannot help but be a noble friend
some day you will find the mystical island solely filled with precious jewels.
Everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy, and scared, even the people who seem to have it more or less together. They are much more like you than you would believe. So try not to compare your insides to their outsides.
Also, you can’t save, fix or rescue any of them, or get any of them sober. But radical self-care is quantum, and radiates out into the atmosphere, like a little fresh air. It is a huge gift to the world.
– Anne Lamott
No, no more: this should be happening in myth, in stone, or paint, not in reality, not here;
it should be an emblem of itself, not itself, something that would mean, not really have to happen,
something to go out, expand in implication from that unmoved mass of matter in the breast;
as in the image of an anguished face, in grief for us, not us as us, us as in a myth, a moral tale,
a way to tell the truth that grief is limitless, a way to tell us we must always understand
it’s we who do such things, we who set the slant, embed the tip, lift the sledge and drive the nail,
drive the nail which is the axis upon which turns the brutal human world upon the world.
– C. K. Williams
There is no point in using the word ‘impossible’ to describe something that has clearly happened.
– Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency
So it’s imperative that you think deeply about the difference between the unreal work you do in life and the real work— the soul work that is closer to vocation, the work that connects you to your ancestors, your land, your community. The distinction is palpable and merciless. Unreal work burns you out; real work renews you. Unreal work conspires to make you repeat yourself or copy others; real work gives you the courage to create your own unique style.
– Phil Cousineau
The body is a resonator; attuning to the energies of the world, it knows them […] Spatioception [which ‘tells you where space is in your body’] is a sense that everyone is born with. Everyone can feel when their body is congested with tension, and everyone knows the difference when it harbors a wide-open, easy spaciousness inside, available to the world. Without a name for that sense, though, it is likely to remain unnoticed. If it remains unnoticed, you lack choice in the matter. As soon as you identify it, you can begin to notice the body in a new light. You notice that spaciousness feels better, and you can learn how to release the body to increasingly reclaim it. As you undo the tensions and holding patterns that choke your spaciousness, your sensitivity to the Present grows until there is room within the body for all the world to live. When the body opens to the Present like that, the very act of feeling it is also an act of knowing it, without any need to categorize or objectify. It simply lives there in its wholeness and its subtle intimacy, whispering its wordless invitations. This is the body’s way of knowing.
– Philip Shepherd
Guthema Roba:
whatever
you’re afraid of,
whatever you avoid
is a part of you
that wants come closer
and hug you for cleansing
and total healing.
Bonnie Ann Burnett:
Poetry came to me in the night
Like words on a Scrabble board falling into place
A word led to a line
then the before and after of it
until it lived, complete, resonant, truth.
A new word appeared
and a new poem fell in.
Then another
and another.
Words falling almost faster than I could catch them.
And I, being tired and a bit in awe
laid there retelling the poems to myself
seeing through their clarity
into those previously murky parts of me
telling myself I should get up and write them
that I should catch them before I lost them.
But it seemed too hard to move
too sweet to sleep
and so I curled up with my new poems
like so many purring cats.
But the poems jumped off the bed before dawn
and I awoke alone
save the warm feeling one has
when the bed next to you bears the inprint of your lover.
There is one line I recall
one line that perhaps says it all
one line that shakes my chest in tears as I type it
“I come from a long line of tongue biters
swallowing our own blood
lest anyone feel the prick of our truth.”
As Markova wrote
‘I choose to risk my significance…
I will not live in fear of falling or catching fire…
(May) that which came to me as blossom
go on as fruit.
On this Sabbath morning
this, too, I pray.
Look underfoot. You are always nearer to the true sources of your power than you think. The lure of the distant and the difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity is where you are. Don’t despise your own place and hour. Every place is the center of the world.
– John Burroughs
I needed words because unhappy families are conspiracies of silence. The one who breaks the silence is never forgiven. He or she has to learn to forgive him or herself.
– Jeanette Winterson
Love means giving something you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it.
– Jacques Lacan
Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assaults of thoughts on the unthinking.
– John Maynard Keynes
When I was young, I expected people to give me more than they could – continuous friendship, permanent emotion. Now I have learned to expect less of them than they can give – a silent companionship. And their emotions, their friendship, and their noble gestures keep their full miraculous value in my eyes; wholly the fruit of grace.
– Albert Camus
Why do I try to gild you in this form?
I’d rather see you off the page and out
in Lake Monroe, pink otter with sleek arms
awash in dreamy waves, your eyes shut tight
– Karen Kovacik
“Thank U”
How bout getting off of these antibiotics
How bout stopping eating when I’m full up
How bout them transparent dangling carrots
How bout that ever elusive “could have”
Thank you India
Thank you terror
Thank you disillusionment
Thank you frailty
Thank you consequence
Thank you thank you silence
How bout me not blaming you for everything
How bout me enjoying the moment for once
How bout how good it feels to finally forgive you
How bout grieving it all one at a time
Thank you India
Thank you terror
Thank you disillusionment
Thank you frailty
Thank you consequence
Thank you thank you silence
The moment I let go of it
Was the moment I got more than I could handle
The moment I jumped off of it
Was the moment I touched down
How bout no longer being masochistic
How bout remembering your divinity
How bout unabashedly bawling your eyes out
How bout not equating death with stopping
Thank you India
Thank you Providence,
Thank you disillusionment
Thank you nothingness
Thank you clarity
Thank you thank you silence…
– Alanis Morrisette
It is not true that the more you love, the better you understand; all that the action of love obtains from me is merely this wisdom: that the other is not to be known; his opacity is not the screen around a secret, but instead, a kind of evidence in which the game of reality and appearance is done away with. I am then seized with that exaltation of loving someone unknown, someone who will remain so forever: a mystic impulse: I know what I do not know.
– Roland Barthes
I have always felt that a human being could only be saved by another human being. I am aware that we do not save each other very often. But I am also aware that we save each other some of the time.
– James Baldwin
I have always been struck, in America, by an emotional poverty so bottomless, and a terror of human life, of human touch, so deep that virtually no American appears able to achieve any viable, organic connection between his public stance and his private life.
– James Baldwin
The Forgotten Dialect Of The Heart – Poem by Jack Gilbert
How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,
God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words
get it all wrong. We say bread and it means according
to which nation. French has no word for home,
and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people
in northern India is dying out because their ancient
tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost
vocabularies that might express some of what
we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would
finally explain why the couples on their tombs
are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands
of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,
they seemed to be business records. But what if they
are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve
Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.
O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,
as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind’s labor.
Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts
of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred
pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what
my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this
desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script
is not laguage but a map. What we feel most has
no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.
You cannot write alone, no more than you can be alone inside your own poems. The muse is not only, in contemporary vernacular, an inspirit but a facilitator … the acknowledged or unacknowledged antagonist … the opposition that creates the energy and story of the poem … the need and the means. It provides the imagination with context, and when all is said and done, the text itself. The freeness of our trees, the birdies of our birds, the pity of our forgiveness, the beauty of our longing, our paralysis, our prevarications, our palaver, all may saturate the colors and textures of our poems, but they are masks over the singular face of the archetype.
– Stanley Plumly
Calendars Do Not Hold Fortunes
by Kelli Russell Agodon
One day you’re old and thankful. One day
you’re buying a ukulele and searching
for your favorite pen, a notebook. One day,
you scream at another driver. One day
you open the jewelry box to find the ring
you thought you lost. One day
the ring is God. One day, fear. One day
there’s a knock on the door—a delivery of flowers,
your lost dog is found. One day a friend asks
how she can help. One day A Streetcar
Named Desire, a glass of wine, and a breakdown.
One day you lean too close
to the stranger on your left. One day
you drop your keys in a parking lot, one day
you pray everyone makes it home safely.
One day the biopsy is cancerous, one day,
but not today.
Word Greed
by Karen Douglass
Admit it, if you are like me, you collect words you’ll never need. I go further in this vice: I collect quotes, whole sentences, even paragraphs. These snippets are not necessarily related to what I’m working on; in fact, I may never use them. Like a crow with shiny objects, I carry them in my beak from a library book to my nest which is a journal and hide them from jealous eyes. It’s not just the words that shine so much as it is how they cling together, like the roots of a tree, hidden but intricate, nourishing resources.
Language is more than a list of words, isn’t it? It’s a harvest of phrases and sentences, images and sounds, some of them heard silently in my brain as I read. It’s a gathering, which like any other healthy community, welcomes immigrants. In fact, it needs strangers in its midst or it stiffens like rheumatic knees. A vast array of word groups from many sources brings news of other villages and cultures, news we need to grow on.
Perhaps our world is the spirit world of some other world. Perhaps our birdsongs are heard but faintly in some other world, and only by certain ears. Perhaps a poem is like an airlock that carries the breath of one world into the lungs of the next.
– Alex Michael Stein
Transformation…
The task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us, to transform all these things into symbols, into music, into something which can last in man’s memory. That is our duty. If we don’t fulfill it, we feel unhappy. A writer or any artist has the sometimes joyful duty to transform all that into symbols. These symbols could be colors, forms or sounds. For a poet, the symbols are sounds and also words, fables, stories, poetry. The work of a poet never ends. It has nothing to do with working hours. Your are continuously receiving things from the external world. These must be transformed, and eventually will be transformed. This revelation can appear anytime. A poet never rests. He’s always working, even when he dreams. Besides, the life of a writer, is a lonely one. You think you are alone, and as the years go by, if the stars are on your side, you may discover that you are at the center of a vast circle of invisible friends whom you will never get to know but who love you. And that is an immense reward.
– Borges
To-day has not seemed like a day. It has been most unearthly, — so mild, so bright, so still.
– Emily Dickinson, from a letter to Austin Dickinson written c. March 1854
I’ve been through all this before, he says to his heart.
‘Yes, you have been through all this before,’ replies his heart. ‘But you have never been beyond it.
– Paulo Coelho, Warrior of the Light
David Budbill:
What it Takes
Enough
of a house
to keep
the bugs and rain
out
in the summer,
stay warm
in the winter.
Books,
a few
musical instruments,
a garden,
silence,
some mountains,
maybe a cat.
In Breton
In Breton, they say
there’s a word that weaves between
green and blue, allowing for haze, precipitation, the burr of distance, the welcome shock of escaping light warming your shoulders.
– Ian Stephen
Roshi Joan Halifax: I think what we’re seeing actually is not compassion fatigue, but empathic distress, where there’s a resonance, and yet we can’t do anything… about it. When we are more stabilized, then we can face the world with more buoyancy, more capacity to address these very profound social and environmental issues. So that’s why I call these things “edge states,” because they really call us to our edge.
She always wanted to believe in things. – Kazuo Ishiguro
..
And Rilke:
…
O tell me Poet what you do?
– I praise.
But the deathly and the monstrous, how do you accept them, bear them?
– I praise.
But the nameless, the anonymous.
How, Poet, can you still invoke it?
– I praise.
Under every costume, every mask of us,
what right have you to be true?
– I praise.
Or that the calm and the impetuous
should know you, as star and storm?
– Because I praise.
we are part of a collective whole…our thoughts, emotions and actions help create our world..
HEALING AND TRANSFORMATION… The world is not decided by action alone. It is decided more by consciousness and spirit; they are the secret sources of all action and behavior. The spirit of a time is an incredibly subtle, yet hugely powerful force. And it is comprised of the mentality and spirit of all individuals together. Therefore, the way you look at things is not simply a private matter. Your outlook actually and concretely affects what goes on. When you give in to helplessness, you collude with despair and add to it. When you take back your power and choose to see the possibilities for healing and transformation, your creativity awakens and flows to become an active force of renewal and encouragement in the world. In this way, even in your own hidden life, you can become a powerful agent of transformation. There is a huge force field that opens when intention focuses and directs itself toward transformation.
- John O’Donohue
And tracing the labyrinthine ways of your mind, the haphazard vagaries of your thoughts at ease, the odds and ends of your mental surplus you carelessly throw at the world, one wants to be at a loss, in a maze; amazed, and amazingly unabashed.
– Adam Zagajewski
Outwardly, I fulfill my duties satisfactorily at the office, not my inner duties, however, and every unfulfilled inner duty becomes a misfortune that never leaves.
– Franz Kafka
The Diaries of Franz Kafka
Even now, only rarely am I able to convince myself that my reluctance to pass on my most secret reflections, meditations, theorizings, all the modes by which I manage to distract myself, arises from my belief that out of my appalling inner universe nothing anyway could possibly be extracted, departicularized, and offered as an instance of anything at all to anyone else.
– C. K. Williams
FORESEEING
Middle age refers more
to landscape than to time:
it’s as if you’d reached
the top of a hill
and could see all the way
to the end of your life,
so you know without a doubt
that it has an end –
not that it will have,
but that it does have,
if only in outline –
so for the first time
you can see your life whole,
beginning and end not far
from where you stand,
the horizon in the distance –
the view makes you weep,
but it also has the beauty
of symmetry, like the earth
seen from space: you can’t help
but admire it from afar,
especially now, while it’s simple
to re-enter whenever you choose,
lying down in your life,
waking up to it
just as you always have –
except that the details resonate
by virtue of being contained,
as your own words
coming back to you
define the landscape,
remind you that it won’t go on
like this forever.
– Sharon Bryan
Alive
Naomi Shihab Nye
Dear Abby, said someone from Oregon,
I am having trouble with my boyfriend’s attachment…
to an ancient gallon of milk still full
in his refrigerator. I told him it’s me or the milk,
is this unreasonable? Dear Carolyn,
my brother won’t speak to me
because fifty years ago I whispered
a monkey would kidnap him in the night
to take him back to his true family
but he should have known it was a joke
when it didn’t happen, don’t you think?
Dear Board of Education, no one will ever
remember a test. Repeat. Stories,
poems, projects, experiments,
mischief, yes, but never a test.
Dear Dog Behind the Fence, you really need
to calm down now. You have been barking every time
I walk to the compost for two years
and I have not robbed your house. Relax.
When I asked the man on the other side
if you bother him too, he smiled and said no,
he makes me feel less alone. Should I be more
worried about the dog or the man?
People talk about creation as a remote fact of history, as if it were something that was attended to a long time ago, and finished at the time. But creation was not an act; it is a process; and it is going on today as much as it ever was. Nature is not in a hurry…
– John Muir
…The tapestry of circumstance is intricate and dense.
Ants stitching in the grass.
The grass sewn into the ground.
The pattern of a wave being needled by a twig.
So it happens that I am and look.
Above me a white butterfly is fluttering through the air
on wings that are its alone,
and a shadow skims through my hands
that is none other than itself, no one else’s but its own.
When I see such things, I’m no longer sure
that what’s important
is more important than what’s not.
– Wislawa Szymborska
Solitude is the most extraordinary means to enter into intimacy with ourselves. And, paradoxically, solitude is also the best way to learn to communicate. Only knowing me, knowing my inner self, can I speak to the interiority of others.
– Susanna Tamaro
Reading isn’t important because it helps get you a job. It’s important because it gives you room to exist beyond the reality you’re given. Reading makes the world better. It is how humans merge. How minds connect. Dreams. Empathy. Understanding. Escape. Reading is love in action.
– Matt Haig
Prayer for all living creatures, I saw it was the only decent activity left in the world.
– Jack Kerouac
Can anyone be anything but a rebel in a conventional world like this?
– Jack Kerouac, The Town and The City
A Ritual to Read to Each Other
If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the
world
and following the wrong god home we may miss
our star.
For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of
childhood
storming out to play through the broken dike.
And as elephants parade holding each
elephant’s tail,
but if one wanders the circus won’t find the
park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.
And so I appeal to a voice, to something
shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should
consider—
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the
dark.
For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to
sleep;
the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
– William E. Stafford
Listening
My father could hear a little animal step,
or a moth in the dark against the screen,
and every far sound called the listening out
into places where the rest of us had never been.
More spoke to him from the soft wild night
than came to our porch for us on the wind;
we would watch him look up and his face go keen
till the walls of the world flared, widened.
My father heard so much that we still stand
inviting the quiet by turning the face,
waiting for a time when something in the night
will touch us too from that other place.
– William E. Stafford
In Buddhism, we speak of two kinds of obstacles: the obstacle of knowledge and the obstacle of afflictions. Our states of mind such as confusion, hatred, anxiety, craving, the desire for vengeance, and so on, refer to the second obstacle. If our mind is burdened by worry, suffering, confusion, anger, strong views, then it is very hard for us to practice mindfulness, concentration, and insight and look deeply into ourselves and our reality.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
Stop Wasting Time
Everything will resolve itself through love. Stop wasting time running after the perfect community. Live your life fully in your community today. Stop seeing the flaws—and thank God there are some! Look rather at your own defects and know that you are forgiven and can, in your turn, forgive others and today enter into the conversion of love, and remember, pray always. – Jean Vanier
HUMILITY
I often awake to a seemingly shaky world, unsure of what to bring to bear, how to live my dream, how to sing my song. In response, I sometimes reach for a kind of confidence based on my training, years of wrestling and suffering, the gifts I have been given, a sense of purpose that calls me. But other times, my confidence just shakes loose and nothing feels solid. I dance between these states, sometimes finding power in may confidence – a power I readily admit that I have misused when it blinds me to the feelings and intelligence of others. And other times I find a kind of humility, a bit of earth (humility comes from the root ‘humus’ – of the earth). At those times, I drop to my knees or even fall flat on my belly, waiting for some kind of grace to find me, reminding me of spirit and mystery.
– David Bedrick
NOVEMBER NIGHT
Listen.
With faint dry sound,
Like steps of passing ghosts,
The leaves, frost-crisp’d, break from the trees
And fall.
– Adelaide Crapsey
RAPIDS
Fall’s leaves are redder than
spring’s flowers, have no pollen,
and also sometimes fly, as the wind
schools them out or down in shoals
or droves: though I
have not been here long, I can
look up at the sky at night and tell
how things are likely to go for
the next hundred million years:
the universe will probably not find
a way to vanish nor I
in all that time reappear.
– A. R. Ammons
Gonna change my way of thinking, make my self a different set of rules. Gonna put my good foot forward and stop being influenced by fools.
– Bob Dylan
But I, Too, Want to Be a Poet
Fanny Howe
But I, too, want to be a poet
to erase from my days…
confusion & poverty
fiction & a sharp tongue
To sing again
with the tones of adolescence
demanding vengeance
against my enemies, with words
clear & austere
To end this tumultuous quest
for reasonable solutions
to situations mysterious & sore
To have the height to view
myself as I view others
with lenience & love
To be free of the need
to make a waste of money
when my passion,
first and last,
is for the ecstatic lash
of the poetic line
and no visible recompense
Mindfulness itself consists in a whole host of integrated mind-body skills in ethically directed action in the world. it’s not a neural network but how you live your life in the world.
– Evan Thompson
it has been said…
the story of the bodhi
was five centuries and fifteen hundred miles removed…
don’t be disheartened, don’t be dismayed
…
the unadorned dream symbol
and the divine tongue’s command
has come into existence
where even the heart’s thought is born of fantasy
where illusions are created at will
sounds reverberate in a thunderous echo
the revered cross… the lotus stem
and prometheus nailed to the world mountain
as a consequence
of this solemn play of life
a life as a quotation
a festival, a mask, a myth
attending to this godly ceremony
wearing the costume of a king
and the high stylization
of the art of the narmer palette
throwing the mind into mythological focus
on one side…
the bulbed white crown
on the other, level red
and the legend of the garden
even a serpent was cursed
while in the trial of pārśvanatha
the serpent came forth to protect
hence the doors of the senses
must be closed
and the forest, shall be the first resort
of the yearning heart
where the breathing
shall be thy teacher
and then, in solitary thought
begin the passage into the self
where flowers of the indus valley river
lead you to the energy of the void
where you find you are everywhere and nowhere at all
don’t be disheartened, don’t be dismayed
a poem by ivan kireevskii
I am certain that after the dust of centuries has passed over our cities, we, too, will be remembered not for victories or defeats in battle or in politics, bu…t for our contribution to the human spirit.
– John F. Kennedy
Nothing keeps you keener than an abyss on both sides.
– Laura Jacobs
Derrick Jensen:
Here is today’s excerpt. It’s from Endgame.
Another night, another talk. Another pacifist plagues me like a biting black fly. He says, “Every act of violence sets back the movement ten years.”
I respond, “How do you know that?”
He stares at me, this time as though I’ve asked him to prove not the existence of gravity, but of air. He shakes his head.
“What evidence do you have?”
Still shaking his head, “I don’t . . .”
“It’s an article of faith. You can’t have any evidence to support your position because no environmentalists or animal rights activists have yet committed any acts of violence against a human being, which means they can’t have set the movement back.”
“They’ve burned SUVs.”
“That’s not violence.”
“It still sets the cause back.”
“How?”
“It harms public opinion.”
“Okay,” I say. “Let me know if this is how it goes. So long as activists behave themselves and follow the rules—set up by those in power—then some theoretical mass of people will be willing to listen to them, maybe even agree with them, and possibly even send them money.”
“Let’s leave money out of this.”
I continue, “But if someone breaks the rules—set up by those in power— then the great mass of fence-sitters will write good activists like you off as lunatics. Then you’ll have to be good for another ten years to make up for the lost good will, right?”
“I don’t like how you’re spinning it, but it’s okay.”
I keep going. “We have to follow the rules of polite discourse in order to be heard. But why do these rules apply only to us? Why is it that when the people and companies and institutions we’re opposing commit violence or otherwise break the rules of polite discourse it doesn’t set them back ten years? Further, if we only act in ways that are acceptable to those who are benefiting from the exploitation in the first place, we will never be able to stop the exploitation.”
There were plenty of other questions that night, so I moved on, but had I more time I would have said more. I would have said for the thousandth time that all life is circumstantial, and that some acts of violence may set some movements back some number of years, and that some acts of violence may move them forward. Some acts of non-violence may set some movements back, and some may move them forward. Some failures to act at the right time with the right tactic (violent or nonviolent) may set movements back or move them forward. The trick is knowing when and how to act. Well, that’s the first trick. The real trick is kicking aside our fear and acting on what we already know (because, truly, we depend on those around us, and they are dying because they depend on us, too).
I would have talked about resistance movements in Latin America, Asia, and Africa where violence helped throw off overt colonialism. I would have talked about resistance by indigenous peoples. I would have talked about violence by abolitionists, and I would have mentioned that Harriet Tubman carried opiates with her, and she carried a gun. The opiates were to drug the people she was transporting in case they got too frightened, and the gun was to shoot them if they wouldn’t stop screaming. Did Harriet Tubman set “the movement” back ten years?
I would also have said that the notion that some act could set some “movement” back implies that the “movement” is actually accomplishing something in the first place. That’s a doubtful proposition, at best.
Next, I would have recalled where I’ve previously heard this sentiment of fearing that more militant actions will threaten one’s own resistance, which is in accounts of discussions between death camp inmates about whether or not they should try to escape. There are those who wish to make things as comfortable as they can within the confines of the razor wire and electrified fences, and those who want to break away entirely. Of course those who want to break away will “set things back” for those whose goals are limited to gaining a sliver of soap and an extra potato in their broth.
pp 722-724, Endgame V II
You have to be burning with an idea, or a problem, or a wrong that you want to right. If you’re not passionate enough from the start, you’ll never stick it out.
– Steve Jobs
You wake up filled with dread.
There seems no reason for it.
Morning light sifts through the window,
there is birdsong,
you can’t get out of bed…
…
What prevents you? The future. The future tense,
immense as outer space.
You could get lost there.
No. Nothing so simple. The past, its destiny
and drowned events pressing you down,
like sea water, like gelatin
filling your lungs instead of air.
Forget that and let’s get up.
Try moving your arm.
Try moving your head.
Pretend the house is on fire
and you must run or burn.
No, that one’s useless.
It’s never worked before.
Where is it coming from, this echo,
this huge No that surrounds you,
silent as the folds of the yellow
curtains, mute as the cheerful
Mexican bowl with its cargo
of mummified flowers?
(You chose the colours of the sun,
not the dried neutrals of shadow.
God knows you’ve tried.)
Now here’s a good one:
You’re lying on your deathbed.
You have one hour to live.
Who is it, exactly, you have needed
all these years to forgive?
– Margaret Atwood
We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will.
The will only controls a few movements of a few muscles, and these movements are associated with the idea of the change of position of nearby objects. I can will to put my hand flat on the table. If inner purity, inspiration or truth of thought were necessarily associated with attitudes of this kind, they might be the object of will. As this is not the case, we can only beg for them… Or should we cease to desire them? What could be worse? Inner supplication is the only reasonable way, for it avoids stiffening muscles which have nothing to do with the matter. What could be more stupid than to tighten up our muscles and set our jaws about virtue, or poetry, or the solution of a problem. Attention is something quite different.
– Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace
Yes, this task from which, over the years, duration springs,
it is fundamentally inconspicuous,
not worth talking about
but worth holding on to through writing:
for it must be my main task….
It must be my true love.
And I must,
if the moments of duration are to spring from me
and give my stiff face a form
and insert a heart into my empty breast,
practice, year in and year out,
unconditionally,
my love.
Staying at the task,
the one dear to me, the chief one,
impeding, thus, its obsolescence,
I feel then, perhaps,
unexpectedly,
the shudder of duration,
incidentally each time,
while cautiously shutting a door,
while carefully peeling an apple,
while crossing a threshold attentively,
while bending down for a thread.
The poem to duration is a love poem.
It is about love at first sight
followed by many such first sights.
And this love,
its duration not in any deed,
much more in a before and after—
through love’s altered sense of time
the before was also after
and the after also before. . . .
– Peter Handke, To Duration
If I approach it,
never by car,
always on foot,
I can hope, even on the threshold of the wood,
for a…n attraction
that will cleanse me of my usual brooding
and that my thinking will become pure
contemplation of the world.
In place of the chatter in me,
of the torment of many voices,
thoughtfulness enters,
a kind of salvific silence
from which then, on arrival at the place,
an explicit thought, my highest thought arises:
rescue, save, rescue!
With a jolt as gentle as it is powerful,
my eyes round
and my ear-passages rustle,
and I celebrate, in the clearing,
the thanksgiving of being here.
– Peter Handke, To Duration
What is attention…but love…?
Do not undervalue attention. It means interest and also love. To know, to do, to discover, or to create you must give your heart to it – which means attention. All the blessings flow from it.
– Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
SUICIDE STREET
Do not go to that street at night
…
that is the street of suicide
it is the street of prostitutes
it is the street of fear and shame
it is the street – of madness
some other music is playing there
people are singing some other songs there
other sounds can be heard there
and a strange light
is covering the desert landscape
on the blind side of the street
the traces of non return are lit
framed in red bouquets
everyone has gone from that street
do not go to that one-way street
because it is the street of suicide
do not go to that street even during the day
there are homes without a name and number
with black graffiti from the ground to the roof
with broken window panes
and rotting doors
do not go to that street day or night
because you will disappear in one direction
they will eat you up and swallow you in a second
it is a street of suicide and prostitutes
a street of fear and shame
a street without a blink and breath
it is the endless one-way street
blinded street
where they eat human flesh
and drink human blood
– IBRAHIM HONJO, FROM BOOK “POEMS I DIDN’T WANT TO WRITE, SOME OTHER DREAMS, 2011
Nithya Shanti:
Assume there is a secret dimension that nobody knows about or talks about. Launch a thought or intention into it and silently notice how it rebounds back. Like …a bat using echo location, you will map a whole new terrain. Live on earth among us, yet be an astronaught of the inner planes. Amazing things can happen.
Autumn Tune
The summer`s gone and the clouds are playing
The morning song it frees me
An autumn tune that is breaking through
Today`s the day I`ll see him…
My eyes are full of childlike wonder
My heart it beats a thousand times
I only need to gaze upon him
And all I want is what`s mine
All the best things they come small
Like just one word from her world
With just a few words life can turn
I`m upside down, inside out, you twist me all around
Today we`ll spend the day together
My fallen angel holds me
Back home again, a year`s gone by
Never again I`ll let him leave me
So say to me your wildest fears
And let me see how it compares
And if it shares a space in me
I`m upside down, inside out, you twist me all around
Upside down, inside out, you twist me all around
– Equation
Don’t be afraid to be a mystery to yourself. So many times we do things or take certain directions that we don’t understand. It is only much later that we see how that action fit perfectly and inevitably to the overall pattern of our life. That is why it is so important to be willing to take a chance on our inspiration, our intuition, our hunger. When we override our deepest desires with ‘practical, ‘reasonable’ considerations we are not only wasting our time, we are passing up precious opportunities that will not come again.
– Reggie Ray
What do we learn? Well, we learn that over the entire inhabited world, in spite of many colorful and distracting variations of nomenclature and costumes, the episodes and personages of myth, legend, fairytale, and fable remain, and have remained throughout all time, essentially the same. Also we learn that these mysteriously constant personages and episodes are precisely those that have been upsetting or delighting us in our personal fantasies and dreams. Oedipus and Orestes…, the Sun Bird and the Serpent are known not only to the scholar’s study but also to the lunatic asylum and the nightly pillow. Mythology, in other words, is not an outmoded quaintness of the past, but a living complex of archetypal, dynamic images, native to, and eloquent of, some constant, fundamental stratum of the human psyche. And that stratum is the source of the vital energies of our being. Out of it proceed all the fate-creating drives and fears of our lives. While our educated, modern waking-consciousness has been going forward on the wheels and wings of progress, this recalcitrant, dream-creating, wish-creating, under-consciousness has been holding to its primeval companions all the time, the demons and the gods.
Apparently, then, the archetypal figures of myth undercut the rational interests of our conscious life, and touch directly the vital centers of the unconscious. The artist who knew how to manipulate these archetypes would be able to conjure with the energies of the human soul. For the symbols are as potent as they ever were. The artist who really knew their secrets might still play the magician—the priest of the potent sign—working marvels purging the community of its pestilential devils and bringing purity and peace. Only, we should tend to explain his effects in psychological rather than theological terms: the heavens and hells being now reinterpreted as chambers of the unconscious. And we should revere him no less than he was revered in the days of yore, when his poems conjured thunderheads and his dances moved the spirits of the soil.
– Joseph Campbell, The Ecstasy of Being. New World Library. 2017, The Ecstasy of Being is a brand new collection of Campbell’s writings on Mythology and Dance from JCF and our partners at New World Library.
Just staying at a holy place
doesn’t make you holier.
Just staying at a place of learning
doesn’t make you more learned.
Meeting true Masters of Wisdom and Compassion, won’t automatically make you wiser and more compassionate.
It all depends on your motivation, aspiration, storehouse of what is called merit, and sincere attitude.
It all depends on your openness, genuine wish to receive, learn and grow.
It is true that without that, the Buddha could be right in front of you and you wouldn’t know.
– Belle Heywood
If you inherently long for something, become it first. If you want gardens, become the gardener. If you want love, embody love. If you want mental stimulation, change the conversation. If you want peace, exude calmness. If you want to fill your world with artists, begin to paint. If you want to be valued, respect your own time. If you want to live ecstatically, find the ecstasy within yourself. This is how to draw it in, day by day, inch by inch.
– Victoria Erickson
It is not so much where my motivation comes from but rather how it manages to survive.
– Louise Bourgeois.
Crush the eggshell of the mind and unfold your wings in the open sky. Destroy the hut of duality and inhabit the expansive mansion of pure awareness. There are no other enemies or obstacles to overcome and vanquish. Ignorance – dualistic thinking – is the great demon obstructing your path. Slay it right now and be free!
– Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche
Rainer Maria Rilke:
Oh not because there is happiness,
that rash profit taken just prior to impending loss,
not out of curiosity, or to give the heart practice,
reasons that would hold for the laurel too…
but because being here is so much, and because everything
in this fleeting world seems to need us, and
strangely speaks to us. Us, the most fleeting. Once
for everything, only once. Once and no more. And we, too,
only once. Never again. But to have been,
this once, if only this once:
to have been of the earth can never be taken back.
Just as an interest in poetry is really an interest in the universe, the problems of translations are really the problems of how to describe the world.
Rilke’s, The Duino Elegies, demand a radical openness to the world… they invite you to think of your consciousness as a resonant, harmonizing life-form.
They also invite you to reclaim the qualia stored inside your concepts—to consider human experience in its raw, exalted form.
If Rilke’s poetry has any relevance to twenty-first century Americans, it’s because we worry, now more than ever, that we are losing unmediated experience.
We’re busy, we’re sleepless, we’re medicated, and we’re marooned in the everyday.
In his introduction to Edward Snow’s, The Poetry of Rilke (2009), writer, Adam Zagajewski, explains that Rilke was on a mission to become real (or feel alive, as some might say).
His own version of eat-pray-love was rather idiosyncratic: he confused the poverty of Russian peasants for noble asceticism, he cherry-picked apocryphal texts, and he fell for a woman, Lou Salome, who also had a thing with Frederic Nietzsche. His lifelong struggle to make pure art, inspired by Cezanne and the sculptor Rodin, prevented him from finally accepting any stable doctrine.
It also prevented him from pursuing romance in real life (as Gass puts it: women were the Muse, to be courted through the post.)… Zagajewski claims that Rilke is not a poet of innocence: only silence is innocent, and he still speaks to us, Zagajewski writes of Rilke.
The angel’s light hands
would come more fiercely to interrogate you,
and rush to seize you blazing like a star,
and bend you as if trying to create you,
and break you open, out of who you are.
To be broken out of who we are: is this what we’re hoping for?
Is this why we turn to poetry? Robert Hass [translator and critic] claims that the Duino Elegies are “an argument against our lived, ordinary lives.”
They were written, after all, during a time when ordinary life was becoming increasingly corporatized; the composition itself was delayed by petty bourgeois concerns. As Hass tells it, one morning in late January of 1922, Rilke received a troubling business letter. He took a stroll around the castle of his wealthy friend and patron, wondering how to respond.
At some point, he was inspired to write the poems that would define his career.
First, he answered the business letter, and then he dealt with his cosmic vision. This is “Modernism.”
Modernist poets understood that the average person’s consciousness is narrowed, perverted, corrupted, and wasted by the burden of daily life.
“Difficult” poetry was meant to reveal the reality hidden within this matrix. In contrast to the Romantic myth of the poet as constant nightingale, T.S. Eliot thought of himself as a part-time mystic. Here he is on the relationship between poetic and religious experience:
To me it seems that at these moments, which are characterized by the sudden lifting of the burden of anxiety and fear which presses upon our daily life so steadily that we are unaware of it, what happens is something negative: not ‘inspiration’ as we commonly think of it, but the breaking down of strong habitual barriers—which tend to reform very quickly.
– Excerpted and adapted from an article of literary criticism, by Drew Calvert in a 2016 issue of The American Reader
the cup of grief is never full
nor is the cup of joy ∙
we build exactly what we build ∙
…
destroy what we destroy ∙
we have just what we have, no more ∙
we are just what we are ∙
consuming this, our puddled rock,
spiraling through the stars –
wakening is no act of will,
it falls with shock and pain,
and if it does not outright kill,
when it comes, both cups may spill –
– E.M.
let us seek…
not to intimidate, but to communicate.
not to win the war, but stop the fighting.
not to lead, but to walk beside of….
– Eric Cockrell
Compromise
Stop asking me to swallow
something I can’t digest
Your jagged little pills…
difficult to ingest
Are bitter to the eye
and painful for the soul
I would rather die
than swallow each one whole
– Kay Salady
Staring at the ceiling, resting my face on my hand, like somebody stealing up on a fresh idea, or lying in wait for gleam of inspiration. After a few hours I realise I wasn’t there on the ceiling, or here on the chair, and my mind was blank. I wasabsorbed in nothing, in total, complete emptiness, and free from pain. I was neither sad nor happy, for nothingness has no connection to emotion or time…. I was nothing in the presence of nothing, and I was calm, trusting, confident. For how lovely it is for a person to be nothing, only once, no more!
– Zen master Mahmoud Darwish
Frank La Rue Owen:
The custodians of other realities fill in the gaps where they can. Like an old blanket, the system frays in parts, is re-woven in others. The fat cats won’t care until forces beyond their control (fate, karma, balance) serves them humble pie and suffering touches their life, or those in their immediate sphere. ‘Til then, their singular focus is their earning. Concurrently, many modernistas are caught in trance; automatons unaware how they play into the hands of schemes; becoming hungry ghosts to feed hungry ghosts. Others, who suffer by their own hand, answer to the same thing, but differently. The adage: People do not change until the pain of change is less than the pain of staying the same. Applies to many things, individual life, oil dependency, cultures of abuse, climate change. Meanwhile, and I’ve seen it firsthand, some of the children of the oppressor culture (who absorb much internally including abusive energy and word shrapnel from Patriarchy) slowly become the opposite of the previous generation, or find themselves searching for its opposite without realizing they are on a quest. “The Empire” has the upper hand right now, but there is something growing under the surface of all this that the Termite People, the Takers of the Fat, the Modernistas, the Great White Father, the “Good Ol’ Boy Klub” cannot see. And yet, the suffering that accompanies the whole thing is real — from vets to Puerto Rico, kids on the rez to mamas in the inner city. The whole great catastrophe breaks my heart, daily. Somehow there are moments of beauty that appear in-between.
have you ever heard a child crying…
for his daddy to find a job?
for his mother not to give up?
for something to eat?
for a place to sleep?…
for a coat to keep his sister warm?
for morning to come?
do you really think it matters
what color he is?
what language he speaks?
what God he believes in?
i mean, really!
– eric cockrell
Forest Orison:
Whoever spoke to me first—
rock, wind, bird, or fir—whoever broke
the membrane of silence…
(I watched its tatters waft like
rags of albumen in water)
whoever made skin skin, not
air, not fur, not sand, not fiber,
whoever uprooted me from the soil
of nothing, whacked breath into me,
unleashed my voice, I ask you now:
Come back.
I know you’re there. I see
your hoofprints in muck, your
signature in torn tree bark, hear
your rowdy scuffle as I walk by.
The leaves Sway. Where you’ve nested
the pressed grass cups form without
substance. Smack in my path
your scat sings its small joke:
blackness riddled with seed and sign.
I’ve heard you breathing softly
snuffling to smell my smell
moving near and ever away.
Your tail has flicked fire on the path
before me, your shape assembled
from deep within the patterned trees,
then come apart. In the rain
in the brisk sigh of ice on the river.
I’ve heard your voices.
When I call, you answer with
a whoosh and shut of air,
and ringing silence.
I ask again and will again:
Come back.
I have been trying to read
the script cut in these hills—
a language carved in the shimmer of stubble
and the solid lines of soil, spoken
in the thud of apples falling …
and the rasp of corn stalks finally bare…Transcribed onto my human tongue
I believe it might sound like a lullaby,
or the simplest grace at table.
Across the gathering stillness
simply this: “For all that we have received,
dear God, make us truly grateful.
– Lynn Ungar
Sometimes we’re asked to drift away from the crowd in order to be found by what we love.
– Mark Nepo, Things That Join the Sea and the Sky
Study and practice are both very important, but they must go hand in hand. Faith without knowledge is not sufficient. Faith needs to be supported by reason. However intellectual understanding that is not applied in practice is also of little use. Whatever we learn from study we need to apply sincerely in our daily lives.
– Dalai Lama
The melancholic errs by turning against his own ego all the critical energies that ought to be directed outward against the powers of the status quo. … Encouraged to draw all of his aggressions inward, away from the true source of discontent, the compliant melancholic sets up a superegoic agency harboring the ego’s own former rage against the object. … Introjection becomes a form of deflected critique. Meanwhile, the berated and debased ego, busy with its own internal ins…ufficiencies and thoroughly discouraged from political activism, is not only fully censured but also is fashioned into a willing, productive—if ultimately impotent—participant in society. … The ideal subject under capitalism is melancholic.
– Klaus Mladek and George Edmondson, A Politics of Melancholia, Leftist Ontology
From Pelagius:
He is a Christian …
who is seen to have no feigning or pretense in his heart,
whose soul is open and unspotted,…
whose conscience is faithful and pure,
whose whole mind is on God,
whose whole hope is in Christ,
who desires heavenly things rather than earthly.
Collins Emeghara:
I often talk about you
No need to go
To Babylon to hear
It from a little bird…
…
No need to look
For a seer in Egypt…
Get it straight
From me now, what
You heard is true, yes
I often talk about you…
When I sleep I talk
And laugh with you as
If you’re hiding behind the dream…
Talking like a child
That’s playing in the dream…
And yes
I often ask
About you too…
In every Street
In the market place
Each day I demand to
Know why you’re keeping quiet…
You make me wonder
If you’re in good health?
You make me wonder
If everything is
All right
With you…
Yes is true,
I often ask about you…
Is not a gossip
What you heard is true
I often talk about you…
In my songs
In my poems
I often talk about you…
When I stand here
On this mountain top
And read my poems
Oh, I read them
To you…
Yes is true
I often talk
About you…
I often ask about you
When I sit here on cloud 9
To talk with the Ring stars…
Yes I always ask
If they’ve seen you by chance…
Even the Earth knows
That I often ask about you
Each day of my life…
It’s now I know
That I did you wrong…
It’s now I know
That I treat you bad…
It’s now I know
That I made you cry…
But I often talk
About you…
Talking to your shadows
Telling the sun about you
Asking the moon about you…
But is only now that I know
That I’m loosing my mind…
But is only now that I know
That I’m going crazy at last
Yes I’m airtight without you…
No doubt what
You heard is true…
I often think about you
I often dream about you
I often ask about you, and
I’ll always talk about you
Each day of my life
Until the end
Of time…
Clarity is of no importance because nobody listens and nobody knows what you mean no matter what you mean, nor how clearly you mean what you mean. But if you have vitality enough of knowing enough of what you mean, somebody and sometime and sometimes a great many will have to realize that you know what you mean and so they will agree that you mean what you know, what you know you mean, which is as near as anybody can come to understanding any one.
– Gertrude Stein
More fundamental than religion is our basic human spirituality. We have a basic human disposition towards love, kindness and affection, irrespective of whether we have a religious framework or not. When we nurture this most basic human resource – when we set about cultivating those basic inner values which we all appreciate in others, then we start to live spiritually.
– Dalai Lama
Sam Hamill — To the Tune: Boat of Stars
Spring after spring, I sat before my mirror.
Now I tire of braiding plum buds in my hair.
I’ve gone another year without you,
shuddering with each letter—
since you’ve been gone,
even wine has lost its flavor.
I wept until it was autumn,
my thoughts going south beside you.
Even the gates of heaven
are nearer to me now than you.
– Li Ch’ing-chao
To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to the violence of our times.
– Thomas Merton
Let the bucket of memory down into the well,
bring it up. Cool, cool minutes. No one
stirring, no plans. Just being there.
This is what the whole thing is about.
– William Stafford
THE LAYERS
I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.
– Stanley Kunitz
Picture time travel as nothing more than knocking your half-read book to the floor and losing your place. You pick up the book and open the pages to a scene too early or late, but never exactly where you’d been reading.
– Chuck Palahniuk
The world is a magic book, and we its sentences.
We read it and read ourselves.
We close it and turn the page down
And never come back,
Returned to what we once were before we became what we are.
This is the tale the world tells, this is the way it ends.
– Charles Wright
One of your smiles erases an entire past:
– Pablo Neruda
Perhaps this is what we are really up against, as translators and as poets: a distorted scale of values, a denigration of feeling and imagination, a denial of the inner world.
– Gounil Brown
God is in the details.
– Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
Think of an archaeologist who brushes the dirt away. Rewrite, rewrite, until you reach what’s under the surface. Or put differently, the sense you have at the beginning is similar to standing in a dark corridor. You can not see it, but you know there is an end to the corridor. The essential element of the poem exists ahead of time, and you have to keep working to reach it.
– Wyatt Prunty
Thread your wires and electric eye
through all my sewers and my pipes
until you find the soul.
Make it sing, or fly, or shriek.
Grant me at least the feeling
that there is something unfinished in me,
something I still have to learn from,
down there,
opening its eyes in the dark.
– Tony Hoagland, Maybe a Hero Is Crossing the Mountains
There is a blueprint of something never finished, something I’ll never
Find my way out of, some web where the light rocks, back & forth,
Holding me in a time that’s gone, bee at the windowsill & the cold
Coming back as it has to, tapping at the glass.
– Larry Levis
Earth is a black fruit that the sky bites.
– Pablo Neruda
you will find the blue hills … with the autumnal shadows silently sleeping on them, and there will be a glory lingering round the day, so you’ll know autumn has been here …
– Emily Dickinson
I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times, in life after life, in age after age forever.
– Rabindranath Tagore
I often long for you and wish to speak only to you.
– Anne Sexton, from a letter to Alfred Sexton
The stranger, in spite of everything, smiles at me, she pushes aside the autumns and sits beside me.
– Roberto Bolaño
So many things show their beauty when we go quiet. So many truths are present when we look up from under our trouble.
– Mark Nepo, Things That Join the Sea and the Sky
Silence in the face of oppression isn’t love it’s compliance, it’s participation. Opposing it is how I show who and what I am for.
– John Pavlovitz, pastor
Red Hawk:
THE TRANSFORMATION
What prayer or magic spell or luck
leaves us breathless, thunder struck
just from looking in each other’s eyes
across the breakfast table? Surprise
of love comes as a kind of Divine Grace,
as if I’d never seen your face
before and now am stunned that you adore
the likes of me; whatever for
I do not know but now you’re stuck
and seem enamored of my face, its every ruck
and deep crevasse your sheer delight; it defies
all reason. Yet this spell causes us to rise
and with no word we tenderly embrace.
The sweetest feelings rush to fill the space
as if God came in through an open door
and we are nothing like we were before.
I breathe easier into my ribs now as I drive,
captivated by bright citrine
fading into brown leaves
clinging to trees, defying storms into
a stirring display of stubbornness.
I am writing verse out of mud
below everything
that would land on the makeshift cliffs
below gratitude.
Are we not often in the act of missing:
someone, something, some act, some failure
in our becoming,
the tarnished platitudes that tuck in
next to the fork and knife, folded napkins, sullied rituals
that belong to us
with their secret cup of blood.
Thank you for the shadow work
and for the blessed fall from a frozen
idealization.
The ancestors’ fingers knead the expanse of time like a challah bread,
this braid of reckoning
that seeks to weave us in
our many ferments, yeasted
with a plentitude of mistakes,
then placed to cook through
the aeons.
An offering to
our clumsy attempts toward
beauty
and the north star of justice,
in this earth and sky,
the worlding
that graces us a million times
and more,
teaches us
what the word forgiveness
could even begin
to convey.
I listen.
– Margo Stebbing
Nithya Shanti:
The purpose of my life
Is spreading happiness
In my own curious ways
Thereby reminding others
That their purpose
Is spreading happiness
In their own curious ways
Thereby reminding others
That their purpose
Is spreading happiness
In their own curious ways
…And on and on
This is my master plan
For shaking up
And waking up
The whole universe
Which curiously enough
Is perfect just as it is.
The global elite is strikingly helpless to enact any course of action that deviates substantially from the current one.
– Charles Eisenstein
I am not other people, and other people are not me.
– Dogen
Poetry is what grasps the nerves of feelings. It is a live, working psychology.
– Sakutarō Hagiwara
I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do.
— Leonardo da Vinci
SWEATER WEATHER: A LOVE SONG TO LANGUAGE
Never better, mad as a hatter,
right as rain, might and main,
hanky-panky, hot toddy,
hoity-toity, cold shoulder,
bowled over, rolling in clover,
low blow, no soap, hope
against hope, pay the piper,
liar liar pants on fire,
high and dry, shoo-fly pie,
fiddle-faddle, fit as a fiddle,
sultan of swat, muskrat
ramble, fat and sassy,
flimflam, happy as a clam,
cat’s pajamas, bee’s knees,
peas in a pod, pleased as punch,
pretty as a picture, nothing much,
lift the latch, double dutch,
helter-skelter, hurdy-gurdy,
early bird, feathered friend,
dumb cluck, buck up,
shilly-shally, willy-nilly,
roly-poly, holy moly,
loose lips sink ships,
spitting image, nip in the air,
hale and hearty, part and parcel,
upsy-daisy, lazy days,
maybe baby, up to snuff,
flibbertigibbet, honky-tonk,
spic and span, handyman
cool as a cucumber, blue moon,
high as a kite, night and noon,
love me or leave me, seventh heaven,
up and about, over and out.
– Sharon Bryan, Flying Blind
Why even say the song
if the heart is so small?
– Pablo Neruda
I have steadily endeavoured to keep my mind free so to give up any hypothesis, however much beloved (and I cannot resist forming one on every subject), as soon as facts are shown to be opposed to it. Indeed, I have had no choice but to act in this manner, for with the exception of the Coral Reefs, I cannot remember a single first-formed hypothesis which had not after a time to be given up or greatly modified. This has naturally led me to distrust greatly deductive reasoning in the mixed sciences. On the other hand, I am not very sceptical,–a frame of mind which I believe to be injurious to the progress of science. A good deal of scepticism in a scientific man is advisable to avoid much loss of time, but I have met with not a few men, who, I feel sure, have often thus been deterred from experiment or observations, which would have proved directly or indirectly serviceable.
– Charles Darwin
The Little Hole
by George Oppen
The little hole in the eye
Williams called it, the little hole
Has exposed us naked
To the world
And will not close.
Blankly the world
Looks in
And we compose
Colors
And the sense
Of home
And there are those
In it so violent
And so alone
They cannot rest.
Icarus, by Yukio Mishima
Do I, then, belong to the heavens?
Why, if not so, should the heavens
Fix me thus with their ceaseless blue stare,
Luring me on, and my mind, higher
Ever higher, up into the sky,
Drawing me ceaselessly up
To heights far, far above the human?
Why, when balance has been strictly studied
And flight calculated with the best of reason
Till no aberrant element should, by rights, remain-
Why, still, should the lust for ascension
Seem, in itself, so close to madness?
Nothing is that can satify me;
Earthly novelty is too soon dulled;
I am drawn higher and higher, more unstable,
Closer and closer to the sun’s effulgence.
Why do these rays of reason destroy me?
Villages below and meandering streams
Grow tolerable as our distance grows.
Why do they plead, approve, lure me
With promise that I may love the human
If only it is seen, thus, from afar-
Although the goal could never have been love,
Nor, had it been, could I ever have
Belonged to the heavens?
I have not envied the bird its freedom
Nor have I longed for the ease of Nature,
Driven by naught save this strange yearning
For the higher, and the closer, to plunge myself
Into the deep sky’s blue, so contrary
To all organic joys, so far
From pleasures of superiority
But higher, and higher,
Dazzled, perhaps, by the dizzy incandescence
Of waxen wings.
Or do I then
Belong, after all, to the earth?
Why, if not so, should the earth
Show such swiftness to encompass my fall?
Granting no space to think or feel,
Why did the soft, indolent earth thus
Greet me with the shock of steel plate?
Did the soft earth thus turn to steel
Only to show me my own softness?
That Nature might bring home to me
That to fall, not to fly, is in the order of things,
More natural by far than that improbable passion?
Is the blue of the sky then a dream?
Was it devised by the earth, to which I belonged,
On account of the fleeting, white-hot intoxication
Achieved for a moment by waxen wings?
And did the heavens abet the plan to punish me?
To punish me for not believing in myself
Or for believing too much;
Too earger to know where lay my allegiance
Or vainly assuming that already I knew all;
For wanting to fly off
To the unknown
Or the known:
Both of them a single, blue speck of an idea?
…Many of us are lonely. And not because we need a new therapy, or mantra, or clever idea, we are lonely because we don’t speak to each other in our old names anymore. That requires real care and an acute beholding. The antelope-dust in our bones misses it. And if the reader can’t understand quite what I mean then that’s fine, but I won’t give anymore hints.
A lot of people loathe the way I write, and I take no great offence in that.
There are certain tangles I refuse to un-comb because I suspect a nymph may be sheltering in the discreet bough of an idea, or a leafy cluster of syntax. If I straighten everything out then she may have no home any more. I couldn’t bear that. Certain ideas or turns of phrase are shards of moonlight, or the hot flank of a tiger.
I’m not writing for academic acclaim or for royalties or to influence a million people, I’m writing a love letter to the holy maker of all things. I’m trying to speak lovingly and truthfully about the things I see quietly closing the door to this world and leaving. There are as many tears splashed on my pages as there is lines of ink.
I’m not writing about the gods I’m writing TO the gods. That’s a dangerous sentiment, but there we have it. I experience them as having an objective reality that is certainly intricately connected to ours, but in no way dependent on it. I don’t invoke the name Dionysus with an ironic wink.
As well as all the animal species and plants leaving, certain energies are still rough-housing about the place. It’s naive and ludicrous to think the gods don’t exist If we don’t think about them.
Consider the implications, the smugness of that statement.
…..If you experience soul as something primarily outside the body then the tendency to internalise sensations of longing switches into a much greater sensual range. It’s likely you have most of what you need in close proximity if you have the guts, tenacity and lack of hysteria to follow it. Most of us don’t like what’s right in front of us.
Your life experience is the very prayer rug you are kneeling on. That’s your axis-mundi, your Gethsemane, your Grail Castle, your holy hills of South Dakota.
If you don’t like it, then create a better weave!
….A decent storyteller lives in a tension of tradition bearer and artist-as-destroyer.
The stories we tell ourselves are spells of a sort. Each spell has a mythopoetic inner-structure to the words that then influence our experience of the world we witness constantly materialising around us. Some spells liberate, some trap.
That’s not to fall into wishful affirmations night and day. The situation is more complex. As phenomenologists would say, there’s a wisdom in seeing things as they are – but that doesn’t mean you can’t negotiate with their ‘are-ness’.
We are then into a big conversation about the capacity of imagination to materialise that negotiation.
So what do stories do? They provoke images that we fall in love with, and in doing so both tenderise and temper the heart. That fascinate us, educate us, infuriate us, throw a cloak over the seeming mundanity of our years and, while sheltering under that woven world, we realise that the cloak is the blue tent of the sky and the earth we stand upon is teeming with flowering miracles.
A tempered heart behaves differently. It has a relationship to passion that doesn’t require ultimate annihilation of its obsession, but stands in perennial courtship, not trading in a temporary seduction. Speaking as a man, it understands husbandry.
A mythic sensibility is a call to action – has to be, this is love story! – but an action that comes not from hysteria but from reverie. The acuity of response, and then the fidelity to that response, is what could create the outer changes you are referring to.
There is a great deal of grief coming to us, and it’s myth that helps us curate that grief, make us usefully fall in love with it, not file it away as a statistic.
– Martin Shaw, 2017
Good morning!
I greet one tree after another–
valley path
– Mitsu Suzuki
I have found both freedom and safety in my madness; the freedom of loneliness and the safety from being understood, for those who understand us enslave something in us.
– Kahlil Gibran
To mine the hidden gold within yourself requires a journey on The Darkened Road. People have hellish associations with it, and our mythologies certainly speak of the trials and tribulations of it too. But the Darkened Road leads to luminosity. Enlightenment means a “lightening up.” In contrast, the hell created in reality by avoiding the depths of one’s own inner work is a lasting one.
– doña Río
Most people do not willingly take what my late teacher called The Darkened Road. They may be thrust upon it by an event, but it is a different matter altogether when a “Traveler,” by their own volition, consciously takes some part of their own brokenness, or a part of this broken world we live in (which is another way of pointing at the same thing), down into the depths to work with it. Despite what the lifeless language of the Modernista World says, it is not collapse in the depressive sense. It is a conscious turning inward and downward; a form of Lower World travel in the sense of dismemberment, healing, and soul-making. Not understanding this domain may be one of the greatest things that imperils us as a byproduct of cultures moving away from their shamanic roots and mystery traditions. Mainstream culture can’t recognize or understand the importance of people engaging in such work. Simultaneously, for those who do, it becomes painfully obvious where such work isn’t happening.
– Frank Saizan Owen
Rebecca Solnit:
On mornings when the water is still, because the tides are gentle and the wind is down, the surface of the bay becomes a mirror, and on cloudy days—for it’s often overcast days that are so tranquil—it’s as though you’re rowing through the sky, your oars breaking the reflection or rather making ripples run through the image of the clouds and heavens. The boat leaves a trail of current that fans out and fans in, so that a sort of cross-hatched fishtail follows you, made of multiple parallel lines that move and dissolve as the agitation calms and the mirror reasserts itself. The still water moves, but it is still glossy, still reflective, so a fragmented sky is there in the ripples.
The oars make grand ripples that send out concentric rings, like shock waves, that intersect behind the boat, and you leave a wake and a series of rings behind you, though which sometimes a bird dives or a seal surfaces. It looks like watered silk, like moire, and facing backward as we row, we see it all.
Further out into the bay the other morning, the water undulated in gentle ripples—long lines of emerging and vanishing ovals surrounded by lines that also appear and erase themselves as new ones appear. The sky was clouded and the early light was still golden. In the channel the sky appeared green, out on the open water closer to blue, so the blue water was full of golden rings and pale clouds, and what was most beautiful and precious was, like dew on grass in first light, like sunrise, like children’s laughter, most fleeting, renewable but not capturable.
I had to stop rowing over and over to gaze at the beauty of it, and then resume my habit of making ripples through the calm water that that morning was a heaven unto itself. For an hour the whole world was pale blue and gold, was calm and quiet, was alive everywhere but with few beings in it, was the otherworldly world that appears when you go out, you pay attention, when you’re fortunate.
Writers matter in a society to the extent that we can help that society hear its unvoiced longing, encounter its erased and disregarded selves, break with complacency, numbness, despair.
– Adrienne Rich
When faced with the choice between engaging with reality or engaging with what Erich Fromm calls the “necrophiliac” world of wealth and power, choose life, wha…tever the apparent costs may be. Your peers might at first look down on you: poor Nina, she’s twenty-six and she still doesn’t own a car. But those who have put wealth and power above life are living in the world of death, in which the living put their tombstones – their framed certificates signifying acceptance to that world – on their walls.
Remember that even the editor of the Times, for all his income and prestige, is still a functionary, who must still take orders from his boss. He has less freedom than we do, and being the editor of the Times is as good as it gets.
You know you have only one life. You know it is a precious, extraordinary, unrepeatable thing: the product of billions of years of serendipity and evolution. So why waste it by handing it over to the living dead?
– George Monboit
What sort of person says that he or she wants to be polished and pure, then complains about being handled roughly?…
You had better run from me. My words are fire.
– J. Rumi
..
And from David Whyte:
The body in full presence
holds its first creative essence
in the pen that touches paper.
Lifting the glass that holds the wine,
this beckoning uncertainty is mine.
I’ll follow my line to an early death,
feeling out rhythm in the spoken breath
and startled by flame
this arrogance shall be my moth,
flying with his burning cloth.
Then humility will rise
out of poetry’s deep surmise,
and I will have confidence in my powers;
wanting this presence, burnt by the past,
I’ll die in the first line — and become the last.
…
– David Whyte
Night Mirror
Li-Young, don’t feel lonely
when you look up
into great night and find
yourself the far face peering
hugely out from between
a star and a star. All that space
the nighthawk plunges through,
homing, all that distance beyond embrace,
what is it but your won infinity.
And don’t be afraid
when, eyes closed, you look inside you
and find night is both
the silence tolling after stars
and the final word
that founds all beginning, find night,
abyss and shuttle,
a finished cloth
frayed by the years, then gathered
in the songs and games
mothers teach their children.
Look again
and find yourself changed
and changing, now the bewildered honey
fallen into your own hands,
now the immaculate fruit born of hunger.
Now the unequaled perfume of your dying.
And time? Time is the salty wake
of your stunned entrance upon
no name.
– Li-Young Lee
We are only about three hundred generations from ten thousand years ago.
Although we are here today, tomorrow cannot be guaranteed. Keep this in mind! Keep this in mind!
– Twelfth-century Korean Buddhist master Chinul.
Are we ready to think of all humanity as a living tree, carrying on splendidly without us? We easily regard a beehive or an ant colony as a single organism, and even a school of fish, a flock of dunlin, a herd of elk. And we easily and correctly regard an aggregate of individuals, a sponge or coral or lichen or slime mold as one creature – but us? When we people differ, and know our consciousness, and love? Even lovers, even twins, are strangers who will love and die alone. And we like it this way, at least in the West; we prefer to endure any agony of isolation rather than to merge and extinguish our selves in an abstract ‘humanity’ whose fate we should hold dearer than our own. Who could say, I’m in agony because my child died, but that’s all right: Mankind as a whole has abundant children? The religious idea sooner or later challenges the notion of the individual. The Buddha taught each disciple to vanquish his fancy that he possessed an individual self. Huston Smith suggests that our individuality resembles a snowflake’s: The seas evaporate water, clouds build and loose water in snowflakes, which dissolve and go to sea. The simile galls. What have I to do with the ocean, I with my unique and novel hexagon and spikes? Is my very mind a wave in the ocean, a wave the wind flattens, a flaw the wind draws like a finger?
We know we must yield, if only intellectually. Okay, we’re a lousy snowflake. Okay, we’re a tree. These dead loved ones we mourn were only those brown lower branches a tree shades and kills as it grows; the tree itself is thriving. But what kind of tree are we growing here, that could be worth such waste and pain? For each of us loses all we love, everyone we love. We grieve and leave. What marvels shall these future whizzes, damn their eyes, accomplish?
– Annie Dillard
The more we move out of the world of dualities, the world of pros and cons, which is a fear-based reality, the more free we become to live in the moment, which is another way of defining spontaneity.
– Maticintin
My God, It’s Full of Stars
BY TRACY K. SMITH
1.
We like to think of it as parallel to what we know,
Only bigger. One man against the authorities.
Or one man against a city of zombies. One man
Who is not, in fact, a man, sent to understand
The caravan of men now chasing him like red ants
Let loose down the pants of America. Man on the run.
Man with a ship to catch, a payload to drop,
This message going out to all of space. . . . Though
Maybe it’s more like life below the sea: silent,
Buoyant, bizarrely benign. Relics
Of an outmoded design. Some like to imagine
A cosmic mother watching through a spray of stars,
Mouthing yes, yes as we toddle toward the light,
Biting her lip if we teeter at some ledge. Longing
To sweep us to her breast, she hopes for the best
While the father storms through adjacent rooms
Ranting with the force of Kingdom Come,
Not caring anymore what might snap us in its jaw.
Sometimes, what I see is a library in a rural community.
All the tall shelves in the big open room. And the pencils
In a cup at Circulation, gnawed on by the entire population.
The books have lived here all along, belonging
For weeks at a time to one or another in the brief sequence
Of family names, speaking (at night mostly) to a face,
A pair of eyes. The most remarkable lies.
2.
Charlton Heston is waiting to be let in. He asked once politely.
A second time with force from the diaphragm. The third time,
He did it like Moses: arms raised high, face an apocryphal white.
Shirt crisp, suit trim, he stoops a little coming in,
Then grows tall. He scans the room. He stands until I gesture,
Then he sits. Birds commence their evening chatter. Someone fires
Charcoals out below. He’ll take a whiskey if I have it. Water if I don’t.
I ask him to start from the beginning, but he goes only halfway back.
That was the future once, he says. Before the world went upside down.
Hero, survivor, God’s right hand man, I know he sees the blank
Surface of the moon where I see a language built from brick and bone.
He sits straight in his seat, takes a long, slow high-thespian breath,
Then lets it go. For all I know, I was the last true man on this earth. And:
May I smoke? The voices outside soften. Planes jet past heading off or back.
Someone cries that she does not want to go to bed. Footsteps overhead.
A fountain in the neighbor’s yard babbles to itself, and the night air
Lifts the sound indoors. It was another time, he says, picking up again.
We were pioneers. Will you fight to stay alive here, riding the earth
Toward God-knows-where? I think of Atlantis buried under ice, gone
One day from sight, the shore from which it rose now glacial and stark.
Our eyes adjust to the dark.
3.
Perhaps the great error is believing we’re alone,
That the others have come and gone—a momentary blip—
When all along, space might be choc-full of traffic,
Bursting at the seams with energy we neither feel
Nor see, flush against us, living, dying, deciding,
Setting solid feet down on planets everywhere,
Bowing to the great stars that command, pitching stones
At whatever are their moons. They live wondering
If they are the only ones, knowing only the wish to know,
And the great black distance they—we—flicker in.
Maybe the dead know, their eyes widening at last,
Seeing the high beams of a million galaxies flick on
At twilight. Hearing the engines flare, the horns
Not letting up, the frenzy of being. I want to be
One notch below bedlam, like a radio without a dial.
Wide open, so everything floods in at once.
And sealed tight, so nothing escapes. Not even time,
Which should curl in on itself and loop around like smoke.
So that I might be sitting now beside my father
As he raises a lit match to the bowl of his pipe
4.
In those last scenes of Kubrick’s 2001
When Dave is whisked into the center of space,
Which unfurls in an aurora of orgasmic light
Before opening wide, like a jungle orchid
For a love-struck bee, then goes liquid,
Paint-in-water, and then gauze wafting out and off,
Before, finally, the night tide, luminescent
And vague, swirls in, and on and on. . . .
In those last scenes, as he floats
Above Jupiter’s vast canyons and seas,
Over the lava strewn plains and mountains
Packed in ice, that whole time, he doesn’t blink.
In his little ship, blind to what he rides, whisked
Across the wide-screen of unparcelled time,
Who knows what blazes through his mind?
Is it still his life he moves through, or does
That end at the end of what he can name?
On set, it’s shot after shot till Kubrick is happy,
Then the costumes go back on their racks
And the great gleaming set goes black.
5.
When my father worked on the Hubble Telescope, he said
They operated like surgeons: scrubbed and sheathed
In papery green, the room a clean cold, a bright white.
He’d read Larry Niven at home, and drink scotch on the rocks,
His eyes exhausted and pink. These were the Reagan years,
When we lived with our finger on The Button and struggled
To view our enemies as children. My father spent whole seasons
Bowing before the oracle-eye, hungry for what it would find.
His face lit-up whenever anyone asked, and his arms would rise
As if he were weightless, perfectly at ease in the never-ending
Night of space. On the ground, we tied postcards to balloons
For peace. Prince Charles married Lady Di. Rock Hudson died.
We learned new words for things. The decade changed.
The first few pictures came back blurred, and I felt ashamed
For all the cheerful engineers, my father and his tribe. The second time,
The optics jibed. We saw to the edge of all there is—
So brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.
David Bedrick:
sometimes a river so red deep
gushes from my chest
even the Egyptian’s considered
letting my people go
The third color ever recorded in language is red. After, of course, black and white. Ancient language doesn’t show blue because people probably didn’t notice it as a thing.
– Sally J. Johnson
Darren Littlejohn:
Don’t fear failure. Fear being in the exact same place next year as you are today.
Arnie Kozak:
Silence, containment, and engagement make up the Holy Trinity of mindfulness. The practice of mindfulness automatically brings a measure of silence into our lives. Silence provides us the opportunity to taste stillness, to just be with the moment as it is. Resting in the moment helps us not to act on impulse. Our behavior becomes contained. Containment does not mean suppression, but rather that we are not pushed around by our thoughts and emotions. Rather than cutting us off from life, containment gives us the chance to engage it more fully without disruptions brought on by unruly thoughts and emotions. When we are engaged, life becomes more vivid. Sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and bodily sensations seem more available. Even the most ordinary circumstances become engaging.
Foreseeing
Middle age refers more
to landscape than to time:
it’s as if you’d reached
the top of a hill
and could see all the way
to the end of your life,
so you know without a doubt
that it has an end—
not that it will have,
but that it does have,
if only in outline—
so for the first time
you can see your life whole,
beginning and end not far
from where you stand,
the horizon in the distance—
the view makes you weep,
but it also has the beauty
of symmetry, like the earth
seen from space: you can’t help
but admire it from afar,
especially now, while it’s simple
to re-enter whenever you choose,
lying down in your life,
waking up to it
just as you always have—
except that the details resonate
by virtue of being contained,
as your own words
coming back to you
define the landscape,
remind you that it won’t go on
like this forever.
– Sharon Bryan
Nithya Shanti:
At some point
when we have
had our fill
of journeying
and exploring
and dabbling,
we will be called
to buckle down
and devote ourselves
to throughly integrating
all our musings
and learnings
and gatherings
into every fibre
of our being
by letting everything
we “know” die
and remerge
shining
all at once
as a singular clarity.
Ethan Nichtern:
In an enlightened society, the day of giving would come *before* the two days of rabid consumerism.
Folks are going to have to take a stand. And so are faith institutions. They’re going to have to decide what they’re going to be about…Because people are hurting! And people are struggling. And they’re looking for institutions, they’re looking for leaders, they’re looking for communities and resources to support them and to have their back.
– Nkosi Anderson
Most music tries to control its circumstances, just as most of us do. But there is another way to live. Accept indeterminacy as a principle, and you see your life in a new light, as a series of seemingly unrelated jewel-like stories within a dazzling setting of change and transformation. Recognizing that you don’t know where you stand, and you will begin to watch where you put your feet. That’s when the path appears.
– Kat Larsen, Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Art
In the jungle of civilization, in the stress of modern living, lies the test. Whatever you give out will come back to you. Hate, and you will receive hate in return. When you fill yourself with inharmonious thoughts and emotions, you are destroying yourself. Why hate or be angry with anyone? Love your enemies. Why stew in the heat of anger? If you become riled, get over it at once. Take a walk, count to ten or fifteen, or divert your mind to something pleasant. Let go of the desire to retaliate. When you are angry your brain is overheating, your heart is having valve trouble, your whole body is being devitalized. Exude peace and goodness; because that is the nature of the image of God within you — your true nature. Then no one can disturb you.
– Paramahansa Yogananda
What has happened in the last two thousand years is that we have been caught in this pattern of dualities where we have the above and the below. And the above is divine where God lives and the below is rather earthy and messy and carnal and naughty and evil and transient.
. . .
And one important aspect of this polarity is that the light is above and the dark is below. But the ancient Greeks and the other traditions they were connected with said, “No”. I explain this in great detail in all of my books, actually, because it’s a very, very fundamental theme for this tradition: the light is hidden in the darkness.
– Peter Kingsley
What America needs is one great healthy ability to say ‘No.’ To rest a minute and realize that many of the things being sought are unnecessary to a happy life. We are suffering in our cities, from a need of simple things.
– Carl Jung
This philosopher’s stone is really the elixir that’s the refinement of your body and mind in unison, displaying your consciousness….All that refinement has to come from within you…and that elixir is what transforms your life into what you want it to be. That’s when your dreams start to come true.
– Maticintin
Spirituality is being willing to go toward the thing that frightens us the most. And that’s *life. Life itself terrifies us! We have to go to places that we thought spirituality was a way to get away from. You can practice the dharma as an escape route only up to a certain point and then, as you know, the shit hits the fan. But that is a blessing, because then you realize that your whole strategy of creating an ego that works, that is so spiritual and so expansive, doesn’t work. So you give it up, and that is spirituality.
– Reggie Ray
I am committed to the view that the whole point and joy of human life is to integrate the spiritual with the material, the mystical with the sensuous, and the altruistic with a kind of proper self-love——since it is written that you must love your neighbor as yourself.
– Alan Watts
And the urgency which we now feel, if we are sensitive, and the urgency which most people express unconsciously when they are not so sensitive, is really the urgency of the divine world which is crying out to be remembered, is the cry of the divine beings who want to be a part of our lives again. They want us, they need us to remember that everything in existence is sacred.
– Peter Kingsley
Becoming more spiritually advanced does not mean becoming more spiritually complicated. It means we become simpler, as we learn to universally apply some very basic principles to all our circumstances: l) Only love is real; 2) What is not love is a call for love, and 3)Forgiveness heals all things. “How can I serve here?” replaces “What can I get here?,” and “How can I open my heart more?” replaces “How can I get that person to do what I want?”
– Marianne Williamson
I have been thinking a lot lately about why there isn’t an organized movement to dismantle this culture, and I have come to believe it is because most people, the poor and disenfranchised included, simply want a better seat on the moving train of civilization, whatever the costs. Like the Occupy movement, and many other dead movements before that, the majority of Westerners don’t really engage in an analysis and critique of the forces that keep them permanently victimized and downtrodden. Unless and until enough people actually begin to find this culture’s narratives abhorrent, this deadly train will continue at full momentum until the entire planet is in ruins.
Many of us talk about waking people up, with the belief that if only people could recognize that this corporate plutocracy will never serve them, and, in fact, harms them and all that they love, they will rise up and fight back. The problem with this thinking is that it doesn’t take into account the power of the American Dream. This dream infects the best minds, and it has existed for centuries in one form or another. The vast majority of people don’t truly care whether or not this culture is void of virtue, only that they are not allowed in the first class cars on this deadly train that is hurtling towards oblivion.
– Alexia Olson
…your life does not depend on reading true words, but true words depend on you reading them. for truth always depends on the sacred deeds of meeting. there is no liberation that is not enacted as a community of man. we must understand that the liberation of the self is an existential project of the liberated between. the liberated between is a way of relationship in society. healing cannot happen neither within nor without, but only in the between of i and thou…
– hune margulies, will and grace: meditations on the dialogical philosophy of martin buber
Phil Rockstroh:
Swirled by eddies of fate, buffeted by crosscurrents of happenstance, carried along in the infinite streams of a deathless dream of unfolding divinity, we have washed up on these shores we know as human existence, wherein we are gripped, and grappled by finite moments of fleeting experience.
Lost, possessed of only a ghostly memory of our point of departure, we seek solace in one another. Our mutual affinity of lostness we have termed love.
Thus: All is holy. Even our confusion.
The knowledge provides us with the courage to risk life and love.
One’s character is wrought as much by misapprehensions as it is by clarity; by one’s errors as well as one’s fleeting moments of triumph.
Success and failure, love and heartbreak, life and death…are bound together by the illusion of time.
In this way, we become imbued by the life-force and are free to seek impossible destiny.
Hune Margulies:
cardinal john henry newman said: “i sought to hear the voice of god and climbed the topmost steeple, but god declared: ‘go down again, i dwell among the people'”. this is a particularly beautiful dialogical insight. the song of god is the voice of the people, and so is her silence. and we will find god most of all dwelling amongst “the least of us”. as elbert hubbard, (of whom i did not until recently) said: “god will not look you over for medals, degrees or diplomas, but for scars.”
A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy dare live.
– Bertrand Russell
Silence is also a form of speaking … We’re always selecting what we say and what we don’t.
– Herta Müller
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Remember, remember always, that all of us, you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.
– Franklin D. Roosevelt
A life without love is of no account. Don’t ask yourself what kind of love you should seek, spiritual or material, divine or mundane, eastern or western…divisions only lead to more divisions. Love has no labels, no definitions. It is what it is, pure and simple. Love is the water of life. And a lover is a soul of fire! The universe turns differently when fire loves water.
– Shams Tabrizi, Rumi’s teacher
There is a work of art each of us was destined to create. That is the central point of our life, and -no matter how we try to deceive ourselves -we know how important it is to our happiness. Usually, that work of art is covered by years of fears, guilt and indecision. But, if we have no doubt as to our capability, we will fulfills our destiny. That is the only way to live with honor.
– Paulo Coelho, The Pilgrimage
A creative dialogue with life, responding to its offerings, gives you a life you want but couldn’t foresee.
– Thomas Moore
If we can find a way to feel hurt, rather than spread hurt, we can change. I believe in a world where we can make and share art and words that will help us find our way back to one other, that instead of yelling from afar and refusing to help each other when we’re struggling, we’ll find the courage to show up for each other.
– Brene Brown
Active, engaged, informed, creative, dedicated, energetic resistance works – and we need lots more of it.
– Rebecca Solnit
Why poke fun at others over the name of their donkey? Aren’t you riding one yourself?
– Deng-Ming Dao, 365 Tao
We are born into two forms of thinking: one is allied with wholeness and the other with parts. Each is necessary. Each has strengths to offer the other. Each specializes in a different kind of knowing, which might be distinguished as ‘abstract knowing’ and ‘embodied knowing’. If this book seems to favor the thinking of the body, or to demean abstract thinking, please understand this is not my intent. My concern is with wholeness, and my aim is to think with the whole of my being, which includes its abstract knowing. But in our culture we have grown as dependent on abstraction as an addict on her drugs—and we have fed that addiction at the expense of the earth and of our embodied experience of life. […] Our very attachment to solving life, in fact, diminishes our experience of it and our sensitivity to it. The gifts of abstract reasoning are wondrous, but if the whole disappears from your sight, you become blind to its harmony, numb to its mystery and detached from its reality. And then your own life will feel as random as you imagine the independent bits of the world to be. […] if I seem to lean in the direction of embodied knowing, it is merely my attempt to counter a deep imbalance that affects us all.
– Philip Shepherd, Radical Wholeness
Reading is a form of prayer, a guided meditation that briefly makes us believe we’re someone else, disrupting the delusion that we’re permanent and at the center of the universe.
– George Saunders
When we look into ourselves, we tend to fixate on our neurosis, restlessness, and aggression. Or we might fixate on how wonderful, accomplished, and invulnerable we are, but those feelings are usually superficial, covering up our insecurities. Take a look. There is something else, something more than all that. We are willing: willing to wait, willing to smile, willing to be decent. We shouldn’t discount that potential, that powerful seed of gentleness.
– Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche
Freedom cannot long exist in an
indifferent world.
– Eric Cockrell
DECEMBER 1ST
The vineyard country, russet, reddish, carmine-brown in this season.
A blue outline of hills above a fertile valley.
It’s warm as long as the sun does not set, in the shade cold returns.
A strong sauna and then swimming in a pool surrounded by trees.
Dark redwoods, transparent pale-leaved birches.
In their delicate network, a sliver of the moon.
I describe this for I have learned to doubt philosophy
And the visible world is all that remains.
– Czesław Miłosz
A man stepping into a river watches the ripple of his foot dissipate away into the waters, and he thinks about all those poems and songs that talk about impermanence, and he is tempted for a moment to become maudlin and existential about the way time washes away everything, but the truth is that his foot did make an impression, his print was there, and just for a second, even running water was perfectly etched in his image and showed that he existed, that he was there, that he had done something.
– John Brantingham, The Green of Sunset
men have built cathedrals
cursed by solitary streams
woven together in tales of gods
imaginations and hopeful fantasies
then clothed them in a mystery
of a hundred thousand shapes
unreadable without a key…
a key cast aside many centuries ago
imagining substance from shadows
in a language perplexingly obscure
a sadness of understanding grown dim
dogmas perishing beneath a tattered page
ah… but your faraway gaze
repudiates your claim
so, turn your face to the teaching of the tree…
and in its silence, tell me whence it springs
a poem by ivan kireevskii
And the wind said:
May you be as strong as the oak,
yet flexible as the birch;
May you stand tall as the redwood,
live gracefully as the willow;
And may you always bear fruit
all your days on this earth.
– Native American Prayer
Giving up one’s own certainties can open up a door toward a deeper intimacy with things, especially with people.
– Henry Shukman
overtothanatos:
But the cloud passes; we survive after all, our sensibilities mostly intact. Madness pecks at us from time to time; the unseen bird from unknown lands. It pecks away mostly at the foot of the trunk, never ascending high enough for us to take note. After all, maybe we avoid looking at it, we, who are not even certain such a bird as that can exist, and even if it did we are surely not worthy to look on it. And so we stand, and breathe and close our eyes. At night sometimes there’s a breeze. It carries sharp scents to our wooden senses. We forget, we remember, we forget.
For my fellow utopian socialists and anti-war fanatics, here’s what Eduardo Galeano says about that:
“Utopia lies at the horizon.
When I draw nearer by two steps,
it retreats two steps.
If I proceed ten steps forward, it
swiftly slips ten steps ahead.
No matter how far I go, I can never reach it.
What, then, is the purpose of utopia?
It is to cause us to advance.”
– Sam Hamill
In the end, writing is like a prison, an island from which you will never be released but which is a kind of paradise: the solitude, the thoughts, the incredible joy of putting into words the essence of what you for the moment understand and with your whole heart want to believe.
– James Salter
The desert does not mean the absence of men, it means the presence of God.
– Carlo Carreto
Those who have suffered much become very bitter or very gentle.
– Will Durant
the most beautiful storm I’ve ever seen,
is you!
– Eric Cockrell
Only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn’t exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Winter begins unnoticed.
The way between half-empty and half-full
begins where you begin forgetting the words,
And put down your pen.
The way to whatever matters begins after that.
– Charles Wright
Anyone who knows me, should learn to know me again;
For I am like the Moon,
you will see me with new face everyday.
– Jalaluddin Mevlana Rumi
Should He come in the disguise of sorrow or pain, we must still know Him.
– Mrym Prhm
when you love someone, let the way you
live your life prove it everyday.
– Eric Cockrell
Drugged. I’m drugged, sense and mind, by desert thoughts, canyon thoughts. I’ve been thinking of the Colorado Plateau, the country around the Green and Colorado and San Juan Rivers . . . Thinking of those great canyons, and of the terrible and grand and unearthly wilderness of rock that surrounds them, my nerves and brain get taut and sharp and hot – I’ve GOT to go there, be there, live there: it’s become an obsession with me, a passion! Those places, those names! . . .
– Edward Abbey
No longer shall I paint interiors with men reading and women knitting. I will paint living people who breathe and feel and suffer and love.
– Edvard Munch
Again, traveler, you have come a long way led by that star.
But the kingdom of the wish is at the other end of the night.
May you fare well, compañero;
let us journey together joyfully,
living on catastrophe, eating the pure light.
– Thomas McGrath, Epitaph
HORSES EXPLAIN THINGS TO ME
Today is a crash course on moving gently.
How to take a gift from someone so gingerly
they believe they still have it. If you move
soft enough through the wind or woods,
they say the sun will make a space for you.
Some of your regrets might soften. I move
terribly. I crush twigs and spiders but the horses
say nothing of it; they let me pet their long manes.
I hop on and we walk out to the end of wanting.
What is God? I ask them. They tell me, Yes.
– Brett Elizabeth Jenkins
Seeing the moonlight
spilling down
through these trees,
my heart fills to the brim
with autumn.
– Ono No Komachi
Autumn. Twilight. Fire lit. Restless. Solitary. She sits. She goes to window. She stands. She sits. Twilight. She thinks. She writes. She sighs. Twilight. Solitary.
– James Joyce
I heard a bird sing / in the dark of December. / A magical thing. / And sweet to remember. // We are nearer to Spring / than we were in September. / I heard a bird sing / in the dark of December
– Oliver Herford
On one level we are each insignificant, merely a speck of life in the immense darkness of a seemingly random universe. On another level, each soul comes to life as a unique torchbearer, each one bearing the eternal flame of existence for an indeterminate length of time.
For each carries in their own way an inner spark of imagination and the flame of conscious life. On one level we barely matter, on another level what matters most to us also matters to the world.
– Michael Meade
It is easier, of course, to find dignity in one’s solitude. Loneliness is solitude with a problem. Can blue solve the problem, or can it at least keep me company within it?—No, not exactly. It cannot love me that way; it has no arms. But sometimes I do feel its presence to be a sort of wink—Here you are again, it says, and so am I.
– Maggie Nelson, Bluets
After Rumors of the End of the World
by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
If we are running out of time,
no one has told that to the avocado
which sits on the counter
hard and light green as if
not only will there be
a tomorrow, but in fact,
things might just be
much more delicious then,
so smooth, so perfect,
so ready to be shared.
The door itself
makes no promises.
It is only a door
– Adrienne Rich
Crossing that thresold into your uncharted future is an act of great courage and self compassion, and it changes your relationship to life in a fundamental way. It embodies your willingness to employ a new form of risk taking, to consciously choose growth-stimulating, soul-nourishing conflicts, to live through the accompanying anxiety, and to accept your life as open ended and unpredictable. Passing through the door commits you to living in the present in a way you never before have. ~Bill Plotkin, Soulcraft
Have you seen that movie, Sliding Doors? I have to admit that I don’t really remember the plot very well, other than in tandem story lines, Gwyneth Paltrow’s character misses her train by seconds as the doors slide shut in one and in the other she makes it and goes on with her day as planned. Her choices as a result of missing the train and going through a different door alter the course of her life almost beyond recognition. In the movie, at least as I remember it, she doesn’t consciously choose to miss the train of course. But she does and goes through a different door that she normally would have chosen, and we see the chain reaction of events that emerge. It can be a scary thing, a door. An unwanted thing. And it can be life changing.
What if passing through whatever door is right in front of us, or choosing a different one that isn’t quite as clear or that we don’t even know about yet, is essential for our wellbeing and wholeness? We all have doors in our lives – some look inviting and we can’t wait to find out what’s on the other side, some are just standing there open, some seem locked, some are swinging back and forth systematically, some are creaking on their hinges and some seem to slam shut with no warning.
Most of the time (i.e. all of the time) we simply can’t know the outcome of our choices. Even if the plan is completely straight forward, and the path seems crystal clear, life has a way of muddying the waters. We miss the train. Loved ones get sick. Our interests change. We learn something new that rocks our worldview. There’s an earthquake, a fire, or a hurricane. We have to start over. We want to start over. We realize we have to find a way to accept the present. We realize we have to find a way to use our acceptance to create change.
We can see conflict all around us and feel weary in the world. Or we can see chances for our soul to grow in every sorrow or angst-filled nuance that punctuates the days. We can stop blaming the door.
After all, it’s only a door.
– Heidi Baar
A Well Runs Out of Thirst
Jane Hirshfield, 1953
A well runs out of thirst
the way time runs out of a week,
the way a country runs out of its alphabet
or a tree runs out of its height.
The way a brown pelican
runs out of anchovy-glitter at darkfall.
A strange collusion,
the way a year runs out of its days
but turns into another,
the way a cotton towel’s compact
with pot and plate seems to run out of dryness
but in a few minutes finds more.
A person comes into the kitchen
to dry the hands, the face,
to stand on the lip of a question.
Around the face, the hands,
behind the shoulders,
yeasts, mountains, mosses multiply answers.
There are questions that never run out of questions,
answers that don’t exhaust answer.
Take this question the person stands asking:
a gate rusting open.
Yes stands on its left, no on its right,
two big planets of unpainted silence.
Because sometimes I’m afraid
that even though the moon shines
fully, I can’t see clearly under
the shroud of self-doubt.
Shutters of abandonment
rattle on wind streaked skies
and heavy heart plunges
to a basement of fears.
What if? Scrapes deep-rooted near.
Who’s there? I ask in timidity. What
ghosts appear in the twilight of
mind? The charred space between worlds.
It’s not pleasant to share greys
shadows, but how does one
navigate when the sludge
wants a lotus to grow?
It needs both.
In the source of soul, triggers are
hauntings. A look. A feel.
That stillness is a hurt-place.
You are nothing but a river;
a shed of quiet and alone.
Abandonment creaks
on stairless steps to a corner
and awaits ‘til the walls form
solid, and the moon lowers
threads of gold.
= Carolyn Riker
I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones. Basically it is nothing other than this fear we have so often talked about, but fear spread to everything, fear of the greatest as of the smallest, fear, paralyzing fear of pronouncing a word, although this fear may not only be fear but also a longing for something greater than all that is fearful.
– Franz Kafka to Milena Jesenská
I will come to you,
when you least expect it.
a cup of coffee,
when you’re trying to wake up,
a kiss on the back of your neck,
when your hair is tossled.
a text from work,
just to say I miss you.
a shared moment of silence.
a hand holding yours,
when you are sad just because.
moonlight coming through your window.
the scent that says you’re not alone.
the shadow that sweeps the porch
of your heart.
– Eric Cockrell
self perfecting wisdom matrix.
– Aric Parker
His passionate longings . . clung low and mist-like in very shady places.
– George Eliot
Those with a systemic critique need to find ways to bring radical ideas, and the energies they unleash, into immediate struggles – and fight to win.
– Mike Marqusee
I was born in a lucky country/Every day I hear the warning bells/They’re so busy building palaces/They don’t see the poison in the wells/In the land of the little kings/Profit is the only thing
– Paul Kelly
How like a winter hath my absence been
From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!
What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!
What old December’s bareness everywhere!
– William Shakespeare
You have to be very fond of men. Very, very fond. You have to be very fond of them to love them. Otherwise they’re simply unbearable.
– Marguerite Duras
I have no right to call myself one who knows. I was one who seeks, and I still am, but I no longer seek in the stars or in books; I’m beginning to hear the teachings of my blood pulsing within me.
My story isn’t pleasant, it’s not sweet and harmonious like the invented stories; it tastes of folly and bewilderment, of madness and dream, like the life of all people who no longer want to lie to themselves.
– Hermann Hesse
Be silent and listen: have you recognized your madness, and do you admit it? Do you not want to recognize your madness and welcome it in a friendly manner? You wanted to accept everything so accept madness too. Let the light of your madness shine and it will suddenly dawn on you. Madness is not to be despised, and not to be feared instead you should give it life!
– C. G. Jung
I know that every fear I’ve empowered has kept me from some wonder that would have lightened my load.
– Mark Nepo, Things That Join the Sea and the Sky
To change the fruits, you have to change the roots. To change the visible, you must first change the invisible.
– T. H Eker
The visible world is a trace of the invisible one, and the former follows the latter like a shadow.
– al Ghazali
To tell the truth, we should not exist. We, not any collective plural, just you and me. Let us use our imaginations to visualize for a moment the circumstances and conditions of the life of our parents, then our grandparents, then great-grandparents, thus further and further back. Back to those who are stalking through the undergrowth of a murky primeval forest with chipped stones for their only weapons, in order to split the skulls of their enemies. It would seem as if we had only parents and that’s all, but those other pre-pre-predecessors exist, and with them their afflictions, manias, mental illnesses, syphilis, tuberculosis, and whatnot, and how do you know they do not continue on in you? And what was the probability that among the children of your great-great-grandparents the one survived who would beget your ancestor? And what was the probability that this would repeat itself in the next generation?
Altogether, a very slim chance that we would be born in these skins, as these, not other, individuals. The very fact that our species survived and even multiplied beyond measure is astonishing, for it had much against it, and the primeval forest full of animals stronger than humans may serve till now as a metaphor for man’s precarious situation – let us add viruses, bacteria, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods, but also his own works, atomic weapons and the pollution of nature. Our species should have disappeared a long time ago, and it is still alive, incredibly resistant. That you and I happen to be part of it should be enough to give us pause for meditation.
– Czesław Miłosz
If Feeling Isn’t It
John Brehm
You can take it away, as far as I’m concerned—I’d rather spend the afternoon with a nice dog. I’m not kidding. Dogs have what a lot of poems lack: excitements and responses, a sense of play the ability to impart warmth, elation . . . .
Howard Moss
Dogs will also lick your face if you let them.
Their bodies will shiver with happiness.
A simple walk in the park is just about
the height of contentment for them, followed
by a bowl of food, a bowl of water,
a place to curl up and sleep. Someone
to scratch them where they can’t reach
and smooth their foreheads and talk to them.
Dogs also have a natural dislike of mailmen
and other bringers of bad news and will
bite them on your behalf. Dogs can smell
fear and also love with perfect accuracy.
There is no use pretending with them.
Nor do they pretend. If a dog is happy
or sad or nervous or bored or ashamed
or sunk in contemplation, everybody knows it.
They make no secret of themselves.
You can even tell what they’re dreaming about
by the way their legs jerk and try to run
on the slippery ground of sleep.
Nor are they given to pretentious self-importance.
They don’t try to impress you with how serious
or sensitive they are. They just feel everything
full blast. Everything is off the charts
with them. More than once I’ve seen a dog
waiting for its owner outside a café
practically implode with worry. “Oh, God,
what if she doesn’t come back this time?
What will I do? Who will take care of me?
I loved her so much and now she’s gone
and I’m tied to a post surrounded by people
who don’t look or smell or sound like her at all.”
And when she does come, what a flurry
of commotion, what a chorus of yelping
and cooing and leaps straight up into the air!
It’s almost unbearable, this sudden
fullness after such total loss, to see
the world made whole again by a hand
on the shoulder and a voice like no other.
…Here I am suspended
between the sidewalk and twilight,
the sky dimming so fast it seems alive.
What if you felt the invisible
tug between you and everything?
A boy on a bicycle rides by,
his white shirt open, flaring
behind him like wings.
It’s a hard time to be human. We know too much
and too little. Does the breeze need us?
The cliffs? The gulls?
If you’ve managed to do one good thing,
the ocean doesn’t care.
But when Newton’s apple fell toward the earth,
the earth, ever so slightly, fell
toward the apple.
– Ellen Bass
TODAY
Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas!
You really are beautiful! Pearls,
harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins! all…
the stuff they’ve always talked about
still makes a poem a surprise!
These things are with us every day
even on beachheads and biers. They
do have meaning. They’re strong as rocks.
– Frank O’Hara, 1950
What else is soul but a listener?
– William H. Gass
We may shout, ‘Let there be peace!’ but this won’t really bring peace. Peace will appear in the world around us only when each individual learns to tame the disturbances arising within his or her own mind.
– Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche
Ethan Nichtern:
In times of chaos, simple practice instructions are usually best. Here is maybe my all time favorite:
“If you’re feeling helpless, help someone.”
– Aung San Suu Kyi
The civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins.
– Edward Abbey
I was going to die, sooner or later,
whether or not I had even spoken myself.
My silences had not protected me.
Your silences will not protect you….
What are the words you do not yet have?…
What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day
and attempt to make your own,
until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?
We have been socialized to respect fear
more than our own need for language.
Next time, ask: What’s the worst that will happen?
Then push yourself a little further than you dare.
Once you start to speak, people will yell at you.
They will interrupt you, put you down and suggest it’s personal.
And the world won’t end. And the speaking will get easier and easier.
And you will find you have fallen in love with your own vision,
which you may never have realized you had.
And you will lose some friends and lovers,
and realize you don’t miss them.
And new ones will find you and cherish you.
And you will still flirt and paint your nails,
dress up and party, because, as I think Emma Goldman said,
“If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.”
And at last you’ll know with surpassing certainty
that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth.
And that is not speaking.
– Audre Lorde
I may be more ridiculous than most of my contemporaries, but I think we all participate in some form of irrational ritual that’s essential to our existence.
– Adam Gopnik
A life without inner contradictions is only half a life…destined only for angels. But God loves humans more than angels.
– Carl Gustav Jung
Any healthy man can go without food for two days–but not without poetry.
– Charles Baudelaire
Anything that has real and lasting value is always a gift from within.
– Franz Kafka
Of mystery, there is no end. Of clarity, there is precious little.
– Leonard Michaels
Stories move in circles. They don’t go in straight lines. So it helps if you listen in circles.
– Naomi Newman
I used to be shy.
You made me sing.
I used to refuse things at table.
Now I shout for more wine.
In somber dignity, I used to sit…
on my mat and pray.
Now children run through
and make faces at me.
– Rumi
Maybe, Then
If you can’t hear the turkey tail and the bright green
moss singing on the rotted oak corpse, please don’t bother me.
If you can’t converse with a stone or
haven’t even thought about learning the language of birds,
Please move on.
Life is short. Each one.
I want my allegiances to be with lovers;
the kind that reach out and invite everything to touch them.
Two hands are not enough for this world
in my humble opinion.
There is so much to hold beyond fear, beyond hatred,
and so we must use our sensibilities to find each other.
Let my prayers be that you will hear the angels at the corpse
and listen for a long while to what the stones know
about the bodies that they have met.
And, the birds, the birds. Let me pray that someday, soon,
you will understand what they are saying about
the need to wake and rise.
Maybe, then, we could take a walk together
and be astonished
by the beauty of this world.
Maybe, then, a poet could be understood.
– Jamie K. Reaser
Often we feel time to be linear, inexorable, suffocating. At other moments we find it oceanic. We kind of swim in it. We expect physicists to come up with an explanation, but we don’t find one, and come back to our intuitive use of the concept. But there are also moments when time appears to be, to say it in one way, both vertical and horizontal, both “single-minded,” monotonous, unalterable, and multi-dimensional, infinite. When a few people come together, I often have wondered if each person’s amount of years was not being added to the amount of years of all the others, so that we were representing together much more than our single self. And if you add up the simultaneous ages of people, animals, plants, objects, the age of celestial bodies and so on, you realize that we are living in the unfolding of the infinite. But why bother? I think because we need to keep in mind the immensity of being, in spite of our fragility and mortality.
– Etel Adnan
The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words.
– William H. Gass
Tom Robbins, American novelist:
Have you risked disapproval? Have you ever risked economic security? Have you ever risked a belief?… Real courage is risking something that might force you to rethink your thoughts and suffer change and stretch consciousness. Real courage is risking one’s clichés.
Curiosity, especially intellectual inquisitiveness, is what separates the truly alive from those who are merely going through the motions. Love is the ultimate outlaw. It just won’t adhere to any rules. The most any of us can do is to sign on as its accomplice. Instead of vowing to honor and obey, maybe we should swear to aid and abet.
Most men in power have not the strength or wisdom
to be satisfied with the way
things are.
The sane know contentment, for beauty is their lover,
and beauty is never absent from the world.
The farther away light is from one’s touch
the more one naturally speaks of the
need for change.
Yes, overthrow any government inside
that makes you weep.
The child blames the external and focuses his energies there;
the warrior conquers the realms within
and becomes
gifted.
Only the inspired should make decisions
that affect the lives of many,
never a man who has not held God in his arms
and become the servant of
unity.
– St. Teresa of Avila
It is through gratitude for the present moment that the spiritual dimension of life opens up.
– Eckhart Tolle
And love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time, and furthermore, to win.
– James Baldwin
This is my living faith, an active faith, a faith of verbs: to question, explore, experiment, experience, walk, run, dance, play, eat, love, learn, dare, taste, touch, smell, listen, speak, write, read, draw, provoke, emote, scream, sin, repent, cry, kneel, pray, bow, rise, stand, look, laugh, cajole, create, confront, confound, walk back, walk forward, circle, hide, and seek.
– Terry Tempest Williams
The great E.B. White (the author of Charlotte’s Web/wrote this to a friend who had lost his faith in humanity.
Dear Mr. Nadeau:
As long as there is one upright man, as long as there is one compassionate woman, the contagion may spread and the scene is not desolate. Hope is the thing that is left to us, in a bad time. I shall get up Sunday morning and wind the clock, as a contribution to order and steadfastness.
Sailors have an expression about the weather: they say, the weather is a great bluffer. I guess the same is true of our human society — things can look dark, then a break shows in the clouds, and all is changed, sometimes rather suddenly. It is quite obvious that the human race has made a queer mess of life on this planet. But as a people we probably harbor seeds of goodness that have lain for a long time waiting to sprout when the conditions are right. Man’s curiosity, his relentlessness, his inventiveness, his ingenuity have led him into deep trouble. We can only hope that these same traits will enable him to claw his way out.
Hang on to your hat. Hang on to your hope. And wind the clock, for tomorrow is another day.
Simone Weil: Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.
When you look back on a lifetime and think of what has been given to the world by your presence, your fugitive presence, inevitably you have to think of your art, whatever it may be, as the gift you have made to the world in acknowledgement of the gift you have been given, which is the life itself. And I think the world tends to forget that this is the ultimate significance of the body of work each artist produces. It is not an expression of the desire for praise or recognition, or prizes, but the deepest manifestation of your gratitude for the gift of life.
– Stanley Kunitz
Stand not aloof with the gaping vacuity of vulgar ignorance, nor bend with the cringe of sycophantic insignificance. The graceful pride of truth knows no extremes, and preserves, in every latitude of life, the right-angled character of man.
– Thomas Paine, Rights of Man
Let no one hope to find in contemplation an escape from conflict, from anguish or from doubt. On the contrary, the deep, inexpressible certitude of the contemplative experience awakens a tragic anguish and opens many questions in the depths of the heart like wounds that cannot stop bleeding. For every gain in deep certitude there is a corresponding growth of superficial ‘doubt.’ This doubt is by no means opposed to genuine faith, but it mercilessly examines and questions the spurious ‘faith’ of everyday life, the human faith which is nothing but the passive acceptance of conventional opinion.
– Thomas Merton
You may not believe it, but I have tried,
set my sights on the morning star
in belief it would guide me. I have tried.
Dale Young
Robert Macfarlane
Word of the day: “eucatastrophe” – the sudden, unexpected, happy turn in a story or series of events which “pierces you with a joy that brings tears” (coined by JRR Tolkien).
From Greek ευ-, “good”, & καταστροφή, “down-turn”.
Losing too is still ours; and even forgetting
still has a shape in the kingdom of transformation.
When something’s let go of, it circles; and though we are rarely the center
of the circle, it draws around us its unbroken, marvelous curve.
– Rilke
Winter, friend, I get it. We are having a long talk
and have just gotten into the thick of it.
– Jill Osier
Seamus Heaney:
Where can it be found again,
An elsewhere world, beyond
Maps and atlases,
Where all is woven into
And of itself, like a nest
Of crosshatched grass blades?
An artist must make time for the long periods of solitude.
– Maria Abramovic
The good work that we do with others comes out of something that is painful in our lives…and deeply painful in the life of the world. We long to come home and to bring all beings home.
– Roshi Joan Halifax
Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
– John Berryman
So many of these poems don’t have a comfortable, relaxed, natural home.
– J. H. Prynne
We clung together as young writers tend to do, to hold each other up.
– Mary Lee Settle
The sun, the moon, a lamp, or a lightning flash can illuminate, but they can not remove inner darkness. But bodhicitta, that is praised and taught by the masters, will completely destroy it.
– Khunu Rinpoche
this is genius: the intelligence that knows its borders.
– Albert Camus
The test of faith is not whether you believe there is a spiritual plane; it’s whether you’ll live by that knowledge once you’ve caught a glimpse of it.
– Mark Bittner
If you don’t know how to die, don’t worry; Nature will tell you what to do on the spot, fully and adequately. She will do this job perfectly for you; don’t bother your head about it.
– Sarah Bakewell
Beware the man of a single book.
– Thomas Aquinas
Don’t settle down and sit in one place. Move around be nomadic, make each day a new horizon.
– Chris McCandless
In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.
– Cormac McCarthy
If you pay attention to the movements in walking with a sustained and continuous kind of attention, within not too long you’ll find that your attention is quite concentrated, quite focused.
– Marcia Rose
There are two dangerous things we do in life. The first is to admit how much we love God, long for God, and how much the deepest longing in our whole being is to be one with the Universe in conscious, sober ecstasy. As Rumi says, once you let that longing out, it “burns down your house” and shows you how limited all the other longings are. The second longing is to be brave enough to admit how deeply you long for a transformative human love. To be brave enough to admit how much you need that, you have to be able to admit how vulnerable you are, how lonely you are, how hungry you are for this fulfillment. If you can’t do that you will never find the kind of generosity, abandon, and commitment that you are going to need to take this journey with another person.
Evolutionary love takes place between two beings who are grounded in their transcendent nature, but who are also absolutely naked and honest about their need for sacred, ecstatic communion with another being. This is dangerous because, as we all know, we can fail. We can believe that someone is our evolutionary partner and they turn out to be a psychopath or a narcissist and we are left flayed and broken in an empty room screaming at the moon. This is dangerous territory, which is why it is so important to approach each step as clearly and completely as possible. Only then can people have the kind of lucidity that will help them choose wisely.
– Andrew Harvey and Chris Saade, Evolutionary Love Relationships
The Night Migrations
by Louise Glück
This is the moment when you see again
the red berries of the mountain ash
and in the dark sky
the birds’ night migrations.
It grieves me to think
the dead won’t see them—
these things we depend on,
they disappear.
What will the soul do for solace then?
I tell myself maybe it won’t need
these pleasures anymore;
maybe just not being is simply enough,
hard as that is to imagine.
The birds don’t alter space.
They reveal it. The sky
never fills with any
leftover flying. They leave
nothing to trace. It is our own
astonishment collects
in chill air. Be glad.
– Praise Them (excerpt) by Li-Young Lee
Cleaning the bathroom or chopping the onions is no less important than sitting in deep meditation. Grasping this and acting on it is called waking up.
– Janet Jiryu Abels
HOMAGE TO LI PO
Woke up one morning to discover
I’d grown old. Last night’s laughter,
ashes by the bed. Now,
my feet on the cold floor.
I get up to gather wood.
In the time it
takes for the tea water to boil
I have replayed the movie of my life.
So much love clumsily spun
like sunlight, like snow.
Where did it go?
I would have some of it back now.
But there is no wood, no tea.
And the fire comes from my heart.
To have lived is no small thing.
via Doug Anderson
The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.
– Seamus Heaney
Winter -evening cold.
Our backs might never warm up but our faces
Burned from the hearth-blaze and the hot whiskeys…
As green sticks hissed and spat into the ashes
And what ever rampaged out there couldn’t reach us,
Firelit, shuttered, slated and stone-walled.
– Seamus Heaney
The heart of man can be full of so much pain, even when things are exteriorly all right. It becomes all the more difficult because today we are used to thinking that there are explanations for everything. But there is no explanation for most of what goes on in our own hearts, and we cannot account for it all. No use resorting to the kind of mental tranquillizers that even religious explanations sometimes offer. Faith must be deeper than that, rooted in the unknown and in the abyss of darkness that is the ground of our being. No use teasing the darkness to try to make answers grow out of it. But if we learn how to have a deep inner patience, things solve themselves, or God solves them if you prefer: but do not expect to see how. Just learn to wait, and do what you can and help other people. Often it is in helping someone else we find the best way to bear our own trouble.
– Thomas Merton
As you descend into that domain, the domain of the cells, even of the very constitution of the cells, how it seems less heavy! This sort of heaviness of Matter disappears — it begins again to be fluid, vibrant. This would tend to prove that the heaviness, thickness, inertia, immobility, is something added, it is not a quality essential to… it is the false Matter, that which we think and feel, but not Matter itself, as it is. This was clearly felt.
(Silence)
The best one can do is not to take sides, not to have preconceived ideas or principles. Oh! The moral principles, the set rules of conduct, what one must do and what one must not and the preconceived ideas from the moral point of view, from the point of view of progress, and all the social and mental conventions… no worse obstacle than that. There are people, I know people who have lost decades in surmounting one such mental construction!… If one can be like that, open—truly open in a simplicity, well, the simplicity that knows that it is ignorant — like that (gesture upward, of self-abandon), ready to receive whatever comes. Then something can happen.
And naturally, the thirst for progress, the thirst for knowledge, the thirst for transformation and, above all, the thirst for Love and Truth — if one keeps that, one goes quicker. Truly a thirst, a need, a need.
All the rest has no importance; it is that one has need of.
To cling to something one believes that one knows, to cling to something that one feels, to cling to something that one loves, to cling to one’s habits, to cling to one’s so-called needs, to cling to the world as it is, it is that which binds you. You must undo all that, one thing after another. Undo all the ties. And it has been said thousands of times and people continue to do the same thing…. Even they who are most eloquent and preach that to others, do c-l-i-n-g — they cling to their way of seeing, their way of feeling, their habit of progress, which seems for them the only one.
No more bonds — free, free. Always ready to change everything, except one thing: to aspire, this thirst.
– Mirra Alfassa, Notes on the Way
When anger trawls the internet,
Looking for a hook.
It’s time to disconnect,
And go and read a book.
– Matt Haig
Sorry, Southerners, we’ve tried to help you for over a century now. All we wanted was a good education system, universal healthcare, and a clean and prosperous future for all of us, you didn’t want that. We pay the vast majority of taxes, and all we get is endless warfare, culture wars, and science denial from you. Sorry to do this, but we’re moving in with Canada.
Sincerely, thoughtful Americans.
– Sandoz
So how do we begin to build that folk culture? What is it we actually have to do?
First, and this was my answer to the student who asked that second question: learn some of the old stories, and tell them. Tell them to your children, and then talk about what they mean. Don’t just become a passive consumer of them. Discuss them with your friends. We need to keep the stories alive, and to think deeply about what they mean. And stories are kept alive by being told.
Turn the television off and reinvent the ceilidh – ask every guest at your table to sing an old song, remember an old nursery rhyme, tell an old tale.
Re-enchant your life.
– Sharon Blackie
Keizan: even if you obliterate your meditation seat with tireless sitting, even if your conduct is immaculate, even if your eloquent dharma teaching astounds heaven and earth, causing flowers to rain miraculously from the blue sky, even if you annihilate all thoughts and emotions and your body becomes like dream, even if you never lose mindfulness though confronted by disasters, even if you die while sitting zazen and appear to have gained liberation, if you have not reached true intimacy, It is all without value.
– Joan Halifax
She was a little given to rehearsing things in her mind, and having imaginary triumphs over people who had upset her in one way and another.
– James M. Cain, Mildred Pierce
The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd – The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.
– Fernando Pessoa
Science does not know its debt to imagination.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.
– William James
It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.
– Leonardo da Vinci
External things are not the problem. It’s your assessment of them. Which you can erase right now.
– Marcus Aurelius
When it shall be said in any country in the world, my poor are happy; neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them; my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars; the aged are not in want, the taxes are not oppressive; the rational world is my friend, because I am a friend of its happiness: When these things can be said, then may the country boast of its constitution and its government.
– Thomas Paine
A solitary American monk named Thomas Berry writes that in our relationship to nature, we have been autistic for centuries. Wrapped tightly in our own version of knowledge, we have been unreceptive to the wisdom of the natural world. To tune in again, to have the “spontaneous environmental rapport” that characterized our ancestors, will take doing something that is perfectly delightful: reimmersing ourselves in the natural world.
– Janine Benyus
Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.
– Epicurus
Pema Chodron says that “nothing ever changes until we see what it has to teach us” and so I find myself in the grips of “Shempa” that attachment to strong beliefs and opinions that lately I recognize by a tightness in my chest, a sadness in my heart. Like many of us I get hooked time and again by politics and it’s not that my views are wrong or fail to come from a place of goodness, of wanting fair and equal treatment of people, it’s that they narrow my scope of vision, get lost in black and white thinking, in blaming, conclusions of who is right and wrong and I forget our oneness. It’s only when we are able to put down our opinions over and over again, because they are persistent, that we open ourselves to a broader vision, a sacred place of just watching, not needing things to be any one way, that our hearts soften and we are able to ask, “What is it like to think and feel like you? What is your experience? What do you need to feel safe and whole? Where are the places that we both hold dear, where we have a common purpose? I pray for us, that we take breaks from our certainty and learn these lessons that keep us separate…
Reading a poem is an act of faith and that involves abandoning oneself to something irresolvable.
– Carl Phillips
If how we relate to the body sets the stage for all other relationships, then how we relate to the world won’t fundamentally change until our relationship with the body does.
– Philip Shepherd, a quote from Radical Wholeness
The test of faith is not whether you believe there is a spiritual plane; it’s whether you’ll live by that knowledge once you’ve caught a glimpse of it.
– Mark Bittner
Thomas Moore:
You don’t need the security of clutching onto your version of the truth as much as the security of constantly deepening your insight.
Debbi Kapp Brody:
Nearly half of 2017’s Fortune 500 companies were founded by an immigrant or the child of one.Nearly half of 2017’s Fortune 500 companies were founded by an immigrant or the child of one.
Ethan Nichtern:
In meditation, political elections, relationships, creative pursuits and everything else, the rule is straightforward:
If you just remember to *show up*, good things are bound to come of it.
An individual is not smart, according to our culture. An individual is merely lucky to be part of a system that has intelligence that happens to reside in them. In other words, be humble about this always. The real intelligence isn’t the property of an individual corporation – the real intelligence is the property of the universe itself.
– John Mohawk
Dear Congress
I never want to write another poem
titled: again
So I’m sending you a pen
I never want to hear the cries
the shattering bullets
from an automatic weapon
designed only to kill people
as fast as possible
so I’m sending you a pen
I’m sending you a brand new shiny pen
like you got on your first day of school
so you can begin to write
new, shiny laws
I want to read happy stories
in the local newspaper
of the grade-school kids
rescuing a duckling from the storm-drain
rather than cowering quietly
under a desk
so I’m sending you a pen
I never want to count
Flag-draped coffins
being unloaded from foreign planes
so I’m sending you a pen
Dear enactors of laws
there are children born on this soil
to parents that entered in the night
who need your shield
your lighting-the-lamps
so I’m sending you a pen
I want our elections to be safe
from rigging and hacking
and accessible to all citizens
so I’m sending you a pen
I want our people to have access
to our wonderful doctors and healers
without the fear of losing their homes
so I’m sending you a pen
I want laws that protect
our sky and oceans
more than the companies that spew
poisonous chemicals
and explode the shale
under our neighborhoods for oil
so I’m sending you a pen
Dear Congress,
I want to stand proudly beside you
as you use your courageous ink
to champion: We The People
so I’m sending you a pen
– Valerie A. Szarek
10/3/2017
A human being has so many skins inside, covering the depths of the heart. We know so many things, but we don’t know ourselves! Why, thirty or forty skins or hides, as thick and hard as an ox’s or bear’s, cover the soul. Go into your own ground and learn to know yourself there.
– Meister Eckhart
This is the path where even suffering transforms into pleasure, where poison becomes nectar, where the world itself becomes the abode of liberation.
– Utpaladeva
Being a Person
by William Stafford
Be a person here. Stand by the river, invoke
the owls. Invoke winter, then spring….
Let any season that wants to come here make its own
call. After that sound goes away, wait.
A slow bubble rises through the earth
and begins to include sky, stars, all space,
even the outracing, expanding thought.
Come back and hear the little sound again.
Suddenly this dream you are having matches
everyone’s dream, and the result is the world.
If a different call came there wouldn’t be any
world, or you, or the river, or the owls calling.
How you stand here is important. How you
listen for the next things to happen. How you breathe.
We think we have to deal with our problems in a way that exterminates them, that distorts or denies their reality. But in doing so, we try to make Reality into something other than what it is.
– Steve Hagen, Buddhism Plain and Simple
Anything you may find through seeking,” the Zen master Rinzai warns, “will be only a wild fox spirit.
In the deserts of the heart
let the healing fountain start.
– Auden
Ich stehe mir im Weg. I am standing in my own way.
The development of personality means fidelity to the law of one’s own being.
– Carl Jung
The best is oftentimes the enemy of the good; and many a good book has remained unwritten… because there floated before the mind’s eye the ideal of a better or a best.
– R. C. Trench, 1861
Naming is a form of adoring. And possessing. There’s not been a beloved or belover in my life whom I’ve not renamed. And renamed and renamed. This is a fact in my life; I’m not romanticizing. The longer and harder you love something, the more names you have for it.
– Lucie Brock-Broido
He could not even admit to her that he was lost, because lost meant there was somewhere he would not be lost if he could just trace a path back.
– Anna-Marie McLemore
Geese vee right above,
How can they carry such grief
And still keep aflight?
– Greg Sellers
The heart keeps sobbing in its sleep.
– Emily Dickinson
It was a strange winter and nothing and everything happened.
– Gertrude Stein
and I am only nerves, strung on constellations,
meridians and vectors quivering.
– Cynthia Huntington
Mostly I have felt myself becoming a servant of sadness. I am still looking for the beauty in that.
– Maggie Nelson
This is shaped in the new merging, like ancestral smiles, common memories, remembering just how the light stood on the water that time. But it is also something new. Outside, can’t you hear it, the traffic, the trees, everything getting nearer. To end up with, inside each other, moving upward like penance. For the continual pilgrimage has not stopped. It is only that you are both moving at the same rate of speed and cannot apprehend the motion. Which carries you beyond, alarmingly fast out into the confusion where the river pours into the sea. That place that seems even farther from shore …
– John Ashbery, The New Spirit
dolorisme:
How many times is it possible to fragment one self ?
As many times as it takes to become whole again.
To craft is, beyond all else, to be patient–alternating between attention and respite–which allows the ideas to shift and life to move along, offering new understandings to the creative work.
– Lauren Camp
Do you understand the sadness of geography?
– Michael Ondaatje
But it wasn’t until recently that I really got just how essential this failing at what we care most deeply about really is. For it is not in avoiding the shadows or the wounds of the past that we heal, it is not in the absence of our suffering that we find grace. It is precisely in our failing that we get the blessed chance to heal the ground under our feet. It is here, where we can become who we aspire to be.
– Petra Lentz-Snow
When we come close to those things that break us down, we touch those things that also break us open. And in that breaking open, we uncover our true nature.
– Wayne Muller
The Protestant ethic is false. We must extricate it from our souls if we hope to save them. This will be shown by three quotations, followed by my commentary.
1. It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.
Source: Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, book 1, chapter 2
2. Luther understands monasticism as a product of an egoistic lovelessness that withdraws from one’s duties in the world. By contrast, this-worldly work in a vocation appears to him to be a visible expression of brotherly love, a notion he anchors in a highly unrealistic manner indeed and in contrast—almost grotesquely—to the well-known passages of Adam Smith.
Source: Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), as translated by Stephen Kalberg (2011), p. 100
3. The ascetic, when he wishes to act within the world … must become afflicted with a sort of happy closure of the mind regarding any question about the meaning of the world, for he must not worry about such questions. Hence, it is no accident that inner-worldly asceticism reached its most consistent development on the foundation of the Calvinist god’s absolute inexplicability, utter remoteness from every human criterion, and unsearchableness as to his motives. Thus, the inner-worldly ascetic is the recognized “man of a vocation,” who neither inquires about nor finds it necessary to inquire about the meaning of his actual practice of a vocation within the whole world, the total framework of which is not his responsibility but his god’s.
Source: Max Weber, Economy and Society (1922), as edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (University of California Press: 1968), pp. 547-548
We all love that which is closest to us most, then our friends, our community, our country, the whole world and finally if possible even the entire universe. My experience has all these different gradations of the heart-felt feeling of love. The main quality that has developed is that all the layers of love are experienced continuously as abstract universal love and constantly flow as specific streams of love within it. I will of course at any time take either one.
I am accepting and cherishing the outside as the inside and the inside as the outside. When this unity of experience where everything feels as familiar as ones own awareness, when it has become permanent is the mature experience of enlightened-awareness. The senses when they are known as and deliver nothing but qualities of pure-awareness then they do not disturb the experience of unbounded awareness and unbounded awareness does not disturb the senses. Then pure awareness has become the ocean in which all aspects, all layers of consciousness reside.
– Harri Aalto, The Senses And Desires Are Central To Awakening
a man comes gratefully late
to some things
(sooner or later)
wholly embarrassed
holy foolish
for taking so long.
sounds
sense
images
words
arrive where they’ve been waiting
all along
trusted
seen
safe.
– Andrew Hagel
We all want to manifest our callings, but timing is everything. I learned this the hard way. I always knew I would write, but I didn’t understand that I needed to build the foundation first. So, I sat down to write, time and again, and I couldn’t quite find it. I knew there was a writer living in there somewhere, but I couldn’t find him. I needed a little more time, a little more suffering, a lot more lessons. I hadn’t lived enough to manifest him.
In this driven world, we are often pushed to manifest too early. We are shamed for our uncertainty, insulted for our confusion, called lazy and selfish. But some callings need time to be cultivated. Some gifts cannot be opened too quickly. We have to craft them first, over time, in the fires of lived experience.
If you have a calling living inside of you, don’t rush to manifest it. Trust your own instincts as to the steps you need to take. Build the inner foundation you will need to see it through.
Better to offer this ailing world one remarkable thing, than a hundred fragments of possibility. We need what you have to offer desperately.
– Jeff Brown
My war – and I have yet to win a decisive battle – is with the modes of thought that and conditioned feelings that prevail in psychology and therefore also in the way we think and feel about our being. Of these conditions none are more tyrannical than the convictions that clamp the mind and heart into positivistic science (geneticism and computerism), economics (bottom-line capitalism), and single-minded faith (fundamentalism).
– James Hillman
There exists, for everyone, a sentence, a series of words, that has the power to destroy you. Another sentence exists, another series of words, that can heal you. If you’re lucky you will get the second, but you can be certain of getting the first.”
– Phillip K. Dick
Do not attach to your own story.
The Universe is in a state of flux. As it always is.
What was true for you before, may not be true for you now.
Allow yourself to ebb and flow as a new Universal vision emerges.
– Bairavee Balasubramaniam
If you’re happy in a dream, does that count?
– Arundhati Roy
Just a thought…
I am poor. If being affluent means owning a house, a car and millions in the bank, but I am a thousand times richer in other aspects for I have invaluable friends.
– Anita Limbu Moktan
Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes.
– Henry David Thoreau
Every poem is a momentary stay against the confusion of the world.
– Robert Frost
You say freedom of utterance is not for times of stress and I reply with the sad truth that only in times of stress is freedom of utterance in danger. No one questions it in calm days because it is not needed, and the reverse is true also; only when free utterance is suppressed is it needed, and when it is needed it is vital for justice.
– from a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial by William Allen White
In bringing intelligence to our spirit and soul practice, we need deep thought and good ideas, not measurements and numbers
– Thomas Moore
There is a growing and disturbing trend of anti-intellectual elitism in American culture. It’s the dismissal of science, the arts, and humanities and their replacement by entertainment, self-righteousness, ignorance, and deliberate gullibility.
– Ray Williams, Psychology Today
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
– George Orwell, 1984
Teach this triple truth to all: A generous heart, kind speech, and a life of service and compassion are the things which renew humanity.
– Siddhārtha Gautama, the Buddha
The more your actual life becomes routine and habit, the less it will be satisfactory.
– Carl Gustav Jung
All that matters, really, is the will to happiness, a kind of enormous, ever-present consciousness. The rest is nothing but excuses.
– Albert Camus
Poetry, like schoolboys, by too frequent and severe correction, may be cowed into dullness!
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
If only the past would have me now that I have its answers–
– Traci Brimhall
Remember that self-doubt is as self-centered as self-inflation. Your obligation is to reach as deeply as you can and offer your unique and authentic gifts as bravely and beautifully as you’re able.
– Bill Plotkin & Animas Valley Institute, Nature and the Human Soul: Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World
I want to be a world, not just another/ American tinky poetty-boo
– Philip Whalen
Of this, I am actually certain. After collecting thousands of stories, I’m willing to call this a fact: A deep sense of love and belonging is an irreducible need of all women, men, and children. We are biologically, cognitively, physically, and spiritually wired to love, to be loved, and to belong. When those needs are not met, we don’t function as we were meant to. We break. We fall apart. We’re numb. We ache. We hurt others. We get sick.
– Brené Brown
When I am stuck, I don’t like to force out work or words. I just walk away from the desk—sometimes not returning for weeks at a time. I find a quiet place in the day and stop. If I’m at home, I lie down on the carpet. Then I do this thing where I just say thank you to all the things and people who have helped me. Of course, simply saying thank you does not awaken any creative force; it just reminds me that the work I am doing is not validated by quantity, but rather by the connection it builds between the world and myself. When my own work is not coming along, I try to stop and recognize the people doing the same challenging, at times unforgiving, art—and I feel happy. I think it’s hard, in our day and age, not to think, It’s me against the world, or, I have to do this for my career because everyone else is hammering away and if I stop now, I will fall behind and be forgotten. But that’s a toxic and self-defeating gaze. I think we are more productive—even in stillness—when we can recognize one another, when we say to each other, Thank you for doing this with me. Thank you for carrying on when I cannot.
– Ocean Vuong
Are you willing to forget what you have done for other people, and to remember what other people have done for you; to ignore what the world owes you, and to think what you owe the world; to put your rights in the background, and your duties in the middle distance, and your chances to do a little more than your duty in the foreground; to see that men and women are just as real as you are, and try to look behind their faces to their hearts, hungry for joy; to own up to the fact that probably the only good reason for your existence is not what you are going to get out of life, but what you are going to give to life; to close your book of complaints against the management of the universe, and look around you for a place where you can sow a few seeds of happiness. Are you willing to do these things even for a day?
– Henry van Dyke
Love, kindness, peace, cooperation, compassion, empathy, forgiveness, generosity, understanding, knowledge, education, science, reason… all of these things are under assault by those who promote the opposite.
Be true to yourself. Stay strong and continue to advocate for what is good, what is right and what is true.
– Laurence Overmire
Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old films, small victories, people hated, people loved.
– Salman Rushdie
I don’t think I could love you so much if you had nothing to complain of and nothing to regret. I don’t like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and of little value. Life hasn’t revealed its beauty to them.
– Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago
What we want
is never simple.
We move among the things
we thought we wanted:
a face, a room, an open book
and these things bear our names
–now they want us.
But what we want appears
in dreams, wearing disguises.
We fall past,
holding out our arms
and in the morning
our arms ache.
We don’t remember the dream,
but the dream remembers us.
It is there all day
as an animal is there
under the table,
as the stars are there
even in full sun.
– Linda Pastan, What We Want
Music brings a warm glow to my vision, thawing mind and muscle from their endless wintering.
– Haruki Murakami
Our rationalistic attitude leads us to believe that we can work wonders with international organizations, legislation, and other well-meant devices. But in reality only a change in the attitude of the individual can bring about a renewal in the spirit of the nations. Everything begins with the individual.
– C. G. Jung, Civilization in transition.
One must be careful of books, and what is inside them, for words have the power to change us.
– Cassandra Clare, The Infernal Devices
The Machine endangers all we have made.
We allow it to rule instead of obey.
To build a house, cut the stone sharp and fast:
the carver’s hand takes too long to feel its way.
The Machine never hesitates, or we might escape
and its factories subside into silence.
It thinks it’s alive and does everything better.
With equal resolve it creates and destroys.
But life holds mystery for us yet. In a hundred places
we can still sense the source: a play of pure powers
that – when you feel it – brings you to your knees.
There are yet words that come near the unsayable,
and, from crumbling stones, a new music
to make a sacred dwelling in a place we cannot own.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Wisdom is finding the path that is best for all – considering the options, the positives and the negatives – and having the courage to change what must be changed for the sake of the entire world.
– Laurence Overmire, The Ghost of Rabbie Burns
Elizabeth Harmon
A MUST-HAVE FOR THE HOLIDAYS
Because I am 23 and not married,
do not have at least one child,
cannot fit my old jeans over my hips,
eat the dessert that’s meant for decoration,
never had the ability to wear
red lipstick with anonymity,
and do not have anyone to share
the season’s fullness with,
I am a failure. (Yes, I know my mother
was barely 21 when she decided to staple down,
don’t remind me.)
I can (and do) wear a turtleneck
to hide my lack of cleavage
and tuck my rounded chin into
the snug cushion of the top,
avoid standing too much so that
couch pillows fold in around me
instead of my lumpiness hanging out,
and make sure not to wear rings
that pudge out my fingers.
And I know that if only
I could throw a plate at my father’s head,
then I could do anything.
If I could haul off half-cocked and cocksure
with yellow, pumpkin-stained,
china blossom plates in my hand
and chuck them against a doorjamb,
then I’d be almost guaranteed that
tomorrow would be a good day,
or at least ordinary enough to stand.
He explained there are two kinds of
suffering; the suffering we run from
because we are unwilling to face the
truth of life, and the suffering that
comes when we’re willing to stop
running from the sorrows and difficulties
of the world. The second kind
of suffering will lead you to
freedom.
– Jack Kornfield
We thought of life by analogy with a journey, a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end, and the thing was to get to that end, success or whatever it is, maybe heaven after you’re dead. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played.
– Alan Watts
Letting go of the Story doesn’t mean letting go of reality; it enables a surrender to nature herself.
– Philip Shepherd
Sometimes losing everything is the only way to begin.
– T.K. Kiser, The Firebrand Legacy
There is a fable in the forest
Whispered by the branches, as they blow.
A tale about the truth of leaving
Things that no longer help you grow.
For on the surface it looks simple,…
Like you only need lace your boots,
But there is nothing quite as painful
As untangling your roots.
And proof is found in tree stumps
Of the price some pay to flee,
That they would cut their lives in half
To cut the time before they’re free.
Yet from the little left behind
Life has been known to grow again,
For unless you take your roots
A part of you will still remain.
– Erin Hanson
I want to know what passion is,’ he said. ‘I want to feel something strongly. We are all grown-up intellectually and during working hours,’ he went on, ‘but we are infants where feeling and desire are concerned.
– Aldous Huxley
Why we don’t get married every day
to the woman or man
or galloping shadow of a horse we love
is beyond me…
– BOB HICOK
Ultimately, America’s answer to the intolerant man is diversity, the very diversity which our heritage of religious freedom has inspired.
– Robert F. Kennedy
Words are easy, like the wind; Faithful friends are hard to find.
– William Shakespeare
Our “kleshas” (or neurotic upheavals) are like torpedoes from an enemy submarine. We rarely see them coming and once they have hit, it is usually too late to do… anything other than ride them out.
Meditation practice is like developing sonar – so we can begin to have more awareness of the part of our consciousness that is underwater so to speak. Then we may have a moment of “INCOMING!” – when we recognize that a habitual pattern is about to take over our whole mind and body.
– David Nichtern
It may look as if the situation is creating the suffering, but ultimately this is not so – your resistance is.
– Eckhart Tolle
Archetypes are a living system of reactions and aptitudes that determine the individual’s life in invisible ways.
– Carl Jung
There is no prescribed route to follow to arrive at new idea. You have to make the intuitive leap.
– Stephen Hawking
To be calm is the greatest asset in the world. It’s the greatest siddhi, the greatest power you can have. If you can only learn to be calm you will solve every problem.
This is something you must remember. When you are perfectly calm, time stops. As there is no time, karma stops, samskaras stop. Everything becomes null and void. For when you are calm you are one with the entire energy of the universe and everything will go well with you.
– Robert Adams
A book is not supposed to be a mirror. It’s supposed to be a door.
– Fran Lebowitz
FAITH:
Sometimes we must wait in a kind of spiritual zero-state, an empty place, a black hole of nothingness. At these times, the urge to fill in the blank space, rid ourselves of fears, even terrors of the unknown, must be avoided. We may not even be able to fill the space with optimism, positivity, or any already known quantities or spiritual notions for all that is known cannot take us anywhere new. Instead, it’s all in the waiting, the pregnancy without assurance, where the still point is, where a G-d just may arise. I call that faith.
– David Bedrick
Remember tonight… for it is the beginning of always
– Dante Alighieri
This is the root of magic and science, life’s response to uncertainties. Magic runs to the beginnings of life because life is a gift and uncertain.
– Loren Eiseley, Notes Of An Alchemist
Wallace J Nichols:
I like to close my eyes and relish the wondrous fact that you and I are sitting on a tilted blue-and-white planet that’s sailing around a star.
What a nuisance is the friend who must have this and that, whose likes and hates are infinite, with bitter and loud voiced complaint about the whole of circumstance? How pleasant are the truly great who, wanting nothing, are content with anything. Accepting all things in a world of illusion as born of cause-effect they live in a mind above the opposites, and we call them great because they do so.
– Christmas Humphreys, The Buddhist Way Of Life
If you can use the words ‘liberation’, ‘intersectionality’, ‘co-creative,’ ‘justice,’ and ‘hermeneutic of suspicion’ in the same sentence. . . you might be a Progressive Christian
– Kissing Fish
The requirements for our evolution have changed. Survival is no longer sufficient. Our evolution now requires us to develop spiritually – to become emotionally aware and make responsible choices. It requires us to align ourselves with the values of the soul – harmony, cooperation, sharing, and reverence for life.
– Gary Zukav
Around me gentle, familiar tugs
the lips of midnight’s amble
wrapped in meridian blues;
With signs of wild moss
soothing solitary fence posts
and watching tree’s elbows
stay knitted to misty hues;
Stay close to pulse.
Wither not as light dwindles
and dawn seems uncertain
inside winter’s pause.
It is the sphere of slowing;
a midpoint to withdraw.
– Carolyn Riker
LAUGH AND BE MERRY
Laugh and be merry, remember, better the world with a song,
Better the world with a blow in the teeth of a wrong.
Laugh, for the time is brief, a thread the length of a span.
Laugh and be proud to belong to the old proud pageant of man.
Laugh and be merry: remember, in olden time.
God made Heaven and Earth for joy He took in a rhyme,
Made them, and filled them full with the strong red wine of His mirth
The splendid joy of the stars: the joy of the earth.
So we must laugh and drink from the deep blue cup of the sky,
Join the jubilant song of the great stars sweeping by,
Laugh, and battle, and work, and drink of the wine outpoured
In the dear green earth, the sign of the joy of the Lord.
Laugh and be merry together, like brothers akin,
Guesting awhile in the rooms of a beautiful inn,
Glad till the dancing stops, and the lilt of the music ends.
Laugh till the game is played; and be you merry, my friends.
– John Masefield
PAINTING VS. POETRY
Painting is a person placed
between the light and a
canvas so that their shadow
is cast on the canvas and
then the person signs their
name on it whereas poetry
is the shadow writing its
name upon the person.
– Bill Knott
In the desert there is space. Space is the twin sister of time. If we have open space then we have open time to breath, to dream, to dare, to play, to pray to move freely, so freely, in a world our minds have forgotten but our bodies remember. This partnership is holy… We remember why we love the desert; it is our tactile response to light, to silence, and to stillness.
– Terry Tempest Williams
I used to find it odd that these hypothetical AIs were supposed to be smart enough to solve problems that no human could, yet they were incapable of doing something most every adult has done: taking a step back and asking whether their current course of action is really a good idea. Then I realized that we are already surrounded by machines that demonstrate a complete lack of insight, we just call them corporations. Corporations don’t operate autonomously, of course, and the humans in charge of them are presumably capable of insight, but capitalism doesn’t reward them for using it. On the contrary, capitalism actively erodes this capacity in people by demanding that they replace their own judgment of what “good” means with “whatever the market decides.”
– Ted Chiang
I don’t know what I think anymore really.
I am Taoist at a heart/soul level.
This means that I believe that things happen as they do when the conditions are ripe for their manifestation, and for no other reason really.
…
If we want things to be different, we have to change *what* and *how* we think, and what we DO in response to what and how we think…
we can’t change the collective, we can only stay close to the deep threads of our own experience and witness them in the larger context to determine whether things are actually changing.
Despite everything going on right now, I sense DEEP positive changes taking place.
I can’t explain it, but that is my sense.
This doesn’t mean that I agree with ANYTHING that I *see* taking place outside of myself. But I am at deep peace regarding those things that I have no control over.
And the ONLY things we can control are our own perceptions and responses, so….
– Ari Annona
There are nights in the forest of words
when I panic, every step into thicker darkness,
the only way out to write myself into a clearing,
which is silence. – Anne Michaels
Everyday Buddhas ~
I have this “theory” that the majority of wise spiritual “masters” on our planet right now are totally unacknowledged and unknown. They don’t write books, lead seminars, do dharma talks or gather students around them. They are auto mechanics, farmers, postal workers, young mothers, grandmothers, grandfathers, aunts, uncles, sales clerks, artists, unpublished poets, street musicians, scientists, truck drivers, nurse’s aides, elementary school teachers, wande…ring gypsies, young children, dolphins and dogs…
They are the patient, loving, wise and joyful beings who we meet in our lives, and they/we are everywhere…
~ Christopher, Tao and Zen
Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works.
– Carl Sagan
With all the intensity of feeling which exalted me, all the intense communion I held with the earth, the sun and sky, the stars hidden by the light, with the ocean, in no manner can the thrilling depth of these feelings be written, with these I prayed, as if they were the keys of an instrument, of an organ, with which I swelled forth the note of my soul, redoubling my own voice by their power.
– Richard Jefferies, The Story of My Heart
The gods weave misfortunes for men, so that the generations to come will have something to sing about. Mallarmé repeats, less beautifully, what Homer said; ‘tout aboutit en un livre,’ everything ends up in a book. The Greeks speak of generations that will sing; Mallarmé speaks of an object, of a thing among things, a book. But the idea is the same; the idea that we are made for art, we are made for memory, we are made for poetry, or perhaps we are made for oblivion. But something remains, and that something is history or poetry, which are not essentially different.
– Jorge Luis Borges
…the whole of this existence of ours will some day have its single, central principle spring to life, that will be so natural we’ll say to ourselves: How could it have been otherwise and how could we have been so stupid all these years not to have seen it?
– John Wheeler
Although the warrior’s life is dedicated to helping others, he realizes that he will never be able to completely share his experience with others…Yet he is more and more in love with the world. That combination of love affair and loneliness is what enables the warrior to constantly reach out to help others. By renouncing his private world, the warrior discovers a greater universe and a fuller and fuller broken heart. This is not something to feel bad about; it is a cause for rejoicing.
– Trungpa
Andrew Hagel:
Language is a lie. The lie is not bad, immoral or bankrupt — it’s just a socially consensual, necessary deception. We have no other choice but to tell our subjective truths with lies: useful fabrications, fictions, maps, models.
So thoroughly are we enthralled to their necessity and utility, we make no other choice but reify their significance, affording them the same ontological status as the things they signify. The words are not the truth.. .no. ..the things themselves are.
Wittgenstein says it better than I ever could:
“Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.”
~and~
A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.
Gic to Har
Kenneth Rexroth, 1905 – 1982
It is late at night, cold and damp
The air is filled with tobacco smoke.
My brain is worried and tired.
I pick up the encyclopedia,
The volume GIC to HAR,
It seems I have read everything in it,
So many other nights like this.
I sit staring empty-headed at the article Grosbeak,
Listening to the long rattle and pound
Of freight cars and switch engines in the distance.
Suddenly I remember
Coming home from swimming
In Ten Mile Creek,
Over the long moraine in the early summer evening,
My hair wet, smelling of waterweeds and mud.
I remember a sycamore in front of a ruined farmhouse,
And instantly and clearly the revelation
Of a song of incredible purity and joy,
My first rose-breasted grosbeak,
Facing the low sun, his body
Suffused with light.
I was motionless and cold in the hot evening
Until he flew away, and I went on knowing
In my twelfth year one of the great things
Of my life had happened.
Thirty factories empty their refuse in the creek.
On the parched lawns are starlings, alien and aggressive.
And I am on the other side of the continent
Ten years in an unfriendly city.
All war is a symptom of man’s failure as a thinking animal.
– John Steinbeck
In deranged societies, many sensible good ideas will, by definition, sound mad.
So long as we have such trouble telling other people what we really feel, there’ll be a role for literature.
People who think highly of themselves are just better at forgetting stuff about who they are.
– Alain De Botton
I sense a certain uncertainty in the pine trees,
Seasonal discontent,
quotidian surliness,
Pre-solstice jitters, that threatens to rattle our equilibrium.
– Charles Wright
There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
Sometimes silence says what your heart would never dare to say.
– Alda Merini
The Coming of Light
by Mark Strand, 1934 – 2014
Even this late it happens:
the coming of love, the coming of light.
You wake and the candles are lit as if by themselves,
stars gather, dreams pour into your pillows,
sending up warm bouquets of air.
Even this late the bones of the body shine
and tomorrow’s dust flares into breath.
I part the out thrusting branches and come in beneath the blessed and the blessing trees. Though I am silent there is singing around me. Though I am dark there is vision around me. Though I am heavy there is flight around me.
– Wendell Berry
The artist is distinguished from all other responsible actors in society—the politicians,legislators, educators, and scientists—by the fact that he is his own test tube, his own laboratory, working according to very rigorous rules, however unstated these may be, and cannot allow any consideration to supersede his responsibility to reveal all that he can possibly discover concerning the mystery of the human being.
– James Baldwin
If you are able to generate bodhicitta, it will be the cause of every happiness for yourself and others, and all the suffering you encounter in your daily life will be dispelled.
Whether we and our fellow beings experience happiness or suffering, whether we have peace or violence in the world, depends entirely on the condition of our minds. The mind is what determines whether there will be happiness or suffering; our states of mind are what makes our actions negative or positive.
Therefore, may those who have not already generated this excellent and precious noble mind work very hard to develop it. May those who have already generated bodhicitta try their best not to impair it, working hard to increase love and compassion so that it continues to grow.
– Trulshik Rinpoche
If the root of a tree is medicinal, then the fruit will be medicine. But if the root is poisonous, then the fruit will be poison. Likewise, positive and negative qualities come from one’s motivation, and not from one’s physical actions in themselves.
– Jigme Lingpa
Jeff Buckley:
You and I.
Ah, the calm below that poisoned river wild,
You and I.
Tears that dry on a rude awakened child.
Where you look down
I’ve walked before, burning holes
With eyes of liquid brown.
If we had only known, in a way
We wouldn’t reach this ground.
You were my only home, silver eyes.
I want to see you shine.
And we will feel the weight
Fall away from us in time
Searching our past for the true
You and I, you and I, you and I,
All for you.
Where you think you’ll fall,
I adore you.
Where you shut your soul,
I will open for you.
If we had only known, in a way
We’d never reach this ground.
I’ll know, silver eyes.
I can see us shine.
I said, we will feel the weight
Fall away from us in time
Searching our past for a true
You and I, you and I, you and I,
All for you.
for a thought to change the world, it must first change the life of the man who wears it. It has to change as an example.
– Albert Camus, Notebooks II (1942-1951)
How did we get here, wrapped in the difficulties we wake in? Circle the sun enough and we all lose reasons like gloves in an alley.
– Mark Nepo, Things That Join the Sea and the Sky
Spoiler alert: The new Star Wars movie has the best usage of visualization meditation in any movie ever.
– Ethan Nichtern
Good ideas are not conjured out of thin air; they are built out of a collection of existing parts, the composition of which expands (and, occasionally, contracts) over time. The trick to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoughts. The trick is to get more parts on the table.
– Steven Johnson
Yolanda Rommel:
This morning conversation with a friend I have not seen for a while. He sounded puzzled when I said he is my imaginary friend…
When we think about each other – all of us – we are imagining each other. Not realizing it, we react to images, thoughts and images created in our own heads. The beauty of it is we can imagine at will… choose the experience…
The loss is we do not think about the fantastic choices we have… :)
Also pain… so often based only on our own imagination…
Bonnie Ann Burnett:
I love the long, long nights. I only wish they came after the holiday hubbub so we could truly settle into their slow beauty. This is deep dreamtime, slow journey inward time, let commitments fall away and share stories time. Blessd be the dark.
I love the dark hours of my being in which my senses drop into the deep.
I have found in them, as in old letters, my private life, that is already lived through, and become wide and powerful now, like legends.
Then I know that there is room in me for a second huge and timeless life.
– Rilke
Dalai Lama:
We need to strengthen such inner values as contentment, patience and tolerance, as well as compassion for others. Keeping in mind that it is expressions of affection rather than money and power that attract real friends, compassion is the key to ensuring our own well-being.
Dana Levy-Wendt Fox
On Winter Solstice
I had dreamed we would all
be joined together
around this fire of devotion.
Instead tonight
I built this fire alone,
choosing the yule log
that will burn till dawn
from a single flame
a tiny spark in the darkness
can grow, but only if I tend this flame
that always shines in me
flickering
Only I know what will kindle
and fuel it through the darkest night.
till morning comes.
I am the keeper of this light.
dim
then bright.
You were each here with me
last night as I kept watch in the darkness
tending the Yule fire
I had a prayer for each of you.
But fire spoke to me…
whispering
we must each tend our own sacred fire
to generate
the light
the alchemical HEAT
to transform
our leaden hearts to gold
We must each tend our flame
with devotion
to keep this light
burning bright.
This sacred duty
is ours alone.
Every step closer to my soul excites the scornful laughter of my devils, those cowardly ear-whisperers and poison-mixers.
– C.G. Jung
Lyna Rose:
Seek love in all things
and failure will be impossible.
I’ve witnessed firsthand that you need to get out of your usual circles if you want to achieve more. Meeting others will help you find your own path.
– Artisha Mann
I think the history of art is simply a history of getting rid of the ugly by entering into it, and using it. After all, the notion of something outside of is being ugly is not outside of us but inside of us. And that’s why I keep reiterating that we are working with our minds, What we are trying to do is to get them open so that we don’t see things as ugly, or beautiful, but we see them just as they are.
– John Cage, 1952
Books are key to understanding the world and participating in a democratic society.
– Carl Sagan
Nithya Shanti:
The less we think, the more we learn to cherish and relish inner quiet and silence, the more everything in our life falls in place and flows effortlessly, beautifully and harmoniously.
The same intelligence and power that manages the arrangement of galaxies and atoms, will step in to manage every last detail of our life – if we only trust and allow it!
Think less. Be more. Respond when required, to the extent required. Do your best and bless the rest. There are no mistakes in the universe. Everything is in its place and happening as it should.
The less we think, the more everything in our life flows harmoniously.
Gift
I have to trust what was given to me
if I am to trust anything
it led the stars over the shadowless mountain
what does it not remember in its night and silence
what does it not hope knowing itself no child of time
what did it not begin what will it not end
I have to hold it up in my hands as my ribs hold up my heart I have to let it open its wings and fly among the gifts of the unknown
again in the mountain I have to turn
to the morning
I must be led by what was given to me
as streams are led by it
and braiding flights of birds
the gropings of veins the learning of plants
the thankful days
breath by breath
I call to it Nameless One O Invisible
Untouchable Free
I am nameless I am divided
I am invisible I am untouchable
and empty
nomad live with me
be my eyes
my tougue and my hands
my sleep and my rising
out of chaos
come and be given
– W.S. Merwin
This tremendous world I have inside of me. How to free myself, and this world, without tearing myself to pieces. And rather tear myself to a thousand pieces than be buried with this world within me.
– Franz Kafka
We will smile at one another, for we know what poetry sounds like: it sounds like this. Close your soft eyes and listen. It sounds like listening to whales, underwater, on an old vinyl record. It sounds like the nightly crickets we forget to hear. It sounds like the pause before a cherished old song comes on: say, Supremes, or Debussy or Chopin, or Gene Kelly, or some whiskey-lit Scottish folk. It sounds like old travels and old streams and going for a walk on a straight dirt road after dinner.
I would like to hold your hand. For it is always the first time, when I hold your hand, for I am so enthusiastic about you that I hope you do not notice, and I have to constantly remind myself that I will lose you.
For the future is all made up, none of this matters, these are just words.
I would like to stop wordplaying, and see you.
– Waylon Lewis
I would like to see you most every day for what I fear most is to miss seeing what you wear, how you laugh, and what you are creating, and what you think about things I think about, and what you think about things I have not thought about, and what you say out of that.
– Waylon Lewis
Who knows, the world might wake up and burst out into a beautiful flower of Dharma everywhere.
– Jack Kerouac
Ethan Nichtern:
There have been inclusive, fearless and generous societies in the past. There will be more. There’s no way the current forces of fear and greed will sustain themselves. Keep *showing up.* Keep opening eyes and hearts. A good human society will grow.
Whatever you most care about, let this tenderness of heart energize your meditation. The sincerity of your longing will carry you home.
– Tara Brach, True Refuge
Let us temper our criticism with kindness. None of us comes fully equipped.
– Carl Sagan
Things are so hard to figure out when you live from day to day in this feverish and silly world.
– Jack Kerouac
I’m right there, swimming the river of hardships but I know how to swim…
– Jack Kerouac
A selfish society is an unsustainable society. May we wake up.
– Jack Kerouac
Wild nights – Wild nights!
Were I with thee
Wild nights should be
Our luxury!
– Emily Dickinson
Grandfather
advised me:
Learn a trade
I learned
to sit at desk
and condense
No layoffs
from this
condensery
– Lorine Niedecker, Poet’s Work
Wholeness is not achieved by cutting off a portion of one’s being, but by integration of the contraries.”
– C. G. Jung
Friends are the family
we choose for ourselves.
– Edna Buchanan
There is another, truer reality,
sending us hints, but we
cannot perceive it without art.
– Saul Bellow
Imperfect things [and people] are
the most beautiful of all.
– Heather Havrilesky
Do not let the clock and calendar
blind you to the fact that
each moment is a miracle and mystery.
– H.G Wells
In matters of style, swim with the current.
In matters of principle, stand like a boulder.
– Thomas Jefferson
Eyes of the Goddess
The poet waits for me in his countryman’s cape
And shows me the map in the gateway stone:
Twin spirals to get you in, and out, of the place of bone;
Wave paths to swim you from shadow to dreamscape;
A stairway of stars for when you are done with earthing.
I am here to practice the art of rebirthing.
She calls me, into the belly of the land that is She.
But I play, like the poet, with the shapes of time:
I am a swimming swan on the River Boyne;
I am a salmon, full with the knowing of the hazel tree;
I wander with Angus, and know the girl I have visioned
in gold at the throat of a white swan, beating pinions.
Drawn by the old perfume of burned bones, I go down
and doze until solstice fire, bright and bountiful
quickens me for the return of the Lady, lithe and beautiful
In the form she has taken, flowing as liquid bronze.
Her face is veiled, so the man-boy called to her side
like the red deer in season will not die in her eyes.
I see beyond the veil, for I come from the Other.
Oh, I yearn for the smell of earth and the kiss of rain!
I leap with her on the hallowed bed, coming again.
She knows the deer-king, as I am child and lover
Her eyes are spiral paths; the gyre of creation whirls
And sends me in green beauty to marry the worlds.
– Robert Moss, From a Journey to Newgrange
To gain freedom, you first have to give.
Let the world be as free as it is.
Let people be free to live as they wish.
And free yourself from having
An opinion about everything.
Reality is wondrous,
Even if everything doesn’t appear to be moral, Righteous, or perfect.
Not all homes are filled with love.
Not all children receive what they need,
And not everyone is happy.
But you can be moral, righteous,
And sensitive to the needs of others.
You can fill your home with love,
And offer your children a clear mind and an open heart.
Let the world be as it is.
Let parallel worlds fade away.
Once in a while clear the thoughts
From the screen of your personality.
Truth is what remains when you go beyond your mind.
There is no real joy in the parallel worlds.
The only place to find happiness is where you are,
And there is no better time than now.
– Zen Master Nissim Amon
I’ve heard many environmentalists state that if only they could get CEOs and politicians out of their boardrooms and legislative halls (or out of their penthouses and vacation homes) long enough to breathe clean forest air and to feel duff beneath their feet, long enough to stop thinking about stock prices and start thinking about spotted owls, that the CEOs would undergo magical transformations and suddenly no longer want to destroy the homes of their newfound forest friends.
It ain’t gonna happen. This false hope ignores many things. It ignores the fact that when Europeans first encountered a wildly fecund North America, they were not entranced by it, they did not fall in love with it, they feared and hated it, and they began to dismantle it, a dismantling that continues its acceleration to this day. It ignores the fact that many loggers spend much of their adult lives in forests, claiming to love these forests they’re destroying. It ignores the fact that CEOs and politicians, like other abusers, are financially and socially well rewarded for maintaining their disconnected state. It ignores the fact that if some individual does have an epiphany, he will simply be replaced and the destruction will continue apace. And most of all it ignores the fact that, as mentioned before, the culture’s problem lies in the belief that controlling and abusing the natural world is justifiable.
Where does this leave us?
Well, if you agree with my thesis—which I think I’ve more than amply supported—that the motivations, dynamics, and damage of abuse play out not only in the bedrooms of little girls and boys, not only in the black eyes and bruised and torn vaginas of women, not only in the fragmented and fearful psyches of the traumatized; but also in blasted streams and dammed rivers, poisoned oceans and extirpated species; and in enslaved, domesticated, or destroyed humans (and nonhumans, and landscapes), then it means that asking, cajoling, or even sending lovingkindness™ to abusers is at best a waste of time. Bancroft again: “You cannot get an abuser to change by begging or pleading. The only abusers who change are the ones who become willing to accept the consequences of their actions.” And yet again: “You cannot, I am sorry to say, get an abuser to work on himself by pleading, soothing, gently leading, getting friends to persuade him, or using any other nonconfrontational method. I have watched hundreds of women attempt such an approach without success. The way you can help him change is to demand that he do so, and settle for nothing less.”
Let’s apply this on the larger scale: We cannot get large-scale abusers to stop exploiting others by pleading, soothing, gently leading, getting people to persuade them, or using any other nonconfrontational method. It won’t work.
But you knew that already.
Bancroft continues, “It is also impossible to persuade an abusive man to change by convincing him that he would benefit, because he perceives the benefits of controlling his partner as vastly outweighing the losses. This is part of why so many men initially take steps to change their abusive behavior but then return to their old ways. There is another reason why appealing to his self-interest doesn’t work. The abusive man’s belief that his own needs should come ahead of his partner’s is at the core of the problem. Therefore when anyone, including therapists, tells an abusive man that he should change because that’s what’s best for him, they are inadvertently feeding his selfish focus on himself: You cannot simultaneously contribute to a problem and solve it.”
Let’s once again explicitly make the connection to the larger scale. It is impossible to persuade the civilized to change by convincing them that they would benefit and simultaneously allowing them to remain within the framework and reward system of civilization, because the civilized perceive the benefits of controlling those around them (including humans and nonhumans; including the land, air, water; including genetic structures; including molecular structures) as vastly outweighing the losses. This is part of why so many of the civilized initially take steps—or at least mouth rhetoric and pretend to take steps—to change their abusive behavior but then return to their exploitative ways. There is another reason why appealing to the self-interest of the civilized doesn’t work (apart from the fact that the entire economic system, indeed all of civilization, is based on this limited and unsustainable sense of self which leads people to believe it’s in one’s self-interest to exploit others, indeed, which causes it to be, within this limited sense of self, actually in one’s self-interest to exploit others): the belief of the civilized that their own needs should come ahead of the landbase’s is at the core of the problem. Therefore when people, including activists, tell a civilized person—for example, a CEO or politician—that he should change because that’s what’s best for him, they are inadvertently feeding his selfish focus on himself: You cannot simultaneously contribute to a problem and solve it.
Let’s go one more time. Bancroft: “An abuser doesn’t change because he feels guilty or gets sober or finds God. He doesn’t change after seeing the fear in his children’s eyes or feeling them drift away from him. It doesn’t suddenly dawn on him that his partner deserves better treatment. Because of his self focus, combined with the many rewards he gets from controlling you, an abuser changes only when he has to, so the most important element in creating a context for change in an abuser is placing him in a situation where he has no other choice. Otherwise, it is highly unlikely that he will ever change his behavior.”
Pay careful attention. No other choice.
No, really. Pay careful attention. No other choice.
No, now really pay attention. No other choice.
None.
Let’s transpose this to the larger scale. Those who are killing the planet won’t change because they feel guilty or drop their addiction to consumerism or find God, or Nature.They don’t change after seeing the fear in factory farmed or vivisected animal’s eyes (or in the eyes of the poor) or feeling wild creatures drift away from them.It doesn’t suddenly dawn on them that the landbase deserves better treatment. Because of their self-focus, combined with the many rewards they get from controlling those around them, these abusers change only when they have to, so the most important element in creating a context for change in those who are killing the planet is to place them in situations where they have no other choice. Otherwise, it is highly unlikely that they will ever change their behavior.
No other choice.
None.
The answer that allowed me to move past the question of whether abusers believe their lies is this: it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter at all. What matters is stopping them.
– Derrick Jensen
The less time I spend resenting whatever is happening, and the more time I spend learning from it, the better off I am.
– Parker Palmer
Your soul is in great need, because drought weighs on its world. If you look outside yourselves, you see the far-off forest and mountains, and above them for vision climbs to the realms of the stars. And if you look into yourselves, you will see on the other hand the infinite as the world of the outer. Just as you become a part of the manifold essence of the world through your bodies, so you becomes a part of the manifold essence of the inner world through your soul. This inner world is truly infinite, in no way poorer than the outer one. Man lives in two worlds. A fool lives here or there, but never here and there.
– Carl Jung
To meditate well, we have to smile, a lot… I always say that a smile can be a practice, a kind of yoga practice. Yoga of the mouth: you just smile even if you don’t feel joy and you’ll see after you smile that you’ll feel differently. Sometimes the mind takes the initiative and sometimes you have to allow the body to take the initiative.Sometimes the spirit leads, and sometimes the body can lead.
– Thich Nhat Han
And like the setting sun
I feel that I am at my best
when I’m inching closer,
ever so closer,
to my inevitable
final burst of color
– Nicholas A Browne
I believe that extroverts are unhappier than introverts and have to compensate for this by constantly proving to themselves and to everybody how happy and at ease with life they are.
– Paulo Coelho
When you possess great treasures within you and try to tell others of them, seldom you are believed.
– Paulo Coelho
There is such a thing
as unconditional expression
that does not come from self or other.
It manifests out of nowhere
like mushrooms in a meadow,
like hailstones, like thundershowers.
– Chögyam Trungpa
Solstice means “sun stands still,” as if the warmth and radiance of life itself hangs in the balance at critical points in the course of planetary existence. When the world becomes darker, the inner light of the soul becomes more important. The light we discover in our own depths is a speck of the original star, a spark of life that connects us to each other and to the Soul of the World.
– Michael Meade
We are not living in ordinary times, and it is not enough for us to admire our nation’s core values from afar…So stand up. Speak out.
– Sally Yates
But now that so much is changing, isn’t it time for us to change? Couldn’t we try to gradually develop and slowly take upon ourselves, little by little, our part in the great task of love? We have been spared all its trouble, and that is why it has slipped in among our distractions, as a piece of real lace will sometimes fall into a child’s toy-box and please him and no longer please him, and finally it lies there among the broken and dismembered toys, more wretched than any of them. We have been spoiled by superficial pleasures like dilettantes, and are looked upon as masters. But what if we despised our successes? What if we started from the very outset to learn the task of love, which has always been done for us? What if we went ahead and became beginners, now that much is changing?
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Jeff Brown:
When people ask me how long it is going to take before they can heal all their wounds, I always respond the same way: “It’s going to take a lifetime.”
This is seldom what they want to hear, particularly in this fast-paced and over-stimulated culture, but it’s the truth. The emotional healing journey is a lifelong process, particularly for trauma survivors. Because trauma is not a concept. It’s not a ‘victim story’ or a needless cry for attention. It’s not something to ‘rise above’ or rush beyond with pseudo-positivity practices.
Trauma is a lived experience, embedded in the emotional and physical bodies, that continues to interface with our consciousness throughout our lives. There is work that we can do to understand and transform our relationship with it, but it will continue to participate in our experience of reality.
And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Because its fundamental to who we are. Because it’s part of our real-time story, and at its heart are the seeds of our individual and collective transformation. How many great healers and world-changing activists did not endure tremendous suffering? Very few.
Trauma is a door-opener to greatness. It’s a portal to awakening. Let’s not pretend it isn’t there. Let’s not deny it’s brazen wisdom. Let’s roar it loud and true.
I am wrapped in my joyful flesh,
and the grass is wrapped in its cloud of green.
Rising from a bed where I dreamt
Of long rides past castles and hot coals,
The sun lies happily on my knees;
I have suffered and survived the night,
Bathed in dark water, like any blade of grass.
The strong leaves of the box elder tree,
Plunging in the wind, call us to disappear
Into the wilds of the universe,
Where we shall sit at the foot of a plant,
And live forever, like the dust.
– Robert Bly, Silence in the Snowy Fields
Chogyam Trungpa ~ At this point, we are in a powerful spot: being in the present, we can reshape the whole future. Therefore, shouldn’t we be more careful, shouldn’t we be more awake in what we are doing this very moment? – True Perception
To the friends who stuck around
Go and hold them closer
– Joan Shelley
Robert Kaplan:
Love is not
an accomplishment
Love is
love
Love is grace
Now is the time—
For the Masculine and the Feminine to work together harmoniously
To get on our knees and to bow to each other
To share our gifts with each other
To walk gently on this earth with Ahimsa—Non-Violence to all essences from earth to sky.
To work side by side as sisters and brothers-
mothers and fathers-
old and young-
within all ethnicities, religions, and cultures—
to resuscitate the Human Race.
To love one another
One heart at a time—
My daily Heart Prayer for all.
May you feel my love in each breath you take,
– Deerheart
If anyone is unwilling to descend into himself, because this is too painful, he will remain superficial in his writing. . . If I perform to myself, then it’s this that the style expresses. And then the style cannot be my own. If you are unwilling to know what you are, your writing is a form of deceit.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
One of the dysfunctional patterns of the mind is the assumption that the Now needs to be filled with something all the time. Of course you have to do things, but see if you can also experience the spaciousness of this moment, the inherent goodness of this moment, regardless of what it contains.
– Eckhart Tolle
I – Cantor y Gaucho
.
1
Aquí me pongo a cantar
Al compás de la vigüela,
Que el hombre que lo desvela
Una pena estraordinaria
Como la ave solitaria
Con el cantar se consuela.
.
2
Pido a los Santos del Cielo
Que ayuden mi pensamiento;
Les pido en este momento
Que voy a cantar mi historia
Me refresquen la memoria
Y aclaren mi entendimiento.
.
3
Vengan Santos milagrosos,
Vengan todos en mi ayuda,
Que la lengua se me añuda
Y se me turba la vista;
Pido a Dios que me asista
En una ocasión tan ruda.
.
4
Yo he visto muchos cantores,
Con famas bien obtenidas,
Y que después de adquiridas
No las quieren sustentar
Parece que sin largar
se cansaron en partidas
.
5
Mas ande otro criollo pasa
Martín Fierro ha de pasar;
nada lo hace recular
ni los fantasmas lo espantan,
y dende que todos cantan
yo también quiero cantar.
.
6
Cantando me he de morir
Cantando me han de enterrar,
Y cantando he de llegar
Al pie del eterno padre:
Dende el vientre de mi madre
Vine a este mundo a cantar.
.
7
Que no se trabe mi lengua
Ni me falte la palabra:
El cantar mi gloria labra
Y poniéndome a cantar,
Cantando me han de encontrar
Aunque la tierra se abra.
.
8
Me siento en el plan de un bajo
A cantar un argumento:
Como si soplara el viento
Hago tiritar los pastos;
Con oros, copas y bastos
Juega allí mi pensamiento.
.
9
Yo no soy cantor letrao,
Mas si me pongo a cantar
No tengo cuándo acabar
Y me envejezco cantando:
Las coplas me van brotando
Como agua de manantial.
.
10
Con la guitarra en la mano
Ni las moscas se me arriman,
Naides me pone el pie encima,
Y cuando el pecho se entona,
Hago gemir a la prima
Y llorar a la bordona.
.
11
Yo soy toro en mi rodeo
Y torazo en rodeo ajeno;
Siempre me tuve por güeno
Y si me quieren probar,
Salgan otros a cantar
Y veremos quién es menos.
.
12
No me hago al lao de la güeya
Aunque vengan degollando,
Con los blandos yo soy blando
Y soy duro con los duros,
Y ninguno en un apuro
Me ha visto andar tutubiando.
.
13
En el peligro, ¡qué Cristos!
El corazón se me enancha,
Pues toda la tierra es cancha,
Y de eso naides se asombre:
El que se tiene por hombre
Ande quiere hace pata ancha.
.
14
Soy gaucho, y entiendaló
Como mi lengua lo esplica:
Para mí la tierra es chica
Y pudiera ser mayor;
Ni la víbora me pica
Ni quema mi frente el sol
.
15
Nací como nace el peje
En el fondo de la mar;
Naides me puede quitar
Aquello que Dios me dio
Lo que al mundo truje yo
Del mundo lo he de llevar.
.
16
Mi gloria es vivir tan libre
Como el pájaro del cielo:
No hago nido en este suelo
Ande hay tanto que sufrir,
Y naides me ha de seguir
Cuando yo remuento el vuelo.
.
17
Yo no tengo en el amor
Quien me venga con querellas;
Como esas aves tan bellas
Que saltan de rama en rama,
Yo hago en el trébol mi cama,
Y me cubren las estrellas.
.
18
Y sepan cuantos escuchan
De mis penas el relato,
Que nunca peleo ni mato
Sino por necesidá,
Y que a tanta alversidá
Sólo me arrojó el mal trato
.
19
Y atiendan la relación
que hace un gaucho perseguido,
que padre y marido ha sido
empeñoso y diligente,
y sin embargo la gente
lo tiene por un bandido
The Gaucho Martín Fierro
.
I – Singer and Gaucho.
.
1
Here I begin to sing
with the company of guitar,
like a man who is sleepless
from an extraordinary pain
that like a solitary bird
sings to be consoled.
.
2
I ask the saints in Heaven
to help me with my thoughts;
I ask them during this moment
that I will sing my history
to refresh my memory of me
and clarify my understanding.
.
3
Come Holy miracles,
come all to my aid,
the language tongue-ties me
and clouds my vision;
I ask that God assists me
in so crude an occasion.
.
4
I have seen many singers,
who obtained good fame,
and after they acquired it
did not want to keep it;
it seems that without realizing
they got tired of the games.
.
5
Further than any gaucho
has Martín Fierro gone;
nothing he does is cowardly
or is he frightened by ghosts,
and since they all sing
I also want to sing.
.
6
Singing I will die
singing they will bury me,
and singing I will arrive
at the foot of the Eternal Father:
because from the belly of my mother
I came into this world to sing.
.
7
Because my speech is not perfect
and words are hard to find:
through singing my glory shines
and by setting myself to sing,
singing they will find me
even when the Earth chasms.
.
8
I am in the plan of a lowly one
to sing out in protest:
like when the wind blows
it makes the grass ripple;
with all the cards in a deck of tricks
my thoughts will play there.
.
9
I am not a learned singer,
and when I start to sing
I do not know when to stop
so I age while I am singing:
the songs are flowing from me
like a water from a spring.
.
10
With a guitar in my hand
the flies do not bother me,
nobody is above me,
and when my chest intones,
I make the strings moan
and cry with the chords.
.
11
I am the bull of my own herd
but visit other herds;
I always thought myself quite good,
but if they want to test me
in contest with another,
they will see who is the better.
.
12
Do not place me in the ranks
when they come cutting throats,
with the friendly I am friendly
but with the tough I am tougher,
and none in any confrontation
have ever seen me walk trembling.
.
13
In dangerous situations, Christ Jesus!
my courage enlarges,
and because all the world is a battle-field,
no one can be astonished:
that who he who is a real man
stands with his legs splayed wide.
.
14
I am gaucho, and understand
like my language will explain;
for me the Earth is small
and should be much larger,
but the viper never bites me
and the sun never scorches me.
.
15
I was born as a fish is born
at the bottom of the sea;
none can take from me
what God gave to me;
what the world gives to me
to the world I will return.
.
16
My glory is to live free
as the bird in the sky:
I do not make a nest on this ground
where to walk is to suffer,
and no one has to follow me
when I veer in my direction.
.
17
I do not have love
for those that come to quarrel;
like those beautiful birds
that jump from branch to branch,
I make my bed with grasses,
and the stars are my blanket.
.
18
And know when you listen
in empathy for my pain,
that I never fight or kill
except when it is necessary,
and when I am so badly treated
I have to give in return.
.
19
And they who make the rules
that persecute a gaucho,
who though father and husband
has been loyal and diligent,
have created for themselves
a bandit for the people
In all arts, as I think, total inexperience and ignorance are preferable to a semi-experience and a half-knowledge. For he who is conscious that he knows nothing of an art aims at less, and consequently comes less to grief: in fact, diffidence excludes presumption. But when anyone parades a superficial knowledge as mastery of a subject, through false confidence he makes manifold slips. They say, too, that it is better to have kept wholly clear of the teachings of philosophy than to have tasted them superficially and, as the saying goes, with the tips of the lips; and that those turn out the most knavish who, going about the precincts of an art, turn aside or ever they have entered its portals.
– M. Cornelius Fronto writing to Marcus Aurelius
For a moment,
after we wake, we are without desire—
five, ten, twenty seconds of
pure calm, as if each one of us is whole.
– Sharon Olds
Skating backwards tells another story –
the risky star above the freezing town,
a way to walk on water and not drown.
– Cynthia Zarin, The Watercourse
A winter poem from Crossing the Yellow River:
T’ao Ch’ien (365-427)
To My Cousin, Ching-yuan,…Twelfth Month, 403
Hidden behind a rustic gate,
I sever my ties with the world.
Some days I look, but no one’s there,
the old wooden gate stays closed.
Cold, the cold year-end winds,
snows cloaking everything.
Bending my ear, I hear nothing.
My eyes see only pure white,
winter air sharp as a blade up my sleeve.
Rice bowl and wine jug empty,
in the whole empty house
there is nothing to sustain me.
Reading the classics again,
sometimes I still find heroes,
old sages I dare not emulate,
but who stood strong in adversity.
I too will not choose the easy way.
My unemployment is not mere ineptitude.
My meaning lies beyond my words—
Who but you can understand my fate?
– Sam Hamill
Hung on the shower that fronts the golden West,
The rainbow bursts like magic on mine eyes!
In hues of ancient promise there imprest;
Frail in its date, eternal in its guise.
– Charles Tennyson Turner
Speaking True
by Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes
When someone says, “We’re saying the same thing.” Say, “We are not saying the same thing.”
…
When someone says, “Don’t question, just have faith.” Say, “I am questioning, vato, and I have supreme faith in what I think.”
When someone says, “Don’t defy my authority.” Say, “There is a higher authority that I follow.”
When someone says, “Your ideas are seductive.” Say, “No, my ideas are not seductive, they are substantial.”
When someone says, “Your ideas are dangerous.” Say, “Yes, my ideas are dangerous, and why are you so afraid, hombre o mujer?”
When it is said, “It’s just not done.” Say, “It will be done.”
When it is said, “It is immature.” Say, “All life begins small and must be allowed to grow.”
When it is said, “It’s not thought out.” Say, “It is well thought out.”
When they say, “You’re over-reacting.” Say, “You’re under-reacting, vato.”
When they say, “You’re being emotional.” Say, “Of course I have well placed emotions, and by the way, what happened to yours?”
When they say, “You’re not making any sense.” Say, “I don’t make sense, I am the sense.”
When they say, “I can’t understand you when you’re crying.” Say, “Make no mistake, I can weep and be fierce at the same time.”
When they say, “I can’t understand you when you’re being so angry.” Say, “You couldn’t hear me when I was being nice, or sweet or silent, either.”
When someone says, “You’re missing the point.” Say, “I’m not missing the point, but you seem to be missing my point. What are you so afraid of?”
When someone says, “You are breaking the rules.” Say, “Yes, I am breaking the rules.”
When someone says, “That’s not practical.” Say, “It’s practically a done deal, thank you very much.”
When it is said, “No one will do it, believe you, or follow it.” Say, “I will do it, I will believe in it, and in time, the world may well follow it.”
When it is said, “No one wants to listen to that.” Say, “I know you have a hard time listening to that.”
When it is said, “It’s a closed system, you can’t change it.” Say, “I’m going to knock twice and if there is no answer, then I am going to blow the doors off that system and it will change.”
When it is said, “They’ll ignore you.” Say, “They won’t ignore me and the hundreds of thousands who stand with me.”
When they say, “It’s already been done.” Say, “It’s not been done well enough.”
When they say, “It’s not yet time.” Say, “It’s way past time.”
When they say, “It’s not the right day, right month, right year.” Tell them, “The right year was last year, and the right month was last month, and the right day was yesterday, and you’re running behind schedule, vato, and what in the name of God and all that is holy are you going to do about it?”
When they say, “Who do you think you are?” Tell them …tell them who you are, and don’t hold back.
When they say, “I put up with it, you’ll have to put up with it too.” Say, “No, no, no, no.”
When they say, “I’ve suffered a long time and you’ll have to suffer too.” Say, “No, no, no, no!”
When they say, “You’re an incorrigible, defiant, hard to get along with, unreasonable woman…”
Say, “Yes, yes, yes, yes! And I have worse news for you yet. We are teaching our daughters, and our mothers, and our sisters… We are teaching our sons, and our fathers, and our brothers…to be just like us.
– Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Surely everyone is aware of the divine pleasures which attend a wintry fireside; candles at four o’clock, warm hearthrugs, tea, a fair tea-maker, shutters closed, curtains flowing in ample draperies to the floor, whilst the wind and rain are raging audibly without.
– Thomas de Quincey
MASS
At the end of the battle, the combatant dead, a man
approached him
and said to him: ‘Don’t die; I love you so much!’… but the corpse, alas!, kept on dying.
Two more came up to him and repeated:
‘Don’t leave us! Be brave! Come back to life!’
but the corpse, alas!, kept on dying.
Twenty, a hundred, a thousand, five hundred thousand
appeared,
crying out: ‘So much love, and no power against death!’
but the corpse, alas!, kept on dying.
Millions of individuals surrounded him
with a common plea: ‘Don’t leave us brother!’
but the corpse, alas!, kept on dying.
Then all the inhabitants of the earth
surrounded him; the corpse looked at them sadly, deeply moved;
he got up slowly
embraced the first man; started to walk…
– César Vallejo
Under all our brokenness waits a bottomless spring that rises from nowhere to feed all hearts.
– Mark Nepo, Things That Join the Sea and the Sky
Who’s proclaiming this…?
“I’m not from here, nor from there
I have no age, nor future
and being happy is the colour…
of my identity.”
– Facundo Cabral
Happiness comes when your work and words are beneficial to others.
– Buddha
Andrea Gibson:
i know god’s number by heart. i know it isn’t listed in any book.
Child, if you speak beautifully but behave badly, you become the worst of practitioners.
– Padampa Sangye
I note the obvious differences
in the human family.
Some of us are serious,
some thrive on comedy.
…
Some declare their lives are lived
as true profundity,
and others claim they really live
the real reality.
The variety of our skin tones
can confuse, bemuse, delight,
brown and pink and beige and purple,
tan and blue and white.
I’ve sailed upon the seven seas
and stopped in every land,
I’ve seen the wonders of the world
not yet one common man.
I know ten thousand women
called Jane and Mary Jane,
but I’ve not seen any two
who really were the same.
Mirror twins are different
although their features jibe,
and lovers think quite different thoughts
while lying side by side.
We love and lose in China,
we weep on England’s moors,
and laugh and moan in Guinea,
and thrive on Spanish shores.
We seek success in Finland,
are born and die in Maine.
In minor ways we differ,
in major we’re the same.
I note the obvious differences
between each sort and type,
but we are more alike, my friends,
than we are unalike.
We are more alike, my friends,
than we are unalike.
We are more alike, my friends,
than we are unalike.
Human Family
by Maya Angelou
There is really only one way to restore a world that is dying and in disrepair: to make beauty where ugliness has set in. By beauty, I don’t mean a superficial attractiveness, though the word is commonly used in this way. Beauty is a loveliness admired in its entirety, not just at face value. The beauty I’m referring to is metabolized grief. It includes brokenness and fallibility, and in so doing, conveys for us something deliciously real. Like kintsukuroi, the Japanese art …of repairing broken pottery with powdered gold, what is normally seen as a fatal flaw is distinguished with value. When we come into contact with this kind of beauty, it serves as a medicine for the brokenness in ourselves, which then gives us the courage to live in greater intimacy with the world’s wounds.
– Toko-pa Turner
Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.
– George Burns
Dead Butterfly
by Ellen Bass
For months my daughter carried
a dead monarch in a quart mason jar.
To and from school in her backpack,
to her only friend’s house. At the dinner table
it sat like a guest alongside the pot roast.
She took it to bed, propped by her pillow.
Was it the year her brother was born?
Was this her own too-fragile baby
that had lived—so briefly—in its glassed world?
Or the year she refused to go to her father’s house?
Was this the holding-her-breath girl she became there?
This plump child in her rolled-down socks
I sometimes wanted to haul back inside me
and carry safe again. What was her fierce
commitment? I never understood.
We just lived with the dead winged thing
as part of her, as part of us,
weightless in its heavy jar.
This world demands the qualities of youth, not a time of life, but a state of mind, a temper of the will, a quality of the imagination. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. It is the one essential, vital quality, for those who seek to change this world which yields most painfully to change..
– Robert F. Kennedy
THE PERFECT TIME
by Pema Dragpa
The key word of our times is disruption.
Whether it’s Blockchain, Bitcoin, or 1,000 other cryptocurrencies
Smartphones that dis/connect
Loneliness, anxiety, and zombie epidemics
Always soma-life if you like
The growing global choice between
Bernie or Trump populism
Alt-right, altogether, or always-only-me
Intensifying heat
Oceanic acidification
Water scarcity
Broken ice shelves
Extreme weather events
Overpowering floods of refugees
Accelerated species extinction
Vegetarianism
Increased human longevity
Ongoing population explosion
All-new diseases and widespread old ones
Ancient herbal remedies
Inevitable “1st world” simplicity
Growing “3rd World” solidarity
Of indigenous communities
Recalcitrant fundamentalist tribalism
Expanded ancient culture wars
Crumbling empires and new alliances
Worldcentric globalism
For one common human family
Or the Military-Prison-Pharmaceutical-Food-Insurance … Industrial Complex
More-obvious-and-less-palatable-by-more-people
Neocon neoliberalism
Different tv channels
Same parent company
The ever-shrinking 0.0000000000001%
Against all the rest of us
Expanding military overreach everywhere.
Protecting what?
Resisting endless war as the cornerstone of economic prosperity.
For whom?
Unrepayable structured and national debts
Trickle down privatized you-name-it
Glaring limitations of gov-corp democracy for the few
Or by the many who mainly want to know
Only hyper-tangible raunchy “real life” reality-tv.
There is always an explosion.
Personal storage batteries
Various alternative energies
Ever-present nuclear jeopardy
Cost-prohibitive carbon emission
Airline traveling
Automated nearly everything
Almost entirely gig economy
Needing to relearn lost abilities
Like listening
Repairing broken things
Stewarding the earth
And growing our own food seasonally
The inescapable need
To rebuild local communities
Of mutual trust
And belonging
Like-it-or-not
Ultra-transparency
Threatening corruption
Personal privacy
And playfulness
A thorough refusal of dominator hierarchies
Accessible education
And the empowerment of young women everywhere
Actively protecting and supporting the vulnerable
With Guru contracts?
PC-only skillful means?
And still the blatant need
For actual equality
And ongoing authentic lineage guidance.
Acknowledging the birth and power of alternative facts
By oppressive, extreme relativist postmodernists.
Nihilists like you and me
In that frame of mind.
Since all opinions are not equal.
Some things are better than others
According to evidence and what fits.
Experts know more than beginners
But are only truly advanced with ongoing open beginner’s mind.
Religious-but-spiritual
Ditching dogma
While honoring endless mysteries and systems of training
Science and (re)discovered magical subtle science
That come alive after logic is developed, enhanced,
And then consciously paused.
Natural and forced mindfulness
Mind training and mind recognition
Not just be here now
As if the absolute could ever be
The only necessary skillful means
A thorough embrace of natural hierarchies
Spectrums of increasing inclusivity
Integral methodologies
Curiously willing to lean
Into all levels, lines, states, stages, types, and quadrants
For deeply rich experience-in-the-making
Actively vulnerable participation
The upcoming obsessions
Of inexpensive, widespread 3D replication
Real time virtual reality living
Impressively accurate gene selection/omission
Microchiping at birth
AI online
That does more than defeat
Every other human or machine
Within hours of learning the rules of a game
Increasingly probable alien contact
Necessary faster-than-light travel to new habitable planets
The technological singularity
What then?
Disruption.
Acceleration-only business-as-usual expectations
That externalize expenses
At the expense of nearly everything
Will fail more thoroughly and frequently.
Nearly nothing from here on out
Will be left unaffected
Inside or outside
Together or alone.
It’s only going to increasingly be
A bumpy ride filled with game-changing surprises
For better and worse.
But will it be a steady trend
Towards breakthroughs or breakdowns?
Fusion, fission, or integration?
Or dynamic agency-in-communion?
Transcendence and embodiment?
Preservation and adaptation?
The always-fresh urgency
Of allowing your heart to break continuously
Without breaking down
Either way
There are still the same old habits and emotions since forever ago
As well as the oldest and always available
Complete disruption-resolution
Of effortless nondistraction
And all the intentional positive grasping supports
For this repeated leap
Into nongrasping wisdom awareness
Either way
I’m certainly praying and training for
Greater wholeness and inclusion
Rather than fragmentation and partiality.
And for all of us to relax a bit
And remember
How amazing it all is.
When I was a lot younger, I looked at people and they seemed to be okay. But, now, I don’t think anybody’s okay. Nobody’s okay. All of us, each one of us, me and you and everybody, carries a tremendously deep sense of pain and fear. We know how fragile our life is. We know how easily everything can fall apart, and on some level, we actually know we’re going to get sick, we’re going to suffer, and we’re going to die. We all know this. So, I have a tremendous amount of sadness and sympathy for our collective, our mutual condition as human beings. It’s very, very difficult. Of course, we get angry at people, we become frustrated, but fundamentally we always have to remember what we’re all trying to deal with. It’s really impossible. There’s no winning. We’re basically all on death row. On some level, we all know it and we’re just trying to put a good face on it…There has to be a sense of an incredible amount of kindness to ourselves and other people because of what we’re all dealing with. At the same time, we have to realize we are hanging on for dear life and to identities that are actually cutting us off from being free…If you are willing to deal with your fear, your insecurity, your vulnerability, your paranoia, your loneliness; if you’re actually willing to enter into your own state of being and experience yourself in an open and fearless way, there is a path. There is a path that will take you to what they call amrita-bhavana, which means a state of undying. You will find that at your basis and in the core who you really are, what you really are is undying. Beyond that, you find that the world itself is a series of moments of eternity.
– Reggie Ray
[transcendence is] just a handle. It’s not the real thing. The real thing is an unquenchable need that never stops gnawing at you. And … you feel that you’re being transcendent in that lousy sense when you are fully expressive. That’s when it happens to you. Then you’re satisfied that you’ve done the right thing. Otherwise no. Otherwise you fall back on explanations and definitions and boring discourse. You might as well be a social scientist and write that sort of stuff.
– Saul Bellow
The gentle strains of great and noble Truths pass through the soul in every fleeting moment; and had we but a wish to hear, coupled with the will to be silent for a spell, we would soon detect the sound of our own eternity sounding out in that silence to which we then would hold so dear.
– Guy Finley
Between things falling and those hastily being raised
Is there place for one who lingers, one who remains?
Between things dying and those living
Is there place for one living quietly in his house,
One who stays where he is, one who sees, one who is seen?
I’m a judge, alone in judgement on the bench,
There is no accuser, no accused,
Only witnesses and testimony.
In my childhood I knew about illness in people,
I understood sick animals,
When I grew up I learned that trees too
Can be ill and suffer in silence.
I’ll live long enough to understand a sick stone,
A suffering rock, a boulder in pain.
The universe will come full circle in me,
The inanimate speaks softly, the living stays silent.
This is my place
And in this way I’ll be magnified
And sanctified.
I’ll Be Magnified and Sanctified
by Yehuda Amichai
The only way was forward, whatever lay at the end.
– Robert Jordan, New Spring
… when someone sees a soul disturbed and unable to see something, he won’t laugh mindlessly, but he’ll take into consideration whether it has come from a brighter life and is dimmed through not having yet become accustomed to the dark or whether it has come from greater ignorance into greater light and is dazzled by the increased brillance.
– Plato, The Republic
If there be light, then there is darkness; if cold, heat; if height, depth; if solid, fluid; if hard, soft; if rough, smooth; if calm, tempest; if prosperity, adversity; if life, death.
– Pythagoras
I am part of a light, and it is the music. The Light fills my six senses: I see it, hear, feel, smell, touch and think. Thinking of it means my sixth sense. Particles of Light are written note. O bolt of lightning can be an entire sonata. A thousand balls of lightening is a concert.. For this concert I have created a Ball Lightning, which can be heard on the icy peaks of the Himalayas.
– Nikola Tesla
A man who trusts everyone is a fool and a man who trusts no one is a fool. We are all fools if we live long enough.
– Robert Jordan, Winter’s Heart
The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn’t live boldly enough, that they didn’t invest enough heart, didn’t love enough. Nothing else really counts at all.
– Ted Hughes, Letters of Ted Hughes
Imagination seems to come fast and true in the morning and evening light, the bookends of the day, shifting as books come and go like moments in time. It’s during these times in which the phrases “It is so” and “It is not so” become “It might be so” and “It might not be so.” In this way, the black and white realism of the day transforms into colorful winged possibilities of morning and night.
– Kayla Severson, Nature’s 1st Gem Is Green
It is crucial that practitioners not simply adopt an intellectual approach to the dharma, but rather understand the immense importance of engaging in actions of merit and virtue. Each practitioner is encouraged to examine whether there is a meeting of the view of the dharma in one’s daily conduct and activities.
– Minling Trichen Rinpoche
Desert is simply that: an ecstatic critique of culture, an ecstatic form of disappearance.
– Jean Baudrillard
Inspire me … and spin me a thread from the world’s beginning.
– Ovid (Metamorphoses)
All things share the same breath – the beast, the tree, the man… the air shares its spirit with all the life it supports.
– Chief Seattle
Pema Khandro ~ Until now, we have been holding on to the idea of an inherent continuity in our lives, creating a false sense of comfort for ourselves on artificial ground. By doing so, we have been missing the very flavor of what we are.
Chogyam Trungpa ~ Buddha began to realize that there was a sane, awake quality within him which manifested itself only in the absence of struggle. So the practice of meditation involves “letting be.” ~ Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism
Pema Khandro:
The Buddhas neither wash ill deeds away with water
nor remove beings sufferings with their hands,
nor transfer their realizations to others.
Beings are released through the teachings on reality.
Whenever you hear that someone else has been successful, rejoice. Always practice rejoicing for others – whether your friend or your enemy. If you cannot practice rejoicing, no matter how long you live, you will not be happy.
– Lama Zopa Rinpoche
Everything in the world has a hidden meaning.
Men, animals, trees, stars, they are all hieroglyphics.
When you see them you do not understand them.
You think they are really men, animals, trees, stars.
It is only years later that you understand.
– Nikos Kazantzakis
We have seen the highest circle of spiraling powers.
We have named this circle God.
We might have given it any name we wished:
Abyss, Absolute Darkness, Absolute Light,
Matter, Spirit, Ultimate Hope, Ultimate Despair,
Silence.
But never forget,
it is we who give it a name.
– Nikos Kazantzakis
Your brightness is my darkness.
I know nothing of You and, by myself,
I cannot even imagine how to go about knowing You.
If I imagine You, I am mistaken.
If I understand You, I am deluded.
If I am conscious and certain I know You, I am crazy.
The darkness is enough.
– Thomas Merton
The things you do not have to say make you rich.
Saying the things you do not have to say weakens your talk.
Hearing the things you do not have to hear dulls your hearing;
and the things you know before you hear them — these are who you are and this is the reason you are in the world.
– William Stafford, Crossing Unmarked Snow
We are subjects, not objects or problems to fix.
We are a living, organic, unfolding
wonder of creation.
– David Bedrick
Travel far enough, you meet yourself.
– David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
What we learn in the fourth turning, the insight that arises, is that however we experience true nature—whether as personal presence or absolute nonbeing—it is a single truth, one truth appearing in different guises. We recognize that true nature is strength and compassion, clarity and intelligence; it is truth and it is love. True nature is equally will and presence, being and nonbeing, spaciousness and awareness. True nature is the inseparability of emptiness and presence. All of these are simply faces of one truth, manifestations and appearances of one reality. When we have enough discernment, when our being is activated, we can see that each includes all the others. In any one, all are implicit. This is different from the experience of the oneness and unity of nonduality, which is based on the principles of sameness and pervasiveness. The oneness and singleness of the fourth turning does not come at the expense of particularity and difference. And it addresses a different matter, a different question—one that points to an omnidirectional unity, where directionality does not suggest extension in time and space.
. . .
The view that arises from this insight of the equalness and completeness of each manifestation of true nature is that experiencing personal presence is no less important than experiencing nondual awareness. Experiencing the emptiness of everything is not more important, more significant, or more powerful than experiencing the joy of being human.
– José Luis G. Soler
I’m definitely more a cabinetmaker than a tormented artist. Not that writing comes easy. I don’t know about cabinetmakers, but I often get stuck. Then I get sleepy and have to lie down.
– Janet Malcolm
Let us learn to live swaying
As in a rocking boat on the sea.
– Holderlin
A man walking is never in balance but always correcting for imbalance.
– Gregory Bateson
Haiku and Tanka for Harriet Tubman
by Sonia Sanchez
1
Picture a woman
riding thunder on
the legs of slavery …
2
Picture her kissing
our spines saying no to
the eyes of slavery …
3
Picture her rotating
the earth into a shape
of lives becoming …
4
Picture her leaning
into the eyes of our
birth clouds …
5
Picture this woman
saying no to the constant
yes of slavery …
6
Picture a woman
jumping rivers her
legs inhaling moons …
7
Picture her ripe
with seasons of
legs … running …
8
Picture her tasting
the secret corners
of woods …
9
Picture her saying:
You have within you the strength,
the patience, and the passion
to reach for the stars,
to change the world …
10
Imagine her words:
Every great dream begins
with a dreamer …
11
Imagine her saying:
I freed a thousand slaves,
could have freed
a thousand more if they
only knew they were slaves …
12
Imagine her humming:
How many days we got
fore we taste freedom …
13
Imagine a woman
asking: How many workers
for this freedom quilt …
14
Picture her saying:
A live runaway could do
great harm by going back
but a dead runaway
could tell no secrets …
15
Picture the daylight
bringing her to woods
full of birth moons …
16
Picture John Brown
shaking her hands three times saying:
General Tubman. General Tubman. General Tubman.
17
Picture her words:
There’s two things I got a
right to: death or liberty …
18
Picture her saying no
to a play called Uncle Tom’s Cabin:
I am the real thing …
19
Picture a Black woman:
could not read or write
trailing freedom refrains …
20
Picture her face
turning southward walking
down a Southern road …
21
Picture this woman
freedom bound … tasting a
people’s preserved breath …
22
Picture this woman
of royalty … wearing a crown
of morning air …
23
Picture her walking,
running, reviving
a country’s breath …
24
Picture black voices
leaving behind
lost tongues …
Take for instance a man driven to incessant work by a sense of deep insecurity and loneliness; or another one driven by ambition, or greed for money. In all these cases the person is the slave of a passion, and his activity is in reality a “passivity” because he is driven; he is the sufferer, not the “actor.” On the other hand a man sitting quiet and contemplating, with no purpose or aim except that of experiencing himself and his oneness with the world, is considered to be “passive”, because he is not “doing” anything. In reality, this attitude of concentrated meditation is the highest activity there is, an activity of the soul, which is possible only under the condition of inner freedom and independence.
– Erich Fromm
What is an artist? He’s a man who has antennae, who knows how to hook up to the currents which are in the atmosphere, in the cosmos; he merely has the facility for hooking on, as it were.
– Henry Miller
I had to stay above the fray or I’d get stuck in a life I didn’t want. That was my form of rebellion, to try to be really, really good.
– George Saunders
Do not get me wrong. I am no kind of hero. I am not Oedipus or Sisyphus, am merely a person, one of billions and one of thousands undergoing this treatment schedule. Ultimately, though, we all have to make the Sisyphusian choice: to go on or not to go on. That is, I think, what Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” is all about. Gogo and Didi see no real purpose in their lives except to wait for Mr. Godot who never appears. “Let’s go on,” Didi says, and they do, or they don’t. Not heroes, just people, like you and me.
– Palmer Hall
Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year
probably isn’t learning enough.
– Alain de Botton
In helping others,
we shall help ourselves,
for whatever good we give out
completes the circle
and comes back to us.
– Flora Edwards
With less haste, we have more speed, since rushing sets up a whole multitude of antagonistic vibrations.
– Alan Watts
There is a difference between losing and failing.
Losing reflects the score. Failing reflects our attitude.
– Simon Sinek
We have no way of knowing whether the world is Cosmos or Chaos, for, as we know the world, all the order is put into it by ourselves.
– CG Jung
Jung’s question haunts us all -what task is this person avoiding? In most cases, we are avoiding responsibility for our lives.
– James Hollis
The work of writing is always done in relation to something that no longer exists, which may be fixed for a moment in writing, like a trace, but which has vanished. I don’t know how the present intervenes.
– George Perec, Je suis né
The psyche does not merely react; it gives its own specific answer to the influences at work upon it.
– CG Jung, Collected Works
lakeside—
i dip my feet
in the bluest sky
– @Meraki_k
Everything you want
is twice as big
as when you get it,
the old monk noticed.
– The Old Monk
The soul will not be mocked. Its rumblings, however unwelcome, are really friendly warnings to change our lives.
– Jame Hollis
I am fifty-two, live alone, considered some mad freak genius
In reality I am a fucked up poet
who will never come to terms with the world
No matter how beautiful the flowers grow
No matter how children smile
No matter how blue is the bluest sky…
Tomorrow is never better…
– Jack Micheline
Fundamentally the marksman aims at himself.
– D.T. Suzuki
The spirit is not only there to make us think deeply. It exists to take us into places where thinking becomes useless and even our own cleverest ideas are left behind.
– Peter Kingsley, Catafalque
IF YOU ARE LOOKING FOR YOUR SOUL
If you are looking for your soul,
You must search outside the formulaic patriotism of flags, parades, and pledges of allegiance.
You must search beyond any cultural ladder of success that has bewitched you.
You must search outside the creeds of your religion
AND outside the mere ridicule of religion.
If you are looking for your soul,
It will not be found in any sacred text,
It will not be found at the top of any ladder of success,
It will not be found by melting into any mob no matter how patriotic and frenzied.
If you are looking for your soul,
Know that it is what stirs within you when you see a forest, or touch the earth.
It is the compassion you feel at the sight of a refugee mother grasping her child in a flimsy boat.
It is the anger you feel at the sight of bullying or exploitation of the poor.
It is the calling you feel to serve this whole world.
Your soul is not hiding from you.
You have traded it for something that does not satisfy your deepest hunger.
Your soul lies where you have been taught not to look,
There at the bottom of things:
In solidarity with the creatures of the earth and all humankind.
– Jim Rigby
I fall in love with peace, coffee, and sunsets. I fall in love with pizza nights, video games that keep me excited for hours and songs that my heart cannot help but to dance to. I fall in love with Septembers, the inevitability of spring after winter and clouds shaped like little puppies. I fall in love with hugs that last more than 5 seconds, friends who are warm like campfires for my heart and good memories. I fall in love with books with characters that remind me of me and how it makes me feel like I too can succeed and find a happy ending in real life. I fall in love with kindness, cheerful surprises, and things that give meaning to suffering. I find it so beautiful and liberating to fall in love with everything that can contribute to my healing.
– Juansen Dizon, Lover of Healing
Nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring.
– Vladimir Nabokov
There is a flowing vitality that is new in every moment, welling up within all things from the formless. The connection with that vitality, both within the body and the elemental life of nature, lifts you out of the ordinary, conditioned mind, with its habits of regret and fear, and carries you into the immediacy of presence that is new in every moment. That sense of presence is intimately related to the unthinking awareness you know as a child.
I still remember seeing formless radiance shining through the physical world when I was very young: welling up from within, pouring through the thickets of leaf and branch and filling every wild bloom in the hedgerows. The forms of this world were not completely solid: they were the filling and the overflowing of that intangible essence of light, and the light-filled blossoming was in me also, so natural that it needed no thought or consideration.
– Eleanor O’Hanlon, Eyes of the Wild
That which hurries toward the rising is small, that which approaches the descent is great.
– @RedBookJung
One of the most frequent uses of places in dreams is to show you whose “turf” you are on, whose influence you are under. So a good way to understand the significance of a place is to ask who it belongs to.
– Robert A. Johnson
Quite possibly there is no such thing
as spiritual practice except stepping
out of self-deception, stopping our
struggle to get hold of spiritual
states. Just give that up.
– Chogyam Trungpa
As a French poet once said, some people smoke to put nicotine in their veins, others to put a cloud between them and others.
– André Aciman
It’s never hard to call a pious man a hypocrite; what takes strength and patience is to see that a ne’er do well might be a saint.
– Pico Iyer
We live in ecstatic moments, but epic pauses stretch between them.
– Adam Zagajewski, Slight Exaggeration
My dreams, my dreams! What has become of their sweetness? What indeed has become of my youth?
– Alexander Pushkin
sprawled lazily
in an empty nest
– autumn sun
– @Meraki_k
I went home inside myself too. The world became so small.
– Joy Priest
My aim in painting has always been the most exact transcription possible of my most intimate impression of nature.
– Edward Hopper
If I were committed to reality as much as most people, I wouldn’t have achieved anything. Never face facts.
– Ruth Gordon
a lotus stem
slightly bent
a symbol of this world
– Issa
The word “eclipse” comes from ancient Greek ekleipsis, “a forsaking, quitting, abandonment.” The sun quits us, we are forsaken by light.
– Anne Carson
Man is born to live and not to prepare to live.
– Boris Pasternak
Guilting people into consuming less doesn’t work very well. Usually it results in trivial gestures, like switching brands or sharing a post online or buying a Tesla and charging it with solar panels.
– Charles Eisenstein
An alternative pathway opening up into nature
– Antonio Paglino
RAINBOW DAY
by Luka Bloom
I want a simple life
Try to be a good man
I never want to hurt nobody
Tread lightly on the land
Forget about the future
Squeeze the juice out of the day
And when I feel unsure
It’s when I like to pray
And if I find love along the way
If I find love, it’s a rainbow day
It’s a rainbow day
Out among the creatures
I come into my own
I love to hide my little secrets
In the bushes and the stones
It’s the simple pleasures
Always come back in the end
Like a night of sweet, sweet music
With my family and friends
And if I find love along the way
If I find love, it’s a rainbow day
It’s a rainbow day…
Every day is an elegy. That is what makes the day so valuable and meaningful; it goes away, comes back, goes away, and so forth. It all sounds so eternal until you come down to your own life.
– Stanley Plumly
If anyone knows how to bet on the future, it must be gardeners, whose work it is every year to put seeds in the earth and trust them to transform.
– Alice Oswald
The earth is not a stable thing, a principled location locked into the subservience of playing backstage to human mobility. Instead, the earth is moving. And “it” is moving so irreverently that one might say the planet is becoming fugitive. That’s why the cracks are showing up everywhere: cracks in settlement; cracks in neurotypicality; cracks in human exclusivity; cracks in democracy and the legitimacy of the nation-state; cracks in time; cracks in being.
I am convinced – in the creaturely ways that conviction marks a gesturing towards and a yearning in risky directions – that this loss of stability, this ontofugitivity of things, traces out a geophilosophy that invites a reconsideration of the premises that have conditioned experience, articulated civilizational problems, and instigated resolutions. Cracks become matters of ontogenesis, intercessory sites of what is to come and what is not quite done-with. Today’s geophilosophy of note is probably a politics that cultivates ways of following cracks to where they might lead.
– Bayo Akomolafe
Grief Work
by Natalie Diaz
I have gazed the black flower blooming
her animal eye. Gacela oscura. Negra llorona.
Along the clayen banks I follow her-astonished,
gathering grief’s petals she lets fall like horns.
Why not now go toward the things I love?
Like Jacob’s angel, I touched the garnet of her wrist,
and she knew my name. And I knew hers—
it was Auxocromo, it was Cromóforo, it was Eliza.
It hurtled through me like honeyed-rum.
When the eyes and lips are touched with honey
what is seen and said will never be the same.
Eve took the apple in that ache-opened mouth,
on fire and in pieces, from the knife’s sharp edge.
In the photo her fist presses against the red-gold
geometry of her thigh. Black nylon, black garter,
unsolvable mysterium—I have to close my eyes to see.
Achilles chasing Hektor round the walls of Ilium
three times. How long must I circle
the high gate above her knees?
Again the gods put their large hands in me,
move me, break my heart like a clay jar of wine,
loosen a beast from some darklong depth—
my melancholy is hoofed. I, the terrible beautiful
Lampon, a shining devour-horse tethered
at the bronze manger of her collarbones.
I do my grief work with her body—labor
to make the emerald tigers in her hips leap,
lead them burning green
to drink from the violet jetting her.
We go where there is love, to the river,
on our knees beneath the sweet water.
I pull her under four times
until we are rivered. We are rearranged.
I wash the silk and silt of her from my hands—
now who I come to, I come clean to, I come good to.
Movies are made out of darkness as well as light; it is the surpassingly brief intervals of darkness between each luminous still image that makes it possible to assemble the many images into one moving picture. Without that darkness, there would only be a blur. Which is to say, that a long movie consists of an hour or an hour of pure darkness that goes unseen. If you could add up all the darkness, you would find the audience in the theatre gazing together in a deep imaginative night. It is the terra incognita of film, the dark continent on every map. In a similar way, a runner’s every step is a leap, so that for a moment he or she is entirely off the ground. For those brief instants, shadows no longer spill out from their feet, like leaks, but hover below them like doubles, as they do with birds, whose shadows crawl below them, caressing the surface of the earth, growing and shrinking as their makers move nearer or farther from that surface. For my friends who run long distances, these tiny fragments of levitation add up to something considerable; by their own power they hover above the earth for many minutes, perhaps some significant portion of an hour for the hundred-mile races. We fly; we dream in darkness; we devour heaven in bites too small to be measured.
– Rebecca Solnit
It is good to love again;
Scan the renovated skies,
Dip and drive the idling pen,
Sweetly tint the paling lies.
– Dorothy Parker
Speaks well of a man to need a little something in this world. I wouldn’t trust a man who could git through it cold sober.
– Harry Crews
We look at the world once, in childhood.
The rest is memory.
– Louise Glück
While their methods differ radically, artists and physicists share the desire to investigate the ways the interlocking pieces of reality fit together. This is the common ground upon which they meet.
– Leonard Shlain
Time, like the sea, unties all knots.
– Iris Murdoch
And those you never forgive you find impossible to forget.
– Jane Urquhart, Underpainter
[He] could remember when words—those ‘little bits of reality,’ she’d once called them—had meant everything to [her]. When the acquisition of a specific term allowed her to constitute a geography of sorts, when the preservation of those nearly extinct vocables had given her a sense—no matter how tenuous—of place, belonging, rootedness. Through language alone, hadn’t she begun constructing a sonorous home of her own? Out of so many patiently collected phrases, the fragile outlines of a lost heritage? Now, she’d let go. Words, phrases, the endless entries she’d made in a lexicon of her own—yes, that vanished world of the magnanairé, which she reconstituted—had volatilized. Now, she realized that home she’d always hoped for would never happen. Nothing could shelter her, now, from the emptiness she felt,
– Gustaf Sobin
Up until a certain afternoon, at closing time, the librarian may come and return me to the shelf where I belong, the precise place where someone grabbed me one fine day, who knows why, perhaps to learn to translate sadness into another language, perhaps to love me as a beloved book—that is, forever. No, not forever.
– Gemma Gorga
Upon the forehead of humanity
all its more ponderous and
bulky worth is friendship …
But at the tip top, there hangs
by unseen film an orbed drop of light.
—And that is love.
– David Lean, Eric Ambler, & Stanley Haynes
I turn over and over in
My heart the memories of
Other days. Tonight as always
There is no one to share my thoughts.
– CHU SHU-CHEN
Night is an element of love; like fog. It liberates space, lets freshness cross it. Its magic elevates the body, brings to the surface the mystery of just being alive, being. With or without stars and galaxies, the sky becomes a private territory—the imagination’s own scope. These are moments when one reaches all there is between the moon and oneself.
– Etel Adnan
My dearest
How endlessly slowly the days are passing, how depressingly slowly.
These last three days have seemed an eternity.
I’m out of sorts, I can’t do anything . I want to be with you, to bear your troubles with you, although, thank God, they are behind you now, but that only gives me a little relief, mostly my mood is desolate.
I sit and read your letters and I realize once again just how good you are.
– Maria Stepanova
Part of the maturation is to realize that you don’t just give up the negative perceptions, you give up the positive ones, too. You give up the whole framework that was used to tell you who and what you are.
– Adyashanti
All the ice has broken and
as a result there are no such things
as strangers anymore. Or polar bears,
but that’s not the point.
– Robert Wood Lynn
Life is only
a reflection of
what we
allow ourselves to see.
– Trudy Symeonakis Vesotsky
My poetry is not an opinion or a belief
to dissect or argue over just observations
of this ever-changing world some days there
is a god some days not.
– Shinzen
I
Know you appear
Vivid at my side,
Denying you sprang out of my head,
Claiming you feel
Love fiery enough to prove flesh real,
Though it’s quite clear
All your beauty, all your wit, is a gift, my dear,
From me.
– Sylvia Plath
turning to look back
through a dark larch forest
lonely journey
– Hakushu
I have no hobby.
– Theodor Adorno
This is what I would like to talk about: the hubris, the inflation, the insanity of separating ourselves from the sacred.
– Peter Kingsley, Catafalque
A single green sprouting thing
would restore me.
– Jane Kenyon
In books we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius.
– Thomas Mann
We all have to find our own way and our own Dharma. The first step is realising what is NOT the way and what is NOT the truth. Only then can we begin to find the way.
– @TravisDurden
rewriting
the third line—
warm winter day
– @ruralitalics
Listen with your body, your heart, your eyes, your energy, your total presence. Listen in silence, without interrupting. Fill any spaces of silence between you with love.
– Beth Roth
In March I’ll be rested, caught up and human.
– Sylvia Plath
Uncertainty, when accepted, sheds a bright light on the power of intention. That is what you can count on: not the outcome, but the motivation you bring, the vision you hold, the compass setting you choose to follow.
– Joanna Macy
Ellington’s reply to Mingus’s proposal that the two of them make “a real avant-garde record” together: “Charles, let’s not go back that far.”
– Nathaniel Mackey
Sometimes I pretend
I’m not me,
I only work for me.
– Naomi Shihab Nye
Don’t be afraid your life will end; be afraid that it will never begin.
– Grace Hansen
Science can never get to the bottom of consciousness. It can only be informed by it, which will turn science on its head.
– Mark Bittner
Haven’t you heard a politician use fifteen hundred words to say something he could have said in exactly three?
– Jack Kerouac
I see men assassinated around me every day. I walk through rooms of the dead, streets of the dead, cities of the dead; men without eyes, men without voices; men with manufactured feelings and standard reactions; men with newspaper brains, television souls and high school ideas.
– Charles Bukowski
Perhaps my unconscious is forming a personality that is not me, but which is insisting on coming through to expression.
– CG Jung
I am so far from being a pessimist…on the contrary, in spite of my scars, I am tickled to death at life.
– Eugene O’Neill
A human being in action cannot represent perfection. The moment you take action, you are imperfect: you have decided to act that way instead of that other way. That’s why people who think they are perfect are so ridiculous.
– Joseph Campbell
In all institutions from which the cold wind of open criticism is excluded, an innocent corruption begins to grow like a mushroom – for example, in senates and learned societies.
– Nietzsche
There is too much fathering going on just now and there is no doubt about it fathers are depressing.
– Gertrude Stein
I have all of these
lily plants but not you,
nor peace.
– Kamilah Aisha Moon
I Saw You
by Joshua Henry Jones, Jr.
I saw you as I passed last night,
Framed in a sky of gold;
And through the sun’s fast paling light
You seemed a queen of old,
Whose smile was light to all the world
Against the crowding dark.
And in my soul a song there purled—
Re-echoed by the lark.
I saw you as I passed last night,
Your tresses burnished gold,
While in your eyes a happy bright
Gleam of your friendship told.
And I went singing on my way;
On, on into the dark.
But in my heart still shone the day,
And still—still sang the lark.
Some cry with tears; others with thoughts.
– Octavio Paz
But in the climbing ecstasy of thought,
Ere consummation, ere the final peak,
Come hours like this…
– Nan Shepherd
In Shepherd’s writing… true learning—like hill-walking—is arduous. True knowledge of the mountains is only possible through the suffering of the body brought on through the relentless motion of the feet.
– Kerri Andrews
Articles of Faith
I have faith in Sentient Earth.
I have faith in this magical place
despite the presence of so much destruction.
I have faith that life teaches us what we most need to learn.
I have faith that there are many worlds within this one world —
“pure lands” and “hells” and places in between;
some known for their heaviness and hate,
others for their frequencies of love, upliftedness, serenity
I have faith that all of this is being held up, supported,
by a great power we cannot fully comprehend.
I have faith that we can (not only) survive but thrive,
but that we can’t save ourselves, or the world,
unless and until we roll the stone away
from the Tomb of Forgetfulness.
I have faith.
I have faith
that if a teaching
doesn’t embody love,
it is a flawed teaching.
– Frank Inzan Owen (Hidden Mountain)
Boarding the S.S. Daijō*
They said the instructions were simple.
Stick with it.
Work at getting your sea legs.
The water can be rough.
Trust in the practice.
Allow the practice to carry you.
There is a reason the practice is called a vehicle.
The vehicle is like a boat
but you need to ‘stay in the boat’.
If you go overboard, stay close to the boat;
if you don’t, in rough waters, you could drown.
If you want to be in the flow,
you have to stay in the boat.
The boat is the vehicle.
The vehicle is the practice.
The practice is the Way
and the way-through.
If you get the feeling like you need to “bail”,
bail the contents of your mind;
bail it like dark water,
but don’t bail on yourself.
If you get the feeling like you might bail,
remember why you’re really here: Everyone else.
– Frank Inzan Owen (Hidden Mountain)
*Daijō is the Japanese word for Mahayana, the second major branch of Buddhism, which stresses an altruistic spiritual practice aimed at serving others, lessening suffering to self and other, and utilizing one’s personal life-force for the betterment and upliftment of the overall situation. The focal point of Mahayana tradition is the archetype, image, and path of the bodhisattva-warrior — the embodiment of cultivated bravery, wisdom, compassion, awake heart-mind, and forthright, thoroughgoing discipline.
As you go to sleep tonight
Let your prayers
fly out of you like cosmic butterflies
off to pollinate some great
blossoming mystery
Let the beauty in your heart
entwine itself with all things~
you share a root system
with every galaxy
Draw nutrients into you
from the stars.
Fill up with wonder.
Everything we do
can serve light
to every sentient tendril
of God
that unfurls
into the multidimensional canopy
of all existence
As you sleep tonight, my love,
rejoice
remembering
we are an essential part
of the ecosystem
of the Universe.
– Chelan Harkin
If for company you find a wise and prudent friend who leads a good life, you should, overcoming all impediments, keep his company joyously and mindfully. If for company you cannot find a wise and prudent friend who leads a good life, then, like a king who leaves behind a conquered kingdom, or like a lone elephant in the elephant forest, you should go your way alone.
– translated from the Pali by Acharya Buddharakkhita
If people are laughing, they are learning. True learning is a joy because it is an act of creation.
– Tyson Yunkaporta
Often when we are ill, the ‘call’ from deep within invites us not to try to ‘fix the problem’ but instead asks us to let go, retreat to our quiet cave, or nest and receive the incubating gift of patient warmth. Ancient Greek incubation caves where the sick reclined, let go and waited, were seen as places of access to the Underworld, the unconscious, dreaming depths of soul where warming energy and secretive alchemical work abound. To incubate, then, is to surrender to the therapeutic wisdom of Nature that resides deep within our bodies and souls. It is a phase of ’suspended animation’, when life is gently held, slowed and cocooned in sleep, rest and dreams that may cast light on the nature of the gifts that are embedded in our wounds. Sacred incubation is this devotional decision to be fully present in our woundedness, instead of struggling to be free.
– Maureen B. Roberts
When practicing the Dharma there are seven types of corruption.
If your faith is small while your intelligence is great, you become corrupted by considering yourself a teacher.
If you have many listeners while your self-regard is high, you become corrupted by considering yourself a spiritual friend.
If you assume superior qualities while not having taken the Dharma to heart, you become corrupted by considering yourself a leader.
If you give oral instructions while not practicing them yourself, you become corrupted by being an insensitive “Dharma expert.”
If you are fond of senseless babble while lacking the Dharma in your heart, you become corrupted by being a craving, charlatan yogi.
If you have little learning while lacking the oral instructions, you become corrupted by being a commoner, though your faith may be great.
A genuine practitioner who acts in accordance with the true teachings should liberate his being with intelligence, tame his mind with faith, cut misconceptions with listening to teachings, cast away social concerns, mingle his mind with the Dharma, perfect his knowledge with learning and reflecting, resolve his mind with the oral instructions, and gain final certainty through the view and meditation.
That, however, is difficult.
– Padmasambhava
When your self-image dissolves in silence, what arises spontaneously is no longer an image but the living substance of what you really are.
– Dennis Lewis
This habit of reading, I make bold to tell you, is your pass to the greatest, the purest, and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures. It lasts when all other pleasures fade. It will support you when all other recreations are gone. It will last until your death. It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live.
– Anthony Trollope
People think when they’re not saying anything, they’re not saying anything. But that is not the case.
– Kenzo Mori
Here
Even as the snow was falling,
the birds in the branches
kept singing into morning,
easing their bright notes
into the thin gray spaces
between snowflakes.
There are days, imagine,
when the birds go unheard.
And it isn’t for lack of song—
the single note chirp
of sparrow, the bass of raven,
the chickadee’s hey swee-tee.
Some gifts come only
when we stay in one place,
come only when we are alone,
come only when we stop praying
to be somewhere else and instead
pray to be here.
– Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Our place is somewhere between being and nonbeing—between two fictions.
– E. M. Cioran
Taut, like a string drawn between yesterday and tomorrow, you know all you have lost and left behind. You cannot see what lies ahead clearly. But a horizontal gravity thrusts you into the thick of tomorrow, to an enchanting unknown in an unfinished poem you are about to begin. Then it will take charge of its course, for what is created overpowers its creator, and the newborn overpowers the mother.
– Mahmoud Darwish
At night my prayers
like empty bowls,
rattle in the cupboard
of my heart,
as trains of sadness
rumble through the crossings
of my life.
– Ed Block
Don’t give me anything to remember you by:
I know how short is memory.
– Anna Akhmatova
There is this lostness, a lost thisness,
light showing through them like scrims.
Behind them, within them, the landscape
thickens into being, thins into dreams,
– Peter Marin
One thing that’s a bummer about unhappiness in your forties is that unlike unhappiness in your twenties, it’s so boring.
– Amber Sparks
Schools teach exactly what they are intended to teach and they do it well: how to be a good Egyptian and remain in your place in the pyramid.
– John Taylor Gatto
If there were no other proof of the existence of a bigger reality than birds, they would do it for me.
– Anne Lamott
How do we accept, finally, that we are not our history but rather, our unfolding journey?
– James Hollis, Ph.D.
A Letter to my Ego in the English Fells
There used to be trees here
singing a song so loud
even you
in your relentless certainty
gave up trying to be heard
above their rhythm.
Before this emptiness
this lonely stillness lingering
like after a great party
when everyone leaves and
it’s just you
and the dishes,
there was noise –
A forest filled with
amazing sounds
echoing amid thrumming
pulsing
penetrating
silences
battles won and lost
orgies and births
unspectacular, ordinary, ongoing
deaths
daily
in the rot and rebirth
of a living earth.
Sometimes the ghosts of those trees
gather close when I shake a rattle
wakening their weary spirits
from the depths of centuries-long
sleep
and gaze groggily
leaning into the breeze
they remember dancing with.
Now
there’s sheep
and the long stories of stones
tractors and cars
and footsteps to denuded peaks.
The ravens cry out from time to time
stirring up as much mischief as they still can
in these predictable hills,
begrudgingly participating
like children settling for an old tired toy.
Now we humans walk past each other
with hardly a glance
lost in the monotony of our
selves
the old stories we recite
consuming each living moment
the vastness filled
the cacophony interrupted
the web ignored.
We walk these fells like martyrs
hunched against the wind
filled with ideals and
sky gods and
rootless plans
mountains eroding
like flesh sliding from bone
on the teetering skeleton of this,
our one
single
human
story.
We wonder from that empty place
the cavernous rib cage
the tired heart
where to find salvation
and walk by the solitary surviving oak
without so much as a
thank you.
– Kristopher Drummond
You know, one of the tragedies of real life
is that there is no background music.
– Annie Proulx
Boredom is your window on the properties of time that one tends to ignore to the likely peril of one’s mental equilibrium. It is your window on time’s infinity. Once this window opens, don’t try to shut it; on the contrary, throw it wide open.
– Joseph Brodsky
It is impossible to entirely avoid abrupt endings in our lives. Anything can happen at any time. At the same time, I do believe that we can become better at protecting ourselves from those who have a tendency to “Abrupt Departure.” They are not easy to spot- some reveal it in their agitated energy, their inherent volatility, their perpetual inability to sustain connection. Others are more subtle, quietly held, difficult to read. You have to get to know them a little better before you will see it coming. Once you do, it is essential to self-protect. Not because they necessarily have an evil intention- many simply don’t know any other way to deal with and communicate their feelings- but because Abrupt Departure is a trauma that is difficult to recover from. If you have been traumatized by it- in the form of shocking deaths, or unexplained and unprocessed disconnects- it can be difficult for the nervous system to calm down and feel relationally safe. It can be difficult to trust human kindness and connection. The way back is to practice the art of selective attachment- learning how to distinguish between those who can stay in the fire of relatedness, and those who can’t. Because we don’t want to give up on human contact. We just want to make it safer.
– Jeff Brown
that bad last century
still bleeding into this one, blood
still soaking the feet of the poets
– George Bilgere
For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.
– Mary Oliver
Time flows in a strange way on Sundays.
– Haruki Murakami
People don’t make decisions based on truth or facts. They don’t spend their money based on data. They don’t connect with each other because of some higher philosophical truth. The world runs on feelings.
– Mark Manson
An essay of geese
Write the sky
Split the sun
From earth
Wing-flapping
Shadows
Make all of us
Look up, and listen
– Valerie A Szarek
THIS LOVE LETTER
(Tribute to Open Readings at Let Them Eat Chocolate)
This love letter
was not composed at Hallmark.
Leave if you will
But you will not be filled
with lines from cliché factories
quarter note monotone deliveries
nutra sweetened promises
This Love Letter
does not come
with trite diddies
It comes with
phrases spoken impulsively
or pre thought
From hearts
that are the strongest
and most vulnerable
of our muscles
From muscles
that carry children on shoulders
the wonderment of a child’s view
from a window
From breath of a calming child
leaning to the heart
of the carrier
From passionate phrases
exchanged in daylight
or dark
and unworded breath
But 2 young lasses
push in chairs
They are sure this love letter
was composed at Hallmark
This Love Letter was composed
from words and actions
that came from an initial spark
that mend torn spots
physical and otherwise
among couples
and other teams
in places torn by disasters
natural and otherwise
and places that appear
to be securely intact
From love for language and sound
the quest
for the words
inflections and pauses
that best connect
with hearts troubled
happy or
in routine mood.
Two young lasses
are exiting to Damen Avenue
They will not hear this Love Letter
that was not composed at Hallmark.
– Jerry Pendergast
This of course is the ultimate temptation of Christianity! To say that Christ has locked all the doors, has given one answer, settled everything and departed, leaving all life enclosed in the frightful consistency of a system outside of which there is seriousness and damnation, inside of which there is the intolerable flippancy of the saved – while nowhere is there any place left for the mystery of the freedom of divine mercy which alone is truly serious, and worthy of being taken seriously.
– Thomas Merton, Raids on the Unspeakable
With age comes the realization
that nothing is as erotic, attractive, rare,
or calming as kindness.
– Tennessee Williams
The weather is rude today, too full of good
color and cheer, and makes me want to be out
of here
– Rickey Laurentiis
After stepping into the world again,
there is that question of how to love,
how to bundle yourself against the frosted morning—
– January Gill O’Neil
VALENTINE
Not a red rose or a satin heart.
I give you an onion.
It is a moon wrapped in brown paper.
It promises light
like the careful undressing of love.
Here.
It will blind you with tears
like a lover.
It will make your reflection
a wobbling photo of grief.
I am trying to be truthful.
Not a cute card or a kissogram.
I give you an onion.
Its fierce kiss will stay on your lips,
possessive and faithful
as we are,
for as long as we are.
Take it.
Its platinum loops shrink to a wedding-ring,
if you like.
Lethal.
Its scent will cling to your fingers,
cling to your knife.
– Carol Ann Duffy
There isn’t time—so brief is life—
for bickerings, apologies, heartburnings, callings to account.
There is only time for loving—
and but an instant, so to speak, for that.
– Mark Twain
In order to write about life
first you must live it.
– Ernest Hemingway
Something was badly amiss with the spiritual life of the planet…Too many demons inside people claiming to believe in God.
– Salman Rushdie
In religious matters it is a well-known fact that we cannot understand a thing until we have experienced it inwardly, for it is in the inward experience that connection b/ween the psyche and the outward image or creed is first revealed as a relationship or correspondence.
– CG Jung
What if a dawn of a doom of a dream
bites this universe in two,
peels forever out of his grave,
and sprinkles nowhere with me and you?
– E.E. Cummings
Enlightenment Hack: Let yourself be a Shlub.
– @VinceFHorn
We try to push all the parts of ourselves that we don’t like into our bodies: our greed, our jealousy, our lust. All the darkness we don’t want to accept, we push down into our muscles, bones and heart. We pretend we have no shadow and try to escape into our heads.
– Marion Woodman
The hermit said:
Because the world is mad,
The only way through the world is to learn
The arts and double the madness. Are you listening?
– Robert Bly
Cross-, Multi-, & Inter- are all prefixes that point toward Pluralism.
Meta-, Trans-, & Post- tend to point toward Integralism, though by it’s very nature, Integral includes Pluralism, so it can’t be fully identified by language alone.
– @VinceFHorn
A healed person is automatically a healer. And his or her strength is the greater for having been through dark times and having brought a conscious solution as a gift to the world.
– Robert A. Johnson
In 1925, Huxley wrote, “It’s this mania for keeping up to date that has killed the art of reading. Almost a century later, some of us are still reading, even Huxley.
– Pico Iyer
There will be no sense of community before the polarities and the fractures become new learning.
First we learn to commune– then we make community (of learning).
– @NoraBateson
So far as I can grasp the nature of the collective unconscious, it seems to me like an omnipresent continuum, an unextended Everywhere.
– C.G. Jung
Love has bridged the high-rises of despair we were about to fall between. Love has been a penlight in the blackest, bleakest nights. Love has been a wild animal, a poultice, a dinghy, a coat. Love is why we have hope.
– Anne Lamott
Poem
If you can make a poem
a farmer finds useful,
you should be happy.
A blacksmith you can never figure out.
The worst to please is a carpenter.
– Olav H. Hauge
From Norwegian by Robert Hedin
The Graceful Poet
As I think about
my American heroes
still living in my mind,
I can’t help thinking about
recently deceased poet
W. S. Merwin,
Pulitzer Prize winner
U.S. Poet Laureate.
On May 10, 2013,
I had the good fortune
to join young NYC friends
at the 92nd Street Y
We listened to the great poet
talk lovingly
poetry and art.
Unsurprisingly, he talked
brilliantly about length and breadth
of the last 2500 years
of humanity.
He read a few poems
from memory,
he was gracefully
going blind.
“Now all my teachers
are dead except silence.”
– Steve Heins
Tonight I entered
a new level
of soul poverty.
I am a weary
love pilgrim
whose heart
has gone
far astray
At times
I am furious
to have even set out
on such an aimless waste
of a journey
driven by
a romanticized illusion
of the divine
that in truth
only leads me
to deeper hollows
in myself.
Tonight, there was no
guiding light—
the stars
were deranged eyes
rolling around in the dead skull
of the night.
The desecrating messages
of our world
have set into me
so deeply
like parasites to beauty
And my prayers
are too bereft to even beg,
my heart too heavy
to think
of asking for light.
And as I somehow
come through another round
inside of myself
of dumpster diving
for God
This time my prize
is new scraps
of compassion
and understanding
For those who only know
how to snarl at Grace.
– Chelan Harkin
Love is the main generator of all good writing… Love, passion, compassion, are all welded together.
– Carson McCullers (Henri Cartier-Bresson)
I miss playing cards with my father,
his muscular hands with the gorgeous sun-
browned skin and the veins like rivers or roads
on maps — Oh, beloved man of my life.
Who sat with me and taught
the way to play the spades
and hearts. King of Diamonds,
though you never could afford
your dream Cadillac, the closest
you could come to that, was the big white Buick Electra with the crimson almost-velvet seats — The siblings did buy you a used slate-
silver Cadillac. I wanted you to have
a new one. At least you had that. We were never the rich ones, but we had enough, because these hands that are the best at scooping up cards
off blue-grey vinyl card tables, worked so hard. First, the soil, turning the earth
either with hands, sickle, or spade.
Later, knocking on doors en El Segundo Barrio, or central El Paso. Fabens, Horizon City on the outskirts, Canutillo. Down by the river. Near
the levy. Your trunk and back seat filled
with goods, you’d drop off at your clientes, allowing them to pay, week by week,
or month by month. My peddler, my salesman. Stocking your car with Levis, tennis shoes, from Sun Dry Goods, taking them to the streets.
The houses with teal blue shutters
on North Florence, loved to receive you with their order of — blue jeans,
cobijas, blankets for the winter. So you could
feed us in winter. While Mama, and your own mama, too — cooked our food in the steam
of the warm kitchen, our counters covered
in their fresh-baked fat loaves — of bread.
The three of you were a well-oiled machine made of hearts—that lived to love us—through the work of your hands and blood-
pumping hearts. You gave us the world.
But my favorite memory, is sitting there with
you, me playing my hand, at 6 or 8,
and me sitting — so close to your hands. Strong. The color of earth. And brown.
– Marian Haddad
An artist is only an artist on condition
that he neglects no aspect of his dual nature.
This dualism is the power of being oneself
and someone else at one and the same time.
– Charles Baudelaire
The great poets stand naked before you without any special knowledge–only a heart.
– Elizabeth Romero
Becoming liberated from samsara is an inner journey. You can travel across the world and universe, and you will not find a way out. To get out, you must go in.
– Chamtrul Rinpoche
My Husband Discovers Poetry
Because my husband would not read my poems,
I wrote one about how I did not love him.
In lines of strict iambic pentameter,
I detailed his coldness, his lack of humor.
It felt good to do this.
Stanza by stanza, I grew bolder and bolder.
Towards the end, struck by inspiration,
I wrote about my old boyfriend,
a boy I had not loved enough to marry
but who could make me laugh and laugh.
I wrote about a night years after we parted
when my husband’s coldness drove me from the house
and back to my old boyfriend.
I even included the name of a seedy motel
well-known for hosting quickies.
I have a talent for verisimilitude.
In sensuous images, I described
how my boyfriend and I stripped off our clothes,
got into bed, and kissed and kissed,
then spent half the night telling jokes,
many of them about my husband.
I left the ending deliberately ambiguous,
then hid the poem away
in an old trunk in the basement.
You know how this story ends,
how my husband one day loses something,
goes into the basement,
and rummages through the old trunk,
how he uncovers the hidden poem
and sits down to read it.
But do you hear the strange sounds
that floated up the stairs that day,
the sounds of an animal, its paw caught
in one of those traps with teeth of steel?
Do you see the wounded creature
at the bottom of the stairs,
his shoulders hunched over and shaking,
fist in his mouth and choking back sobs?
It was my husband paying tribute to my art.
– Diane Lockward
Love is a series of choices and behaviors, not a feeling.
– Dr. Nicole LePera
You don’t know me from the wind
you never will, you never did
I’m the little jew who wrote the Bible.
I’ve seen the nations rise and fall
I’ve heard their stories, heard them all
but love’s the only engine of survival.
– Leonard Cohen
Shout out to the poets who keep it real. Who mind their business & show love when they can. Life is too short to waste time on bitterness or other nonsense. Poetry is too full of hope & possibility to get distracted by petty negativity..
– Jose Hernandez
You have to try to figure out what the addictive substance means symbolically. Otherwise,it will hold an almost religious significance. People are driven to addiction because there is no collective container for their natural spiritual needs.
– Marion Woodman
to the fucked up or broken or downed or felled. to the can’t get it quite right, to the long alone, to the heart fractured. to the misfitted, misunderstood, the hard-edged, the heart-edged. to the incarcerated, the displaced. to the lost. to the haunted. to the down so deep the ocean blocks out the light. to the dis eased. to the given up on. to the ones beaten up by that fist-shaped muscle for a million different reasons. to those who let go or gave up or left us, i still see you in the night sky, i can see you on the ocean floor. i know how to hold my breath, how to go to the bottom of the wreck. this is a love letter.
– Lidia Yuknavitch
ON THE DEATH OF A SCHOLAR
Shakespeare
has heard the news
and wept.
how do we live
but through the intelligence
of our admirers?
how endure
but by their love?
for Ed Pechter
– Jack Foley
I love you.
I will meet you in the midst. Unready and lost, but with the nectar of possibility in my mouth.
each day there are horrors unspeakable, baked long in histories, unchangeable,
and life is still outrageous-
each day despair is undeniable –destruction steeped in justifications deeply motivated for why this is… This violence should not be.
and life is still untamed-
each day there are plenty of reasons to give in -and give up, the effort to keep going runs dry,
and life is still unstoppable-
each day i wake up
And life is there, singing through the impossible-
This is goodness unfettered, meeting the enormity of this mess with nothing other than
skin-bare
banality
of the sacred love life has in its pulse,
bringing one day like storm into the breath of the next.
– Nora Bateson
Some people say sex is like riding a rainbow.
Maybe theirs is. I say I fall on a grenade each time.
– Frederick Seidel
fishing village
a rumor of blues running
through the café
– Jim Kacian
The waitress
gives the blind man
a special smile
– Roswitha Erler
I want to avoid preaching at you but I do want to convince you that the true and durable path into and through experience involves being true to the actual givens of your lives. True to your own solitude, true to your own secret knowledge. Because oddly enough, it is that intimate, deeply personal knowledge that links us most vitally and keeps us most reliably connected to one another.
And you will be sure to keep going in life on a far steadier keel and with far more radiant individuality if you navigate by that principle.
– Seamus Heaney
There is something seriously, terribly wrong with a person if they manage to get to a certain age–cross a lot of bridges; bury a lot of friends and enemies and dreams and grudges; look back at the progress of pages that led to this big, fucking book that is your life–and they do not cry readily and fulsomely. Often.
You begin to see–I now see–where the dots were or were not connected. I see what made and unmade me. I see what Tennessee [Williams] described to you as the time knot, and, dear God, how much time and oxygen and courage do I have to get things said and done and acknowledged before it all comes to an end? So cry. Cry a lot. You are expressing that your life meant something to you, and you hate to see it drift away.
– Mike Nichols
Writing is a difficult question, since it is not only a blessing but also a bad temptation because it tickles the devil of self-importance. If you want to write something, you have to be quite sure that the whole of your being wants this kind of expression.
– CG Jung
Let my heart be a sunrise
bravely beginning
the morning.
Let my heart be a river
traveling ever home
to the sea.
Let it carry my praise to all creatures.
Let me sing praises
for the gifts of rain
and sun-warmed seeds
that nourish all I love.
Let my prayers of gratitude fly up
in all seasons.
Let them rise
with the smoke from my winter hearth.
Let them rise
with the wings of the wren and the sparrow
in spring time
and the songs of the coyotes joyous
with summer hunting.
May I carry my own dark stones,
call them by name
and blame no one.
May the wisdom of ancestors
guide my thoughts and my hands.
May their wisdom guide my feet.
May I walk the path of kindness.
May all beings be safe
in the world’s ever-becoming.
– Elizabeth Carothers Herron
When we recognize the virtues, the talent, the beauty of Mother Earth, something is born in us, some kind of connection, Love is born.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
There’s a difference between a person who hurts you by making a mistake and a person who hurts you by continuing a pattern. Mistakes can be forgiven. Patterns should be broken.
– Heather Thompson Day
…great writers are indecent people
they live unfairly
saving the best part for paper.
good human beings save the world
so that bastards like me can keep creating art,
become immortal.
if you read this after I am dead
it means I made it.
– Charles Bukowski
Any Night
Look, the eucalyptus, the Atlas pine,
the yellowing ash, all the trees
are gone, and I was older than
all of them. I am older than the moon,
than the stars that fill my plate,
than the unseen planets that huddle
together here at the end of a year
no one wanted. A year more than a year,
in which the sparrows learned
to fly backwards into eternity.
Their brothers and sisters saw this
and refuse to build nests. Before
the week is over they will all
have gone, and the chorus of love
that filled my yard and spilled
into my kitchen each evening
will be gone. I will have to learn
to sing in the voices of pure joy
and pure pain. I will have to forget
my name, my childhood, the years
under the cold dominion of the clock
so that this voice, torn and cracked,
can reach the low hills that shielded
the orange trees once. I will stand
on the back porch as the cold
drifts in, and sing, not for joy,
not for love, not even to be heard.
I will sing so that the darkness
can take hold and whatever
is left, the fallen fruit, the last
leaf, the puzzled squirrel, the child
far from home, lost, will believe
this could be any night. That boy,
walking alone, thinking of nothing
or reciting his favorite names
to the moon and stars, let him
find the home he left this morning,
let him hear a prayer out
of the raging mouth of the wind.
Let him repeat that prayer,
the prayer that night follows day,
that life follows death, that in time
we find our lives. Don’t let him see
all that has gone. Let him love
the darkness. Look, he’s running
and singing too. He could be happy.
– Philip Levine
From Sean Singer, vital poet and disseminator of poetry and poetry ideas. Philip Levine articulates a situation in poetry that has puzzled me: how unpopulated most poems are. You’re lucky to have a somewhat complex speaker and a moose. Maybe a generic parent or a lover.
Why don’t more poems seek to create vivid, interactive characters? This is something I’d like to do more of. Do poets you know do it, via character monologue or dialogue? As literary genres converge, is characterization another frontier for poetry?
Philip Levine:
Much of our recent poetry seems totally without people. Except for the speaker, no one is there. There’s a lot of snow, a moose walks across the field, the trees darken, the sun begins to set, and a window opens. Maybe from a great distance you can see an old woman in a dark shawl carrying an unrecognizable bundle into the gathering gloom. That’s one familiar poem. In others you get people you’d sooner not meet. They live in the suburbs of a large city, have two children, own a Volvo station wagon; they love their psychiatrists but are having an affair with someone else. Their greatest terror is that they’ll become like their parents and maybe do something dreadful, like furnish the house in knotty pine. You read twenty of those poems and you’re yearning for snow fields and moose tracks.
Apocalypse does not point to a fiery Armageddon but to the fact that our ignorance and our complacency are coming to an end…What is the kingdom? It lies in our realization of the ubiquity of the divine presence in our neighbors, in our enemies, in all of us.
– Joseph Campbell
You can be buried alive
By a certain kind of love
– Sarah Ederer
falling snow
another soup recipe
to consider
– @YourMoonliness
my own shadow
leading me home
from moon watching
– Shiki
Everybody is somebody, and nobody is made for my use.
– Jericho Brown
If we push for change too fast there will be a backlash. How we go about creating change is important. If it threatens people into survival mode we will end up w/ violence in one form or another. Even dismantling hierarchies will flat land into liberal violence by POWER vacuums.
– Emily Horn
You should have a ritual for your life. All a ritual does is concentrate your mind on the implications of what you are doing.
– Joseph Campbell
Then the golden hour
Will tick its last
And the flame will go down in the flower.
A briefer length of moon
Will mark the sea-line and the yellow dune.
– Arna Bontemps
I suffer from unrequited self love. I love myself, but I don’t love myself back.
– Andrea Gibson
Abstract thinking can lead us no further than to intellectual sophistries, which are invariably used as shields and subterfuges and are calculated to prevent the realization of the whole.
– CG Jung
Nobody can give you a mythology. The images that mean something to you, you’ll find in your dreams, in your visions, in your actions—and you’ll find out what they are after you’ve passed them.
– Joseph Campbell
Learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.
– Leonardo da Vinci
Not an act, I’m told, more a leave to live
where words have no leverage—I’ve a pile
of words.
– Tommye Blount
I think of my friends
& how lucky in life
I’ve been to get
to know them, to have
had the time to laugh &
drink & dance & to argue
& feel hurt too.
– Gina Myers
Sayings of a Jewish Buddha
If there is no self, whose arthritis is this?
Be here now. Be someplace else later. Is that so complicated?
Drink tea and nourish life; with the first sip, joy; with the second sip, satisfaction; with the third sip, peace; with the fourth, a Danish.
Wherever you go, there you are. Your luggage is another story.
Accept misfortune as a blessing. Do not wish for perfect health, or a life without problems. What would you talk about?
The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single Oy.
There is no escaping karma. In a previous life, you never called, you never wrote, you never visited. And whose fault was that?
Zen is not easy. It takes effort to attain nothingness. And then what do you have? Bupkis.
The Tao does not speak. The Tao does not blame. The Tao does not take sides. The Tao has no expectations. The Tao demands nothing of others. The Tao is not Jewish.
Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in. Breathe out. Forget this and attaining Enlightenment will be the least of your problems.
Let your mind be as a floating cloud. Let your stillness be as a wooded glen. And sit up straight. You’ll never meet the Buddha with such rounded shoulders.
Deep inside you are ten thousand flowers.
Each flower blossoms ten thousand times.
Each blossom has ten thousand petals.
You might want to see a specialist.
Be aware of your body. Be aware of your perceptions. Keep in
mind that not every physical sensation is a symptom of a terminal illness.
– David M Bader, ZEN JUDAISM
At Least Two People I know Take Photos of Hearts in Nature
by Karen Paul Holmes
Morning glory leaves, rocks, clouds,
a horse’s fur, an upturned pear
that grew oddly so.
Or manmade by chance—
oil swirls on pavement,
an accidental heart in marbled rye.
These shapes—symbols
for the human heart,
its beats and chambers linked
with love since Sappho’s mad heart
quaked with it, and Venus
gave Cupid his bow.
The seekers aren’t looking for
a weeping Mary or Jesus
for thousands to bow down before,
just reminders to be mindful,
like when my Buddhist chime
sprinkles the quiet with silver.
Once I look, I begin to see.
Valentines in the unexpected universe,
small doses of hope.
A broken cockle shell tangled in kelp,
the grain of a cedar bench,
pollen on a still pond.
Yes, watch me soar.
Swaying to smoky song,
dark and proud of razing this
wild, wild land o’er & o’er like a beacon,
a calling, a Black love.
– Junious ‘Jay’ Ward
I believe in the sacred because I simply no longer have the strength to sustain disbelief. It takes too much energy to deny the sacred, to defend against grace; too much time to block out poignancy, to explain away love. So somewhere along the way I just gave up and admitted that life is too poetic to be explained in prose and the sacred is too manifest to be denied.
– David Elkins
In time, such painful experience (mistakes of first half of life) becomes the smithy in which a more authentic journey becomes possible — that is, if one does the work to learn what there is to learn.
– James Hollis
The sea is so far from us now. Partly I think because we
are not softspoken desire.
– francine j. harris
I always thought old age would be a writer’s best chance… Now, my memory’s gone, all the old fluency’s disappeared. I don’t write a single sentence without saying to myself, ‘It’s a lie!’ So I know I was right.
– Samuel Beckett
Not everyone who comes
comes to listen,
the poet said about
the old monk’s teaching.
– The Old Monk
Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.
– Eric Hoffer
For the wounds and every other evil that men inflict upon themselves spontaneously and of their own choice, are in the long run less painful than those inflicted by others.
– Niccolo Machiavelli
Study people’s eyes, follow their gestures – surer barometers of pain and pleasure than any spoken word.
– @RobertGreene
stark trails
snow and sky
what we can’t know
– @everettpoetry
After many years, to start a story still scares me to death.
– John Steinbeck
How to Comfort Someone
after Katy Luxem
Be the patch of sunlight on the floor
so that as someone comes near
they feel your warmth and can bask in
the subtle glow. Be the clear window
with shades pulled up, and the sparkle
of snow, which holds space or all
that falls into it. Be the water glass
filled at the faucet, then offered
to another in need, and let them
drink and drink until it’s time for you
to go, leaving like the slow fade
of the setting sun on a winter day,
traces of pink light spread
like a balm across the sky.
– James Crews
peace to the world
now and forever
cherry blossoms
– Issa
When I think of my own personal pantheon of writers, I do think of many American poets – Stevens, Eliot, Ashbery – but the funny thing is that each of these writers was deeply influenced by the poetry of a foreign culture.
– Srikanth Reddy
deep winter sky
a spoonful of stardust
in my coffee
– Edward Cody Huddleston
Sometimes the things that are wrong with something are the same things that make that thing great … that’s the way art works.
– Jon Landau
Culture and civilisation are tested by vital consciousness. Are we more vitally conscious than an Egyptian 3000 years B.C. was? Are we? Probably we are less. Our conscious range is wide, but shallow as a sheet of paper. We have no depth to our consciousness.
– DH Lawrence
Reaching down to sleep’s hem, you wonder what the dream will sew in it.
– L. A. Weeks
Throw away the light, the definitions, and say what you see in the dark.
– Wallace Stevens
After the Spiritual High comes the Human Low.
– @VinceFHorn
The great problem is bringing life back into the wasteland, where people live inauthentically.
– Joseph Campbell
it’s as if I’ve interrupted something
that was falling in a straight line
from the eye of God
– Alice Oswald
Do the gods light this fire in our hearts or does each man’s mad desire become his god?
– Virgil, Aeneid
The main problem in any democracy is that crowd-pleasers are generally brainless swine who can go out on a stage & whup their supporters into an orgiastic frenzy—then go back to the office & sell every one of the poor bastards down the tube for a nickel apiece.
– Hunter S Thompson
There is fundamentally no help at all because the misery, turmoil and confusion are created by oneself, and therefore must be cleared away by oneself. Whatever another can do to help is but a temporary alleviation.
– Krishnamurti
Dream, vision, god – god is a luminous vision. The image of god is equivalent to the dream vision. So, your god is an aspect of yourself, just as your dream image is.
– Joseph Campbell
In the world of psyche, it is your work, rather than your theoretical ideas, that builds consciousness.
– Robert A. Johnson
Self-reflection needs a lot of time & space in order to effect change. In this process, it’s important for us to be nauseated contemplating our faults & defects. Once you are good & sick to your stomach, then you can see what it is you need to do to transform.
– Dzigar Kongtrul
As in the novels of James Joyce, so in those of Thomas Mann, the key to the progression lies in the stress on what is inward.
– Joseph Campbell
(Robert Burns says in one of his letters: “There is scarcely any earthly object gives me more – I do not know if I should call it pleasure – but something which exalts me – something which enraptures me – than to walk in the shelter’d side of a wood in a cloudy winter day, and hear the stormy wind howling among the trees, and raving over the plain. It is my best season of devotion.” Some of his most characteristic poems were composed in such scenes and seasons.)
– Walt Whitman, February Days
You and Art
Your exact errors make a music
that nobody hears.
Your straying feet find the great dance,
walking alone.
And you live on a world where stumbling
always leads home.
Year after year fits over your face––
when there was youth, your talent
was youth;
later, you find your way by touch
where moss redeems the stone;
And you discover where music begins
before it makes any sound,
far in the mountains where canyons go
still as the always-falling, ever-new flakes of snow.
– William Stafford
I almost didn’t see the you who wasn’t you.
I was walking past the outdoor tables of the French café. And just at the last second, I caught a familiar hand gesture, and I looked again.
It couldn’t have been you though, my love, because your other hand was clasping the hand of the woman opposite.
Your heads were too close. She was laughing, that abandoned laughing you do when you’re totally in the moment, totally in love.
I walked on, heels tapping out a staccato rhythm, as I no longer wanted to look at the you who wasn’t you.
– Laura Besley, Doppelgänger
A world is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.
– Gaston Bachelard
Been trying for years to get a government job. Maybe I’ll never get into that club. I don’t think they like poets.
– @LeahJCallen
One must give up the retrospective longing which only wants to resuscitate the torpid bliss and effortlessness of childhood.
– CG Jung
There is no separation. We are all from the same place. As long as there is respect and acknowledgement of connections, things continue working. When that stops we all die.
– Joy Harjo
Word of the day: ARSLE – to make absolutely no progress whatsoever
This dreary tedium of a world can go take a flying fuck.
– Jack Kerouac
Now that we have come out of hiding,
Why would we live again in the tombs we’d made out of our souls?
– Khaled Mattawa
the grad school system is like okay how about we break your brain with stress and then you can use the fragments to write a coherent 250-page analysis.
– @snackowska
Because you want to understand Buddhist teaching from the standpoint of human thought, you are going 180° in the wrong direction.
– Kodo Sawaki, To You
Your mental climate, for lack of a better word, is your reality. Your basic reality. It’s your creation, your responsibility, and you have to maintain it. No one can interfere with how you believe in or react to people and things. Let them make fun of you: They’ve been making fun of me for years for being, as they say, out of touch. I don’t approve of most things that are in touch.
– Marian Seldes
I’ve never liked labels or name calling. Labels create illness – I made a video already on the nocebo effect. Name calling in my house is not allowed. However, it still happens on a regular basis because it’s so easy to fall into name calling and everyone is doing it without thinking about what they’re doing. Labels and name calling is very harmful, energetically.
Colluding with delusions to make someone happy – I don’t do that either. I’m a psychotherapist by training and we don’t collude. We also did not come to this place to be happy, we came to grow. So being happy is not the goal of life. But people don’t like that idea. They won’t put the work in to be responsible for themselves because it’s difficult. This explains a lot.
Psychotherapists listen and try to understand. We offer compassion and empathy, and a safe space for the other person to explore their feelings. Unless someone is at risk of harming themselves or someone else. Then we must call it out. It’s also imperative that psychotherapists show their clients where they may be seeing things from a forced perspective, where they are not giving others the benefit of the doubt. Because we tend to believe the stories we tell ourselves over the truth, even if the stories we tell ourselves are harmful.
If clients are in an abusive situation then we encourage them to become empowered so they can decide what to do for themselves. But ultimately we cannot give advice, we cannot tell someone what to do. This makes life as a psychotherapist difficult at the best of times – it’s a vocation for sure.
Knowing right from wrong is vital. Giving someone space to decide for themselves is also vital. But we do not ever need to compromise our own beliefs for someone else’s. Let me say that again. Nobody has the right to enforce their thinking upon you and make you collude with their story. And you don’t have the right to do that to anybody else either.
When a client won’t take responsibility for themselves and projects this responsibility out to the other, we, as psychotherapists must see it and catch it and gently push it back to them and show them what they are doing, without taking on that responsibility ourselves. This can be so subtle that as compassionate beings we can be like the frog in the saucepan, taking it on little by little without realizing it until we are embroiled. That’s where the training comes in useful – it helps us see it quicker and put a stop to it.
So. In a world where people are encouraged to live a deluded life, where the systems of education and law are promoting a deluded life, where delusion seems to be seeping into the very fabric of our society, how does a person like me hold themselves?
With integrity. With authenticity. And with grace. Anger is inevitable but we must learn to manage our anger and not fall into name calling and labelling people. And we must live congruently – as above, so below. For me this is the core essence of who I am and I am not ever going to change this because of someone else’s need to be happy. And I would never expect you to twist yourself out of your alignment to make me happy either. This is where two responsible adults can agree to disagree.
Lecture over. Is there anything else you’d like to add? Or do you see a fundamental error in my debate? Let me know. I’m open to listening and changing my mind. Unusual qualities I think? Yes?
– Abby Wynne
How easily nothing happens.
– Veronica Patterson