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
Where is what I started for,
and why is it yet unfound?
– Walt Whitman
Eileen Myles:
At a Waterfall, Reykjavik
I still feel like
the world
is a piece
of bread
I’m holding
out half
to you.
That little letdown
at the end of a long day
one-foot waterfall.
– Clark Strand
Believe me I am not being modest
when I admit my life doesn’t bear repeating.
I agreed to be the poet
of one life, one death alone.
– C.D. Wright
This should be the spirit every Monday. Know that something good will always happen.
– Gabriel García Márquez
Chiho’s Calligraphy
(for Chiho Kaneko)
Chiho brushed for me
three Chinese characters.
She sent them to me in the mail.
I have her calligraphy framed on the wall
in my room above my little homemade
altar where I sit every day.
The characters from top to bottom say:
Shu, which means keep or obey,
as in obey the teacher.
The second one is ha, which means
break, rebel, try things out, other than
what the teacher said.
The third one is ri, which means
depart on your own path,
go your own way.
– David Budbill, Happy Life
I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil triumphant.
– Martin Luther King, Jr.
It’s a cold and it’s a broken cowabunga.
– Alicia Kraft
A dream is the bearer of a new possibility, the enlarged horizon, the great hope.
– Howard Thurman
Year’s end is neither an end nor a beginning but a going on, with all the wisdom that experience can instill in us. Cheers to a new year and another chance for us to get it right.
– Oprah Winfrey
How else to enter into the forty-day place that lay ahead of him? How else to cross into the wilderness where he would have no food, no community, nothing that was familiar to him—and, to top it off, would have to wrestle with the devil? How else, but to go into that landscape with the knowledge of his own name: Beloved.
– Jan Richardson
Beloved Is Where We Begin
If you would enter
into the wilderness,
do not begin
without a blessing.
Do not leave
without hearing
who you are:
Beloved,
named by the One
who has traveled this path
before you.
Do not go
without letting it echo
in your ears,
and if you find
it is hard
to let it into your heart,
do not despair.
That is what
this journey is for.
I cannot promise
this blessing will free you
from danger,
from fear,
from hunger
or thirst,
from the scorching
of sun
or the fall
of the night.
But I can tell you
that on this path
there will be help.
I can tell you
that on this way
there will be rest.
I can tell you
that you will know
the strange graces
that come to our aid
only on a road
such as this,
that fly to meet us
bearing comfort
and strength,
that come alongside us
for no other cause
than to lean themselves
toward our ear
and with their
curious insistence
whisper our name:
Beloved.
Beloved.
Beloved.
– Jan Richardson
One of the things I try to do: memorize the smallest, most mundane and ordinary, unprepossessing, and virtually invisible of physical moments: the look and feel of a certain wall at a certain time on a certain day. Those walls, those little shacks, those cats in the sun: all that is lacking in self-consciousness I seek to hold in vision, memory. (Simple composition, color tints, a wash of light, crumbled brick, cold shadow, stillness, rose-color dirt, a twitching whisker.) Not knowing why, but thinking I may want it later, I try to keep it and I never can.
– Michelle Anderson-Binczak
How beautiful you must be
to have been able to lead me
this far with only
the sound of your going away
heard once at a time and then
remembered in silence
when the time was gone
you whom I have never seen
o forever invisible one
whom I have never mistaken
for another voice
nor hesitated to follow
[…]
you incomparable one
for whom the waters fall
and the winds search
and the words were made
listening
– W.S. Merwin
We should have fled at once, and we both knew it,
but we both lacked the stamina to do it;
tugged by two loves, society and sorrow,
we drifted off to different romances,
leaving behind a monument of glances.
– Rachel Wetzsteon
Memory is a funny thing. When I was in the scene, I hardly paid it any mind. I never stopped to think of it as something that would make a lasting impression, certainly never imagined that eighteen years later I would recall it in such detail. I didn’t give a damn about the scenery that day. I was thinking about myself. I was thinking about the beautiful girl walking next to me. I was thinking about the two of us together, and then about myself again. It was the age, that time of life when every sight, every feeling, every thought came back, like a boomerang, to me. And worse, I was in love. Love with complications. The scenery was the last thing on my mind.
– Haruki Murakami
‘Listening,’ [Erich] Fromm argues,’is an art like the understanding of poetry’ and, like any art, has its own rules and norms. Drawing on his half-century practice as a therapist, Fromm offers six such guidelines for mastering the art of unselfish understanding:
1. The basic rule for practicing this art is the complete concentration of the listener.
2. Nothing of importance must be on his [her] mind, he [she] must be optimally free from anxiety as well as from greed.
3. He [She] must possess a freely-working imagination which is sufficiently concrete to be expressed in words.
4. He [She] must be endowed with a capacity for empathy with another person and strong enough to feel the experience of the other as if it were his [her] own.
5. The condition for such empathy is a crucial facet of the capacity for love. To understand another means to love him [her] — not in the erotic sense but in the sense of reaching out to him [her] and of overcoming the fear of losing oneself.
6. Understanding and loving are inseparable. If they are separate, it is a cerebral process and the door to essential understanding remains closed.
– Erich Fromm
It is still grey out as I follow the outline of memory.
– Joy Harjo, The Psychology of Earth and Sky
Walk the good road, my daughter, and the buffalo herds wide and dark as cloud shadows moving over the prairie will follow you . . . Be dutiful, respectful, gentle and modest, my daughter. And proud walking. If the pride and the virtue of the women are lost, the spring will come but the buffalo trails will turn to grass. Be strong, with the warm, strong heart of the earth. No people goes down until their women are weak and dishonored …
– Howard Zinn
To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places – and there are so many – where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.
– Howard Zinn
But you don’t have to become art
to hunger me, nor do I need
metaphor to see you as love.
– Jack B. Bedell
The whole sky is yours
to write on, blown open
to a blank page.
– Rita Dove
The peril is that the human intellect is free to destroy itself. Just as one generation could prevent the very existence of the next generation, by all entering a monastery or jumping into the sea, so one set of thinkers can in some degree prevent further thinking by teaching the next generation that there is no validity in any human thought. It is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith. Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all. If you are merely a skeptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question, “Why should anything go right; even observation and deduction? Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape?” The young skeptic says, “I have a right to think for myself.” But the old skeptic, the complete skeptic, says, “I have no right to think for myself. I have no right to think at all.
– G. K. Chesterton
“Shut up,” he said, “you talk too much.”
“Thank you; now I see how many books are still inside of me before I can close my mouth.”
– David Bedrick
The Request
The day my son was born
my spiritual practice dissolved.
Whatever I had absorbed
on the wisdom of non-attachment
left in a great commotion. Rope of
— what else can I name it — love
pulled me towards his unopened eyes.
Expelled from his first home, he flailed
naked in the new light. I bent over my wife
and tasted the salt sweat beading on her brow,
stroked her hair matted in its disarray,
bent over both of them — flesh
to flesh to flesh — and whispered a request:
grant me another hundred years
to spend in my present form.
– Ken Victor
Subject and object of consciousness cannot exist apart from each other. Without an object, the subject cannot be aware of anything. Mountains and rivers, earth and sun, all lie within the heart of consciousness. When that realization arises, time and space dissolve. Cause and effect, birth and death, all vanish.
Though we dwell a hundred thousand light years from a star, we can cross that distance in a flash. The saints of the past can return to the present in a microsecond, their presence as vivid as a bright flame.
You are there, because I am here. We inter-are. If we do not exist, nothing exists. Subject and object, host and guest, are a part of each other…
Let us welcome impermanence and non-self. There is no need to seek a Pure Land somewhere else. We only need to lift our heads and see the moon and stars. The essential quality is awareness. If we open our eyes, we will see.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
The challenge remains. On the other side are formidable forces: money, political power, the major media. On our side are the people of the world and a power greater than money or weapons: the truth.
Truth has a power of its own. Art has a power of its own. That age-old lesson – that everything we do matters – is the meaning of the people’s struggle here in the United States and everywhere. A poem can inspire a movement. A pamphlet can spark a revolution. Civil disobedience can arouse people and provoke us to think, when we organize with one another, when we get involved, when we stand up and speak out together, we can create a power no government can suppress. We live in a beautiful country. But people who have no respect for human life, freedom, or justice have taken it over. It is now up to all of us to take it back.
– Howard Zinn
Like the ground turning green
in a spring wind, like birdsong beginning inside the egg.
Like this universe coming into existence,
the lover wakes, and whirls
in a dancing joy,
then kneels down
in praise.
– Rumi
No birth happens in the light:
Not human, plant or plankton.
Find and gather your seeds,
Push them deep into the soil
Of undoing, made deeper
By digging and attrition,
So the moon shall be a sun
For all things hidden,
For everything germinating inside you.
– Jack Adam Weber
When you die, only three things will remain of you, since you will abandon all material things on the threshold of the otherworld: what you have taught to others, what you have created with your hands, and how much love you have spread.
So learn more and more in order to teach wise, long-lasting values. Work more and more to leave the world things of great beauty. And love people around you for the light of love heals everything.
– François Bourillon
I love the way you take a walk / And all the things you see with your eyes/ Oh, to be that distant thought / Some growing meaning in your mind
– Angel Olsen
you have yourself within you
yourself, you have her, and there is nothing
that cannot be seen open then to the coming of what comes.
– Carolyn Forché
Books, like landscapes, leave their marks in us. Sometimes these traces are so faint as to be imperceptible – tiny shifts in the weather of the spirit that do not register on the usual instruments. Mostly, these marks are temporary: we close a book, and for the next hour or two the world seems oddly brighter at its edges; or we are moved to a kindness or a meanness that would otherwise have gone unexpressed. Certain books, though, like certain landscapes, stay with us even when we have left them, changing not just our weathers but our climates.
– Robert Macfarlane
What if, when we take a long, mindful look at everything around us, we’re not actually seeing everything? What if we’re only seeing part of what’s really there? What if we are missing an entire layer of reality?
And what if, by simply opening our hearts and our minds to a new vocabulary of seeing and understanding, we begin to see a much bigger picture? What if the world suddenly becomes a magnificent tapestry of connections and signs and light and love, all woven into the ordinary fabric of life that we’re so used to?
– Laura Lynne Jackson
Culture
I’ve reached the edge of this world. I’m at an outpost. I’m standing in the middle of an expansive, godless rubbish dump of culture; a quarry filled with pop songs that have fallen back to earth like false angels; status updates that endlessly stream like SOSs; and a haze of news, fashion, books, thoughts and clever ideas that have became rubbish the instant they were born. And I can hear the sound of seagulls circling above it all; a dog whimpers somewhere from inside a parked car and strangers race to what they call their ‘next scheduled appointment’, when really, they’re just running blindly from death. And as I lean over the crumbling edges of myself, I’m ready to take the leap.
– Darby Hudson
top down, heading home, /
jasmine lines roadside, perfume /
still mingles with stars
– Greg Sellers
Landscapes with frames around them, to keep the landscapes from leaking out.
– Kelly Link
Do you understand? When I am done telling you these stories, when you’re done listening to these stories, I am no longer I, and you are no longer you. In this afternoon we briefly merged into one. After this, you will always carry a bit of me, and I will always carry a bit of you, even if we both forget this conversation.
– Hao Jingfang
Having a Coke with You
Frank O’Hara – 1926-1966
is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne
or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona
partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian
partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt
partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches
partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary
it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it
in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles
and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint
you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them
I look
at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick
which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together for the first time
and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism
just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or
at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me
and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them
when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank
or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully
as the horse
it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience
which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I’m telling you about it
Big Brother isn’t watching. He’s singing and dancing. He’s pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother’s busy holding your attention every moment you’re awake. He’s making sure you’re always distracted. He’s making sure you’re fully absorbed. He’s making sure your imagination withers. Until it’s as useful as your appendix. He’s making sure your attention is always filled. And this being fed, it’s worse than being watched. With the world always filling you, no one has to worry about what’s in your mind. With everyone’s imagination atrophied, no one will ever be a threat to the world.
– Chuck Palahniuk
Things didn’t remember their names and I have begun to forget them
memory’s like a pocket riddled with holes that cannot hold change
words or ideas and some in the Dark Ages knew this already
and some know it still in our pitch-black era
as they store up what others before them had carried
and released into the dark from their embarrassed hands
like a bird or a lizard or simply a crumb
something between something and nothing between us and our forgetting
something with no beginning no end and no meaning
– Jaan Kaplinski
As we are a doomed race, chained to a sinking ship, as the whole thing is a bad joke, let us, at any rate, do our part; mitigate the suffering of our fellow-prisoners; decorate the dungeon with flowers and air-cushions; be as decent as we possibly can.
– Virginia Woolf
There are so many ways to reconnect with the sacred within creation, to listen within and include the earth in our spiritual practice and daily life. When we hear the morning chorus of birds, we may sense that deeper joy of life and awake to its divine nature; at night the stars can remind us of what is infinite and eternal within us and within the world. Watching the simple wonder of a dawn or a sunset can be an offering in itself.
Whatever way we are drawn to wonder, to recognize the sacred, what matters is always the attitude we bring to this intimate exchange. It is through the heart that a real connection is made, even if we first make it in our feet or hands. Do we really feel our self as a part of this beautiful and suffering planet, do we sense its need? Then this connection comes alive, a living stream that flows from our heart as it embraces all of life. Then every step, every touch, will be a prayer for the earth, a remembrance of what is sacred.
– Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
The Edge You Carry With You
What is this
beguiling reluctance
to be happy?
This quickness
in turning away
the moment
you might
arrive?
The felt sense
that a moment’s
unguarded joy
might after all,
just kill you?
You know
so very well
the edge
of darkness
you have
always
carried with you.
You know
so very well,
your childhood legacy:
that particular,
inherited
sense of hurt,
given to you
so freely
by the world
you entered.
And you know
too well
by now
the body’s
hesitation
at the invitation
to undo
everything
others seemed
to want to
make you learn.
But your edge
of darkness
has always
made
its own definition
secretly
as an edge of light
and the door
you closed
might,
by its very nature
be
one just waiting
to be leant against
and opened.
And happiness
might just
be a single step away,
on the other side
of that next
unhelpful
and undeserving
thought.
Your way home,
understood now,
not as an achievement,
but as a giving up,
a blessed undoing,
an arrival
in the body
and a full rest
in the give
and take
of the breath.
This living
breathing body
always waiting
to greet you
at the door,
always prepared
to give you
the rest you need,
always,
no matter
the long
years away,
still
wanting you,
to come home.
– David Whyte
O Thou
Dweller in my heart,
Open it out,
Purify it,
Make it bright and beautiful.
Awaken it,
Prepare it,
Make it fearless,
Make it a blessing to others.
Rid it of laziness,
Free it from doubt,
Unite it with all,
Destroy its bondage.
Let thy peaceful music
Pervade all its works.
Make my heart
Full of joy,
Full of joy,
Full of joy.
– A favorite prayer of Gandhi
I care about what is said, and I care about how it is said. They’re twins, and together they form the whole point & meaning …
– Olivia Dresher
Water, be my memory, let me see what I have lost.
– Agha Shahid Ali
For he would be thinking of love
Till the stars had run away
And the shadows eaten the moon.
– William Butler Yeats
I am torn because I cannot find on earth
An answer to the sunset’s aching cry.
– Richard Eberhart
Learning from History
by David Ferrty
They said, my saints, my slogan-sayers sang,
Be good, my child, in spite of all alarm.
They stood, my fathers, tall in a row and said,
Be good, be brave, you shall not come to harm.
I heard them in my sleep and muttering dream,
And murmuring cried, How shall I wake to this?
They said, my poets, singers of my song,
We cannot tell, since all we tell you is
But history, we speak but of the dead.
And of the dead they said such history
(Their beards were blazing with the truth of it)
As made of much of me a mystery.
How intense can be the longing to escape from the emptiness and dullness of human verbosity, to take refuge in nature, apparently so inarticulate, or in the wordlessness of long, grinding labour, of sound sleep, of true music…
– Boris Pasternak
I have closed my eyes on the past
As you want it remembered for
The rest of life, called ‘forever.’
– Kenneth Rexroth, No!
And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.
– Roald Dahl
An Earth Song
by Langston Hughes
It’s an earth song,—
And I’ve been waiting long for an earth song.
It’s a spring song,—
And I’ve been waiting long for a spring song.
Strong as the shoots of a new plant
Strong as the bursting of new buds
Strong as the coming of the first child from its mother’s womb.
It’s an earth song,
A body song,
A spring song,
I have been waiting long for this spring song.
A profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of doing profound hurt.
– Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
Slender memory, stay with me.
– Li-Young Lee
Love Sonnet I
How often I have wished time with you was
More than dreams my mind keeps, though any real
Time with you seemed a dream, too. Between us
Time meant everything yet nothing—the seal
For an empty tomb when we had to part,
Some sense of timelessness together. Still,
There’s no need to roll a stone from this soul,
For eternity won’t matter without your heart
To save my own. And the world that waits will
Never offer enough beauty to hold
My attention or affection as you
Did. Now time’s all wrong, each day’s a year, each
Year a lifetime, yet there’s no life without
Your breath to breathe, eyes to see, heart to be.
– Greg Sellers, Love Sonnet
Love, how the hours accumulate. Uncountable.
The trees grow tall, some people walk away
and diminish forever.
The damp pewter days slip around without warning
and we cross over one year and one year.
– Li-Young Lee
When you realize you are mortal you also realize the tremendousness of the future. You fall in love with a Time you will never perceive.
– Etel Adnan, Journey to Mount Tamalpais
I see that the life of this place is always emerging beyond expectation or prediction or typicality, that it is unique, given to the world minute by minute, only once, never to be repeated. And this is when I see that this life is a miracle, absolutely worth having, absolutely worth saving. We are alive within mystery, by miracle.
– Wendell Berry
No one grumbles among the oyster clans,
And lobsters play their bone guitars all summer.
Only we, with our opposable thumbs, want
Heaven to be, and God to come, again.
There is no end to our grumbling; we want
Comfortable earth and sumptuous Heaven.
But the heron standing on one leg in the bog
Drinks his dark rum all day, and is content.
– Robert Bly
It is not diversity that divides us; it is not our ethnicity or religion or culture that divides us.
– Nelson Mandela
Fear unites the disparate parts of our false selves very quickly.
The ego moves forward by contraction, self-protection, and refusal, by saying no.
Contraction gives us focus, purpose, direction, superiority, and a strange kind of security.
It takes our aimless anxiety, covers it up, and tries to turn it into purposefulness
and urgency, which results in a kind of drivenness.
But this drive is not peaceful or happy.
It is filled with fear and locates all its problems as
“out there,” never “in here.”
The soul or the True Self does not proceed by contraction but by expansion.
It moves forward, not by exclusion, but by inclusion. It sees things deeply
and broadly not by saying no but by saying yes, at least on some level,
to whatever comes its way. Can you distinguish between those two
very different movements within yourself?
Fear and contraction allow us to eliminate other people, write them off,
exclude them, and somehow expel them, at least in our minds.
This immediately gives us a sense of being in control
and having a secure set of boundaries…
But in controlling we are usually afraid of losing something.
If we go deeper into ourselves, we will see that there is both a rebel
and a dictator in all of us, two different ends of the same spectrum.
It is almost always fear that justifies our knee-jerk rebellion
or our need to dominate—a fear that is hardly ever recognized as such
because we are acting out and trying to control the situation.
– Richard Rohr
Just live your life as it comes.
Keep quietly alert, inquiring into the real nature of yourself.
Perception is based on memory and is only imagination.
The world can be said to appear but not to be.
Only that which makes perception possible is real.
You agree to be guided from within
and life becomes a journey into the unknown.
Give up all names and forms, and the Real is with you.
Know yourself as you are. Distrust your mind and go beyond.
Do not think of the Real in terms of consciousness and unconsciousness.
It is utterly beyond both.
It gives birth to consciousness.
All else is in consciousness.
Nothing you can see, feel or think is so. Go beyond the personal and see.
Stop imagining that you were born. You are utterly beyond all existence
and non-existence, utterly beyond all that the mind conceives.
Question yourself: Who am I?
What is behind and beyond all this?
Soon you will see that thinking yourself to be a person
is mere habit built on memory. Inquire ceaselessly.
Just be aware of your being here and now.
There is nothing more to it.
In reality you are not a thing nor separate.
You are the infinite potentiality, the inexhaustible possibility.
Because you are, all can be.
The universe is but a partial manifestation of your limitless capacity to become.
You are neither consciousness nor its content.
You are the timeless Source.
Disassociate yourself from mind and consciousness.
Find a foothold beyond and all will be clear and easy.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
You must become brother and sister
to each and every thing
so that they flow through you
dissolving every difference
between what belongs to you and others.
No star, no leaf shall fall –
you fall with them –
to rise again
in every new beginning.
– Hermann Hesse
When I think of the relationship between artists and society – and for me the question is always what it could be, rather than what it is – I think of the word transcendent. It is a word I never use in public, but it’s the only word I can come up with to describe what I think about the role of artists. By transcendent, I mean that the artist transcends the immediate. Transcends the here and now. Transcends the madness of the world. Transcends terrorism and war.
– Howard Zinn
Blue Horses
Franz Marc
I step into the painting of the four blue horses.
I am not even surprised that I can do this.
One of the horses walks toward me.
His blue nose noses me lightly. I put my arm
over his blue mane, not holding on, just
commingling.
He allows me my pleasure.
Franz Marc died a young man, shrapnel in his brain.
I would rather die than explain to the blue horses
what war is.
They would either faint in horror, or simply
find it impossible to believe.
I do not know how to thank you, Franz Marc.
Maybe our world will grow kinder eventually.
Maybe the desire to make something beautiful
is the piece of God that is inside each of us.
Now all four horses have come closer,
are bending their faces toward me
as if they have secrets to tell.
I don’t expect them to speak, and they don’t.
If being so beautiful isn’t enough, what
could they possibly say?
– Mary Oliver
I do most sincerely believe that ethical behavior as we best construe it ought to be followed by us throughout our lives, even on the last day of life, and that if we have made a bad or even evil choice we are not barred (or excused) thereby from continuing to live the last moments or years given to us in whatever way we consider to be most right.
– William T. Vollmann
from “Sand and Foam”
Kahlil Gibran
Once I filled my hand with mist.
Then I opened it and lo, the mist was a worm.
And I closed and opened my hand again, and behold there was a bird.
And again I closed and opened my hand, and in its hollow stood a man with a
sad face, turned upward.
And again I closed my hand, and when I opened it there was naught but mist.
But I heard a song of exceeding sweetness.
Sad people have the gift of time, while the world dizzies everyone else; they remain stagnant, their bodies refusing to follow pace with the universe. With these kind of people everything aches for too long, everything moves without rush, wounds are always wet.
– Warsan Shire
A child’s instinct is almost perfect in the matter of fighting; a child always stands for the good militarism as against the bad. The child’s hero is always the man or boy who defends himself suddenly and splendidly against aggression. The child’s hero is never the man or boy who attempts by his mere personal force to extend his mere personal influence.
But really to talk of this small human creature, who never picks up an umbrella without trying to use it as a sword, who will hardly read a book in which there is no fighting – to take this human creature and talk about the wickedness of teaching him to be military, seems rather a wild piece of humour. He has already not only the tradition of fighting, but a far manlier and more genial tradition of fighting than our own. No; I am not in favour of the child being taught militarism. I am in favour of the child teaching it.
– G. K. Chesterton
Why We Stay
I am on the porch with strong coffee.
All the artists, poets, philosophers with
no reason, and the haphazard gardeners
are sleeping in or waking to their visions.
At the feeder – the first birds of the morning:
chickadees in their black-and-white cassocks,
the house finches, their muted red scarves
head to shoulder, nuthatches upside down.
This is the way the day is to be – loved
without definition. Joy known without
needing sorrow. It is only quiet, first
light moving in its unencumbered way
across each leaf, branched or fallen. Deep
in itself the earth trembles, our own way
lost and lingering at an unfelt edge.
– Jack Ridl
I want to be in such a
passionate adoration that
my tent gets pitched against the sky.
Let the beloved come
and sit like a guard dog
in front of the tent.
When the ocean surges,
don’t let me just hear it.
Let it splash inside my chest.
– Rumi
All attempts to restore the sky,
even just a spark, have left us here in the dark.
– Cat Dixon
…and the memory of her lived in my body for years.
– Abdulrazak Gurnah, Gravel Heart
Not enough light has ever reached us here among the shadows, and yet I think it has never been entirely absent.
– Wendell Berry
Imagine all the
flowers we’ve trampled
are growing in paradise,
ready to forgive us.
– C. T. Salazar
I’m not saying
it never existed
but it never existed
the way I’m saying.
– C. T. Salazar
I said I wanted to worship something,
[…]
and felt myself become gospel in your hands.
– C. T. Salazar
Perhaps there is no greater lie than the feeling that someone else’s prolonged daylight depends on you, their chance to flounder for a while longer on the surface, to appear briefly once more in the light before yielding to the complete and total darkness.
– Maria Stepanova
With the invention of digital photography, yesterday and today have coexisted with unprecedented intensity. It’s as if the waste chute in a building has been blocked off and all the trash just keeps piling up forever. There’s no need to save film, just press the shutter release, even the deleted pictures remain in the computer’s long memory. Oblivion, the copycat of nonexistence, has a new twin brother; the dead memory of the collector. We look through a family album with a sense of affection–it contains a little, perhaps just what remains. But what should we do with an album containing everything, without exception, the whole disproportionate volume of the past?
– Maria Stepanova
In the country, spring is a time of small happenings happening quietly, hyacinth shoots thrusting in a garden, willows burning with a sudden frosty fire of green, lengthening afternoons of long flowing dusk and midnight rain opening lilac…
– Truman Capote
I have Spanish dancers in my stomach
they’re my arching striving in dance where it’s black
red flowers darken to be huge pleasuring the
severe, tried Angel who meets transition,
transport, as abruptly as necessary
for everyone’s are apt
Says the Unassuming Graceful
Whose down-hip-ness
Is that window
The dancers’ sensuous flaw
That admits Spring,
Contingent upon our personality
Spring is for the worldly
just like the HaHa Room
Just like dearest rockbottom
suddenly gone buoyant
To be black geese to be
strenuous dancers
is not to dignify a passion but to
grip it.
Not saints but always pupils
pupils dilated fully black in full achievement of
gut-feeling. Joy.
– Alice Notley, How Spring Comes
She lets the confused stay confused
if that is what they want
and is always available
to those with a passion for the truth.
In the welter of opinions,
she is content with not-knowing.
She makes distinctions
but doesn’t take them seriously.
She sees the world constantly breaking
apart, and stays centered in the whole.
She sees the world endlessly changing
and never wants it to be
different from what it is.
– Chuang-tzu
Even a short period of retreat is a benevolent rest, a stepping outside of busy daily rounds, and our ordinary identity. Released from the tyranny of time, we are invited into the reality of the present, to see the mystery of life anew. My teacher Ajahn Chah called it food for the heart.
Find ways to take regular retreats. Long ones, short ones, daily mini ones. Take five minutes to do nothing, walking under the trees outside work. Sit silently on the grass or the balcony or the porch, or on your zafu. First breathe with compassion for your busy self and then put down all your plans. Open yourself to wonder. Let your heart be fed and your spirit renewed. May it be so.
– Jack Kornfield
One could start just by taking a few minutes out of every day to sit quietly and do nothing, letting what moves one rise to the surface. One could take a few days out of every season to go on retreat or enjoy a long walk in the wilderness, recalling what lies deeper than the moment or the self. One could even, as Cohen was doing, try to find a life in which stage sets and performances disappear and one is reminded, at a level deeper than all words, how making a living and making a life sometimes point in opposite directions.
“What if?” points in both directions.
– Pico Iyer
There is a permanent amnesia planted in us, which just as we keep forgetting our dreams, we sometimes keep on forgetting our reality.
– Isaac Bashevis Singer
My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle. What do I care about knowledge. All I want is to answer to my blood, direct, without fribbling intervention of mind, or moral, or what-not.
– D. H. Lawrence
Stories are the only enchantment possible, for when we begin to see our suffering as a story, we are saved.
– Anaïs Nin
Grandma once gave me a tip:
During difficult times, you move forward in small steps.
Do what you have to do, but little by bit.
Don’t think about the future, not even what might happen tomorrow. Wash the dishes.
Take off the dust.
Write a letter.
Make some soup.
Do you see?
You are moving forward step by step.
Take a step and stop.
Get some rest.
Compliment yourself.
Take another step.
Then another one.
You won’t notice, but your steps will grow bigger and bigger.
And time will come when you can think about the future without crying.
Good morning
– Elena Mikhalkova, The Room of Ancient Keys
Maps are ubiquitous in one sense, and completely missing in another. A lot of younger people don’t own maps and atlases and don’t have the knowledge a map gives you. We call things like MapQuest and Google Maps on your phone interactive… but are they? Are they interactive? It’s a system that largely gives you instructions to obey. Certainly, obedience is a form of interaction. (Maybe not my favorite one.) But a paper map you take control of — use it as you will, mark it up — and while you figure out the way from here to there yourself, instead of having a corporation tell you, you might pick up peripheral knowledge: the system of street names, the parallel streets and alternate routes. Pretty soon, you’ve learned the map, or rather, you have — via map — learned your way around a city. The map is now within you.
You are yourself a map.
– Rebecca Solnit
How to Come Out of Lockdown
by Jim Moore
1
Someone will need to forgive me for being
who I am, for sneaking back to my blue chair
by the window, where for the last three hundred and seventy days
I have learned that to be alone is what is good for me. I am pretending
as if I really belong with those who want to return to this world
with open arms, even though it has done to us
what it has done. I wish I could love like that,
instead of wanting to turn my back on it all,
as if life in the world were a marriage
assumed too young and necessarily left behind.
Try as I might I will never become
one of the world’s faithful ones.
My naked face and your naked face,
maskless. A cold March dawn,
harsh sunlight, impersonal and honest,
mindless like the light from a surgeon’s lamp
worn on the forehead as you peer down
into the wound. Nothing in this new life
is asked of me except to remember how small I am.
2
Sometimes the world won’t let itself
be sung. Can’t become a poem. Sometimes
we are sane, but sanity alone is not enough.
Warm moonlight and wind. I am sitting here,
simply breathing because there is no other way
to be with those who no longer can.
I don’t know what to say about it all,
but if you do please show me how to be you.
In the last play I saw, fourteen months ago,
before there were no more plays,
they had made a sea of the stage. Songs were chanted
on its shore. Lives lived. People pretended to die
and a ship sailed into the night. A moon. One star.
Afterward, applause. Then began that long silence
which it is now time for me to admit I have loved
beyond any reason or defense. Who among us
has not seen that star to the left
of the lockdown moon, shining
as the ship sets sail?
It seems to be in the nature of human beings to spend the first part of their lives mocking the cliches and conventions of their elders and the final part mocking the cliches and conventions of the young,
– Michael Chabon
Apologize when you’re Wrong. Stop looking for quotes that support your stupidity.
– unknown
Do you know what’s more exciting than red flags and ‘passion’? Healthy, respectful love.
– unknown
One thing a person cannot do, no matter how rigorous their analysis or heroic their imagination, is to draw up a list of things that would never occur to them,
– Thomas Schelling
Don’t make rules for others,
make them for yourself.
We’ll all be better off,
the old monk said.
– via Tom Montag
TEN OLD MONK POEMS
IF YOU CAN’T
If you can’t
see the mountain,
you’ve gone too far,
the old monk says.
~
THE EDGE
The edge of
the universe is
always new,
the old monk said.
~
IF YOU GO BACK
If you go back
to talk about it,
you’ve already
lost the argument,
the old monk says.
~
EVEN IF
Even if
it occurs
only once,
there’ll still be
wisdom in it,
the old monk says.
~
IF I GO UP
If I go up
the mountain
with rice and beans
what do I come
back down for,
the old monk asked.
~
THE SOUND YOU HEAR
The sound you hear,
that note is E-flat,
the old monk says.
That’s the key
the universe
sings in.
~
PHYSICS IS
Physics is the way
the universe thinks,
the old monk says.
Pull up a chair, listen.
~
IF YOU KEEP
If you keep
wanting it
to hurt,
it will hurt,
the old monk says.
Stop wanting it
to hurt.
~
FLY THROUGH
Fly through
Sunday
fast enough,
you make it
halfway to
Wednesday,
the old monk says.
~
DO IT DIFFERENT
Do it different
than you always do,
you will lose it,
the old monk says.
– via Tom Montag
Help doesn’t always come
in big packages,
the old monk said,
nor hope either.
– via Tom Montag
Look, America is no more a democracy than Russia is a Communist state. The governments of the U.S. and Russia are practically the same. There’s only a difference of degree. We both have the same basic form of government: economic totalitarianism. In other words, the settlement to all questions, the solutions to all issues are determined not by what will make the people most healthy and happy in their bodies and their minds but by economics. Dollars or rubles. Economy über alles. Let nothing interfere with economic growth, even though that growth is castrating truth, poisoning beauty, turning a continent into a shit-heap and driving an entire civilization insane. Don’t spill the Coca-Cola, boys, and keep those monthly payments coming.
– Tom Robbins
Searching for spring all day, I never saw it,
straw sandals treading everywhere
among the clouds, along the banks.
Coming home, I laughed, catching
the plum blossom’s scent:
spring at each branch tip, already perfect.
– unknown zen nun from the Song Dynasty
Sam Hammill and J.P. Seaton
If you only walk on sunny days,
you’ll never reach your destination.
– Paulo Coelho
I’m a radiant void. I’m convalescing after a long and dreadful illness… I cannot brood over broken hearts, mine is too recently mended.
– Vladimir Nabokov
Annunciation by Denise Levertov
We know the scene: the room, variously furnished,
almost always a lectern, a book; always
the tall lily.
Arrived on solemn grandeur of great wings,
the angelic ambassador, standing or hovering,
whom she acknowledges, a guest.
But we are told of meek obedience. No one mentions
courage.
The engendering Spirit
did not enter her without consent.
God waited.
She was free
to accept or to refuse, choice
integral to humanness.
Aren’t there annunciations
of one sort or another
in most lives?
Some unwillingly
undertake great destinies,
enact them in sullen pride,
uncomprehending.
More often
those moments
when roads of light and storm
open from darkness in a man or woman,
are turned away from
in dread, in a wave of weakness, in despair
and with relief.
Ordinary lives continue.
God does not smite them.
But the gates close, the pathway vanishes.
She had been a child who played, ate, slept
like any other child – but unlike others,
wept only for pity, laughed
in joy not triumph.
Compassion and intelligence
fused in her, indivisible.
Called to a destiny more momentous
than any in all of Time,
she did not quail,
only asked
a simple, ‘How can this be?’
and gravely, courteously,
took to heart the angel’s reply,
perceiving instantly
the astounding ministry she was offered:
to bear in her womb
Infinite weight and lightness; to carry
in hidden, finite inwardness,
nine months of Eternity; to contain
in slender vase of being,
the sum of power –
in narrow flesh,
the sum of light.
Then bring to birth,
push out into air, a Man-child
needing, like any other,
milk and love –
but who was God.
This was the moment no one speaks of,
when she could still refuse.
A breath unbreathed,
Spirit,
suspended,
waiting.
when no one looks / both poets & children grieve / the shifting contours // of cathedrals
– Ina Cariño
BONE by Mary Oliver
I.
Understand, I am always trying to figure out
what the soul is,
and where hidden,
and what shape
and so, last week,
when I found on the beach
the ear bone
of a pilot whale that may have died
hundreds of years ago, I thought
maybe I was close
to discovering something
for the ear bone
II.
is the portion that lasts longest
in any of us, man or whale; shaped
like a squat spoon
with a pink scoop where
once, in the lively swimmer’s head,
it joined its two sisters
in the house of hearing,
it was only
two inches long
and thought: the soul
might be like this
so hard, so necessary
III.
yet almost nothing.
Beside me
the gray sea
was opening and shutting its wave-doors,
unfolding over and over
its time-ridiculing roar;
I looked but I couldn’t see anything
through its dark-knit glare;
yet don’t we all know, the golden sand
is there at the bottom,
though our eyes have never seen it,
nor can our hands ever catch it
IV.
lest we would sift it down
into fractions, and facts
certainties
and what the soul is, also
I believe I will never quite know.
Though I play at the edges of knowing,
truly I know
our part is not knowing,
but looking, and touching, and loving,
which is the way I walked on,
softly,
through the pale-pink morning light.
The Book of Longing
by Leonard Cohen
I can’t make the hills
The system is shot
I’m living on pills
For which I thank G-d
I followed the course
From chaos to art
Desire the horse
Depression the cart
I sailed like a swan
I sank like a rock
But time is long gone
Past my laughing stock
My page was too white
My ink was too thin
The day wouldn’t write
What the night penciled in
My animal howls
My angel’s upset
But I’m not allowed
A trace of regret
For someone will use
What I couldn’t be
My heart will be hers
Impersonally
She’ll step on the path
She’ll see what I mean
My will cut in half
And freedom between
For less than a second
Our lives will collide
The endless suspended
The door open wide
Then she will be born
To someone like you
What no one has done
She’ll continue to do
I know she is coming
I know she will look
And that is the longing
And this is the book
Beware the ‘empathy-washing’ of self-proclaimed caring capitalists
by Evgeny Morozov
(….)
… In reality, the technological euphoria spawned by the refugee crisis suggests that we update the list of clever co-optation efforts that arise from compassionate capitalism –from “greenwashing” for fake ecological commitments to “openwashing” for fake transparency pledges – with yet another term: “empathy-washing”. It seems apt to describe growing corporate efforts to hijack humanitarian crises in order to tout corporate commitment to humanitarianism.
Empathy-washing initiatives create the false impression that the crisis is under control, with individual ingenuity, finally unlocked by privatised technologies, compensating for the rapidly deteriorating situation on the ground. And even if some of them do temporarily relieve the effects of the crises – against their causes, privatised technological solutions are impotent – they also entrench the power of technology platforms as indispensable intermediaries essential to the smooth administration of the post-crisis political landscape.
(….)
In the future – which, somehow, increasingly looks like our feudalist past – to be truly free, we’ll first have to pledge allegiance to a giant technology provider. Should our corporate overlord “pivot” to a new business model or simply decide that our freedom can no longer be justified in its cost-benefit analysis, we’ll have to find some other private guarantor of freedom.
Fleeing from the effects of neoliberal capitalism, all of us are becoming permanent refugees – with technology giants occasionally taking pity on us by offering us free services, identity papers, and an opportunity to make money in the sharing economy. And, soon, there won’t be anywhere to flee.
We all have the extraordinary coded within us, waiting to be released.
– Jean Houston
Laughter is the loaded latency given us by nature as part of our native equipment to break up the stalemates of our lives and urge us on to deeper and more complex forms of knowing.
– Jean Houston
At the height of laughter, the universe is flung into a kaleidoscope of new possibilities.
– Jean Houston
No matter the situation, never let your emotions overpower your intelligence.
– Jean Houston
The world needs the sense that we are all in it TOGETHER!
– Jean Houston
If you keep telling the same sad small story. You will keep living the same sad small life.
– Jean Houston
I firmly believe that all human beings have access to extraordinary energies and powers. Judging from accounts of mystical experience, heightened creativity, or exceptional performance by athletes and artists, we harbor a greater life than we know.
– Jean Houston
Development involves giving up a smaller story in order to wake up to a larger story.
– Jean Houston
With subtly developed body awareness, it is possible for the individual to become the conscious orchestrator of health.
– Jean Houston
Critical to any practice of sacred psychology is training in multiple imageries to facilitate the inner realism of journeys of the soul. …
– Jean Houston
Run towards the roar,’ the old people used to tell the young ones. When faced with great danger and when people panic and seek a false sense of safety, run towards the roaring and go where you fear to go. For only in facing your fears can you find some safety and a way through. When the world rattles and the end seems near, go towards the roar.
– Michael Meade
An old Celtic proverb boldly places death right at the center of life. ‘Death is the middle of a long life,’ they used to say. Ancient people did things like that; they put death at the center instead of casting it out of sight and leaving such an important subject until the last possible moment. Of course, they lived close to nature and couldn’t help but see how the forest grew from fallen trees and how death seemed to replenish life from fallen members. Only the unwise and the overly fearful think that death is the blind enemy of life.
– Michael Meade
If you don’t know who you are, anyone can name you.
– Michael Meade
The genius inside a person wants activity. It’s connected to the stars; it’s connected to a spark and it wants to burn and it wants to make and it wants to create and it has gifts to give. That is the nature of inner genius.
– Michael Meade
In these dark and uncertain times, there can be great value in imagining a bit of star in each human soul.
Not just that it gives some hope for humanity at a time when man’s inhumanity to man seems ever on the increase; but also because it points to an inner brightness
that can light the way
in dark times.
– Michael Meade
Our job is not to comprehend or control everything, but to learn which story we are in and which of the many things calling out in the world is calling to us. Our job is to be fully alive in the life we have, to pick up the invisible thread of our own story and follow where it leads. Our job is to find the thread of our own dream and live it all the way to the end.
– Michael Meade
If we want the world to change, the healing of culture and greater balance in nature, it has to start inside the human soul.
– Michael Meade
Life roars at us when it wants or needs us to change. Ultimately, change means trans formation, a shifting from one form to another that involves the magic of creation. The trouble with entrenched oppositions is that each side becomes increasingly one-sided and single minded and unable to grow or meaningfully change. In the blindness of fear and the willfulness of abstract beliefs, people forget or reject the unseen yet essential unity that underlies all the oppositions in life.
– Michael Meade
Liberation happens each time we become conscious of the contents of the soul.
– Michael Meade
All meaningful change requires a genuine surrender. Yet, to surrender does not simply mean to give up; more to give up one’s usual self and allow something other to enter and redeem the lesser sense of self. In surrendering, we fall to the bottom of our arguments and seek to touch the origin of our lives again. Only then can we see as we were meant to see, from the depth of the psyche where the genius resides, where the seeds of wisdom and purpose were planted before we were born.
– Michael Meade
The ship is always off course. Anybody who sails knows that. Sailing is being off course and correcting. That gives a sense of what life is about.
– Michael Meade
Each life involves an essential errand; not simply the task of survival, but a life-mission embedded in the soul from the beginning.
– Michael Meade
What’s secretly in the water
of modern culture is that people
enter the world empty.
That’s a very dangerous idea,
because if everybody’s empty
than other people can get us
to do whatever they want
because there’s nothing
in us to stand against it.
But if we came to do
something that’s meaningful,
that involves giving and
making the world a more
beautiful, healthy, lively place,
then you become a difficult person
to move around and manipulate.
– Michael Meade
Whether we know it or not, our lives are acts of imagination and the world is continually re-imagined through us
– Michael Meade
There are those, however, that are not frightened of grief: dropping deep into the sorrow, they find therein a necessary elixir to the numbness. When they encounter one another, when they press their foreheads against the bark of a centuries-old tree…their eyes well with tears that fall easily to the ground. The soil needs this water. Grief is but a gate, and our tears a kind of key opening a place of wonder thats been locked away. Suddenly we notice a sustaining resonance between the drumming heart within our chest and the pulse rising from the ground.
– David Abram
Breathing involves a continual oscillation between exhaling and inhaling, offering ourselves to the world at one moment and drawing the world into ourselves at the next.
– David Abram
Sensory perception is the silken web that binds our separate nervous systems into the encompassing ecosystem.
– David Abram
Each place its own mind, its own psyche! Oak, Madrone, Douglas fir, red-tailed hawk, serpentine in the sandstone, a certain scale to the topography, drenching rains in the winters, fog off-shore in the summers, salmon surging up the streams – all these together make up a particular state of mind, a place-specific intelligence shared by all the humans that dwell therein, but also by the coyotes yapping in those valleys, by the bobcats and the ferns and the spiders, by all beings who live and make their way in that zone. Each place its own psyche. Each sky its own blue.
– David Abram
Each thing organizes the space around it, rebuffing or sidling up against other things; each thing calls, gestures, beckons to other beings or battles them for our attention; things expose themselves to the sun or retreat among the shadows, shouting with their loud colors or whispering with their seeds; rocks snag lichen spores from the air and shelter spiders under their flanks; clouds converse with the fathomless blue and metamorphose into one another; they spill rain upon the land, which gathers in rivulets and carves out canyons.
– David Abram
Entranced by the denotative power of words to define, to order, to represent the things around us, weve overlooked the songful dimension of language so obvious to our oral [storytelling] ancestors. Weve lost our ear for the music of language — for the rhythmic, melodic layer of speech by which earthly things overhear us.
– David Abram
Does the human intellect, or “reason,” really spring us free from our inherence in the depths of this wild proliferation of forms? Or on the contrary, is the human intellect rooted in, and secretly borne by, our forgotten contact with the multiple nonhuman shapes that surround us on every hand?
– David Abram
Only as the written text began to speak would the voices of the forest, and of the river, begin to fade. And only then would language loosen its ancient association with the invisible breath, the spirit sever itself from the wind, the psyche dissociate itself from the environing air.
– David Abram
The world we experience with our unaided senses is fluid and animate, shifting and transforming in response to our own shifts of position and of mood.
– David Abram
I think it was Miłosz, the Polish poet, who when he lay in a doorway and watched the bullets lifting the cobbles out of the street beside him realized that most poetry is not equipped for life in a world where people actually die. But some is.
– Ted Hughes
My courageous life
has gone ahead
and is looking back,
calling me on.
My courageous life
has seen everything
I have been
and everything
I have not
and has
forgiven me,
day after day.
My courageous life
still wants
my company:
wants me to
understand
my life as witness
and thus
bequeath me
the way ahead.
My courageous life
has the patience
to keep teaching me,
how to invent
my own
disappearance,
and how
once gone,
to reappear again.
My courageous life
wants to stop
being ahead of me
so that it can lie
down and rest
deep inside the body
it has been
calling on.
My courageous life
wants to be
my foundation,
showing me
day after day
even against my will
how to undo myself,
how to surpass myself,
how to laugh as I go
in the face
of danger,
how to invite
the right kind
of perilous
love,
how to find
a way
to die
of generosity.
– David Whyte
Words are carried away in this flow. They emerge, disappear, and reappear farther, like flotsam. They echo or repeat themselves. They associate with words, disassociate, re-associate with other words–constantly creating new images. They are elements of permanence and of change at the same time, in this continuously transforming landscape.
– Beatrice Szymkowiak
in bloom for only /
a few weeks, wisteria– /
cascades of blue grief
– Greg Sellers
We know more than we can say: we live
in waves of feelings and awareness
where images indwell and grow
along the leafwork of our nerves and veins;
and when one morning […]
we walk out on our porch and see
the white azaleas open to the air
we recognize them from our dreams
as every cell projects our affirmation
– Peter Meinke, Azaleas
I wish I didn’t love you
or that I loved you much more.
– Michelangelo Antonioni
For what should I save
my longing?
– Maggie Smith
Seattle weather: it has rained for weeks in this town,
The dampness breeding moths and a gray summer.
I sit in the smoky room reading your book again,
My eyes raw, hearing the trains steaming below me
In the wet yard, and I wonder if you are still alive.
Turning the worn pages, reading once more:
By misty waters and rainy sands, while the yellow dusk thickens.
– Weldon Kees
Wang Yangming noted, ‘There have never been people who know but do not act. Those who are supposed to know but do not act simply do not yet know.’ You know when you’ve reached the place of fully experiencing the Earth’s heartbreak, because you suddenly realize you are drawn to action – not because you think you should do something, but because you are impelled to do it.
– Jeremy Lent
And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man; A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things.
– Jeremy Lent
The sense of separateness that our culture foists on us is, in Einstein’s words, ‘a kind of optical delusion of consciousness … a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us’. This delusion of consciousness is not, however, our only available option. ‘Our task,’ he continues, ‘must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
– Jeremy Lent
That was the river, this is the sea.
– Mike Scott
I pictured a rainbow
You held it in your hands
I had flashes
But you saw the plan
I wandered out in the world for years
While you just stayed in your room
I saw the crescent
You saw the whole of the moon
– Mike Scott
a jutting bough –
here, another companion
of the moon
– Louis Osofsky
If you brew your own cauldron, magic will surely happen.
– Dara McAnulty
We must change almost everything in our current societies.
The bigger your carbon footprint – the bigger your moral duty.
The bigger your platform – the bigger your responsibility.
Adults keep saying: ‘We owe it to the young people to given them hope.’
But I don’t want your hope.
I don’t want you to be hopeful.
I want you to panic.
I want you to feel the fear I feel every day.
And then I want you to act.
I want you to act as you would in a crisis.
I want you to act as if our house is on fire.
Because it is.
– Greta Thunberg
Some people say that the climate crisis is something we have all created. But that is just another convenient lie. Because if everyone is guilty then no one is to blame.
– Greta Thunberg
Your silence is almost worst of all.
– Greta Thunberg
Some people say that I should study to become a climate scientist so that I can ‘solve the climate crisis’. But the climate crisis has already been solved. We already have all the facts and solutions. All we have to do is to wake up and change.
– Greta Thunberg
And what is the point of learning facts within the school system when the most important facts given by the finest science of that same school system clearly mean nothing to our politicians and our society?
– Greta Thunberg
In this world you’ve a soul for a compass and a heart for a pair of wings/There’s a star in the far horizon, shining bright in an azure sky/For the rest of the time that you’re given, why walk when you can fly.
– Mary Chapin Carpenter
When in doubt, do something.
– Harry Chapin
Now sometimes words can serve me well
Sometimes words can go to hell
For all that they do
– Harry Chapin
He wondered what percentage of the world’s art was actually kept in bank vaults and the like. Like unread books and unplayed music, did it matter that art went unseen?
– Ian Rankin
Those who are most sincere are also the most morally suspect, as well as being incapable of producing or appreciating wit.
– Ian M. Banks
I can never get over when you’re on the beach how beautiful the sand looks and the water washes it away and straightens it up and the trees and the grass all look great. I think having land and not ruining it is the most beautiful art that anybody could ever want to own.
– Andy Warhol
Until we understand what the land is, we are at odds with everything we touch. And to come to that understanding it is necessary, even now, to leave the regions of our conquest – the cleared fields, the towns and cities, the highways – and re-enter the woods. For only there can a man encounter the silence and the darkness of his own absence. Only in this silence and darkness can he recover the sense of the world’s longevity, of its ability to thrive without him, of his inferiority to it and his dependence on it. Perhaps then, having heard that silence and seen that darkness, he will grow humble before the place and begin to take it in – to learn from it what it is. As its sounds come into his hearing, and its lights and colors come into his vision, and its odors come into his nostrils, then he may come into its presence as he never has before, and he will arrive in his place and will want to remain. His life will grow out of the ground like the other lives of the place, and take its place among them. He will be with them – neither ignorant of them, nor indifferent to them, nor against them – and so at last he will grow to be native-born. That is, he must reenter the silence and the darkness, and be born again.
– Wendell Berry, A Native Hill
You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, back home to romantic love, back home to a young man’s dreams of glory and of fame, back home to exile, to escape to Europe and some foreign land, back home to lyricism, to singing just for singing’s sake, back home to aestheticism, to one’s youthful idea of ‘the artist’ and the all-sufficiency of ‘art’ and ‘beauty’ and ‘love,’ back home to the ivory tower, back home to places in the country, to the cottage in Bermude, away from all the strife and conflict of the world, back home to the father you have lost and have been looking for, back home to someone who can help you, save you, ease the burden for you, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time–back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.
– Thomas Wolfe
Natures of your kind, with strong, delicate senses, the soul-oriented, the dreamers, poets, lovers are always superior to us creatures of the mind. You take your being from your mothers. You live fully; you were endowed with the strength of love, the ability to feel. Whereas we creatures of reason, we don’t live fully; we live in an arid land, even though we often seem to guide and rule you. Yours is the plentitude of life, the sap of the fruit, the garden of passion, the beautiful landscape of art. Your home is the earth; ours is the world of ideas. You are in danger of drowning in the world of the senses; ours is the danger of suffocating in an airless void. You are an artist; I am a thinker. You sleep at your mother’s breast; I wake in the desert. For me the sun shines; for you the moon and the stars.
– Hermann Hesse
Only one who takes over his own life history can see in it the realization of his self. Responsibility to take over one’s own biography means to get clear about who one wants to be.
– Jürgen Habermas
[Jürgen Habermas’ obituary to friend and philosopher, Richard Rorty]
One small autobiographical piece by Rorty bears the title ‘Wild Orchids and Trotsky.’ In it, Rorty describes how as a youth he ambled around the blooming hillside in north-west New Jersey, and breathed in the stunning odour of the orchids. Around the same time he discovered a fascinating book at the home of his leftist parents, defending Leon Trotsky against Stalin. This was the origin of the vision that the young Rorty took with him to college: philosophy is there to reconcile the celestial beauty of orchids with Trotsky’s dream of justice on earth. Nothing is sacred to Rorty the ironist. Asked at the end of his life about the ‘holy’, the strict atheist answered with words reminiscent of the young Hegel: ‘My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.
– Jürgen Habermas
Today, the language of the market penetrates every pore and forces every interpersonal relation into the schema of individual preference.
– Jürgen Habermas
Only by externalization, by entering into social relationships, can we develop the interiority of our own person.
– Jürgen Habermas
The parliament no longer is an ‘assembly of wise men chosen as individual personalities by privileged strata, who sought to convince each other through arguments in public discussion on the assumption that the subsequent decision reached by the majority would be what was true and right for the national welfare.’ Instead it has become the ‘public rostrum on which, before the entire nation (which through radio an television participates in a specific fashion in this sphere of publicity), the government and the parties carrying it present and justify to the nation their political program, while the opposition attacks this program with the same opennes and develops its alternatives.
– Jürgen Habermas
Always strive to excel, but only on weekends.
– Richard Rorty
My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.
– Richard Rorty
A talent for speaking differently, rather than for arguing
well, is the chief instrument of cultural change.
– Richard Rorty
The purpose of a pilgrimage is about setting aside a long period of time in which the only focus is to be the matters of the soul. Many believe a pilgrimage is about going away but it isn’t; it is about coming home. Those who choose to go on pilgrimage have already ventured away from themselves; and now set out in a longing to journey back to who they are.
Many a time we believe we must go away from all that is familiar if we are to focus on our inner well-being because we feel it is the only way to escape all that drains and distracts us, allowing us to turn inward and tend to what ails us. Yet we do not need to go to the edges of the earth to learn who we are, only the edges of ourself.
– L.M. Browning
We all have those things that help us carry on through life. It is important that these things upon which we depend for daily strength are healthy for our character rather than harmful. We must ask ourselves whether the comforts we reach for each day are vices or virtues? Do they feed the best parts of us or do they rob us of them? Even when we are at our most fatigued and are tempted to reach for self-destructive things, we must try to seek out and take solace in those things that will lead to our eventual renewal; rather than those things that will only serve to bring us lower.
– L.M. Browning
Make the sunrise a temple.
– Frank LaRue Owen
The antidote to depression is devotion.
– Frank LaRue Owen
My deepest wish for you is that the deepest parts of you can one day put down the battle and let yourself truly be held in a cradle of loving sunlight.
– Frank LaRue Owen
Stop spinning on your busy wheel of pain long enough to hear this: You are not outside the fold of your original preciousness. Even the dawn-bird is heralding this truth each morning, singing to you a map-song with coordinates leading to your renewal.
– Frank LaRue Owen
If you’re tired of shouldering heavy weight: off-load what isn’t vital and begin what it is.
– Frank LaRue Owen
If what is true brings us sorrow, if what sorrow brings is truth.
– Robert Peake
I find people who have dedicated their lives to art in disparate media often arrive at similar conclusions about the artistic process. So, reading something about art from a painter can be just as inspiring to me as reading something by a poet.
– Robert Peake
it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities’that makes our heart sing.
– Steve Jobs
Remember when life’s path is steep to keep your mind even.
– Horace
Every poet is a herd of one.
– Lucie Brock-Broido
The mark of a moderate man / is freedom from his own ideas.
– Lao Tzu
Art is a way of life, not a career.
– Marvin Bell
Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.
– Henri Bergson
Knowing is not enough, we must apply. Willing is not enough, we must do.
– Goethe
When we do not do the one thing we ought to do, we have no time for anything else – we are the busiest people in the world.
– Eric Hoffer
The problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get old ones out.
– Dee Hoc
We are a landscape of all we have seen.
– Isamu Naguchi
Bring to me, it said, continual proof / you’ve been alive.
– Stephen Dunn
Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.
– Wordsworth
Be steady and well-ordered in your life so that you may be fierce and original in your work.
– Flaubert
If there is somethig to desire, / there will be something to regret.
– Vera Pavlova
Let your lie be even more logical than the truth itself, so the weary travelers may find repose.
– Czeslaw Milosz
Celebrate any progress. Don’t wait to get perfect.
– Ann McGee Cooper
I have defined poetry as a ‘passionate pursuit of the Real.
– Czeslaw Milosz
Art makes life better, even in the harshest of circumstances
– Marvin Bell
Much of the stress that people feel doesn’t come from having too much to do. It comes from not finishing what they’ve started.
– David Allen
That’s when you’re at your best, when you’re focused and serious and passionate about what you do…
– Derek Fisher
In the middle of my life, I found myself in a dark wood, the true path having been lost
– Dante
A truly stable system expects the unexpected, is prepared to be disrupted, waits to be transformed.
– Tom Robbins
Thinking and doing, doing and thinking – these are the sum of all wisdom.
– Goethe
Hard to find anything lovelier than a tree. They grow at right angles to a tangent of the nominal sphere of the Earth.
– Bill Nye
Anxiety is usually caused by lack of control, organization, preparation and action.
– David Kekich
Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.
– Wallace Stevens
Competitions are for horses, not artists.
– Béla Bartók
The wind blows because philosophy cannot move a tree.
– Boyd Benson
All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking.
– Robert Hass
I was very careful not to tell my students to only write about what you know, because I couldn’t define what they knew. That’s where the question really begins. How to define what you know.
– Paula Fox
So how can you write a great novel if you cannot touch upon the most burning issues of the society of which you are a part?
– Josef Skvoercky
What other writers get from geography—regionalism—I get from shoptalk.
– Stanley Elkin
But it’s what I love about poetry: there is so much intergenerational hanging out that I find very stimulating among the poets in San Francisco.
– Garrett Caples
When you read something good, the idea of looking at television, going to a movie, or even reading a newspaper is not interesting to you.
– James Salter
Can’t believe we buy into this right/left political frame where people who don’t want certain kinds of people to even exist are considered just as extreme as people who want everyone to have healthcare, including the people who don’t want certain kinds of people to exist.
– Ethan Nichtern
Being skeptical of new technologies is wise! But if that skepticism keeps you from examining new tech with an open attitude, that isn’t so helpful. Now you’ve just cordoned yourself off from what’s emerging.
– Vince Horn
Enlightenment is interoperable with all things.
– Vince Horn
Enlightenment is intimacy with all things.
– Dogen Zenji
Maybe a poet could come along who could solve all our problems, but I haven’t seen him yet.
– James Dickey
APRIL
How the light is sad.
How it will not leave us alone.
How we are tugged up staircases
by the way it angles across landings.
Or just our faces – tipped
to the clear, depleted sky.
How because of sunset, the imagination
headquarters in the west.
Spring in the north: all that
tawny grass and gravel and nothing
green to sop up the excessive honesty.
Outside our windows,
something like youth or promises.
How the wind blows right through them,
blossoming. Fleet.
– Jan Zwicky
i don’t expect
any of us
to know
what it’s like
to be free
of worry
all i ask
is that when
a tree or stone
or cloud
mentions the possibility
we stop
what we’re doing
turn our heads
listen
– Leath Tonino
The first duty of love is to listen.
– Paul Tillich
Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.
– James Baldwin
Lord, help me to accept my tools. However dull they are, help me to accept them. And then Lord, after I have accepted my tools, then help me to set out and do what I can do with my tools.
– Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Poem: Spring Letter — 25/3/22
By Don Paterson
April 7, 2022
Hi man—
OK, I’ll go. I thought I’d go in MacNeice’s rugged antiphon
with its drunk and disorderly rhymes
on the grounds that a form already halfway to broken
might be halfway adequate to the times;
besides, I certainly do not sit in one of the dives
but instead am up with the worms
watching the sunlight soften in a garden slung
between the Sidlaws and the Cairngorms,
up with the crocuses and snowdrops and celandine
that are up so early these years
we must soon change the wheel of the seasons
to align with the broken gears.
Heatwaves at the poles. The days
…Nah. I just don’t have the stomach for pastiche.
I’ll use the line I talk in in my sleep
since sleep is where I try to live these days.
Last night I dreamt the little guy again.
I was looking through his pisshole eyes and saw
my armies multiply and lands increase
and through the greasy thermoplastic windows
my towers tumesce and rise, my gold domes swell;
I saw my marble table yawn, and add
another mile of snow between my hands
and my own death, further away than ever.
Then suddenly I was down the other end
with the germs and free votes, knives and Novichok,
with the thugs and toadies, foremen and machinists
who bear the major offices of state
on the usual grounds that they’ll be shit at them.
And from there, I saw the truth. It’s parallax:
the wee man at the other end was shrinking,
his baby face all purple-black—O quick!
O bring him good news from the front! O tell him
Kyiv has fallen and his father loved him!
I saw exactly what would happen next.
Homunculus. White dwarf. Dead star. Black hole
and then the pause before he hits the button,
then with the radiance of a thousand suns—
My screaming woke up L and both the dogs.
Personally I blame it all on god
or at least the human tendency to place
whoever in the crew’s most like a god
at the centre of the office, team, class, party,
and use their psychopathic certainty
to act as we would not dare otherwise,
for the gods don’t wash away our sins
but our conscience. As order forms around them
we imagine that the gods like hierarchies,
that our hymns will win a high place at the table—
but gods like two things: everything and nothing.
So build his golden bridge, and gloriously.
Let him take the Donbas and Luhansk
and say his superb mission is complete.
The assassins will come now, given time and money.
Or not. Like I’d know. What’s your money on?
No one thinks they’ll ever take Kyiv.
I thought they’d rubblise it like Aleppo
but Russia might remember Stalingrad
and knows a year of fighting street to street
to take a city you don’t even want
will see her gold gone and her grain-bins empty
and the bodies of her young men shit for sunflowers.
Comic relief, at least, at times like this
to see ourselves up on the world stage
as bin-fire Churchill correlates the plight
of the children dead below the bombed-out theatre
in Mariupol marked CHILDREN on the roof
with Brexit, and is “desperate” to go to Ukraine
and be ruminant against its ruined skylines
in his faraway pose, his head full of his dinner,
if anything. I am collecting for his fare.
You see that tweet, him jogging on the beach?
Like a walrus won a holiday at Butlins
but had just been told his shadow was a demon.
What are you watching? I started The Bureau
finally, and a Polish horror thing
on the bike we bought in lockdown. Innocent times.
The algorithm’s tagged me for a sucker
for tales of corporate hubris and comeuppance
and keeps trying to punt me Risk about Assange.
Useful to see the cult shrunk to a snow globe:
the narcissist; the mini-me; the harem
of his doting supply; the childlike seekers;
the outer moons of useful idiots;
the goal whose moral purpose is long lost
in favour of progressively degrading
tests of one’s faith and talent for denial.
Russia always played these narcs like fiddles.
The Moscow Strings: Jools. Trump. Sleepy Cuddles.
Nige. Lebedev was in the fucking room
the night Wormtongue and Alex plumped for Brexit.
Anyway Girls5eva’s good. And Netflix
has all three seasons of Servant of the People
but since the even money’s on Zelensky
being dead by August, I can’t watch it
and I just start crying when I think of him.
I had better stop. One could go on
but in the time I took to write this thing
four outrages have come to pass such as
we used to count whole decades in between.
Being a poet, I’ll start to think it’s me.
(Bono: “Every time I click my fingers
another baby dies in Africa.”
Voice from the back: “Maybe stop doing it.”)
Even in these last four goddamn lines
Navalny has been rendered to some black site
in god knows where and is as good as dead.
But the news is all the wheels are coming off.
The Russian boys are begging food from villagers
while their crap tyres spin in the rasputitsa.
John Sweeney said they brought just three days’ food
to make room in their bags for their parade dress.
The villagers are binding the boys’ hands
for frostbite and sending them back home.
Their ration packs are five years out of date
and tins marked “prime beef” turn out to be dog food
since no good kleptocrat knows when to stop.
The boys don’t know what war is and beg gas
from Ukrainian squaddies like they were their mates
from the next town over and end up PoWs.
One brigade got slaughtered, so the kids
gave up and drove their tank over their colonel.
The boys are too tired to inter their dead.
All militarists agree this is not good.
The boys have no chemsuits, which is reassuring
until you think of Putin, and remember.
My old mum says some dude on Radio Tay
said put your valuables in the microwave.
Since I cannot fit my children in the microwave
and the iodine won’t do us any good
I’ll meet the shockwave headlong in the garden
but as the expert on the chemical life
you’ll want to know a gram of NAC
and one tab of dihydromyricetin
mostly kills the hangover. Tonight, I’ll add
a drop of food-grade hydrogen peroxide
to this middling Waitrose non-organic pinot
to turn the sulphites into sediment
because I have to work tomorrow morning
but need an eight-hour dream without him in it.
Wish me luck. Be safe. Slava Ukraini.
When no one remembers, what is there?
– Mark Strand
I love my land, comfortable; I love this life, loud. / I have a living– / I have a room.
– KB Brookins
Find a few poets that strike home to you and memorize them…The music gets inside your head.
– Eugene Peterson
Don’t let anyone tell you we need more cops because of this mess.
– Lisa Lucas
I do believe that poetry is in the realm of the gift and in the realm of the sacred. Poetry is earned spiritually. It’s earned with silences. It’s earned, it isn’t arrogated.
– Seamus Heaney
if the only thing you need to be happy is writing, you’ve got it.
– Mary Ruefle
Somehow, the changing of consciousness is deemed to be threatening to the state. Now, why is that? Is the state somehow playing a shell game, that would be exposed, if people were to actually open their eyes? In what way does the expansion of consciousness threaten industrial democracies? I believe we need real answers to this.
– Terence McKenna
This rush of black words today
Searching for you on the white page.
– John O’Donohue
When the mind is festering with trouble or the heart torn, we can find healing among the silence of mountains or fields, or listen to the simple, steadying rhythm of waves. The slowness and stillness gradually takes us over. Our breathing deepens and our hearts calm and our hungers relent. When serenity is restored, new perspectives open to us and difficulty can begin to seem like an invitation to new growth.
This invitation to friendship with nature does of course entail a willingness to be alone out there. Yet this aloneness is anything but lonely. Solitude gradually clarifies the heart until a true tranquility is reached. The irony is that at the heart of that aloneness you feel intimately connected with the world. Indeed, the beauty of nature is often the wisest balm for it gently relieves and releases the caged mind..
– John O’Donohue
The Lamp of Memory
by Joshua Edwards
The writer looks back, year
by year, star after star, ever
and anon. “I came out singing,
sailing, and gliding on beauty.”
The writer remembers
the river, hills, and flowers.
“I lived like a landscape with
a large glaciar in its midst.”
Let us imagine him in stone,
devoted to a life of posterity
and the idea of the future,
Watching the passing waves
of humanity, outlasting the world.
“I believe in objects more
than subjects. Art is the failure
of the subject. Objects are true.”
His mind becomes itself a subject,
subordinate to a twisted sense
of historical proportion, clinging
to sublimity and preservation.
“I think of my life as a skeleton
and modern times as a funeral.
I belong to the future, like a green
sea, like the sun, like the sky.”
Look at the trees; willows, mostly–
They move in that way willows move–as if wanting to
pace themselves, slow, impossibly, in a building wind, as if
the wind were fate, and the trees’ response one that could
maybe make a difference.
– Carl Phillips
I realize now, at this stage, that poetry led me more to my religion than my religion led me to my religion.
– Spencer Reece
We can make our minds so like still water
that beings gather about us that they may see,
it may be, their own images, and
so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps
even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.
– William Butler Yeats
Everything is for you: my daily prayer, And the thrilling fever of the insomniac, And the blue fire of my eyes, And my poems, that white flock.
– Anna Akhmatova
And to elucidate mysticality, I employ Spanish philosopher Maria Zambrano’s principal argument: poetic reason. Zambrano sought a reasoning that was broader than reason itself, a concept that ‘slips into the interior, like a drop of soothing oil, a drop of happiness.’ This philosophy is poetic reason, or poiesis, which valorizes the role of being, the metaphysical, and one’s intuition.
Zambrano’s philosophical praxis examines the exteriority of poetic words (referred concepts or ideologies) versus an interiority they can often express (the poet’s inner sanctum); the function of her poiesisis to engender this spirit as a rejection of more secularized philosophy. Here, I offer Zambrano’s definition of poiesis itself: It is simultaneous expression and creation in the sacred form, from which poetry and philosophy are successively born. Birth is necessarily a separation—poetry into its different species, and philosophy.
The poet is the ideal artist to push the limits of the self in order to explore such limits. As such, poetic reason carries a great discursive advantage over other reasoning: the ability to allow for the unsaid, ‘the poetic word shudders over silence and only its rhythm’s orbit lifts it up, because it is music, not logos, that wins over silence.’ The poet neither renounces nor searches, because he has. The poet is responsible for expressing not only what they sense in the physical world but also what they access in dreams and interior ghosts, thus rendering any kind of expression a possibility. Their creation is an ongoing process of ‘poetic being’ approaching full self-consciousness. There is a centrality to the human psyche, for Zambrano, and then a series of underlying, unseen controls that regulate boundaries of this central being. It is this precise occurrence of being in a space and time that is considered to be both an interior knowledge of said being’s sovereign right and the exterior knowledge of its extant boundaries.
– Stephanie Malak
Recuerdo
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
We were very tired, we were very merry—
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable—
But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table,
We lay on a hill-top underneath the moon;
And the whistles kept blowing, and the dawn came soon.
We were very tired, we were very merry—
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry;
And you ate an apple, and I ate a pear,
From a dozen of each we had bought somewhere;
And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold,
And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold.
We were very tired, we were very merry,
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
We hailed, “Good morrow, mother!” to a shawl-covered head,
And bought a morning paper, which neither of us read;
And she wept, “God bless you!” for the apples and pears,
And we gave her all our money but our subway fares.
I can’t think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people’s understanding of what’s going on in the world.
– Seamus Heaney
When you are young you can declare that there is no hope for mankind, but when you are older, you learn to avoid encouraging people to hate the world.
– Naguib Mahfouz
Compassion
It could have been a whale’s heart
she towed in her wagon.
It looked like an ocean sponge
with a red viscous beating.
We watched,
not knowing
how she managed.
It was sad and strange
how her heart had become her burden.
– Carl Adamshick
He could not see what constituted the horror of the original sin, which is transmitted from generation to generation, is that the man who has tasted the fruit of knowledge cannot do other than think by means of general ideas and forever seek “proofs.”
– Shestov on Schoepenhauer
You know what rubs me the wrong way when I got to a reading? When a host goes, “I’m not gonna bother with their bio.” Why? That’s mad disrespectful. Read the writer’s bio.
– Joy Priest
What I *know* wreaks havoc upon what I *want*.
– Emil Cioran
Poetry is everywhere; it just needs editing.
– James Tate
Tell me people laughed there,
In trains, ferries, buses.
I’d like to hear it even if it’s a lie, say it.
Always agony, always agony, always agony
I’ve had enough…
– @ZeeshanJaanam
Mary Ruefle:
You grow old.
You love everybody.
You forgive everyone.
You think: we are all leaves
dragged along by the wind.
Then comes a splendid spotted
yellow one—ah, distinction!
And in that moment
you are dragged under.
To a Poet a Thousand Years Hence
I who am dead a thousand years,
And wrote this sweet archaic song,
Send you my words for messengers
The way I shall not pass along.
I care not if you bridge the seas,
Or ride secure the cruel sky,
Or build consummate palaces
Of metal or of masonry.
But have you wine and music still,
And statues and a bright-eyed love,
And foolish thoughts of good and ill,
And prayers to them who sit above?
How shall we conquer? Like a wind
That falls at eve our fancies blow,
And old Maeonides the blind
Said it three thousand years ago.
O friend unseen, unborn, unknown,
Student of our sweet English tongue,
Read out my words at night, alone:
I was a poet, I was young.
Since I can never see your face,
And never shake you by the hand,
I send my soul through time and space
To greet you. You will understand.
– James Elroy Flecker
The more I dim my eyes over print and frazzle my brain over abstract ideas, the more I appreciate the delight of being basically an animal wrapped in a sensitive skin: sex, the resistance of rock, the taste and touch of snow, the feel of the sun, good wine and a rare beefsteak and the company of friends around a fire with a guitar and lousy old cowboy songs. Despair: I’ll never be a scholar, never be a decent good Christian. Just a hedonist, a pagan, a primitive romantic.
But what’s an honest soul to do? I don’t know. I can say this: Be loyal to what you love, be true to the earth, fight your enemies with passion and laughter.
– Edward Abbey
It’s destabilizing to exist in a media environment where political views demonstrating care for others, and care for the planet, are considered extremist positions.
It leads to a lot of “is compassion crazy?” thoughts, second-guessing yourself.
Please know, you’re not crazy.
– Ethan Nichtern
Can’t believe how alive with good poetry this world is.
– Dr. Han VanderHart
I didn’t know what it meant in any realistic sense to be a poet.
– Rae Armantrout
I like the sound of facts, but I don’t care about them as facts. I like them as texture.
– Kay Ryan
Poetry is the mathematics of writing and closely kin to music.
– John Steinbeck
Atlantis—A Lost Sonnet
by Eavan Boland
How on earth did it happen, I used to wonder
that a whole city—arches, pillars, colonnades,
not to mention vehicles and animals—had all
one fine day gone under?
I mean, I said to myself, the world was small then.
Surely a great city must have been missed?
I miss our old city —
white pepper, white pudding, you and I meeting
under fanlights and low skies to go home in it. Maybe
what really happened is
this: the old fable-makers searched hard for a word
to convey that what is gone is gone forever and
never found it. And so, in the best traditions of
where we come from, they gave their sorrow a name
and drowned it.
Our culture has taken leisure away. We strain our spirits a lot. If we would just fully and consciously do the one thing before us, we would discover that we actually have more time. We’d sense life flowing through us.
– Gunilla Norris
Between
But it’s the cave I want to know.
Not how He left, rose, became a something
again. But what happens in the cave?
Not blood, not flesh, not wine stamped with the memory
of blood, but the space between breath
and breath where we are nowhere
to be found.
Someone weeps outside. Someone tugs at the boulder.
Someone clings to a torn lock of His hair.
And inside, in the still, lightless air
the turning back
into everything.
– Kim Rosen
love between us is
speech and breath. loving you is
a long river running.
– Sonia Sanchez
Why do billionaires have such shrunken imaginations? All rockets to the moon and no “maybe I’ll figure out a way to reseed coral reefs in cooler waters to save them for future generations” or “I’ll get controlling shares in a fossil fuel company and make it go in for rewilding.”
– Alicia E. Stallings
ILLEGIBLE this
world. Everything doubled.
Staunch clocks
confirm the split hour,
hoarsely.
You, clamped in your depths,
climb out of yourself
for ever.
– Paul Celan
Programming is not about typing, it’s about thinking.
– Rich Hickey
On Village-Making: The Means and the Ends of Our Personal and Collective Redemption (Part 1)
by Tad Hargrave
And so, here we are.
Drowning in the raging river of our times hurtling towards who knows where.
And none of us knows what to do about it. Our best efforts fail. Our victories are small. The sense of hopelessness is growing and, with it, a deep sense of anger.
We struggle inside our hearts and the struggle rages in the streets. We see the same problems in our home as we do in our boardrooms. Our movements for social change are no strangers to the way things have come to be with sexism in movements against racism and racism in movements against sexism. They too bear the thumb print of our times. Dysfunction everywhere.
What can come into focus in times like this, if we are willing to see it, are the ways that the problems we face as are mirrored in the ways we go about solving them.
A thread begins to appear.
Our approach to solving our problems has become invisible to us and so goes unquestioned.
But what if the approach we are using to contend with our challenges is actually an expression of the challenge with which we’re contending?
What I’m speaking about is our culture’s dogged insistence of going it alone. I’m speaking of the ragged individualism with with we approach all of our struggles and suggesting that these notions of self-sufficiency are not only not the cure, they are the syndrome that plagues us.
And I want to make the case for a radical re-orientation to the issues that plague us: village making.
*
Perhaps the most significant and vital win for the colonizer is the atomization of culture.
The breaking down of community into notions of nuclear family and the center of it all, the holy individual, the almighty Self at whose altar we, individually, worship. If there has been a central wound on the psyche of those of us who live in my corner of the world it has been this: the obliteration of the village and, worse, the obliteration of much capacity at all for village-mindedness.
Stated another way: globalization has not resulted in more togetherness. It has resulted in more individualization. It has created more highly niched communities of affinity and less communities of geography. Globalization is not, and has never been, a network of highly interconnected villages. It has, and will forever be, the end of villages.
This has affected us in ways we can’t even imagine.
So it’s important to have a Plan B. But why is our Plan B to manage all of it on our own?
Jessa Crispin articulates how this cult of individualism and independence has fully infiltrated mainstream feminism in her book Why I Am Not a Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto. What follows are a series of excerpts.
“Making feminism a universal pursuit might look like a good thing, or at the very least a neutral thing, but in truth it progresses, and I think accelerates, a process that has been detrimental to the feminist movement, and that is the change of focus from society to the individual. What was once collective action and a shared vision for how women might work and live in the world has become identity politics, a focus on individual history and achievement, and an unwillingness to share space with people with different opinions, worldviews, and histories. It has separated us out into smaller and smaller groups, until we are left all by ourselves, with our concern and our energy directed inward instead of outward..
So it’s important to have a Plan B.
But why is our Plan B to manage all of it on our own?
To have to, as individuals, make out money, set up our homes, bear and raise children, cook our meals, develop and maintain a sense of style and taste, decide how we spend our free time, and on and on until we die. In the name of freedom, we broke out of communities and towns and tribes and created families and blood lineage.
In the name of freedom, we broke out of families and blood lineage to create a nuclear household. In the name of freedom, we broke out of the nuclear households to become individuals. And yet, at no point along that way did we put serious consideration into creating a social equivalent of the support system those larger groups provided to us…
Now independence is hailed as a feminist virtue, The ability to stand on one’s own, outside of family and men. And now we have all the freedom and independence we desire, like freedom to go bankrupt, to be socially isolated, to be homeless without any social support network, to labour all your life with nothing to show for it.
As long as feminism is still infected with the Protestant economic determinist mindset – the idea that your station in life is determined by how virtuous you are or what you deserve – we’ll continue to put our time and energy into breaking down social structures rather than creating new, more empathetic ones.
We’ve been cut off from traditions and rituals, from family and intergenerational connections, from communities and a sense of belonging. We saw these things as unpaid labor that we were forced to do, rather than something worth preserving. It is true that we were forced into these roles, but it’s also true that these things have value and should be maintained.
It goes beyond squabbling over who does the housework and childcare in a nuclear family, to the question of how do we feel like we belong somewhere?”
What we are left with are Facebook groups, online forums where me connect with people we might never meet in person.
What we are left with are beautiful festivals and gatherings in which good people gather for too short a period of time but that wake up in us the hunger for something more in our regular lives.
We are left with psychological practices of the ‘self-regulating’ of our nervous systems, a triage like practice that can pull people through an overwhelming crisis by pulling them ever deeper into themselves and by disconnecting and detaching from the world.
Self-regulation is not the end all and be all.
There are those in the field of psychology pointing at research that shows up how the jangled nervous systems of humans are best regulated with the presence and support of other humans, eye-contact, touch, listening, playing together, this sort of co-regulation seems to be more aligned with our neuro-biology.
Self-regulation is deified because our culture deifies the Self and its independence.
It’s deified because our culture worships heroes not villages.
Self-regulation is seen as a sign of how incredibly strong and resilient we are.
Self-regulation helps us survive but that doesn’t mean it’s healthy. It just keeps us from dying.
And so, the practice of village-making becomes an antidote to the troubled times we are in.
On Village-Making: The Means and the Ends of Our Personal and Collective Redemption (Part 2)
by Tad Hargrave
Derrick Jensen once interviewed Martín Prechtel, and asked him: “You’ve spoken a lot today about the importance of maintenance. How does that relate to the Tzutujil practice of building flimsy houses?”
Prechtel: “In the village, people used to build their houses out of traditional materials, using no iron or lumber or nails, but the houses were magnificent. Many were sewn together out of bark and fiber. Like the house of the body, the house that a person sleeps in must be very beautiful and sturdy, but not so sturdy that it won’t fall apart after a while. If your house doesn’t fall apart, then there will be no reason to renew it. And it is this renewability that makes something valuable. The maintenance gives it meaning.
The secret of village togetherness and happiness has always been the generosity of the people, but the key to that generosity is inefficiency and decay. Because our village huts were not built to last very long, they had to be regularly renewed. To do this, villagers came together, at least once a year, to work on somebody’s hut. When your house was falling down, you invited all the folks over. The little kids ran around messing up what everybody was doing. The young women brought the water. The young men carried the stones. The older men told everybody what to do, and the older women told the older men that they weren’t doing it right. Once the house was back together again, everyone ate together, praised the house, laughed, and cried. In a few days, they moved on to the next house. In this way, each family’s place in the village was reestablished and remembered. This is how it always was.
Then the missionaries and the businessmen and the politicians brought in tin and lumber and sturdy houses. Now the houses last, but the relationships don’t.
In some ways, crises bring communities together. Even nowadays, if there’s a flood, or if somebody is going to put a highway through a neighbourhood, people come together to solve the problem. Mayans don’t wait for a crisis to occur; they make a crisis. Their spirituality is based on choreographed disasters — otherwise known as rituals — in which everyone has to work together to remake their clothing, or each other’s houses, or the community, or the world. Everything has to be maintained because it was originally made so delicately that it eventually falls apart. It is the putting back together again, the renewing, that ultimately makes something strong. That is true of our houses, our language, our relationships.
It’s a fine balance, making something that is not so flimsy that it falls apart too soon, yet not so solid that it is permanent. It requires a sort of grace. We all want to make something that’s going to live beyond us, but that thing shouldn’t be a house, or some other physical object. It should be a village that can continue to maintain itself. That sort of constant renewal is the only permanence we should wish to attain.”
*
Once a year, the Q’eswachaka people of Peru build a rope bridge connecting two villages on either side of a canyon. If a permanent bridge were put in, it would mean one less important way for the community to come together. It would mean more speed, ease and convenience, but less village.
I was reading Wade Davis’ book The Wayfinders. In it, he speaks of the immense preparations that are made for the journey of the Kula ring from island to island in an ornate, intergenerational process of gift giving.
“Men from widely separated villages had to be coordinated. Gardens had to be planted simply to grow the food to be consumed during the preparations for the journey. There were taboos to enforce, ritual magic to perform, feasts to celebrate, supplies to secure and store for the journey. Fleets of canoes had to be built, new sails woven from pandanus leaves, outriggers polished and painted, paddles carved and ornate prows ritually cleanses and empowered to ward off all evil.”
What you are reading there is village-making in action. What you are reading there ‘all hands on deck’. What you are reading there is ‘everyone is needed to play their role.’ If any one of those roles is not played, the journey might not happen. If there are no roles to be played, there is no village.
Village is a made thing. And it must be constantly re-made. Village must be enacted and maintained.
“People often say, “No one loves me.” But we have to create that thing which loves us, and which we love. We are inclined to take love like.. a gold mine. We simply can’t go on taking for granted that love is something that we get from ‘somewhere.’ It has to be created because it does not exist, it must be made first.
– C.G. Jung
All that we know about those we have loved and lost is that they would wish us to remember them with a more intensified realization of their reality. What is essential does not die but clarifies. The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude.
– Thornton Wilder
…Creativity can often be the first thing to be forgotten when you’re in a time of constraint, or a time of difficulty, or demand… even though it can be the first thing that might help you recover yourself… The creative is not just a decoration. It’s not just a luxury. The creative is an element. And the creative doesn’t mean, ‘I’m going to go and write an orchestral suite.’ It might be, ‘I’m going to make a scarf with my terrible knitting, or a pie, or write a letter, or do anything where you can see, ‘I participated in creating that.’ And that’s a relationship with yourself, and somehow there is a satisfaction in that that can also then burgeon the satisfaction for making justice, for making change, for making a movement.
– Padraig O’Tauma
A truly great library contains something in it to offend everyone.
– Jo Goodwin
All of us live in the big, wide world: The world composed of so many people doing and wanting so many things. However, we are born into and grow out of a singular, insular world over which we have a great deal of control. When we are alone and preparing to enter the day, the whirl of activity, we have to create and then demand the placement of the world we want–for ourselves and for others. This is the only way, I think, that we can remain reasonably sane and kind and responsible and alert and gloriously human.
– Alec Guinness/Interview with James Grissom/1991
To walk in money through the night crowd, protected by money, lulled by money, dulled by money, the crowd itself a money, the breath money, no least single object anywhere that is not money, money, money everywhere and still not enough, and then no money, or a little money or less money or more money, but money, always money, and if you have money or don’t have money it is the money that counts and money makes money, but what makes money make money?
– Henry Miller
last wild
.
in a high place I remember,
far from water,
far from you ∙
bloody feet in breaking shoes ·
out of food · friction burning through –
the arc fell to the umbra ·
the sky abandoned blue ·
a hard place I shall not forget
where the last wild condors flew —
.
– Elijah Morton
SAXAPHONING YOU .
1.
From the stage
to your table
by the window
Is your ear/ heart open?
I hold a note
lifted
from the gut
to the throat
Climb another octave
in a giant leap
Drummer light on the high hat
Top of my range
still driving the rhythm
Piano holds steady
Pauses for a measure.
Bass fading.
I glide down
In half steps
Your head
turns toward side of stage
Couple in evening gown,
three piece suit
escorted to front row seat
Drummer flurries
Slows to light symbol taps.
2
Saxaphoning you
from the studio
over the airwaves
as a leader
as a sideman
Rehearsing
lakeside
riverside.
Crossing a bridge
Voices along the shore
and from my own lungs
and bloodstream
surfacing.
I want to collect them.
Release them
with a wider range
tonal variation
and better precision
3.
Saxaphoning you
in your home
Through an open window
or creases in the door
Can be a wakeup call
or a lullaby without words
Saxaphoning you
in your office
I want to introduce you
to sounds outside your system.
Saxaphoning you
Between business calls
Notes seeping through your walls.
4.
Saxaphoning you
my report
of voices, visions
of seed planters, preservers
Of sandbaggers, rescuers
Rebuilders of homes
near flooded banks
of winds harsh, gentle and routine
blowing through rows
of crops tall and short
Sounds and visions
of drought and flood
filtered through my blood stream
of artists constructing
from used and repaired boards, nails,
scraps of metal
from miscellaneous material
tossed into vacant lots
by hand, by bulldozers
Mixed with my own pulse
and nerves
The laughter, shouts and curses I hear
Whispers I imagine
when dueling voices
seem to have fallen silent
5.
Saxaphoning you
beside drums and base
piano
Pushing the story along
Saxaphoning you
my response to a call
from a voice, an image
seen, heard on the surface
dreamed or imagined
Shaping
sounds under my skin
from memories of an embrace long ago
into notes I breath for my message to you.
6.
Saxaphoning you
On the dance floor
You and partner close
Heads on shoulders
I breath the lyrics
They linger between you
Sink inside, you cling closer.
– Jerry Pendergast
In all people I see myself, none more and not one a barley-corn less, And the good or bad I say of myself I say of them…
– Walt Whitman
Never say too late
– Shunryu Suzuki roshi
The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite. Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait.
– G. K. Chesterton
Do you bow your head when you pray or do you look
up into that blue space?
Take your choice, prayers fly from all directions.
And don’t worry about what language you use,
God no doubt understands them all.
Even when the swans are flying north and making
such a ruckus of noise, God is surely listening
and understanding.
Rumi said, There is no proof of the soul.
But isn’t the return of spring and how it
springs up in our hearts a pretty good hint?
Yes, I know, God’s silence never breaks, but is
that really a problem?
There are thousands of voices, after all.
And furthermore, don’t you imagine (I just suggest it)
that the swans know about as much as we do about
the whole business?
So listen to them and watch them, singing as they fly.
Take from it what you can.
– Mary Oliver
It is not enough to weep for our lost landscapes; we have to put our hands in the earth to make ourselves whole again. Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.
– Robin Wall Kimmerer
My shadow has put me in my place.
– Roberto Juarroz
… wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world
my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don’t cry
—the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids’ flutter which says
we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life’s not a paragraph
And death i think is no parenthesis
– e e cummings
Such Is the Story Made of Stubbornness and a Little Air
by Ilya Kaminsky
Such is the story made of stubbornness and a little air—
a story signed by those who danced wordless before God.
Who whirled and leapt. Giving voice to consonants that rise
with no protection but each other’s ears.
We are on our bellies in this quiet, Lord.
Let us wash our faces in the wind and forget the strict shapes of affection.
Let the pregnant woman hold something of clay in her hand.
She believes in God, yes, but also in the mothers
of her country who take off their shoes
and walk. Their footsteps erase our syntax.
Let her man kneel on the roof, clearing his throat
(for the secret of patience is his wife’s patience).
He who loves roofs, tonight and tonight, making love to her and to her forgetting,
let them borrow the light from the blind.
There will be evidence, there will be evidence.
While helicopters bomb the streets, whatever they will open, will open.
What is silence? Something of the sky in us.
THERE IS NO PATH THAT GOES ALL THE WAY
Not that it stops us looking
for the full continuation.
The one line in the poem
we can start and follow
straight to the end. The fixed belief
we can hold, facing a stranger
that saves us the trouble
of a real conversation.
But one day you are not
just imagining an empty chair
where your loved one sat.
You are not just telling a story
where the bridge is down
and there’s nowhere to cross.
You are not just trying to pray
to a God you always imagined
would keep you safe.
No, you’ve come to a place
where nothing you’ve done
will impress and nothing you
can promise will avert
the silent confrontation;
the place where
your body already seems to know
the way, having kept
to the last, its own secret
reconnaissance.
But still, there is no path
that goes all the way,
one conversation
leads to another,
one breath to the next
until
there’s no breath at all,
just
the inevitable
final release
of the burden.
And then,
wouldn’t your life
have to start
all over again
for you to know
even a little
of who you had been?
– David Whyte
Life, for most people, is a pain the neck that they hardly notice, a sad affair with some happy respites, as when the watchers of a dead body tell anecdotes to get through the long, still night and their obligation to keep watch.
I’ve always thought it futile to see life as a valley of tears; yes, it is a valley of tears, but one in which we rarely weep. Heine said that after great tragedies we always merely blow our noses. As a Jew, and therefore universal, he understood the universal nature of humanity.
Life would be unbearable if we were conscious of it. Fortunately we’re not. We live as unconsciously, as uselessly and as pointlessly as animals, and if we anticipate death, which presumably (though not assuredly) they don’t, we anticipate it through so many distractions, diversions and ways of forgetting that we can hardly say we think about it.
That’s how we live, and it’s a flimsy basis for considering ourselves superior to [other] animals. We are distinguished from them by the purely external detail of speaking and writing, by an abstract intelligence that distracts us from concrete intelligence, and by our ability to imagine impossible things. All this, however, is incidental to our organic essence. Speaking and writing have no effect on our primordial urge to live, without knowing how or why. Our abstract intelligence serves only to elaborate systems, or ideas that are quasi-systems, which in animals corresponds to lying in the sun.
And to imagine the impossible may not be exclusive to us; I’ve seen cats look at the moon, and it may well be that they were longing to have it..
– Fernando Pessoa
Existence
By this empathic crucible of fusion,
schooled in damp and vulnerable calculations,
expert of the partly willed collusion
that retools the spells of animation,
I inveigle eons to attend to
one exclusive bird whose perfect feathers
accommodate atomic innuendos,
by whose grace are entertained all weathers.
Only by this art as old as going
to extremes that only know creation
or destruction, grave and cradle growing
out of one another, as elation
stands against the ground of disappointment,
do we come by skin and eyes and all
the well-determined alchemical ointments
to such strange renewed mortality.
This old spell, forgotten yet remembered
by every secret spark of living time,
this rhythmic substance, telegraphed and tendered
by every corded clump of limber mind,
is mine to make by my own art and fashion,
and by the symbiotic urge refined,
into some infant synergies of passion.
New flasks for the old temperamental wine.
– George Gorman
Break the vitriol.
Forgodsakes!
There is no need for all the justifications we might find to polarize.
Let the drama fizzle while we build a fire together.
Or, let’s just sing.
– Nora Bateson
Altogether, I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn’t shake us awake like a blow to the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we’d be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like suicide. A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe.
– Franz Kafka
Creativity is one of those intimidating words, like artist, musician, writer, and so on, which has been co-opted to mean something rarefied and unreachable. We think of ourselves as being ‘a creative type’ or not, as if it were a quality bestowed on the chosen few. But if we take the word back to its true origins, we find the root “crescere,” a word which means to come forth, spring up, grow, thrive, swell. Like the crescent moon, creativity is the living impulse in each of us which continually begins again.
– Toko-pa Turner
‘When Marshall McLuhan coined the metaphor of the Global Village to describe the effects massive increases in the volume and speed of information flow were going to have on human individuals and groups, he misread several crucial aspects. Nearly all of his misreadings can be tracked to the same source: McLuhan was a Christian, a Roman Catholic, and he was blinded by the optimism and belief in the essential benevolence of invisible authority inherent in Roman Catholic doctrine and practice — that there is something out there that can forgive mistakes and cruelties. Some of the misreadings, such as thinking that computers would save us from our own stupidity, now seem laughable. But they’re typical of a man who believed that if we ourselves weren’t able to control our fate, then God would help.’
I was right to say… years ago, that McLuhan misread what the Global Village would be like, but I was wrong about how the Global Village would evolve as we entered the 21st century. Since 1989 it has become more a series of fiscal malls than a unified village: London, Tokyo, Milan, Paris, Frankfurt, New York City. The best thing to be said about these malls is that they’re impervious to cultural differences and race, which, if you think the first and final aspiration of human life is ownership of a BMW and a diversified investment portfolio, is an advance. While there is now a global financial apparatus… there is nothing resembling a global polity, and no coherent global culture beyond some insincere corporate glorification of independent business, endless enticement to buy and consume products, and, rarely, the same sort of naive aspiration Woodrow Wilson must have felt in 1918 when… he called for the creation of the League of Nations.
Meanwhile, interpersonal, social, and political polity, outside a few enclaves of extreme privilege and wealth, has degenerated into a partisan and frequently violent competition over race, ethnicity, gender, and, in the West, sexual and lifestyle preferences. Within that competion, everyone loathes anyone who displays difference or indifference. In North America… the majority of us get to interact with our preferred institutions and recreational camps while we drift, collectively, towards self-inflicted segregation. At the flashpoints in the world — Kosovo, Somalia, Rwanda, and Palestine — people carry machetes and automatic rifles and suppress differences with flashing blades and flying bullets, just as they did in 1918, except with improved ordnance.
The joyous retribalization McLuhan imagined hasn’t produced the vast tribe connected by electronic communications, but, rather, virtually its opposite: a clamour of hostile, competitive, entrepreneurial enclaves competing with one another to gain access to commodities and the dignity they believe possession confers. Culturally, the Global Village of the 21st century most resembles the biblical Tower of Babel, with franchise kiosks sprouting from it. This tower is becoming more murderous and fractious as it transforms the constitutional democracies into societies dedicated to the mere accumulation of capital and whatever else the unremitting pursuit of material wealth permits.
– Brian Fawcett, Local Matters: A Defence of Dooney’s Cafe and Other Non-Globalized Places, People, and Ideas
Spring Thunder
by Mark Van Doren
Listen. The wind is still,
And far away in the night—
See! The uplands fill
With a running light.
Open the doors. It is warm;
And where the sky was clear —
Look! The head of a storm
That marches here!
Come under the trembling hedge—
Fast, although you fumble. . . .
There! Did you hear the edge
Of winter crumble?
So I tell them the story of Sisyphus,
how he was doomed to push
a rock up a mountain, knowing nothing
would come of this effort
but that he would repeat it
indefinitely. I tell them
there is joy in this, in the artist’s life,
that one eludes
judgment, and as I speak
I am secretly pushing a rock myself,
slyly pushing it up the steep
face of a mountain.
So I retract
the myth; I tell them it occurs
in hell, and that the artist lies
because he is obsessed with attainment,
that he perceives the summit
as that place where he will live forever,
a place about to be
transformed by his burden: with every breath,
I am standing at the top of the mountain.
Both my hands are free. And the rock has added
height to the mountain.
– Louise Glück
You told me, ‘We get to choose our literary kin.’ I choose you.
– Sejal Shah
Spring in Belfast
by Derek Mahon
Walking among my own this windy morning
In a tide of sunlight between shower and shower,
I resume my old conspiracy with the wet
Stone and the unwieldy images of the squinting heart.
Once more, as before, I remember not to forget.
There is a perverse pride in being on the side
Of the fallen angels and refusing to get up.
We could all be saved by keeping an eye on the hill
At the top of every street, for there it is,
Eternally, if irrelevantly, visible —
But yield instead to the humorous formulae,
The spurious mystery in the knowing nod;
Or we keep sullen silence in light and shade,
Rehearsing our astute salvations under
The cold gaze of a sanctimonious God.
One part of my mind must learn to know its place.
The things that happen in the kitchen houses
And echoing back streets of this desperate city
Should engage more than my casual interest,
Exact more interest than my casual pity
Memoir is like a tree. You can branch, fork, and scaffold in time, place, and topic, so long as the writing still connects to the trunk, still draws nutrients from the roots. If not, it’s time to trim.
– Sarah Fawn Montgomery
Several men live inside of me.
A young college man is in here, more interested in drugs than school and the one who is years older telling him, “That WAS your education.”
There’s a poet and the one who wishes he were a poet. Sometimes they sit around arguing with each other about which one is the real poet. Some good verse arises from those debates.
Then there’s the rooster howling all night long. He doesn’t sleep – never saw the purpose of it when he lives to wake other’s up. What better time to enjoy his purpose than the middle of the night.
The hermit wishes everyone and everything would go away. “No people, no tasks,” is his mantra. He lives on the Oregon coast, talking to rocks named Lion and sea lion’s named Joy. Waves are his eternal friend.
It is impossible to forget the teacher, and the other teacher, and another and another. It looks like a hall of mirrors that goes on to infinity. I hope they have enough students for all of them to fulfill their calling.
The old dying one, face wrinkled like an overripe plum, eyes barely slits to let in the last bits of light, is lying beside me reclining. He’s less afraid of dying than me, knowing without a single doubt that he is about to become a piece of Earth – something he has longed for all his life.
Yes, there are some women in here too, but that telling is for another day.
– David Bedrick
Have you ever moved from love, to hate, and then back to love again?
I have.
Sometimes it has happened over decades, like in the case with some of my biological family members.
Sometimes it happens over swirls of time, like in the case where I mostly felt the sting of inner criticism for years and then slowly came back to love, with occasional repeats of the cycle.
And sometimes it flips in a flash. One moment I’m screaming, “I can’t believe I fucked that up.” And the next moment, “I love how free I am to scream about my fuck ups.”
How about you? Is hate too strong a word for you? If so, you can temper it with words like dislike, upset by, unhappy with… but give “hate” a chance – it has passion and aliveness and can sometimes flip into love easier than a long term dislike.
– David Bedrick
I lied and said I was busy.
I was busy but not in a way
most people understand.
I was busy taking deeper breaths.
I was busy silencing irrational thoughts.
I was busy calming a racing heart.
I was busy telling myself I am okay.
Sometimes this is my busy,
and I will not apologize for it.
– B. Oakman
At least once you should live with someone
more medicated than yourself […]
I had to read Plato for a grade,
each circle’s the bastard child
of a perfect O I remember he said,
and Kierkegaard I thought was writing stand-up
with the self is a relation which relates
itself to its own self but my roommate
nodded as I read this aloud, he’d stood
so long before carnival mirrors
that the idea of a face being a reflection
of a reflection of itself was common sense.
— Bob Hicok
Perhaps the most difficult relational pattern to shift is the tendency to be attracted to unavailable people. Often rooted in the early life unavailability of one or both parents, this stubborn primal pattern can easily obstruct any possibility of partnership. Because if you are only drawn to those who are not drawn to you, you can spend your whole life chasing the impossible. It’s kind of like looking for a dance partner in an empty ballroom. You are trying to get the attention of someone who is not actually there. To heal this pattern, it is imperative that you do deep, somatic work around your early experiences. There is something inside you that longs to be healed, and until it is, it will be difficult to take seriously those who take you seriously. It will be difficult to feel an energetic charge toward those who feel one for you. Because they are reflecting back to you something that you have yet to believe—your inherent worth and beauty. You see, they know something that you don’t—they know that you are worthy of love. Now you have to do the work to see it, too.
– Jeff Brown
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.
– Mary OliverThink in stitches.
Think in willows.
– Gertrude Stein
A haiku is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside, a small world that can contain an unlimited range of human thoughts and emotions.
– Clark Strand
There is an emptiness
so huge we can’t tell if we are in it, or it in us.
– Richard Jackson
Nobody has the time … to be vulnerable to each other.
So … we just go on.
– John Cassavetes
Inspiration is a sort of spontaneous combustion—the oily rags of the head and heart.
– Stanley Elkin
You write to communicate to the hearts and minds of others what’s burning inside you. And we edit to let the fire show through the smoke.
– Arthur Plotnik
Speaking Tree
I had a beautiful dream I was dancing with a tree.
– Sandra Cisneros
Some things on this earth are unspeakable:
Genealogy of the broken—
A shy wind threading leaves after a massacre,
Or the smell of coffee and no one there—
Some humans say trees are not sentient beings,
But they do not understand poetry—
Nor can they hear the singing of trees when they are fed by
Wind, or water music—
Or hear their cries of anguish when they are broken and bereft—
Now I am a woman longing to be a tree, planted in a moist, dark earth
Between sunrise and sunset—
I cannot walk through all realms—
I carry a yearning I cannot bear alone in the dark—
What shall I do with all this heartache?
The deepest-rooted dream of a tree is to walk
Even just a little ways, from the place next to the doorway—
To the edge of the river of life, and drink—
I have heard trees talking, long after the sun has gone down:
Imagine what would it be like to dance close together
In this land of water and knowledge. . .
To drink deep what is undrinkable.
– Joy Harjo
Choose people who choose you.
– Unknown
People often say that ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder,’ and I say that the most liberating thing about beauty is realizing that you are the beholder. This empowers us to find beauty in places where others have not dared to look, including inside ourselves.
– Salma Hayek
The shortest essay I ever wrote, maybe the shortest essay anyone has ever written, was ‘Little Essay on Form.’ It went like this: ‘We build the corral as we reinvent the horse.’
– Stephen Dunn
I guess I don’t worry about my poems so much. I worry about me.
– Eileen Myles
I hate almost all rich people, but I think I’d be darling at it.
– Dorothy Parker
One of the main reasons we have so much conflict these days is that we’ve been taken over by the belief that every thing is absolutely separate from every other thing—particularly we human beings. It’s very common to hear the idea that everybody has their own truth, their own reality. Accordingly, we can’t agree on what anything is or what anything means. Everybody attaches their own meanings to words, which makes it difficult if not impossible to communicate. I have my truth, you have yours. That makes a lot of sense to people. But I don’t believe it. I subscribe to the idea that all reality is one, that beneath our cultural habits and environments, human nature is the same in everybody. Someone here is going to tell me that the idea that everything is one is simply my personal truth. I’m waiting.
– Mark Bittner
Letters of the alphabet go to war
clinging to one another standing up forming words no one wants to shout
sentences that are blown by the mines
– Lesyk Panasiuk, poet from Bucha, Ukraine
Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees.
– Victor Hugo
Wendell Berry once wrote that “there is an enormous number of people, and I am one of them, whose native religion, for better or worse, is Christianity. We were born to it; we began to learn about it before we became conscious; it is, whatever we think of it, an intimate belonging of our being; it informs our consciousness, our language, and our dreams. We can turn away from it or against it, but that will only bind us tightly to a reduced version of it. A better possibility is that this, our native religion, should survive and renew itself, so that it may become as largely and truly instructive as we need it to be.”
The vehicle of nirvana
Must be divided into two parts:
The vehicle of defined causes,
And the vehicle of the vajra, the result.
That of defined causes is of three categories:
The Auditors who renounce sorrow,
The Private Buddhas who block up their consciousness,
And the Sutra Group, who study ideas.
The Auditors who renounce sorrow
Use austere practices to get rid of it.
The Private Buddhas who block up their consciousness
Block the twelve dependent connections of non-awareness.
The group that studies ideas
Establishes that the sky is an empty reality,
Just as we imagine it to be,
And believes in things like the eight analogies for illusion.
The vehicle of the result also has three:
The Kriya group,
The Both group,
And the Yoga Tantra.
These are the three.
The Kriya is the work of rites.
It uses rituals in twelve branches
For what it believes to be the Victorious One’s
Body, speech, and wisdom.
The practice of Both is Upaya.
They practice the yogas that the Kriya practices,
But believe that they succeed by being disconnected.
Yogins are of two sorts:
Outsiders and Insiders.
The Outsiders have the yoga of the Sages,
And believe that they may use
The five enlightenments and four magical powers
To achieve the status of being like a water-moon.
The yogas of the Insiders are of three sorts:
The Mahāyoga is generation.
It uses generation, perfection, and the Great Perfection,
Generating these three aspects in stages.
If their supplies do not run out,
And if they persevere in their applications,
They believe they will achieve
A Victorious One’s body, speech, and mind.
The Anuyoga is perfection.
We depend on our hearts,
And speak about the pure nature of causes and conditions
And to perfect the mandala of our wisdom.
The Great Perfection is the Atiyoga.
We do not depend on pure causes or conditions.
We do not work on a quest.
This Great Perfection does not depend on anything.
It blesses all the Dharmas,
The aspects of which may be counted.
Even though everyone is rejecting happiness,
It blesses us all.
The Bodhicitta Sutra: Ten Scriptures of the Great Perfection
Translated by Christopher Wilkinson
Chögyam Trungpa ~ Hope is a Hindrance
We can quite safely say that hope, or a sense of promise, is a hindrance on the spiritual path. Creating this kind of hope is one of the most prominent features of spiritual materialism. There are all kinds of promises, all kinds of proofs. We find the same approach as that of a car salesman. Or it’s like someone demonstrating a vacuum cleaner and telling you how well you could clean your house if you would just buy it. If you would just buy that vacuum cleaner, how beautiful your room would be, completely free of dirt and dust, down to the last speck! Whether it is a vacuum cleaner salesman or a guru, we find the same level of salesmanship. That is why both are included in the same bag of materialists. There are so many promises involved. So much hope is planted in your heart. This is playing on your weakness.
I think you know my blue ranch
on the down side of the up
that looked out
from scattered reaching oak trees
in the early of the evening
when the deer came over the yellow hills
out over the Valley
at night turned upwards
to an infinite bowl of stars
from the long porch awash with rockers
that looked up the tilting road
It left the main road years ago
But the view
is the view hammered together
from old wood and is
a house of blue dream
And the rains come in on swallow’s wings
from the ancient Sea
With salt perfume that remains
coming over the warm sage
of an evening of you of me
and the owls wander through the lamplight
and the moon crosses through the starlight
There are so many roads
to my blue ranch
with its Valley far below
The door swinging welcome
The dances and cotillions of the ghostly
Just the seasons
And the quail
And the sails
you barely see
on the far off sea
If you shade your eyes with your hand
you can just see them leaving grieving
the land
Soft flannel in the soft night
and the green eyes
and the lamp light
of your soft sight
say you say you turned to hold me
The soft flutter the moth’s route
soft wings of dark
enclosed to fold me
to hold me
through your unseeing clamor
of wild geese in flight
and hear them honking wandering
against the night
through the stars that kept you ever
in their sight
– Nicholas Pierotti
To write is to sell a ticket to escape, not from the truth but into it. My job is to make something happen in a space barely larger than the span of your hand, behind your eyes, distilled out of all that I have carried, from friends, teachers, people met on planes, people I have seen only in my mind.
– Alexander Chee
Lament
Everything is far
and long gone by.
I think that the star
glittering above me
has been dead for a million years.
I think there were tears
in the car I heard pass
and something terrible was said.
A clock has stopped striking in the house
across the road…
When did it start?…
I would like to step out of my heart
an go walking beneath the enormous sky.
I would like to pray.
And surely of all the stars that perished
long ago,
one still exists.
I think that I know
which one it is—
which one, at the end of its beam in the sky,
stands like a white city…
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Looking out the window at the trees
and counting the leaves,
listening to a voice within
that tells me nothing is perfect
so why bother to try, I am thief
of my own time. When I die
I want it to be said that I wasted
hours in feeling absolutely useless
and enjoyed it, sensing my life
more strongly than when I worked at it.
Now I know myself from a stone
or a sledgehammer.
– David Ignatow
the mothers of the revolution of compassion that this century so desperately needs. You have a special role to play in creating a better world. Women are more empathic and sensitive, more receptive to the feelings of others. These qualities make women models of humanity. Study history and you’ll see that it’s men who have been responsible for carnage and destruction
– His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama
Buddhist texts do not exaggerate
when they say that our greatest enemy
is clinging to a self. Why?
We are caught in a situation
where mind is incapable
of directly experiencing
its own essential emptiness,
and instead posits a self
that must be sustained.
We thus develop all the needs and wants
that must be gratified
in order to maintain such a self.
Suffering comes from the endless search
to satisfy what cannot be satisfied.
“I” leads to “I am” which leads to “I want”
and so on.”
– Kalu Rinpoche
For we do not know their eyes
or what their purpose at night
where the Rio San Antonio flowed
in a Minoan silence under the great iron bridge
or what we did as raw teenagers
in the dark of night
in the bull corrals
where it may have been the firelight
that made their eyes glow red like coals
their great black horned heads snorting steam
were we crazy or was this
bronze age foolishness that was sacred
but afterwards we would drink red Zinfandel
out of Paso Robles grapes
from wineskins
and drive down to San Simeon
and swim in the dark blue sea
like dolphin people
and lie in the sand on the beach
with the moon leaving a yellow trail
on the nightdark Sea
To the north the Big and the Little Sur
in the sky above us Orion the Hunter
the Sea that was empty and endless
and then the long drive home
through oak tree country
I am of the West.
I am the West.
– Nicholas Pierotti
Why shouldn’t we, so generally addicted to the gigantic, at last have some small works of art, some short poems, short pieces of music […], some intimate, low-voiced, and delicate things in our mostly huge and roaring, glaring world?
– Elizabeth Bishop
Tender words we spoke
to one another
are sealed in the secret
vaults of heaven.
One day like rain,
they will fall to earth
and grow green
all over the world.
– Rumi
Getting a shot of Jesus and the Holy Ghost may save you but not transform you.
Until our ego is dealt a fatal blow, nothing changes.
– Bob Holmes
The Inheritance
I open the door to the world every morning,
anticipating, wondering
who will be the first to greet me
as I step onto the earth with eyes still soft
from dreaming.
Will it be pine, or pine warbler?
Who will be beside me
when I kneel at the pond,
walk through the wood,
cross the meadow?
Will I notice them?
Will they notice me?
Never are my days lived alone.
Never are my breaths less than
an exchange of breaths with some
other soul.
Everything wants to be known.
So, for awhile each day, I tend to this
mutual desire for belonging,
Saying, “Hello pretty girl,” to the doe.
stroking the pussy willows.
meditating beside a frog.
This is how I apprentice to love,
and learn to speak those forgotten words
that acknowledge every living thing
as a simple miracle.
When the day comes that my body
no longer needs to walk out the door
in order to know this fine world,
I pray that some young person is
stepping across their threshold,
taking a deep breath in the morning air,
and realizing,
this is my inheritance.
– Jamie K. Reaser
Love is a canvas furnished by nature and embroidered by imagination.
– Voltaire
When things fall apart, they make a lot of noise.
When things come together, they do so quietly and slowly.
And so, we often miss them.
Yet things are constantly coming together, though we have forgotten how to hear them.
– Mark Nepo
Rising in Perilous Hope
What can I hold in my hands this morning
that will not flow through my fingers?
What words can I say that will catch
in your mind like burrs, chiggers that burrow?
If my touch could heal, I would lay my hands
on your bent head and bellow prayers.
If my words could change the weather
or the government or the way the world
twists and guts us, fast or slow,
what could I do but what I do now?
I fit words together and say them;
it is a given like the color of my eyes.
I hope it makes a small difference, as
I hope the drought will break and the morning
come rising out of the ocean wearing
a cloak of clean sweet mist and swirling terns.
– Marge Piercy, Colors Passing Through Us
When someone leaves, it’s because someone else is about to arrive.
– Paulo Coelho
The best revenge is not to be like your enemy.
– Marcus Aurelius
A cloud—huge, calm,
and dignified—covered the sun
but did not, could not, put it out.
The light surged back again.
Nothing could rouse her then
from that joy so violent
it was hard to distinguish from pain.
– Jane Kenyon
Shantideva wrote in that if someone is suffering and we refuse to help, it would be like our hand refusing to remove a thorn from our foot. If the foot is pierced by a thorn, our hand naturally pulls the thorn out of the foot. The hand doesn’t ask the foot if it needs help. The hand doesn’t say to the foot, ‘This is not my pain.’ Nor does the hand need to be thanked by the foot. They are part of one body, one heart.
– Roshi Joan Halifax
THE POET VISITS ME IN SPRING
by Julia B. Levine
After the birds bed down
and the carpenter bees
come out to work, we drink red wine
on my porch. She says the moon
is moving fast as a racecar
though of course from here
we can’t see it any better
than we can see the faraway
villagers drink from puddles,
step over the dead
fallen in their streets. The poet
tells me a story
about her terrible past,
but my mind circles around
that newborn lamb I saw
on a ranch last week. I can’t stop it.
I keep seeing that little runt
wobbling up, bleating, tail wagging
as she scents the ewe,
only to be butted away again.
And again. The heftier twin
allowed the teat. And I’m thinking
it was the lamb’s hope
that was hardest to see,
how each time she rose up,
she rose into the certainty
that milk would fall
like manna from the sheep’s
undercarriage, its dark
and wooly sky.
Now, at dusk, the poet
compliments my garden
with its wild weeds
and bolting kale, and of course
she’s right, it matters,
these brief explosions of seed
and the ripening of the petals
into perfume, even that runt
cast away to die,
while the living lamb walks
with the ewe through fields
of meadow barley and bleached
sheep bones shaken out like salt.
And of course the poet’s baby
that died in an accident
too horrible to repeat—
that matters too,
the way the world can break
the twinned lives of a soul
too early, so that only half
stays here on earth,
while the other is set free,
though strung between them,
there will always be a line
troubled by their vacancy.
Perhaps that is how a door
like the moon opens
in the poet, where the dead
walk in, ask her
to pick up her pen.
I love how we both
believe it matters what we think
in a poem. Because
outside the kingdom of the page,
what can we do? How else
might her little boy and that lamb
find each other, while the moon
goes on speeding
to that faraway country?
How else pause the war
for one night, so the villagers
might slip from their cellars
into the glittered shatter
of stars? Just one night.
They’ve forgotten
how it feels to stand
under all this luminous
silence. To look
at the fine wool
that, for weeks now,
has fallen like snow
over their dead
to keep them warm.
The healing of our wounds is no lovely Fall-leaved walk or sweet swim in a Summer lake.
The terrain may be unsettling, unrelenting, untravelled, resisting advance. Unbearable.
Our feet calloused in order to bear the broken glass we once walked upon; our baby-body longing for a touch that didn’t come, recoiling from the one that did.
And the starts and stops, the findings and losings – so many moments we thought we had arrived, only to look out and see a storm of relationship, or illness, or wild emotion in the distance. We close our eyes begging denial to have it move further out to sea, but we can’t fool ourselves for long. The dream of safety will have to wait for another day.
Yes there are allies along the way, not only the ones that try to kill you, but the ones of fellow travelers who bear a true ear or carry an ancient map that they have learned to read.
And hopefully there are rest stops where we step away from the diet of our heroic efforts and share a crust of bread or a tender embrace.
But this I know for sure: Before and regardless of any pilgrim’s progress on this most serious of tasks, the moment you reveal the wound to another, the dove inside your chest flies from its cage. And perhaps at this first gesture, the beginners mind of the healers journey, the lover in you is born.
– David Bedrick
Praying
It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch
a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorway
into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.
– Mary Oliver, Thirst
Psychology says, removing yourself from an environment where it constantly triggers your anxiety is a form of self-care.
– @Positive_Call
I tried to give to my words just the weight that a stroke of Cezanne’s gave to an apple.
– Georges Simenon
Ain’t it just like the night to play
Tricks when you’re trying to be so quiet?
We sit here stranded
Though we’re all doing our best to deny it
And Louise holds a handful of rain, tempting you to defy it
Lights flicker from the opposite loft
In this room the heat pipes just cough
The country music station plays soft
But there’s nothing, really nothing to turn off
Just Louise and her lover so entwined
And these visions of Johanna
That conquer my mind.
– Bob Dylan
Kyiv circa 2019
Once there was a country
Caught in its ordinary dreams
Of ennui and desire
A chaotic place, an unformed idea
Electric with potential
Volatile and beautiful
Ripe with macho tenderness
And women with wet eyes and dreamy sex
The Moustachioed cossack and his leopard-skin wife
In the tourist restaurant of Erotic longing
And I was drinking fancy expresso
With a couple of friends
In a hipster cafe in downtown kyiv
The future war zone
With one who is already dead
And a megaphone revolutionary
Rocks stars every one of us
And I remember watching the couple who ran the cafe
And were undoubtedly dreaming of bitcoin apartments
And making few babies to populate the wild east
War being last thing on their erotically charged minds
And I remember flags underwear hanging
For the forgotten soldiers
On relics of Soviet architecture
And shiny new towers
I remember capitalist emptiness
Communist frustration
And a Eurovision love parade
The muscle men who play music
And all the women are beautiful
And I just invented a person person
Who thought about the future
Who got drunk on vodka,
Who counted his rosary beads
Who had a dark sense of humour
Who made women smile
What is he now
A smashed head on a pavement
A dark pixel on social media
A bit of war porn
Outrage from my blue sofa
As the dark machines rain down their forgetfulness
As the wine vessel breaks
And the world gets dark
Let me dream that Ukraine
The violated country
Will be the new Jerusalem
And David will smash Goliath
With some tender bullets
Will bring down the wounded rabid bear
That has been set loose on the world
– Andrew Sweeny
See the tail that wags the dog.
Language is speaking the man.
Look, the shovel is making a hole in the grave digger!{…]
That oar is rowing every person in the boat.
Don’t you see it? Here is a head that thinks a man into a man.
– Lyudmyla Khersonsky, poet from Odesa
o sweet spontaneous
earth how often have
the
doting
fingers of
prurient philosophers pinched
and
poked
thee
, has the naughty thumb
of science prodded
thy
beauty, how
often have religions taken
thee upon their scraggy knees
squeezing and
buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive
gods
(but
true
to the incomparable
couch of death thy
rhythmic
lover
thou answerest
them only with
spring)
.
.
– e.e. cummings (1894-1962)
Comment to a friendly being:
It’s dull and fruitless to have metaphysical conversation with those who bring everything back to their prospective political agendas. You are wonderful precisely because you offer a deeper nourishment. Don’t get stuck in the shallow waters.
– Andrew Sweeny
Quarantine
by Eavan Boland
In the worst hour of the worst season
of the worst year of a whole people
a man set out from the workhouse with his wife.
He was walking—they were both walking—north.
She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up.
He lifted her and put her on his back.
He walked like that west and west and north.
Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived.
In the morning they were both found dead.
Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.
But her feet were held against his breastbone.
The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.
Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.
There is no place here for the inexact
praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body.
There is only time for this merciless inventory:
Their death together in the winter of 1847.
Also what they suffered. How they lived.
And what there is between a man and woman.
And in which darkness it can best be proved
Take a little time to be amazed by something you won’t enjoy unless you consciously choose to focus on it. See the things you can’t see when you’re rushing. Hear the things you can’t hear when you’re stressing. Get so caught up in your senses that everything else seems to stop for a moment—because things don’t actually stop. So we have to be the ones who do it.
– Simdha Gitul Rinpoche
Forget injuries, never forget kindnesses.
– Confucius
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
Everything you add to the truth subtracts from the truth.
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
If we merge mercy with might, and might with right, then love becomes our legacy.
– Amanda Gorman
He was like the mother ship, right? He had this real magic about him that would lock us all in, and we’d all take off.
– Gregg Allman talking about his brother Duane from a 1981 interview published in Guitar Player magazine.
O Superman.
O judge.
O Mom and Dad.
Mom and Dad.
O Superman.
O judge.
O Mom and Dad.
Mom and Dad.
Hi.
I’m not home right now.
But if you want to leave a message, just start talking at the sound of the tone.
Hello?
This is your Mother.
Are you there?
Are you coming home?
Hello?
Is anybody home?
Well, you don’t know me, but I know you.
And I’ve got a message to give to you.
Here come the planes.
So you better get ready.
Ready to go.
You can come as you are, but pay as you go.
Pay as you go.
And I said: OK.
Who is this really?
And the voice said: This is the hand, the hand that takes.
This is the hand, the hand that takes.
This is the hand, the hand that takes.
Here come the planes.
They’re American planes.
Made in America.
Smoking or non-smoking?
And the voice said: Neither snow nor rain nor gloom of night shall stay these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.
‘Cause when love is gone, there’s always justice. And when justive is gone, there’s always force. And when force is gone, there’s always Mom.
Hi Mom!
So hold me, Mom, in your long arms.
So hold me, Mom, in your long arms.
In your automatic arms.
Your electronic arms.
In your arms.
So hold me, Mom, in your long arms.
Your petrochemical arms.
Your military arms.
In your electronic arms.
– Laurie Anderson
The Two Sides of the River
by Chris Green
The Two Sides of the River
The time I said to my mother, “There’s no God.
There’s not.” She was hoping there was, wished
to see her dead parents again in heaven, her two dead
brothers and sister. She asked if I was sure.
I held to it, a small man miniscule in my innocence.
Mother of love and loneliness, I am falling eyes shut.
Today, I pray to you for all the oblivion to come in.
Disappear for a bit. Work on yourself.
– @Positive_Call
Many of the people I love have chronic illnesses and/or limited social abilities. Dad, in translation, says, “Some people have ten orange and give you half of one. Others have only half and hand you slices. Be perceptive. Who is loving you with what they have to survive?”
– Jai Hamid Bashir
You are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.
– Jean-Jacques Rousseau
albertine, deep secret, sweet magic, yesterday, keepsake, dance du feu, canary bird, complicata, amber queen, freedom, fortune’s double, threepenny bit, boule de neige, the prince, little white pet, scarlet fire, piccadilly, polar star, loving memory, ophelia
[names of roses]
– Mary Frances
there should be no writing advice. except reading everything. i will die on this hill.
– Aria Aber
Sometimes letting things go is an act of far greater power than defending or hanging on.
– Eckhart Tolle
Nothing needs to be eliminated from or added to the tathagatagarbha. Nothing can spoil it, just as clouds cannot change the actual light of the sun. Emotional obscurations are just extraneous veils that never penetrate or spoil the primordially perfect and unchanging buddha-nature. It simply rests naturally as it is. When we look without dualistic clinging at the buddha-nature, we will be liberated.
– Shechen Rabjam Rinpoche
You gotta resurrect the deep pain within you and give it a place live that’s not within your body.
Let it live in art. Let it live in writing. Let it live in music. Let it be devoured by building brighter connections. Your body is not a coffin for pain to be buried in. Put it somewhere else.
– @ehimeora
What if we choose not to do the things we are supposed to do? The principal gain is a sense of an authentic act – and an authentic life. It may be a short one, but it is an authentic one, and that’s a lot better than those short lives full of boredom. The principal loss is security. Another is respect from the community. But you gain the respect of another community, the one that is worth having the respect of.
- Joseph Campbell
On Village-Making: The Means and the Ends of Our Personal and Collective Redemption (Part 8)
by Tad Hargrave
How do we do this?
We ask.
It seems to me, that someone has to be willing to ask for the help on the behalf of another. If someone is struggling, someone else has to step in to convene a community response – a response that will bring healing both to the people struggling but also to the community.
It won’t just happen.
Sadly, raised as we are in the barren wasteland of mono-crops grown in orderly rows with plenty of space in between each other, raised as we are in schools that separate us in a strict apartheid by age and ability, working as we often do alone at our jobs, learning as we tend to do, alone, suckled on the tit of privatized everything and nuclear families living in houses surrounded by white picket fences… the chances of a community response being organized are low indeed.
And so someone needs, not knowing how to do it, to try.
And they need to ask more than just the usual, overburdened suspects who are already always there for everyone, sitting on every volunteer board who have no doubt in their mind that they are needed.
What about those people who walk around in our communities doubting that they have anything to give? How else will they find out how much they have to offer unless they are asked to show up for duty?
How will they find their strength unless they are counted on? How else will they know they are needed without being asked to contribute to a cause that needs them? How will they come to know their wealth and unless someone draws the line connecting it and all the good it might do that they had never yet considered?
*
I lived on the shady side of the road
and watched my neighbours’ gardens
across the way
revelling in the sunshine.
I felt I was poor,
and from door
to door
went with my hunger.
The more they gave me
from their careless abundance
the more I became aware
of my beggar’s bowl.
Till one morning
I awoke from my sleep
at the sudden opening of my door,
and you came and asked for alms.
In despair I broke the lid of my chest open
and was startled into finding my own wealth.
– Rabindranath Tagore
*
Someone must be willing, with no permission, authority or qualifications whatsoever, to gather people together who never would have gathered on their own and to coordinate some sort of response that redeems both those hurting and those helping.
Someone has to be willing to take the first step.
Someone has to be willing to fail in the attempts and to pick up the pieces and mend them together with the gold of being a clumsy, plodding, confused, selfish, impoverished and beautiful human living in this modern world.
Someone needs to proceed as if they are needed in the absence of any evidence that might back that up and court others so that they know they are needed.
What if that was you?
What if we looked at all of our troubles – and the troubles of others – as yet one more chance for the village to reconstitute itself again?
I had no idea
how much would change
when all that mattered
became all that mattered.
– Andrea Gibson
We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.
– Bill Anders, Apollo 8
Some things have to end ugly. It’s not the way we want it to be, but sometimes it’s the way it has to be. Sometimes there is no possibility of a kind farewell. There is too much water under the bridge, or one or both parties are incapable of resolution, or its just one of those woundmate connections that is riddled with unfriendly fire. Whatever it is, don’t beat yourself up if an ending gets ugly. Don’t pile more suffering onto the open wound. Difficult endings are part of life. They just are. Instead, focus your energies on learning what you need to learn so you can manifest something healthier the next time. Our lives don’t improve when we expect perfection. They improve when we graduate from the School of Heart Knocks, one lesson at a time…
– Jeff Brown
How strange and wonderful is our home, our earth, with its swirling vaporous atmosphere, its flowing and frozen liquids, its trembling plants, its creeping, crawling, climbing creatures, the croaking things with wings that hang on rocks and soar through fog, the furry grass, the scaly seas – how utterly rich and wild. Yet some among us have the nerve, the insolence, the brass, the gall to whine about the limitations of our earthbound fate and yearn for some more perfect world beyond the sky. We are none of us good enough for the world we have.
– Edward Abbey
The Dream of Now
When you wake to the dream of now
from night and its other dream,
you carry day out of the dark
like a flame.
When spring comes north and flowers
unfold from earth and its even sleep,
you lift summer on with your breath
lest it be lost ever so deep.
Your life you live by the light you find
and follow it on as well as you can,
carrying through darkness wherever you go
your one little fire that will start again.
– William Stafford
The limits of my language
mean the limits of my world.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
Poets don’t have an ‘audience’: They’re talking to a single person all the time.
– Robert Graves
You can never quite access the image in people’s minds that you are being compared with.
– Claudia Rankine
What turns red in spring/ before it greens? The redbud trees along/ the highway, also the human heart. Each/ glows lamp-like on the road to church.
– @hmvanderhart
The simple step of-courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. One word of truth outweighs the world.
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
[…] Unjustified emotion is a sign of mental illness. Or hormonal imbalances. Or some other dis-order. Dis-order.
What if everything we tell ourselves about why we feel a particular emotion at any given moment is nothing more than another story we’ve learned to compose as a way to soothe ourselves? To control one another and keep the world predictable?
Kids wake up happy without questioning their sanity or looking for the reason for it. I know there are some adults who do this, too. I have heard people talk about them and rationalize it by describing these adults as “simple-minded”. Or “special”. Unexplained cheerfulness is definitely anti-social behavior. It makes us giggle nervously. I’m not sure if it is a named archetype, but it should be. (Note to self to look it up when the headache subsides).
What if all art is just an act of unlearning? Resisting. And that our ideas of what poetry is can get in the way of that? What if art should start where we are familiar and then chisel at it until it leaves us speechless. What if instead of giving us more stories related to our own stories, it tears down every story?
What if it is the “made thing” that shows us the artifice in all made things? Even our own stories?
– Ren Powell
You can listen to my story, but you’re no longer allowed to write it.
You can even criticize my story, but it will no longer be the narrative echoing in my head.
For so many years, I was compressed within boxes that constricted my spirit. I was soft, malleable, pathologically agreeable. Leaving one box only led to me finding the next one. It was all I knew; it was the shape of my soul.
I’m leaving behind the boxes that confined me. I’m stretching out my arms to embrace the me beyond the fear; the me that will no longer shrink and contort myself—to please the unpleasable.
You can listen to my story, but you’re no longer allowed to write it.
– The Subversive Lens
We’ve been running away from our collective heartbreak for centuries and centuries. We have to choose to be embodied; we have to choose to touch into and metabolize that broken-heartedness.
– Lama Rod Owens
Ultimately, the entire universe has to be understood as a single undivided whole.
– David Bohm
Whatever you are doing, look constantly
into the mirror of your mind and check
whether your motive is for yourself or for others. Gradually you will develop the ability
to master your mind in all circumstances;
and by following in the footsteps of the accomplished masters of the past, you will gain enlightenment
in a single lifetime. Do all that you can
to bring your own stubborn mind under control
and to develop your faith, diligence and renunciation.
Never think that the dharma you are practising
is for your benefit alone. To recite even a single
mani mantra is of inconceivable benefit,
so dedicate it for the sake of all who live.
– Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche
Because if a sufficient number of people are different, no one has to be normal.
– Frederik Backman, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry
Your life is shaped by the ends you live for. You are made in the image of what you desire.
– Thomas Merton
Sometimes there are no words for your joy and no words
For my sorrow. I am the pillow trapped between
Othello and Desdemona—no wonder I can’t sleep.
– J. K. McDowell
I gazed upon the rainbow.
the leaping fish taught me whitewater streams
the frogs on the walls of the showers at Cedar Grove
and the maidens at the Basque Hotel
spoke to me of freedom
and yet I had much to learn
on the libraries of highways
the soft and sudden dreams
that woke me to a World
that was eternally worlding
but you only catch glimpses
when your quietness exceeds your grasp
and all of being is a light
that has always illuminated what you love
where what you want and dream of
is your heart revealed
when even when it doesn’t happen
is still the story of your truth
it becomes your youth
it never dies
love never lies
sometimes it’s dawn light
where there are sandpipers
sometimes a memory of a mountain pass
where people crossing over were singing
where the linnets and swallows were winging
and yet you waited
alone looking back down the pass
for the one who completed you
never knowing
that seeds were sowing
for that which though unsuspected
still detected the green valleys yet to come
the Summer rainbows
the Autumn leaves
tumbling in the wind.
Become their spin.
what wave is this?
what sudden spray?
that makes this day
I cannot say.
you turn and know that everything in your eyes
could be a hidden truth
unrealized
is there sense to bother
the great World is both father
and mother
there is no other
to reach you
to teach you
to dance
this Summer evening in the Winter by a lake romance.
Leave it to chance.
– Nicholas Pierotti
CLARION
The future is won or lost in the war of ideas
As we gather here today, our words flying into
The ether, they make war with loftier or
Meaner configurations of syntax and vocabulary
Out of this linguistic soup, making its way
Through a billion brains and
Five billion more
Half-starved stomachs
There are those few who take action
Those very few, for good—or for evil
Who dare to take a stand
To do something to
Change the world.
Where do you stand?
While the world passes you by and day becomes night
Twice as dark as before the last
Break of sleeping dawn
Before you’ve had time to
Set the alarm, pull the curtain, and rise up
Out of your much too comfortable
Skin.
– Laurence Overmire, Report from X-Star 10
TURNING
Hep cats turning hip
Was it one chord change at a time?
The flip of a hip on a dance floor?
Was it by someone in a record store
holding an LP?
Body remembering parts of tunes
one bar at a time.?
The slip
of backbones, shoulders
Dancers swinging low
Zuit suits lifted away
by split notes
Flash traded for greater mobility.
Accents changing on
steps, phrases.
Bass or drums
Leading more often?
Instruments a beat behind
a stanza with rhyme?
Intensifying with pauses
between lines
in and out
side the meter?
“Wrong notes”
Carefully placed
Where rhyme was anticipated?
Paint scattered
on the canvass,
Or strategically placed?
for our eyes and ears
to connect the dots, blots
and curved lines?
Inspired by unfamiliar scales?
Mags turning to zines
with the flip of a page
A mix of rage
and coolness from
fingers, breath, voices
Funk edging it’s way in.
Choices
Expanding then narrowing
again.
New and long time fans
sounding off about what’s really
Jazz
Blues
Folk
About
Miles’
back turned
Duke’s move to pack up
“I think that working with you gentlemen
would have been a pleasure” said he
to T.V. execs who said
a mixed band could not all go on together
Sam Cooke’s demand to
“take the rope down”
Undividing a young audience.
About the impurity
of fusion
Rocking some Jazz
Jazzing some rock
Invoking the name
in the next frame
of Charlie Parker.
No idea how much not really
Jazz he played.
Does some sage
say turn the page
the zine now a mag
Is the next step
from hip back to hep?
– Jerry Pendergast
Christianity didn’t save me. Therapy didn’t change me. Buddhism didn’t calm me down. Journaling didn’t go anywhere.
No, the truth, thirty years later, is that all the self-help programs I tried in my twenties, and I tried a lot of them, didn’t really work. What worked was love.
Thirty years ago today, on my father’s birthday which is why I remember the date, and only now feel a deep gratitude to a mysterious spiritual entanglement and sense of him as an unconscious magician, thirty years ago today, a man walked into a coffee shop and asked to sit across from me. We talked for hours and both of us knew almost immediately that we were only picking up a conversation we’d been having for lifetimes, eons, eternities.
Thirty more years together will never be enough, there will never be enough lifetimes, enough epochs for our love. Everything changed when we found each other again. Children were born. Books were written. Joy was renewed.
My prayer today and always is that we always find each other, lifetime after lifetime.
Perhaps it is not fashionable or cool anymore to believe in love. But I believe in love because I know it changes everything. I know that the robins are praying for love and the dandelions and the mountains and the rivers and even the stones. The whole world changes when we pray for love.
Love heals everything, changes everyhing, renews everything, and saves each and every one of us now and always.
– Perdita Finn
The Question
for Jude Jordan Kalush
All day, I replay these words:
Is this the path of love?
I think of them as I rise, as
I wake my children, as I wash dishes,
as I drive too close behind the slow
blue Subaru, Is this the path of love?
Think of these words as I stand in line
at the grocery store,
think of them as I sit on the couch
with my daughter. Amazing how
quickly six words become compass,
the new lens through which to see myself
in the world. I notice what the question is not.
Not, “Is this right?” Not,
“Is this wrong?” It just longs to know
how the action of existence
links us to the path to love.
And is it this? Is it this? All day,
I let myself be led by the question.
All day I let myself not be too certain
of the answer. Is it this?
Is this the path of love? I ask
as I wait for the next word to come.
– Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
I want to love the world but I’m tired of it
walking by me on the street and not
even waving.
– Christine Potter
Supporting indigenousity to flower in diverse forms means that I can’t be too partisan about how that happens. A spiritual “practice,” as it is called, is just that. Michael Meade said it best when he pointed out that a person is supposed to not be that good at their practice . . . otherwise what are they learning if they are simply going through the motions instead of being properly challenged by it! Someone can look skilled to others and still be in a dynamic learning and exploration process. Yet a person can look very diligent and actually be stuck for years. Human beings do practices by nature. Practice can take all sorts of forms and shapes. The practice is what your body is doing already. If you already go to the gym, or already sit and watch television, those are the practice you are doing. There are practices that aren’t worth much, like watching television, and practices that are probably, in general, better, like going to the gym.
People sign up for practices, like yoga, and sometimes blindly follow the practice after it has died because of a misplaced loyalty. If that happens, the practice they are actually doing is the practice of misplaced loyalty, no longer yoga, or you could also say that their new practice is the “yoga of misplaced loyalty.” Misplaced loyalty can be a practice too, but its down near the bottom of the list, like watching television. A little bit of watching television is probably good, if only to develop empathy for those that are trapped in it, or to develop compassion for people who actually make television as part of their job. It’s good to dabble in a lot of practices, but find ones that keep feeding aliveness. It is also possible to take an everyday thing like cooking and make a practice out of that.
What isn’t so much a common thing is to have the skills of evaluating practices, and our blind spots then reduce the impact the practice has on us. A practice is meant to change you, step by next best step, over time. There are plateaus on the learning curve as well, and that is a natural process in engagement with a practice, but a plateau shouldn’t last forever. The practice should be full of joy, even when it isn’t going well. For years I went to the drum circle, even though there was always only two or three times a year when the drumming really clicked for an hour or two and got dancers going into a frenzy. Those were the nights where everyone present was grinning, including all the people around the circle visiting with friends or witnessing. Some people came with dance as their practice, and some came to drum. But some of the people sitting on the side were also there taking it as a practice as well.
– Randy Jones, Medicine Without An Expiration Date
A true healer does not heal you.
She simply reflects back to you
your own capacity to heal.
She is a reflector,
a loving mirror.
– Jeff Foster
Keep reading; keep rereading; keep observing; keep synthesizing… Locate within yourself the primal sympathy and hold tight to it; find soothing thoughts that spring out of human suffering, but stay angry.
– Tony Kushner’s advice for writers
The blue sky slept.
The blue sky slept.
The blue sky slept.
– Javed Akhtar
Reading is the best education.
– Fran Lebowitz
I suppose that my work is always mourning something, the loss of a paradise—not the thing that comes after you die, but the thing that you had before.
– Jamaica Kincaid
Outside the youth center, between the liquor store
and the police station,
a little dogwood tree is losing its mind;
overflowing with blossom foam,
like a sudsy mug of beer;
like a bride ripping off her clothes,
dropping snow white petals to the ground in clouds,
so Nature’s wastefulness seems quietly obscene.
It’s been doing that all week:
making beauty,
and throwing it away,
and making more.
– Tony Hoagland, A Color of the Sky
If we’re not listening, we’ve got no stories to tell the future.
– @DGHaskell
HONESTY…
…doesn’t mean simply vomiting out your “uncensored truth” to anyone who will listen.
“Sharing your feelings” is not actually always the kindest, most attuned or most conscious thing to do.
Yes, let’s be real and honest with each other! Of course. Let’s come out of hiding and reveal our authenticity. Let’s break the spell of shame in relationship and courageously show who we truly are. Of course.
But – and this is also crucial – let’s keep, and develop, our discernment. Attunement. Sensitivity, to what we need, yes – but also deep sensitivity to where the other person is, a profound care about their inner life, too.
Otherwise “I’m only sharing MY raw truth!”…
is simply narcissism, self-absorption, ego, in disguise.
Ego … disguised as “authenticity”!
It’s not always loving, kind, or helpful to share your deepest truth – your anger, your sorrow, your fear, your pain, your opinions, your advice, your profound spiritual realizations – with someone who hasn’t signed up to receive, or isn’t able to receive, or doesn’t want to receive, or doesn’t have the capacity to receive them.
We can be authentic, AND we be very respectful and aware of other people’s boundaries, feelings and needs. We can be sensitive to their willingness to receive our words and feelings. Their ability to listen. How they are managing their energies. What they can handle on any given day. Their own pain and trauma. The demons they are secretly fighting (the ones we may never know about). Who they feel close to, and safe with, and trusting of.
We can learn to ask before we splurge our stories, share our private inner lives, speak our deepest truths and opinions and judgements, express our “raw and uncensored self” to another.
Otherwise we are just dumping our sacred inner world on them, using others as receptacles for our own pain, fear, loneliness and the unmetabolized regions of our psyche. This is not kind to others, and ultimately not kind to ourselves.
Because our holy innards deserve a safe and committed holding environment, too.
Yes, let’s be “honest and real” with each other. Let’s tell our unvarnished truth… to those who are open and willing and ready and able to listen, to those who have signed up for this sacred work and who have the capacity to hold our truth. A therapist. A good friend. A partner. A family member. Someone who has committed to offering their time and heart and to listening to us in this way.
Yes, let’s “speak our truth”, bravely and loudly if we need to. But let’s also learn when to stop talking sometimes. And breathe. And be still. And listen. And open our awareness in a different way. Ask about the other person. Find out what they want, and need, and are able to offer, and hold, and process. Get deliciously curious about their inner world, too.
There is a time for speaking, and a time for silence. A time for sharing our deepest inner life, and a time for listening too. A time for being together, and a time for being alone. A time for coming closer, and a time for giving each other space. A time for “telling our raw truth”, and a time for… well, holding our truth close, and waiting, and cultivating patience, and perhaps finding an alternative outlet. Sometimes that is the kindest thing. To not share. Or to wait. Or to listen instead.
There is no right or wrong way. There is only this mysterious and never-ending dance… and we are all invited.
– Jeff Foster
We will be known as a culture that feared death and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity for the few and cared little for the penury of the many. We will be known as a culture that taught and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke little if at all about the quality of life for people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a commodity. And they will say that this structure was held together politically, which it was, and they will say also that our politics was no more than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of the heart, and that the heart, in those days, was small, and hard, and full of meanness.
– Mary Oliver, Of the Empire
Nobody goes willingly into initiation. By its very nature, initiation is a humbling of the will. It shatters us on all levels. And though every part of us may mount resistance to being changed, we are not meant to emerge intact. We are not meant to re-cover what has been revealed. Rather, we are meant to be dis-illusioned, dis-solved, dis-appointed before any thought of rebuilding and declaring meaning.
– Toko-pa Turner
Wise wretch! with pleasures too refined to please, With too much spirit to be e’er at ease, With too much quickness ever to be taught, With too much thinking to have common thought: You purchase pain with all that joy can give, And die of nothing but a rage to live.
– Alexander Pope
The best students always are flunking. Every good teacher knows that.
– Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
When you’re cold, don’t expect sympathy from someone who’s warm.
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
A teacher I once had told me that the older you get, the lonelier you become and the deeper the love you need.
– Leonard Cohen
Awareness is always surrendering, always grace,
always gratitude and wonder.
– Bob Holmes
Every day, priests minutely examine the Dharma and endlessly chant complicated sutras. Better that they should learn to read the love letters sent by the wind and rain, the snow and moon.
– Ikkyū Sōjun a.k.a. Crazy Cloud (1394-1491)
It’s not that we don’t know ourselves, it’s that we don’t always have opportunities to be ourselves. Strong friendships provide those opportunities.
– Simon Sinek
Awareness is hard because attention is fleeting.
Self awareness is even harder because it is hard to be unbiased about ourselves.
So instead, crowd source self knowledge. Ask a friend, do a 360 review, hire a therapist / coach.
– Siu David
I’m not going anywhere. Should this place become more toxic, I pledge to strive even harder to lift up reason, science, compassion and the rule of law. The struggle against fascism, misinformation, and hate requires tough fighters. I hope you stay in the fight, right beside me.
– George Takei, On Twitter and Elon Musk
Chögyam Trungpa ~ JUST DO IT!!
You may hear what I’m saying and think that it’s true. But you have to practice it; you have to do it, sweethearts. We can’t just issue messages of philosophy all over the world. We are capable of actually sending up a satellite that would beam down Shambhala or Buddhist slogans twenty-four hours a day. What good would that do? We have to get OURSELVES together.
So clearly we need a social media app for writers and artists.
– Cheryl Pappas
We are so small between the stars, so large against the sky.
– Leonard Cohen
Read widely – with one toe in the main stream and nine toes in all the other streams.
– C.M. Rivers
At the Base of the Mountain
by Mark Nepo
The Japanese monk, Ryokan,
returned to his hut in the moon-
light to find a frustrated thief. For
there was nothing to steal. So, Ryokan
offered him his clothes, saying, “You
have come such a long way to visit. Take these.”
The stunned thief scampered away
and Ryokan thought, Poor soul. I wish
I could give him this beautiful moon.
Nothing can be taken if it is given.
Nothing can be missing if left in
the open. Nothing is lacking if
we water what we chase, where
it lives, within us.
The phenomenon of chills or goosebumps that come from a piece of music (or from any other aesthetic experience) is called frisson, and it’s been one of the big mysteries of human nature since it was first described.
– Michael Rothenberg
I’d woken up early,
and I took a long time
getting ready to exist.
– Fernando Pessoa
The Problem with Saints
Beatifying the living, turning them into saints while they are still engaged with the muck and mess of corporeal existence, is always a fraught business. The adorable giggling monk serves an institutional hierarchy rife with sexual and financial abuses. The mother superior tending tirelessly to the poor does nothing concrete to help their circumstances. The inspiring mystic is actually having an affair with a local nurse. The long-suffering ascetic was a bit of a bitch. I promise you, it’s always the same story.
We try to saint the living because we have forgotten what saints actually are.
The living, even the best of us, are mostly a muddle. And those determined to wrack up a good score in heaven are often the most insufferable. “If even the good person attains birth in the Pure Land, how much more so the evil one,” notes the Tannisho of Shin Buddhism. I often think its why the wisest people can often be found in the basements of 12-step meeting rooms trying to let go of their resentments and make small amends each and every day. At least they know they are addicts, at least they acknowledge they’ve made a mess of things and need a little help from their friends.
But on the other side of the veil each and every one of us is nothing more or less than a saint waiting to happen.
Long before the Church got involved in the (big) business of sanctification, a saint was nothing more or less than an ancestor who showed up for you when you called. All the dead were saints…standing ready to help us, collaborate with us, and get the job done. They could find things, heal things, and make miracles and magic happen. Who better to help us get sober than the mother who died of drink? Who better to help us succeed than the uncle who failed at every endeavor? Who better to help us see than the girl who lost her eyes?
We have forgotten that the failures of the living become the wisdom of the dead. “Fail, fail again, fail better,” noted Samuel Beckett dryly. But that failure is the greatest of all resources for the dead, the muck and muddle out of which they bring the whole world into bloom. If we plant ourselves in it, if we call out to them and ask for help.
The dirt beneath our feet is nothing but the bodies of the dead, the soil out of which we can grow if we acknowledge it, activate it, recognize them and call out to them. We have forgotten that it is always the dead who can help us grow a miracle.
Over the next eight weeks I will be teaching a workshop on collaborating with the dead—from traditional saints to personal ancestors to those secular souls on the other side longing to be beatified not by popes and cardinals but by us.
Every time I teach this Way of the Rose workshop I am stunned yet again at what can happen when we remember who the real saints are and how to work with them.
– Perdita Finn
Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language.
– Aldo Leopold
A Happy Birthday
by Ted Kooser
This evening, I sat by an open window
and read till the light was gone and the book
was no more than a part of the darkness.
I could easily have switched on a lamp,
but I wanted to ride this day down into night,
to sit alone and smooth the unreadable page
with the pale gray ghost of my hand.
Give Your Daughters Difficult Names
by Assétou Xango
Give your daughters difficult names.
Names that command the full use of the tongue.
My name makes you want to tell me the truth.
My name does not allow me to trust anyone
who cannot pronounce it right.
– Warsan Shire
Many of my contemporaries,
role models,
But especially,
Ancestors
Have a name that brings the tongue to worship.
Names that feel like ritual in your mouth.
I don’t want a name said without pause,
muttered without intention.
I am through with names that leave me unmoved.
Names that leave the speaker’s mouth unscathed.
I want a name like fire,
like rebellion,
like my hand gripping massa’s whip—
I want a name from before the ships
A name Donald Trump might choke on.
I want a name that catches you in the throat
if you say it wrong
and if you’re afraid to say it wrong,
then I guess you should be.
I want a name only the brave can say
a name that only fits right in the mouth of those who love me right,
because only the brave
can love me right
Assétou Xango is the name you take when you are tired
of burying your jewels under thick layers of
soot
and self-doubt.
Assétou the light
Xango the pickaxe
so that people must mine your soul
just to get your attention.
If you have to ask why I changed my name,
it is already too far beyond your comprehension.
Call me callous,
but with a name like Xango
I cannot afford to tread lightly.
You go hard
or you go home
and I am centuries
and ships away
from any semblance
of a homeland.
I am a thief’s poor bookkeeping skills way from any source of ancestry.
I am blindly collecting the shattered pieces of a continent
much larger than my comprehension.
I hate explaining my name to people:
their eyes peering over my journal
looking for a history they can rewrite
Ask me what my name means…
What the fuck does your name mean Linda?
Not every word needs an English equivalent in order to have significance.
I am done folding myself up to fit your stereotype.
Your black friend.
Your headline.
Your African Queen Meme.
Your hurt feelings.
Your desire to learn the rhetoric of solidarity
without the practice.
I do not have time to carry your allyship.
I am trying to build a continent,
A country,
A home.
My name is the only thing I have that is unassimilated
and I’m not even sure I can call it mine.
The body is a safeless place if you do not know its name.
Assétou is what it sounds like when you are trying to bend a syllable
into a home.
With shaky shudders
And wind whistling through your empty,
I feel empty.
There is no safety in a name.
No home in a body.
A name is honestly just a name
A name is honestly just a ritual
And it still sounds like reverence.
He struggled
valiantly.
He would develop the strength to move
impossibilities.
He would become a warrior
against the internal
darkness.
His demons would be vanquished in the
smoldering fire
of his resolve.
He would be known for his indomitable
will.
Then he discovered that the most powerful
force resided in the open acceptance of
what is.
And in letting
go.
He let go
valiantly.
– The Subversive Lens
Charming by Jonatha Brooke
If it was any other year or any other life
But this one is mine to carry on now
Yes, it’s mine to carry on now
‘Cause I will always disappoint you
Is it vengeance or your pride?
‘Til you lose me like that trinket on your bracelet
Charming, charming
In the dream it’s all a test that I face by myself
Lose the briefcase, lie at the airport
Swallow the inky code
We’ll all answer in the end in our temporary tongue
But for now, don’t say anything
Don’t say anything
Charming, charming
Charming charming
‘Cause there, at the garden verge
I will pull you up in hope again
No more second thought
Will crowd you out of your desire
To be loved, not touched
To be blameless and ecstatic again
This is all there is
No knowledge is too much to bear in the end
And I want this more than anything
And I want the damned red shoes
And I want to lead Dorothy back home
Here today, here tomorrow
Here’s the lay of the land
Here’s my heart, here’s my sorrow
I surrender
Charming, charming
Charming, charming
‘Cause there, at the garden verge
I will pull you up in hope again
No more second thought
Will crowd you out of your desire
To be loved, not touched
To be blameless and ecstatic again
This is all there is
No knowledge is too much to bear in the end
At the garden verge
I will pull you up in hope again
No more second thought
Will crowd you out of your desire
To be loved, not touched
To be blameless and ecstatic again
This is all there is
No knowledge is too much to bear in the end
At the garden verge
I will pull you up in hope again
No more second thought
Will crowd you out of your desire
To be loved, not touched
To be blameless and ecstatic again
This is all there is
No knowledge is too much to bear in the end
The inmost spirit of poetry, in other words, is at bottom, in every recorded case, the voice of pain – and the physical body, so to speak, of poetry, is the treatment by which the poet tries to reconcile that pain with the world.
– Ted Hughes
Spring in New Hampshire
Too green the springing April grass,
Too blue the silver-speckled sky,
For me to linger here, alas,
While happy winds go laughing by,
Wasting the golden hours indoors,
Washing windows and scrubbing floors.
Too wonderful the April night,
Too faintly sweet the first May flowers,
The stars too gloriously bright,
For me to spend the evening hours,
When fields are fresh and streams are leaping,
Wearied, exhausted, dully sleeping.
– Claude McKay
Father forgive me for all the times I desired a seat at a table you would have flipped.
– Steven Price
Without the way, there is no going; without the truth, there is no knowing; without the life, there is no living.
– Thomas-Kempis
Each person enters the world “called,” like an oak tree, to fulfill their soul’s agenda.
– James Hillman, The Soul’s Code
Projections carry very real energy; they either sustain or undermine. If someone hits us with a poisoned projection, we feel it whether we recognize it or not; if we are struck with a loving projection, energy is released. As we become more conscious we become increasingly aware of what we have projected onto others, both the good and the bad in ourselves. Unconsciously we have asked them to take responsibility for what we have failed to recognize in ourselves or what of ourselves we have failed to realize. Projections are charged with archetypal energy until they have been assimilated by the conscious ego.
– Marion Woodman
But I wonder… why complete a work when it’s so beautiful just to dream it.
– Pier Paolo Pasolini
Dear spiritual bypassers: We don’t need your faux forgiveness. We don’t need your perfected asanas. We don’t need your head-tripping meditations. We don’t need your detachment practices. We don’t need your fake names. We don’t need your victim bashing. We don’t need your love and light. We don’t need your (alleged) law of attraction. We don’t need your wishful thinking. We don’t need your superficial affirmations. We don’t need your perpetual positivity. We don’t need your pseudo-transcendence. We don’t need your flight from feeling. We don’t need your obsession with illusion. We don’t need your stillness and silence. We don’t need your patriarchal rituals and lineage. We don’t need your enbullshitment enlightenment.
What we need is for you to come down from your world-avoidant perch and take all that energy you have been selfishly hoarding and give it back to humanity. What we need is for you to exit your cave of cowardice, put your tender tootsies on the ground, and actually do something to heal our species. What we need is for you to help us shape a new lineage- one that is rooted in a truly inclusive and embodied consciousness. Not a non-duality that omits everything human from the field, but one that includes all that we are, and all of your fellow humans, in its unified fold. What we need is for you to understand that ALL OF THIS is real. And that any spirituality that is bereft of humanness, is a collective death knell. You want to wake up for real? Stop hiding behind your egoic badge of egolessness, come back into your body, and help us to heal this bloodied species.
– JEFF BROWN
There are two ways of rejecting the revolution. The first is to refuse to see it where it exists; the second is to see it where it manifestly will not occur.
– Félix Guattari
To a humiliating (but helpful) extent, some of the gravest problems we face during a day can be traced back to a brutally simple fact: that we have not had enough sleep.
– The School of Life
Fulfillment comes from usefulness and contribution, not acquisition and achievement.
– Zach Mercurio
Go home and write it all down, every single detail. But don’t forget that what you have to capture is the unseen, the imponderable.
– Eula Biss
Anyone can train a mind to be happier. It’s a ritual, like the dance class, the notes, the cleaning of the leotard. It’s like prayer or a diet or the meditation and yoga that so many do. I think all of us have around and within us things for which she should be grateful. The present is full of riches and hope. I tried to impart to my students that there would be work, but there would also be love and friendship, and so much beauty in the world to study that you can be frustrated that there isn’t time to experience it all. Julie Harris and I were talking once, and we were catching each other up on things we had seen and loved, and she said that it frustrated her that even if she lived to be one hundred years old, healthy and clear of mind, she could never read all the books that needed to be read; see all the art that is out there waiting to inspire us; could never hear the new music that could elate her, much less listen again to music she already loved. There is just not enough time for all the friendships, so I don’t understand the time wasted on grudges or rivalries or negativity. I give to charities and I try to help every friend that I can, but the weight of the world for me is not the tragedies, but the huge weight of beautiful things that are waiting for our witness.
Try to be happy. Allow into each day those things that remind you how grateful you can be for all that is in the world.
– Marian Seldes
The people who know God well—mystics, hermits and prayerful people, those who risk everything to find God—always meet a lover, not a dictator.
– Father Richard Rohr
Decency is the absence of strategy. It is of utmost importance to realize that the warrior’s approach should be simple-minded sometimes, very simple and straightforward. That makes it very beautiful: you having nothing up your sleeve; therefore a sense of genuineness comes through. That is decency.
– Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche
If we can’t stay connected to the stream of life in the midst of the thousand tasks, our frustration and disconnection will begin to hurt others.
– Mark Nepo
To be alive at this time means to be caught in the great unraveling that strands us near all the loose threads of creation; but it also means to be close to the revelation of the new design and the next paradigm. The old knowers say that the cave of knowledge can be found in the depths of the human soul, that each soul is threaded with inner qualities intended to be woven into the world and added to the garment of creation. They say that the creative energies of each soul become more important when the dark times come round again. In facing up to the enormous problems of the world and accepting the troubles that knock on our doors, we can better learn what hidden resources, deep resolves, and surprising designs we have hidden within us.
– Michael Meade
The Hummingbird Feeder
If what we wait to see partly defines us,
then this red bulb hanging in the blue
is a simple model for the heart,
swaying slightly at the end of its string
as I rock slightly, standing next to it,
eyes fixed, waiting for the buzz, the blur
of wings, the body like a tiny seal’s
balancing the feeder on its nose.
Surely these moments we stand on tiptoe for
make us what we are as much as pain
and sorrow: the moment the hummingbird
flashes his read throat, the moment he spreads
his tail and swerves off like a fish, a green
streak, then sticks like a leaf to a branch –
the moment he stops in midair and sticks
his beak into that severed artery.
As he drinks, an embolism forms,
like the bubble in a spirit level,
and rises slowly up the tube, a bit
of the outside world going in, a moment
trapped: like one of those clear marbles
in which everything is upside-down, and small.
As the last drop quivers and disappears
with the bird, the heart becomes a mind.
– Jeffrey Harrison
BOOGIE-WOOGIE
You shout from the other room
You ask me how to spell boogie-woogie
And instantly I think what luck
no war has been declared
no fire has consumed
our city’s monuments
our bodies our dwellings
The river didn’t flood
no friends
have been arrested
It’s only boogie-woogie
I sigh relieved
and say it’s spelled just like it sounds
boogie-woogie
– Adam Zagajewski
LISTEN TO YOURSELF
by Zoë Ryder White
Listen to yourself, the therapist said;
do you hear how you sound, she said,
and I heard the sound of a mare
trying to turn around
in a stall too small for turning.
Trying to know the other view.
This is not a metaphor
for an unhappy life.
This is how my body felt.
This is how my neurology followed its groove,
showed me a picture of a mare
in a stall too small for turning.
Mare shoulder pressed in one direction,
mare’s flank pressed in the other.
The torque involved.
The stillness at the center.
And field in every direction:
visible field.
“I would die for my child.”
I believe you. But, would you live for them?
Would you get yourself healthy?
Would you eliminate distractions?
Would you lead them more intentionally?
You’d only have to die once. You have to live every day.
Do that.
– @MattBeaudreau
Enough Music
by Dorianne Laux
Sometimes, when we’re on a long drive,
and we’ve talked enough and listened
to enough music and stopped twice,
once to eat, once to see the view,
we fall into this rhythm of silence.
It swings back and forth between us
like a rope over a lake.
Maybe it’s what we don’t say
that saves us.
It’s inevitable that your work will express your view of life—and that’s desirable.
– Deborah Eisenberg
Prayer To Be Changed
I ask for just the slightest shift
in my thinking, the kindest sifting
of my busy mind, so only wonder
and peace are left behind. So that
as I walk out in sleet this morning,
I can see even the muddy ruts
made by trucks on the forest trail
as harbors of miracle that will fill
with snowmelt and rain for tadpoles
to swim in, until that sunlit instant
come summer, when they feel the flexing
of legs working in the water beneath them,
and leap out onto the ground, their bodies
having decided, by pure instinct alone,
to be soft and fully alive in this world.
– James Crews
Now is the time to stop drifting and wake up—to assess yourself, the people around you, and the direction in which you are headed in as cold and brutal a light as possible. Without fear
– Robert Greene
When I think about the kind of person I’d like to be, when it comes to engaging with people and with art, I think of Pádraig Ó Tuama in interviews / on Poetry Unbound—the wisdom & care, the warmth, intelligence in service of connection… A north star kind of presence.
– Gabrielle Bates
work: an ode for the human micropoem*
Jennifer Karmin
one has to have
a reason for living
a guiding philosophy
a purpose
a goal
the best way
to communicate
an idea
is to act it out
no work
no eat
i want to have something to say
about my own destiny
something i care about
something of value
something important
DIABLERIE
Inside walls, mirrors and
Sloping windows, sorcerers in suits
Midnight shades of black and gray
Ties twisted, stretching necks
Pretty assistants chained to clocks
Trap doors closed, ghouls in glasses
Pouring numbers in burning
Cauldrons, mixed and stirred
Siphoned into tiny vials for
Mass consumption
Boxed and labeled on
Conveyor belts to no-man’s land
A poof of smoke in flash of
Pan
Abracadabra!
The meaning disappears.
– Laurence Overmire
Chögyam Trungpa ~ BEYOND THE MISHAP
When you begin to relax in the teachings, but you are not quite adult enough, you’re not grown up enough, at that point you’re still thinking that everything is going to be OK. At that level, when the relaxation and the tension both begin to take place together, you get a mishap. Otherwise, how can you have the accident? An accident happens when tension and relaxation are put together . . . . So first there has to be a mishap. Then that is the situation. On top of the mishap, there is clear vision. You begin to evolve and involve yourself beyond the mishap, and you begin to expand beyond that particular situation.
We aren’t experiencing a Great Resignation. We’re experiencing a demand for dignity.
– Omar Brownson
Early morning practice,
wandering thoughts come easy.
In awe of how poetry, art, is never done. It is the eternal
expressed through the transient. For those who write, compose,
paint, draw, sing, or dance, we understand.
Rarely at rest, though oftentimes we look still and quiet,
there is no hurry,
for there is nothing really to get done.
Eternity is forever
…and we are it.
– Shinzen
The more you read and reread a text, the more it becomes yours, in a sense, part of your unconscious mind.
– Margaret Jull Costa
Sometimes I feel like I’m actually on the wrong planet. It’s great when I’m in my garden, but the minute I go out the gate I think, ‘What the hell am I doing here?’
– George Harrison
Forget the years, forget distinctions, leap into the boundless, and make it your home.
– Chuang T’zu
1. Is it true?
2. Is it kind?
3. Is it beneficial?
4. Is it necessary?
5. Is it the right time?
You live long enough as a poet, you lose entire support networks, those 90s journals, those first 2000s online journals, editors and mentors die, scenes burn themselves out, and you just have to go on writing, with faith and kindness, still dedicated to this difficult art.
– Sean Thomas Dougherty
Inventing Father In Las Vegas
by Lynn Emanuel
If I could see nothing but the smoke
From the tip of his cigar, I would know everything
About the years before the war.
If his face were halved by shadow I would know
This was a street where an EATS sign trembled
And a Greek served coffee black as a dog’s eye.
If I could see nothing but his wrist I would know
About the slot machine and I could reconstruct
The weak chin and ruin of his youth, the summer
My father was a gypsy with oiled hair sleeping
In a Murphy bed and practicing clairvoyance.
I could fill his vast Packard with showgirls
And keep him forever among the difficult buttons
Of the bodice, among the rustling of their names,
Miss Christina, Miss Lorraine.
I could put his money in my pocket
and wearing memory’s black fedora
With the condoms hidden in the hatband
The damp cigar between my teeth,
I could become the young man who always got sentimental
About London especially in Las Vegas with its single bridge-
So ridiculously tender–leaning across the river
To watch the starlight’s soft explosions.
If I could trace the two veins that crossed
His temple, I would know what drove him
To this godforsaken place, I would keep him forever
Remote from war–like the come-hither tip of his lit cigar
Or the harvest moon, that gold planet, remote and pure
American.
There is an underbelly of terror to all life. It is suffering, it is hurt. Deep within all of us are intense fears that have left few of us whole. Life’s terrors haunt us, attack us, leave ugly cuts. To buffer ourselves, we dwell on beauty, we collect things, we fall in love, we desperately try to make something lasting in our lives. We take beauty as the only worthwhile thing in this existence, but it cannot veil cursing, violence, randomness, and injustice.
– Deng Ming-Dao
Chögyam Trungpa ~ VIVIDLY ALIVE
The basic point of mindfulness is to be completely, totally in touch with what happens in your body and the environment around you. You are not reduced to an inanimate clod of earth while you are meditating. You may feel your pulse or your heartbeat. You feel your breathing. You hear sounds and see sights. You feel vividly that you are alive.
Better to say what you mean than to mean what you say.
Without a syntax, there is no immortality.
_________
Truth’s an indefinite article.
When we live, we live for the last time,
as Akhmatova says,
One the in a world of a.
– from Broken English by Charles Wright
The moment you organize the world into words, you modify its nature.
– Enrique Vila-Matas
earth
breeze & finch
pleasing sun
i’ve stopped
interrogating
sun
in order to be
light
passerine
& softest breeze
my leaves
are hymns
despite anxiety
& pain
i am earth
all these illuminated
things
grow from my
faithful core
a lonesome
tree i am
i release
my name
& become
lightest air
in verdurous
valley
of my simplest
unpoetic words
You called me
out of logic’s maze
o sweetest
unifying
irrational worship
i am earth
while i stay in
so much
i blossom
with flowers
i remain a lake
of quiet air —
in a field
though trapped
in valley’s pain
out from my
expanding heart
rises the tiny
blue finch
out of my
suffering dried
leaves
i am earth
i foolishly
so lovingly
worship
christ
i am earth
– Rick Davis
We were all born like empty fields.
What we are now shows what has been planted.
– Naomi Shihab Nye
If only we knew before we crossed that line into bonding, what a price we will pay for its early delights. It is like the most precarious decision we make in life- who to bond to. The art of selective attachment is essential, with respect to all things relational. Our lives are precious. Take as much time as you need before you commit to a union. Remain open, but ever-vigilant. Pay close attention to how you change around another. Do you retain your best traits, or do they fade away? Does it bring out the best in you, or the worst? Do you remain hopeful, or does everything become dark and overwhelming?
– Jeff Brown
Work is a blessing. God has so arranged the world that work is necessary, and He gives us hands and strength to do it. The enjoyment of leisure would be nothing if we had only leisure. It is the joy of work well done that enables us to enjoy rest, just as it is the experiences of hunger and thirst that make food and drink such pleasures.
– Elisabeth Elliot
We must be moving, working, making dreams to run toward; the poverty of life without dreams is too horrible to imagine.
– Sylvia Plath
I always think about when my mom came to visit me in Denver, and she said, “It’s sharp out here, the land is sharp, the streets are sharp, even the people are sharp, and they talk fast.” I’d only been living here for a year at the time, and had moved from Hawaii, via West Virginia (surprisingly similar soft culture and landscape, even the hugging), and I was like, “Wow, that’s what I’ve been feeling but couldn’t name for some reason.” What she said is still true in a lot of ways.
– Steven Dunn
The Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.
– J.B.S. Haldane
DO NOT DEFINE YOURSELF, MY LOVE.
Definitions are dead and of the past.
You are too alive for definitions.
You’re not a success or a failure.
You’re not a good person or a bad person.
You’re not a wise person or a fool.
You’re not beautiful, nor are you ugly.
You’re not enlightened, and you can’t be unenlightened, ever.
You’re not any one thing, nor nothing,
nor many things at once.
You are pure potential.
A vessel for life,
prior to any incarnation.
You always knew you were changing
too fast to be defined.
No concept can capture your vastness.
No mouth can speak your name.
No word can capture
your outrageous fire.
– Jeff Foster
Friend,
You came in a dream, yesterday
—The first day we met
you showed me your dark workroom
off the kitchen, your books, your notebooks.
Reading our last, knowing-last letters
—the years of our friendship
reading our poems to each other,
I would start breathing again.
Yesterday, in the afternoon,
more than a year since you died,
some words came into the air.
I looked away a second,
and they were gone,
six lines, just passing through.
for Adrienne Rich
– Jean Valentine
For the Bird Singing before Dawn
Some people presume to be hopeful
when there is no evidence for hope,
to be happy when there is no cause.
Let me say now, I’m with them.
In deep darkness on a cold twig
in a dangerous world, one first
little fluff lets out a peep, a warble,
a song—and in a little while, behold:
the first glimmer comes, then a glow
filters through the misty trees,
then the bold sun rises, then
everyone starts bustling about.
And that first crazy optimist, can we
forgive her for thinking, dawn by dawn,
“Hey, I made that happen!
And oh, life is so fine.”
– Kim Stafford
What progress, you ask, have I made? I have begun to be a friend to myself.
– the Stoic philosopher Hecato of Rhodes, quoted by Seneca in his Moral Letters to Lucillus, ep. VII
Here’s the truth: you are literally bending reality every single day with your thoughts. So watch what you think.
– @Vishen
Ry Cooder: Once you can see somebody play, I’ve always found this to be true, it illuminates the whole situation, how they hold the instrument, how they physically go about doing these things. Copying notes off a record is pointless. You got to know how they get themselves in a physical state and then things happen, they just seem to happen, that you know how that’s done or you can understand how it’s done makes a whole lot of difference. That’s why filming musicians is such a good thing, because then if you can’t go where they are, if they’re dead, you look at this film and you really understand a lot, just looking at a guy, you understand a lot.
I wish I knew how
It would feel to be free
I wish I could break
All the chains holding me
I wish I could say
All the things that I should say
Say ’em loud say ’em clear
For the whole round world to hear
I wish I could share
All the love that’s in my heart
Remove all the bars
That keep us apart
I wish you could know
What it means to be me
Then you’d see and agree
That every man should be free
I wish I could give
All I’m longin’ to give
I wish I could live
Like I’m longin’ to live
I wish I could do
All the things that I can do
Though I’m way overdue
I’d be starting anew.
Well I wish I could be like a bird in the sky
How sweet it would be
If I found I could fly
I’d soar to the sun
And look down at the sea
And I sing ’cause I know
How it feels to be free
– Nina Simone
Muir at once went wild when we reached this fairyland. From cluster to cluster of flowers he ran, falling on his knees, babbling in unknown tongues, prattling a curious mixture of scientific lingo and baby talk, worshiping his little blue-and-pink goddesses. “Ah! my blue-eyed darlin’, little did I think to see you here. How did you stray away from Shasta?” “Well, well! Who’d ‘a’ thought that you’d have left that niche in the Merced mountains to come here!” “And who might you be, now, with your wonder look? Is it possible that you can be (two Latin polysyllables)? You’re lost, my dear; you belong in Tennessee.” “Ah! I thought I’d find you, my homely little sweetheart,” and so on unceasingly. So absorbed was he in this amatory botany that he seemed to forget my existence. While I, as glad as he, tagged along, running up and down with him, asking now and then a question, learning something of plant life, but far more of that spiritual insight into Nature’s lore which is granted only to those who love and woo her in her great outdoor palaces.
– Samuel Hall Young, Alaska Days with John Muir
presence
be mindful of the
holy presence
especially before
you leave the house
so that wherever
you are
love’s gentlest
petals will lie
before you
on the softest
mountain path
– Rick Davis
When altruists come together, they can produce a formidable power for good.” (… ) Everyone can mobilize in their own way and cultivate an altruistic mindset to become a link of the huge chain of solidarity that goes beyond borders, castes, genders and religions.
– Matthieu Ricard
solitude
It is in the nature of man, when he feels lost in the large and busy external world, that he should seek to find his proper self in solitude. And the more deeply he has felt the inward cleavage and rending, the more absolute is the solitude required. If religion adds to this a feeling of sin and a need for abiding and uninterrupted union with God, then every earthly consideration vanishes and the recluse becomes an ascetic, partly to do penance, partly to owe the world without nothing more than the barest existence, but partly also to keep the soul capable of constant intercourse with the sublime. Quite of his own accord the recluse sought to bind himself from a return to his previous state by taking vows. If several inspired by the same strIving were met together in their retirement, their vows and their general manner of life took on the character of a community, of a rule. The anchorite way of life premises a not wholly healthy state of society and the individual, but belongs rather to periods of crisis, when many crushed spirits seek quiet, and at the same time many strong hearts are puzzled by the whole apparatus of life and must wage their struggle with God remote from the world, But if any man possessed by the modern preoccupation with activity and its immoderately subjective view of life would therefore wish to place the anchorites in some institution for enforced labor, let him not regard himself as particularly healthy-minded, he is no more so than the multitudes in the fourth century who were too weak or too superficial to have any comprehension of the spiritual forces which drove those towering personalities into the desert.
– Jacob Burckhardt
What comes after, in the walking home alone forever, & the writing it
Out, is like the testimony of a witness, always imperfect, changing,
Until one is spent in the exhaustion of the music, in each twisted,
Unmemorized limb of mesquite scoring the blood-spattered Hawk’s screech of each note—no voice left in it & no accompaniment—
What comes after is the knowledge that
One is no longer part of it, & can no longer be part of it,
Who, with no one to answer to, passes the brown, indifferent grasses
In the winter months, the lascivious blooms that come on later, cock
Purple & blush pink, noticing them one moment, then looking away
Without focusing on anything in particular, unable to believe either
The chill of visitation or any lie the wind tells him
—
Forgetting, & becoming,
Without the slightest awareness of it in that moment, another.
– Larry Levis – A Singing in the Rocks
I supposed that what I most value are real human relations and imagination. It is possible we cannot have one without the other. It took me a long time to discard the desire to please those who do not have my best interests at heart and who cannot live warmly with me. I own the books that I have written and bequeath the royalties to my daughters. In this sense, my books are my real estate. They are not private property. There are no fierce dogs or security guards at the gate and there are no signs forbidding anyone to dive, splash, kiss, fail, feel fury or fear or be tender or tearful, to fall in love with the wrong person, go mad, become famous or play on the grass.
– Deborah Levy, Real Estate
The body isn’t just a vehicle for realization, or for getting things done. It’s the root of wisdom—its very source. Sometimes we need to be nudged to remember this. Sometimes the reminder is a bit more blunt. But at the end of the day, the body will have the last word.
– Vanessa Zuisei Goddard, Stuck in Slow Motion
Hummingbird
-for Tess
Suppose I say summer,
write the word “hummingbird,”
put it in an envelope,
take it down the hill
to the box. When you open
my letter you will recall
those days and how much,
just how much, I love you.
– Raymond Carver
The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
My striving after stillness was a noisy affair, I discovered. It seemed raucous and fitful and poorly planned. I could be wrong about stillness, though. If it isn’t fitfull after all, then the simpler conclusion might be that I’m just not very good at it. Trying to still your life is something between a pinky swear with whatever ordains you and an arm wrestle with your nature. That’s what I found.
– Stephen Jenkinson
Four AM can be a devastating hour. The day, no matter what kind of day it was is indisputably over; almost instantaneously, a new day begins: and how will one bear it? Probably no better than one bore the day that is ending, possibly not as well. Moreover, a day is coming one will not recall, the last day of one’s life, and on that day one will oneself become as irrecoverable as all the days that have passed.
It is a fearful speculation — or, rather, a fearful knowledge — that, one day one’s eyes will no longer look out on the world. One will no longer be present at the universal morning roll call. The light will rise for others, but not for you.
Sometimes, at four AM, this knowledge is almost enough to force a reconciliation between oneself and all one’s pain and error. Since, anyway, it will end one day, why not try it — life — one more time?
– James Baldwin
You find peace not by rearranging the circumstances of your life, but by realizing who you are at the deepest level.
– Eckhart Tolle
Like wildflowers; You must allow yourself to grow in all the places people thought you never would.
– Simdha Getul Rinpoche
The Metier of Blossoming
Fully occupied with growing—that’s
the amaryllis. Growing especially
at night: it would take
only a bit more patience than I’ve got
to sit keeping watch with it till daylight;
the naked eye could register every hour’s
increase in height. Like a child against a barn door,
proudly topping each year’s achievement,
steadily up
goes each green stem, smooth, matte,
traces of reddish purple at the base, and almost
imperceptible vertical ridges
running the length of them:
Two robust stems from each bulb,
sometimes with sturdy leaves for company,
elegant sweeps of blade with rounded points.
Aloft, the gravid buds, shiny with fullness.
One morning—and so soon!—the first flower
has opened when you wake. Or you catch it poised
in a single, brief
moment of hesitation.
Next day, another,
shy at first like a foal,
even a third, a fourth,
carried triumphantly at the summit
of those strong columns, and each
a Juno, calm in brilliance,
a maiden giantess in modest splendor.
If humans could be
that intensely whole, undistracted, unhurried,
swift from sheer
unswerving impetus! If we could blossom
out of ourselves, giving
nothing imperfect, withholding nothing!
– Denise Levertov
I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,
but because it never forgot what it could do.
– Naomi Shihab Nye
you live in a world that barely knows you
on a ship that is always pointed
somewhere else
– Naomi Shihab Nye
The only serious answer to determining the course of philosophizing lies in your relation to the works you care about. And this means to me, in your relation to what allows you…to think further.
– Stanley Cavell on pedagogy and, perhaps, criticism as well
Light produces space, distance, orientation, calm contemplation; it is the gift that makes no demands, the illumination capable of conquering without force.
– Hans Blumenberg
Escape somehow from the history of poetry,
From fashions of poetry,
From a hundred years of poetic authority.
Be born trembling, wild and alone.
– Ko Un
For Peace
As the fever of day calms towards twilight
May all that is strained in us come to ease.
We pray for all who suffered violence today,
May an unexpected serenity surprise them.
For those who risk their lives each day for peace,
May their hearts glimpse providence at the heart of history.
That those who make riches from violence and war
Might hear in their dreams the cries of the lost.
That we might see through our fear of each other
A new vision to heal our fatal attraction to aggression.
That those who enjoy the privilege of peace
Might not forget their tormented brothers and sisters.
That the wolf might lie down with the lamb,
That our swords be beaten into ploughshares
And no hurt or harm be done
Anywhere along the holy mountain.
– John O’Donohue
I am watching a bat scoop the emptiness
from the night, watching the hackberry embrace the moon.
Sometimes we have to hold hands with our own nightmares.
When I tell you that the voice of the nightingale turns dark
you have to understand what this love is trying to overcome,
you have to know that if you ever leave, if you ever disappear,
the sky would rip, and the stars would lose their way.
– Richard Jackson
New Age spirituality becomes a global industry during/through the intensification of globalization.
Its banal, depoliticized universalism depends on feeling that history is over, conflict is an illusion, money is intentionality, and the world is the playground of the self.
– Matthew Remski
When you learn something from people, or from a culture, you accept it as a gift, and it is your lifelong commitment to preserve it and build on it.
– Yo-Yo Ma
The truest warriors on the planet are those who have had to overcome tremendous hardships with very little or no support. The real super-heroes are those that have been so disillusioned by the world, so uprooted in their daily life, yet they find a way to get up in the morning and believe in life again. We want to co-create a society that elevates and supports these individuals. We want to co-create a world that pulls humanity close, that refuses to let anyone fall off the edge, that breathes individuals back to life when they lose all hope, that moves the way loves makes us move. In this world of divine possibility, we will never forget that we are all part of this human-nest. If even one is left out, the nest is empty.
Unity consciousness is not simply a beautiful vision of possibility- it is our best and truest hope. Until each and every one of us rises into fullness, the collective cannot actualize its wholeness. Until we all rush to the side of someone in need, we are all fractured beings. Until we all recognize that each of us is a magnificent reflection of the Godself, we are collectively blind. Until everyone has what they need to flourish, we are all birds with one wing. The measure of a healthy society is not how effectively it elevates its achievers, but how compassionately it supports those who have fallen. Our community is humanity. We rise in unison, or not at all.
– Jeff Brown
According to Psychologists, there are four types of Intelligence:
1) Intelligence Quotient (IQ)
2) Emotional Quotient (EQ)
3) Social Quotient (SQ)
4) Adversity Quotient (AQ)
1. Intelligence Quotient (IQ): this is the measure of your level of comprehension. You need IQ to solve maths, memorize things, and recall lessons.
2. Emotional Quotient (EQ): this is the measure of your ability to maintain peace with others, keep to time, be responsible, be honest, respect boundaries, be humble, genuine and considerate.
3. Social Quotient (SQ): this is the measure of your ability to build a network of friends and maintain it over a long period of time.
People that have higher EQ and SQ tend to go further in life than those with a high IQ but low EQ and SQ. Most schools capitalize on improving IQ levels while EQ and SQ are played down.
A man of high IQ can end up being employed by a man of high EQ and SQ even though he has an average IQ.
Your EQ represents your Character, while your SQ represents your Charisma. Give in to habits that will improve these three Qs, especially your EQ and SQ.
Now there is a 4th one, a new paradigm:
4. The Adversity Quotient (AQ): The measure of your ability to go through a rough patch in life, and come out of it without losing your mind.
When faced with troubles, AQ determines who will give up, who will abandon their family, and who will consider suicide.
Parents please expose your children to other areas of life than just Academics. They should adore manual labour (never use work as a form of punishment), Sports and Arts.
Develop their IQ, as well as their EQ, SQ and AQ. They should become multifaceted human beings able to do things independently of their parents.
Finally, do not prepare the road for your children. Prepare your children for the road.
– Unknown
Every time I see a listing for an artist, I see that they’ve won this and won that and this person who does something says they’re good. What if you don’t win anything and don’t get reviews or sound bites and quotes? Are you still a valid artist? Have you even made an album if it doesn’t get reviewed?
I’m not asking for compliments here or validation, I’m just wondering if this stuff is necessary or people are impressed by it?
Do people even listen to music any more or do they just read the quotes??
– Jessica Lee Morgan
Critics in the West often ask whether poetry matters. I now realize that the only valid response to this question is: Do such critics matter? If a person sheltering deep underground as her city is bombed recites poems as a survival tool—to soothe herself and others—that is all the evidence I need that poetry matters. But we humans always knew that.
– Ilya Kaminsky
If you get a friend request
from God,
don’t accept it.
She is a hacker.
She will infect your cell phone,
your iPad, your camera
and everything it sees,
even your own
reptilian brain
with a viral buzz,
a neuroplastic musk
that melts all boundaries,
all fine distinctions,
the molecular membranes
that guard the bureaucracy
of your punctilious neurons
from amphibious tongues
of fire that tease up
out of your steaming amygdala,
yes, even dissolving
the firewall between “inner”
and “outer,”
until the algorithm of your
own heart forces you
to surrender, to collapse
into the cyber-void
at the center of the iris,
to erase all your files,
empty your memory,
and simply gaze
into what gazes.
– Fred LaMotte
Song to Forgotten Ancestors
Whatever you sing to them
Is only this world humming to itself
Through the single human song
Is only your heart answering their love.
And the words you sing are not your own
Though you sounded them they are older than you
They rise from the soul of your people
Music of your emigrant ancestors
Whose hard history left a long soul scar.
They are behind you breathing through you
Still hungering for the unlived life beyond.
Their passion never fired breaks through in you
Their energy passed to you carries it so strongly on
Listen where the ages roar
In the morning wind through the forest
Where no one yet walks.
– Douglas Stewart, MacTalla
He was still too young to know that the heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.
– Gabriel García Márquez
What can I give you,
O splendid scene?
All I have is a few tears,
a few sighs.
– Guru Dutt
You were my first lesson in living memory; how it leaps and snaps. How it nips at you, unexpectedly.
– Kiki Petrosino
Memory begins to qualify the imagination, to give it another formation, one that is peculiar to the self. I remember isolated, yet fragmented and confused, images–and images, shifting, enlarging, is the word, rather than moments or events–which are mine alone and which are especially vivid to me. They involve me wholly and immediately, even though they are the disintegrated impressions of a young child. They call for a certain attitude of belief on my part now; that is, they must mean something, but their best reality does not consist in meaning. They are not stories in that sense, but they are story-like, mythic, never evolved but evolving ever. There are such things in the world: it is their nature to be believed; it is not necessarily in them to be understood. Of all that must have happened to and about me in those my earliest days, why should these odd particulars alone be fixed in my mind? If I were to remember other things, I should be someone else.
– N. Scott Momaday
the earth is a living thing
is a black shambling bear
ruffling its wild back and tossing
mountains into the sea
is a black hawk circling
the burying ground circling the bones
picked clean and discarded
is a fish black blind in the belly of water
is a diamond blind in the black belly of coal
is a black and living thing
is a favorite child
of the universe
feel her rolling her hand
in its kinky hair
feel her brushing it clean
– Lucille Clifton
So often when things feel constricted or there are changes happening that we don’t agree with but can’t control, it feels like doors are slamming shut all around. The need to conserve energy for what could be coming feels urgent, and your shoulders get stuck up around your ears, breath coming quick and shallow.
[Take a moment to sit up straight, roll your shoulders back and down, and take a few deep belly breaths.]
When options feel limited, or things are so muddy you can’t even see what the options might be, sometimes it’s the simplest questions that illuminate the path forward – and it’s not always the path we think of when we consider what’s next. Today, I invite you to allow for a new possibility, one that perhaps you’ve not yet considered.
What else is possible?
– Heidi Barr
Great strategists do not act according to preconceived ideas; they respond to the moment like children. Their minds are always moving, and they are always excited and curious. They quickly forget the past – the present is much too interesting.
– Robert Greene
Everyone experiences pain and most suffer from patterns that continue to make life miserable unless something or someone intervenes. The pain we feel comes from the cross-wise energies that keep curving back and cancelling the wise self and the good word that wait to be expressed from within us. Persistent pain is usually the indication that we have become trapped in a life too small for our true nature. That is the usual human fate and the common predicament where the little-self obscures the greater nature behind it. Until people realize what harms them and limits them from within, they are unlikely to call out for someone to help stop the pain. The remedy may be nearby, but until the pain becomes unbearable most remain caught in the agony of one form or another of self-inflicted wounds. As Rumi said, ‘The cure for the pain is in the pain.’”
– Michael Meade, Fate and Destiny
The kindest most pleasant people are those who easily, and without pride, quickly imagine they might be in the wrong.
– School of Life
Stepping out of the frenetic pace set by this consumerist culture sets in motion a couple wonderful things…you gain your mind back…you gain time back…and being present, really present, where your feet are planted, becomes possible. It will make you a much safer person for everyone else to be near.
– Kent Burgess
What we most need is the prayer of fervent desire for growth in grace, expressed in patience, meekness, love, & good deeds.
– Cindy Schneider
Myth is a wild way of trying to tell the truth about something.
– Martin Shaw
LEARNING TO THINK IN DREAM:
Find the wildest mountain you can
And ask it to be your grandfather,
Find the curviest river you can
and ask it to be your grandmother.
If blood spilled from me onto you, a significant amount of the drop – and I would hope it only a drop – would be Connemara in origin. Indeed, I was enspelled into a splendiferous thwonk of rapture when the taxi wheezed from mid Ireland up to Clifden to give the John Moriarty memorial lecture. The glass-glazed lakes, the bleached white cottages, dun cows and sheer swing of the conversation. I knew the yomp of it somehow.
Late that night after the reading, swelled with porter and a couple of Paddies, I sat on a park bench and opened my ears, nostrils and mouth to the pungent languages of the land and its associated dead. Little willow-the-wisps they were, that glittered and danced and in they flew.
There’s more than one dimension in Connemara, and to Ireland. Along with its namesake Ériu, there’s Banba and Fódla her sisters. Three deities, three sisters who were all granted their name as the title of the island. Though we tend to remember Ériu, if we are to fall into poetic consciousness it is good to speak of Fódla, if we fall into land dreaming it is good to speak of Banba. So we want to be talking to three sisters in our chat, banter and occasional big speech.
And then there’s a fourth step, a journey into the ‘Dinnseanches’ of Ireland, the land-lore, magic and elusive memory energetics of the place. If that description is a little hard to follow it’s meant to be. It needs to breath, the edges of the tent still flapping a little.
Knowing Dinnseanches is part of how you learn to think in dream again.
I’ve spent much time loyal to that, though here, in the far west of Britain, not Ireland. I’m not saying they are the same country, but I recognise the necessity of contact if you want to deepen into a place. The vibrational dip. Sitting and sleeping and walking and listening in wild, holy crofts. Getting your back up against an oak tree and the turf under your arse. Thousands of hours of wandering and wondering, opening to the dimension of Fódla, the murmur of Banba. Being astray, getting adrift. Getting to grips with a little Irish in the jaw, sucking on the marrow of the language.
Sometimes a hill could be a white cow at a certain time of day, a river a sauntering woman.
My friend Manchán Magan knows all about this kind of thing. Things that saunter and twirl. He suggests that to an Irish way of looking, a field’s not just a field. It could be:
Tuar – a night field for cattle
Biorach – a field of marsh
Plasog – a field sheltered for foals to grow
Cluain – a meadow field between two woods
Caithairin – a field with a fairy place within it
We all swoon into such distinctions, the care, the poly not the mono. It’s how humans also desire to be known. That a lover knows your many temperaments and seasonal shifts. Tied up with close attention is usually something of a love affair. The farmer knows the fields character because they love and depend on the character of that field. They coax it, get into the muck of it, even dream with it.
Manchán had his young mind blown as kid by his granny delivering a proverb to him, a seanfhocal – an ‘old word’. She said this:
Saol tri mhiol mhor saol Iomaire amhain, saol tri Iomaire saol an domhain.
‘Three time the life of a whale is the lifespan of a ridge, and three times the life span of a ridge is the life span of the world.’
The saying works like this: it used to be speculated that a whale could live a thousand years, a ridge for growing could make three thousand, and the world which the Irish understood would be nine thousand years old.
With nine thousand years being around the time that humans first started settling in Ireland there really is encoded knowledge in this saying, it’s a storehouse, as all good thinking and storytelling really is. Long before they were thought of as entertainers, storytellers were oral libraries, they kept history and magical lore tucked under their antler of their tongue.
Nine thousand years feels just about bearable for a human to comprehend. When we move into millions of years our legs buckle or we simply vacate the proposition. There was a time when we believed the sun revolved around us, not the other way round. There was a time when we looked up at the planets and called them influences, that they affected our mood, our tides, our plants and minerals. So in a wonderful way, when you looked up you were also looking inward, you saw aspects of yourself scattered over the night sky. Very beautiful. Reassuring and awesome. I’m not convinced that our current knowledge of nameless, endless universes has done much to steady us. Humble us possibly.
– Martin Shaw, On Manchan Magan
Oh, how this
love/lineage drops
into me, begs me to
hold my breath,
and sink.
– Desireé Dallagiacomo
Everything—including love, hate, and suffering—needs food to continue. If suffering continues, it’s because we keep feeding our suffering.
– Thích Nhất Hạnh
When I was a little kid, I always knew that I had some special kind of thing inside me. I mean, I wasn’t very attractive, I wasn’t very verbal, I wasn’t very smart in school. I wasn’t anything that showed the world that I was something special, but I had this tremendous hope all the time. I had this tremendous spirit that kept me going […] I just had this light inside that kept spurring me on. I had this feeling I was going to go beyond my body physical, I just knew it.
– Patti Smith
THE 17th. KARMAPA
Spiritual Consumerism
I want to be clear that seeking your own understanding does not mean rejecting all established spiritual paths. Many people feel that organized religions are problematic – or even hopelessly flawed. They might even think that they could assemble a better religion for themselves by picking and choosing bits they like from different religions. I do not think this is realistic. It simply does not work as we think it might. Instead of something holistic that transforms us, it just yields a patchwork that pleases us. This can become a kind of spiritual consumerism.
Worse, it can be dangerous. Bits that you thought would be beneficial for you can turn out to be ineffective or even harmful if you apply them out of context. When you extract practices from a gradual path of transformation, they might not have the same effect outside of their intended sequence. Our spiritual path has to unfold organically – and we have to be receptive to going where it leads us, step-by-step.
– 17th Karmapa
My dear, in the midst of hatred, I’ve found within me a love that can’t be stopped.” In the midst of tears, I found inside me a smile that can’t stop. In the midst of all the chaos, I found within me an invincible calm. I’ve realized through it all that, in the midst of winter, there’s an invincible summer in me, and that makes me happy, because it says no matter how the world pushes against me, there’s something stronger, something better in me wearing out back at it again.
– Albert Camus
I’m grateful for the lessons one learns from great writers, but also from imperialists, sexists, friends, lovers, oppressors, revolutionaries—everybody. Everybody has something to teach a writer.
– Arundhati Roy
Belonging creates and undoes us both.
– Pádraig Ó Tuama
staff engineer
principal engineer
distinguished engineer
It’s starting to feel like air miles.
What level is next?
Wrong answers only
– Patrick Debois
I feel like a novel—dense / and vivid, uncertain of the end.
– C.D. Wright
I’ve never seen how love made people better, stronger, more real to themselves. On the other hand, if I had to live without work, life would be intolerable.
– Vivian Gornick
It is a moral mandate that we aid those who carry on cultural memory. If we choose to do so and move to value artists’ role in carrying legacies forward, we will choose life over war.
– Sarah Kornfeld and Cate Riegner on supporting artists in wartime.
The purpose of ritual is to connect us to our own essence, to help us tune into the collective spirit, or to mend whatever is broken, whatever wires have been pulled out of one’s life, so we can start anew. Ritual is to the soul what food is to the physical body.
– Sobonfu Somé
In the short term, you are as good as your intensity. In the long term, you are only as good as your consistency.
– Shane Parrish
The Lost Land
by Eavan Boland
I have two daughters.
They are all I ever wanted from the earth.
Or almost all.
I also wanted one piece of ground:
One city trapped by hills. One urban river.
An island in its element.
So I could say mine. My own.
And mean it.
Now they are grown up and far away
and memory itself
has become an emigrant,
wandering in a place
where love dissembles itself as landscape:
Where the hills
are the colours of a child’s eyes,
where my children are distances, horizons:
At night,
on the edge of sleep,
I can see the shore of Dublin Bay.
Its rocky sweep and its granite pier.
Is this, I say
how they must have seen it,
backing out on the mailboat at twilight,
shadows falling
on everything they had to leave?
And would love forever?
And then
I imagine myself
at the landward rail of that boat
searching for the last sight of a hand.
I see myself
on the underworld side of that water,
the darkness coming in fast, saying
all the names I know for a lost land:
Ireland. Absence. Daughter.
My poetry begins for me where certainty ends.
– Eavan Boland
Every time I sit down to write, I think, Will I find someone at the crossroads? And sometimes I do, and I feel my soul. When I don’t, I’m disappointed.
– Jamaica Kincaid
See there’s culture in
these words, the bent back
of my speech comes
from years of carrying
the Black experience.
– Steven Willis
Every day reality is not eclipsed by art; it is reconfigured by it.
– Rita Felski
One might well characterize the philosopher as one who possesses an organ that receives and reacts to the totality of being.
– Georg Simmel
[exchanging water for wealth]
will I always stare into the darkness of those who wait in deadened familiar, not suitable for the main course; gone up in flames, done up in toxic blossom, 99.9% similar, alone facing inquisitional preconditions for normal?
a billion miles away, I burn, we all burn, the ice melts, the multiindustrial playhouse brings more boom boom to the local meat market.
almost underground, next to preservation first, down the corridor to a crypt like, discarded, hopeless outdated metal file cabinet, locked in a room, waiting for benediction, new icons for teeth.
somewhere someone says, chemistry for the future. somewhere someone says there is never enough mesmerizing heads, dieting on crystalline traditions, exchanging water for wealth.
– Keri Edwards
8th & Ingraham
I forget about money watching the clouds over 8th and Ingraham. The clouds a rhubarb-colored ship in the sky. To my right it all grays out, the bats emerging now from the chimneys. The bats listening for the cicadas’ echo. Echo is a way to create space, is a metaphor for time. Time for the cop to move along I think watching the cop watch me from my porch. Fuck 12. The robin on the wirevine the wireeye competing with the bats for cicadas. The robin competing reds with the sky. The sky a money for the cicadas: a way to make space, time. The cicadas sounding out the future through repetition. A friend says to spend nothing is to keep flexibility in your hands, to keep your youth. Money the sound of decay. Money the repetition of waste.
– Taylor Johnson
Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be.
– Thomas-Kempis
I am quite confident that even as the oceans boil, and the hurricanes beat violently against our once safe shores, and the air sweats with the heat of impending doom, and our fists protest the denial of climate justice, that there is a path to take that has nothing to do with victory or defeat: a place we do not yet know the coordinates to; a question we do not yet know how to ask. The point of the departed arrow is not merely to pierce the bullseye and carry the trophy: the point of the arrow is to sing the wind and remake the world in the brevity of flight. There are things we must do, sayings we must say, thoughts we must think, that look nothing like the images of success that have so thoroughly possessed our visions of justice.
May this new decade be remembered as the decade of the strange path, of the third way, of the broken binary, of the traversal disruption, the kairotic moment, the posthuman movement for emancipation, the gift of disorientation that opened up new places of power, and of slow limbs. May this decade bring more than just solutions, more than just a future – may it bring words we don’t know yet, and temporalities we have not yet inhabited. May we be slower than speed could calculate, and swifter than the pull of the gravity of words can incarcerate. And may we be visited so thoroughly, and met in wild places so overwhelmingly, that we are left undone. Ready for composting. Ready for the impossible.
Welcome to the decade of the fugitive.
– Bayo Akomolafe
what I found to be
most powerful and natural
is not to give speeches.
It is to remain silent,
as if you forgot all the words you have learned.
Silence is a simple way
of touching a place within us
that is whole and serene.
It is a direct way of dissolving into God.
– Guthema Roba
Space is not empty. It is full, a plenum as opposed to a vacuum, and is the ground for the existence of everything, including ourselves. The universe is not separate from this cosmic sea of energy.
– David Bohm
Understand that every act is an act of self-definition. Everything you think, say, and do defines you, announces your choice about yourself.
– Neale Donald Walsh
If you really want the world to be a better place, I think you really have to talk to children. It’s got to be about the children.
– Ziggy Marley
Change the self and your inner world changes. And when your inner world changes, the outer world that you touch changes, little by little. And when the outer world that you touch changes, the world that it touches changes, and the world that it touches. Outward and outward and outward this spreads, like a ripple in a pond.
– Neale Donald Walsh
It’s okay if ‘progress’ looks different in this season.
– Morgan Harper Nichols
If you learn the right words to sound “empathetic” and you follow the script, but the learning has not come up through your bones.. It is only a matter of time before a new script will be necessary.
The right words are no replacement for the learning.
This is going to be increasingly evident in the woke/anti-woke polarity, which is tearing people apart who might otherwise be able to care for each other. (late edit: this is so of many discourses now, climate, complexity, mental health, self help and more–so this is NOT just about woke/anti-woke but about lots of scripts that ossify and polarize)
There is much more to being in mutual learning than either set scripts allows for.
The words will fail, be replaced, be gilded or vilified… Their fluidity is necessary while new perceptions form.
Tending the mending of this era of divisive language is going to be scriptless.
– Nora Bateson
…by the time I get to the end of the short story, I want my entire life to have changed.
– Anton Hur
When you say I am from Dunedin in New Zealand- you are saying you are from Edinburgh in Scottish Gaelic “Dun Eideann”
– Eddi Reader
Sometimes two linked things are actually one thing. Take letting go and forgiveness. Embraced, they become freedom. “The one thing” turns out to be paradoxical, holding many things together. Love surely is one.
– Gunilla Norris
The Time Will Come
by Derek Walcott, Love After Love
The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
There must be a word bigger than gratitude for folks that are gentle, kind, and patient with you even when you’re fumbling, even when you’re playing catch-up on a daily basis. Lately, I feel like every email I write starts with Prince, “I never meant to cause you any sorrow…”
– Ada Limón
INSTRUCTIONS ON NOT GIVING UP
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.
– Ada Limón
Every word is
physical and
immediately
affects the
body
– Gilles Deleuze
i count the morning
stars the air so sweet i turn
riverdark with sound.
– Sonia Sanchez
HOPE ISN’T ALWAYS SOMETHING WE FEEL
Personal growth is obviously a good thing. At the time, however, growth can hurt like a baby’s new tooth. Deep insights about living must sometimes protrude up through the tender wounded flesh of who we have been. New insights can feel terribly disorienting because they give us a wider context for life and therefore can make us feel lost while we seek new landmarks.
At the time, great insights may not feel like hope. They may even feel like our life is unraveling. I don’t know if it hurts a caterpillar to become a butterfly but I know when human beings outgrow an earlier understanding we can feel abandoned, orphaned, left behind.
When someone we love dies hope can feel irretrievably lost. Standing at a grave can feel for a time like our hopes have been buried with the beloved. But this stage of grief, though it can feel like an eternity, is just the beginning. After grieving awhile, we slowly begin to hear the songs of birds overhead. We slowly awaken to the comforting murmur of wind blowing through the trees. Eventually, the explosive beauty of wildflowers protrudes through our grief giving irrefutable witness that the beauty of living is worth the pain.
If the dead could speak to us I think they would remind us that what we love in each other is not our ephemeral forms but a mysterious something within us all that belongs to life. They might gently whisper that life is change and so we can not experience lost loves by going back in time. They might remind us that hope is not a feeling but an intuitive trust that, if we let grief do its painful work, we will someday awaken to that beautiful something all around us.
– Jim Rigby
False maps all around —
religion, politics, even so-called spirituality, abound.
Forgo the map, be still
…and the way home shows itself.
– Shinzen
Peace will only prevail
if it is born within the mind.
– Dilgo Khyentse Yangsi Rinpoche
You can’t play Mozart if you don’t learn your scales.
– C.M. Rivers
I’ve Been Thinking about Love Again
Those who live to have it and
those who live to give it.
Of course there are those for whom both are true,
but never in the same measure.
Those who have it to give are
like cardinals in the snow. So easy
and beautifully lit. Some
are rabbits. Hard to see
except for those who would prey upon them:
all that softness and quaking and blood.
Those who want it
cannot be satisfied. Eagle-eyed and such talons,
any furred thing will do. So easy
to rip out a heart when it is throbbing so hard.
I wander out into the winter.
I know what I am.
– Vievee Francis
It is a puzzling thing. The truth knocks on the door and you say, ‘Go away, I’m looking for the truth,’ and so it goes away. Puzzling.
– Robert M. Pirsig
Small Kindnesses: A Collaborative Poem by Teenagers From Around the World
Compiled by Danusha Laméris
Kindness is neighbors saying “Buenos Dias”
It’s the man in the red shirt helping the woman in the floral blouse cross the street
It’s the way my heart sings when I’m smiling at a baby, and their mom notices and lifts up the baby’s sweet little hand and waves it at me
A friend patiently waiting as you quickly tie your loose shoelaces, while everyone continues walking
A slight buzz in your jean pockets indicating messages from friends appearing out of the blue, questioning how you might be feeling that day, written in text abbreviations, the shared teenage experience
Getting woken up at my bus stop
Letting somebody have the last cookie and then they insist on splitting it in half
Chamomile tea, placed on my bedside table, sweet honey resting at the bottom of the cup
Kindness is a seed. It starts trivial and trifling
It’s the wheezing, ugly laugh that melts two people together
The crinkle in someone’s eyes behind their mask as they wave back
The warm smile that the old crossing guard gives when I greet him in the morning and wave goodbye in the afternoon
Swarming aisles at the grocery store with strangers letting you pass, a simple hand gesture saying “go ahead”
The crooked teeth gleaming through a wrinkled smile when the elderly woman next door nods her head
In elevators, it’s how one passenger seamlessly assumes the role of the old-time operator, pushing all our floors
It’s when you’re struggling with your hair, so the woman on the train offers to braid it and strand by strand, kindness by kindness, you think the world is not so bad after all
Kindness feels like a freshly bloomed flower in a field of lonely grass
A smile of sunflowers chasing the light, golden petals pressed forever in the pages
The lyric poet is a person who says, “I am not sure the language I write in is spoken here, or anywhere.”
– Ilya Kaminsky
I think it’s one of the hardest things in the world to somehow make sure that the ones you love receive your care for them as physical information, as definite as raindrops hitting your palm. Like when you hold your hand out to check if it’s raining and it is.
– Helen Oyeyemi
What I did not know when I was very young was that nothing can take the past away: the past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.
– John Berger
Resistance is contraindicated in meditation practice.
How are we going to be truly ourselves if we are fighting off any part of our experience? We can’t be free if we are rejecting any part of ourselves.
– Frank Ostaseski
So high
is my Lord’s palace,
my heart trembles
to mount its stairs:
Yet I must not be shy,
if I would enjoy … His Love.
– Kabir
Basically, there are three ways
to work with the afflictive emotions
and their root, ego-clinging:
you can discard, transform or utilize them.
Apply whichever method is most effective
for your own abilities.
The safest method is to use direct antidotes
to discard each afflictive emotion.
This method works for everyone.
Practitioners with some experience
can use the second method
to transform their emotions
rather than counteract them with antidotes.
Those with higher acumen and prowess
can actually use the afflictive emotions as the path.
In each case, the goal is always the same:
to get rid of ego-clinging.
– Shechen Rabjam
you think
you think
you know me —
with your assumptions
& stereotyping
as if i was born
& live in a
mountain of
diamonds
but my life
has been
more like a
mountain of
coal
still my heart
has always
always tended
as best it could
tangled in
many worlds
many of them
more sorrowful
than meets
the eye
because i don’t
want you to know
of the way
life has twisted
my divine soul
with torment
still, i don’t
live in the past
nor really have
& have unfashionably
worked hard
to forget
my stories
because they
aren’t real
& aren’t me
the “real me”
is one who
cleaves to
Divinity
despite
intense agony
that you wouldn’t
believe anyway
but the truth is
is it’s becoming
easier & easier
though far from
simple
but it’s never
simple
for any of us
so perhaps
that’s why
my simplistic
poems
are a bit
different
than others
you’ve seen
– Rick Davis
Emotional attachment to books is very dangerous if you are a bookseller. We live dangerously.
– @secondshelfbks
One thing I often think these days is that tons of people are having a visceral emotional response to the terrible pressures and fears of our time, but they’re turning that into an intellectual analysis of why they need to believe this crazy shit or attack that vulnerable target. That way they believe they’re having a rational response to something external rather than an emotional one to something internal, and this will go on indefinitely as long as the true source of that energy is not clear. I’m not sure how else to explain the large numbers of people who seem to have gotten on board with a lot of luridly weird and hostile stuff.
Confusing emotions with analyses is such a pandemic unto itself.
– Rebecca Solnit
To proceed toward wholeness and manifest the promise only you can bring to the world, you must investigate your shadow. It contains values and perspectives needed to round out your conscious personality. It contains personal powers you’ll need when you befriend or wrestle with the inner and outer dragons and angels encountered on your soul journey.
– Bill Plotkin, Soulcraft
I used to think that the soul
Grew by remembering, that by retaining
The character of all the times and places it had lived
And working backwards, year by year,
It reached the center of a landscape
Time couldn’t penetrate,
– John Koethe
Soon in the inland glen wakes the dawn-dove. We must try
To love so well the world that we may believe, in the end, in God.
– Robert Penn Warren
I got saved by poetry, and
I got saved by the beauty of the world.
– Mary Oliver
Since memory is all we really have of the past, and the vast processes of memory occur in the present, it follows that history can occur only in the present. It may be a recollection of events that occurred in some past time, but the happening-ness of history is going on right now (and now and now and now). Henri Bergson was one of the first psychologists to posit a difference between what he called ‘social’ and ‘individual’ time, saying that individual time was equal to temporal duration in the mind and that social time was chronological common time in the world.
– Nate Pitts
Please, let us not turn this heartbreak into something useful just yet. If we do, we will be tempted to walk in old ways. We will rely on tired words. We will make memes of ourselves. Easy, digestible phrases that fill a short term longing for solutions.
Instead let us truly bear witness. Let the fog of confusion obscure our clarity for a time. To not know how – or where – we’ll live. To be fumbling and full of grief, because what we always counted on has been struck from our horizon. And we may never be as magnificent again.
Acknowledging this isn’t pessimistic, but rather grounding. Lightning and ground are collaborators, after all. Once you’ve been struck, you no longer live in the upper chakras alone, believing you are the creator of your reality. Or that some higher power is only benevolent, and rewards people for good. Instead you learn the paradoxical nature of life and death.
– Toko-pa Turner
Earth Child – Promised Land
Carry the child, wrap her up warm,
Lift her gently into the litter.
Take her away from this place so forlorn
Where the land freezes hard and the living is bitter.
Let the camels walk soft, so their footfalls don’t wake her
Let her sleep deep, and never forsake her.
For she is the precious, the pure light of ages,
Her spirit aglow, though the storm round her rages.
Cross the Great Waste, where winds cough and splutter,
And gaunt lobo wolves scent the camels and mutter.
Then turn to the south when the storm is abating
Head for the Country of Bliss that is waiting.
Carry the child, though it take seven seasons,
Do not turn aside whatever the reason.
And when you arrive, lay her down in warm sand,
For she will be Mother in that promised land.
– Michael Asher
Honing to the one thing that matters may turn out to be the only thing that matters.
– Gunilla Norris
Chögyam Trungpa ~ LET US DO SOMETHING
I’m quite desperate. A lot of other teachers must have experienced this desperation. I am so desperate. You can help the world. You, you, you, you, and you – all of you – can help the world. You know what the problems are. You know the difficulties. Let us do something. Let us not chicken out. Let us actually do it properly. Please, please, please!
Old Manuscript
The sky
is that beautiful old parchment
in which the sun
and the moon
keep their diary.
To read it all,
one must be a linguist
more learned than Father Wisdom;
and a visionary
more clairvoyant than Mother Dream.
But to feel it,
one must be an apostle:
one who is more than intimate
in having been, always,
the only confidant –
like the earth
or the sea.
– Alfred Kreymborg
Chögyam Trungpa ~ Innocent Mind, Innocent Projections
Mind and its projections are innocent. They are very ordinary, very natural, and very simple. Red is not evil, and white is not divine; blue is not evil, and green is not divine. Sky is sky; rock is rock; earth is earth; mountains are mountains. I am what I am, and you are what you are. Therefore, there are no particular obstacles to experiencing our world properly, and nothing is regarded as problematic.
Oh, if a tree could wander
and move with foot and wings!
It would not suffer the axe blows
and not the pain of saws!
For would the sun not wander
away in every night ?
How could at every morning
the world be lighted up?
And if the ocean’s water
would not rise to the sky,
How would the plants be quickened
by streams and gentle rain?
The drop that left its homeland,
the sea, and then returned?
It found an oyster waiting
and grew into a pearl.
Did Joseph not leave his father,
in grief and tears and despair?
Did he not, by such a journey,
gain kingdom and fortune wide?
Did not the Prophet travel
to far Medina, friend?
And there he found a new kingdom
and ruled a hundred lands.
You lack a foot to travel?
Then journey into yourself!
And like a mine of rubies
receive the sunbeams’ print!
Out of yourself, such a journey
will lead you to your self,
It leads to transformation
of dust into pure gold!
– Rumi
One reason people insist that you use the proper channels to change things is because they have control of the proper channels and they’re confident it won’t work.
– Crispin Hunt
on reddest rose
a dying monarch
praying
– Rick Davis
I come weary,
In search of an inn—
Ah! These wisteria flowers!
– Matsuo Basho
Getting started, keeping going, getting started again — in art and in life, it seems to me this is the essential rhythm not only of achievement but of survival, the basis of self-esteem & the guarantee of credibility in your lives, credibility to yourselves as well as to others.
– Seamus Heaney
free-markets, by definition, are a contradiction in terms. markets are never free. the capitalist markets operate in accordance to very strict and inflexible internal laws of its own, laws that resist most attempts at outside intervention (except for taxpayers bailouts). human interaction with the markets and its laws is motivated by, and mediated through, some of the basest of human psychological traits, such as greed and materialism. we are free to be in the market but the market does not make us free, as by participating in it, we consent to be bound for life to its near absolutist rules. from a dialogical perspective it is clear that what we get out of our interactions with the market, is exactly what we have brought in to it in the first place. in the capitalist markets, we, the people, become the commodities the market buys and sells.
– Hune Margulies
fisherman
praying sacred texts & renewing meditation
help me to loose my small self
& touch Light & revere
the whimsical song of a fisherman
inviting God back into earth’s garden
mists of rain on the ephemeral river
as the gray moon peeks in & out from
dusky pearl clouds
the fisherman intones simple pop tunes
helping the Universe to expand
his is unpretentious elegance
that i can’t even begin to describe
nor shouldn’t
– Rick Davis
Time and memory redeems and commends.
And the difference between
This moment and no moment at all
Between the light and nothingness of the fall–
The readiness of so short a scene–
Is everywhere and everything.
– Chad Chisholm
He told her to look at a clear sky whenever she began to doubt him, for the stars meant every way he loved her.
– Greg Sellers
For he would be thinking of love Till the stars had run away And the shadows eaten the moon.
– W.B. Yeats
Go out and do something. It isn’t your room that’s a prison, it’s yourself.
– Sylvia Plath
Well, let it pass, he thought; April is over, April is over. There are all kinds of love in the world, but never the same love twice.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
Love’s not the way to treat a friend.
I wouldn’t wish that on you. I don’t
want to see your eyes forgotten
on a rainy day, lost in the endless purse
of those who can remember nothing.
Love’s not the way to treat a friend.
I don’t want to see you end up that way
with your body being poured like wounded
marble into the architecture of those who make
bridges out of crippled birds.
Love’s not the way to treat a friend.
There are so many better things for you
than to see your feelings sold
as magic lanterns to somebody whose body
casts no light.
– Richard Brautigan
[…] one abyss comes, another goes,
and the world is a choice.
– Adonis
Tell the king; the fair wrought house has fallen
No shelter has Apollo, nor sacred laurel leaves
The fountains are now silent; the voice is stilled.
It is finished.
– The final recorded words of the last Oracle of Delphi, 395 AD
You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words: but most of your friends do not see it at all, and often wonder why, liking this, you should also like that. Again, you have stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you have been looking for all your life; and then turned to the friend at your side who appears to be seeing what you saw – but at the first words a gulf yawns between you, and you realise that this landscape means something totally different to him, that he is pursuing an alien vision and cares nothing for the ineffable suggestion by which you are transported. Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of – something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clapclap of water against the boat’s side? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it – tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest – if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say “Here at last is the thing I was made for.” We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.
– C.S. Lewis
Be what you are becoming without clinging to what you might have been; what you might yet be.
– Luce Irigaray
What are we without our teachers?
– Marian Haddad
The search for happiness is not about looking at life through rose-colored glasses or blinding oneself to the pain and imperfections of the world. Nor is happiness a state of exaltation to be perpetuated at all costs; it is the purging of mental toxins, such as hatred and obsession, that literally poison the mind. It is also about learning how to put things in perspective and reduce the gap between appearances and reality. To that end we must acquire a better knowledge of how the mind works and a more accurate insight into the nature of things, for in its deepest sense, suffering is intimately linked to a misapprehension of the nature of reality.
– Matthieu Ricard
I’m waiting for you, I’m waiting for the evening calm, I’m waiting for our time, the oblique light, this pause between day and night. Peace will come, surely. But I can imagine no other peace than that of our two bodies bound together, of our gaze given over to each other – I have no other homeland but you.
– Albert Camus, Letter to Maria Casarès
Rest and be kind, you don’t have to prove anything.
– Jack Kerouac
ANYONE’S DESIRE?
Does anyone
really desire
rivers on fire
and no good paying jobs
as only choices?
Accept the phrases
“good economy”
“new way to work”
“reinvent” ?
Voices that
question exponentially repeated
statements presented
as axioms
ridiculed
vocally
electronically
and printed
with cliches
spoken, typed
reflexively
May we ask
“with any
Reflection?
– Jerry Pendergast
Gardening simply does not allow one to be mentally old, because too many hopes and dreams are yet to be realized.
– Allan Armitage
If there is a task for readers…it is to never stop trying to understand why something was written, and for whom.
– Heinz Helle
I shall keep on feeling less and less and remembering more and more, but what is memory if not the language of feeling, a dictionary of faces and days and smells which repeat themselves like the verbs and adjectives in a speech, sneaking in behind the thing itself, into the pure present, making us sad or teaching us vicariously until one’s self itself becomes a vicar, the backward-looking face opens its eyes wide, the real face slowly becomes dim as in old pictures… Oh, let me come in, let me see some day the way your eyes see.
– Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch
Hune Margulies:
in honor of may 1, this quote from one of the most profound pacifist-humanist-revolutionary thinkers and activists of the last century “what i call anarchism is a basic mood which may be found in every man who thinks seriously about the world and the spirit. i mean the impulse in man to be reborn, to be renewed and to refashion his essence, and then to shape his surroundings and the world, to the extent that it can be controlled. such a sublime moment should fall to the lot of everyone.
– gustav landauer, anarchic meditations about anarchy
A Golden Day
I found you and I lost you,
All on a gleaming day.
The day was filled with sunshine,
And the land was full of May.
A golden bird was singing
Its melody divine,
I found you and I loved you,
And all the world was mine.
I found you and I lost you,
All on a golden day,
But when I dream of you, dear,
It is always brimming May.
– Paul Laurence Dunbar
Reveille
Come forth, you workers!
Let the fires go cold—
Let the iron spill out, out of the troughs—
Let the iron run wild
Like a red bramble on the floors—
Leave the mill and the foundry and the mine
And the shrapnel lying on the wharves—
Leave the desk and the shuttle and the loom—
Come,
With your ashen lives,
Your lives like dust in your hands.
I call upon you, workers.
It is not yet light
But I beat upon your doors.
You say you await the Dawn
But I say you are the Dawn.
Come, in your irresistible unspent force
And make new light upon the mountains.
You have turned deaf ears to others—
Me you shall hear.
Out of the mouths of turbines,
Out of the turgid throats of engines,
Over the whisling steam,
You shall hear me shrilly piping.
Your mills I shall enter like the wind,
And blow upon your hearts,
Kindling the slow fire.
They think they have tamed you, workers—
Beaten you to a tool
To scoop up a hot honor
Till it be cool—
But out of the passion of the red frontiers
A great flower trembles and burns and glows
And each of its petals is a people.
Come forth, you workers—
Clinging to your stable
And your wisp of warm straw—
Let the fires grow cold,
Let the iron spill out of the troughs,
Let the iron run wild
Like a red bramble on the floors . . .
As our forefathers stood on the prairies
So let us stand in a ring,
Let us tear up their prisons like grass
And beat them to barricades—
Let us meet the fire of their guns
With a greater fire,
Till the birds shall fly to the mountains
For one safe bough.
– Lola Ridge
Beltane Prayer
It may be dangerous to beseech the sun
in times of drought.
It may be risky to seek his attention
when the holy wells have dried out
and people – who dragged fragments
of their Celtic fairy tales
across an ocean, over blood-soaked fields,
and into the desert – sparked a bonfire
and
burned the whole world down.
Still, Bridget or Patrick help me,
I trust to magic,
even misunderstood magic,
and ask for solar deliverance.
Sunshine,
igniting the horizon every morning
with harsh realities,
offers answers more dependable
than the old gods or new, ever do.
In the afternoon,
at the height of his powers,
the sun hums over my skin
and burns my brown beard red.
Then, the difference between
simple sound and prayer
disappears on the speech
of little lizard feet skittering across
the baked, fallen fronds
of a date palm tree.
It’s just hard to hear
during this noisy Beltane week.
Sunshine and little lizard feet
are not enough when I long
to soothe myself by imagining any of us
can remember any of our
starving ancestors’ actual prayers.
The best I can do is weep
by a mine, a mission, and a massacre site forgotten by the McSons and O’Daughters
of the immigrant diggers, builders, and killers.
Ghosts tell me that only amnesiacs
insist that traditions can be ripped
from the land who created them
and imported like whiskey
to drown the horror of the diaspora.
A different kind of banshee
clothed in coyote furs and eagle feathers screeches that the Beltane weather
is not complicit in America’s
gilded veneer.
Sometimes, though,when you’re
desperate or drunk enough to forget,
it just seems that way.
– Will Falk
I lost my right eye in 1982
it happens
a day before
Easter when
I was eight-years-old
it was Holy Saturday
for everyone else
for me it became
my holey-eyeterday
~ you see what happened was
there was this stick
that was just minding
it’s own business
being a pretend wand
in the hands of
a pretend wizard
named David
and I ran right into it
pupil first
the last thing I
remember seeing
with my right eye
was David’s face
as he was casting a spell
to kill an invisible orc
and then came
the indescribable pain
of my exploding lens
I passed out
when I woke up
about five minutes later
I was l sitting in
my dad’s chair
that he spent
two hours a night
reading mystery novels in
I knew I must
have been in
bad shape if
they were letting
me sit in that chair
I could only open my
left eye
my right eye was sewn shut
with agony
my dad was talking to
me but I couldn’t
quite hear what he was saying
the only thing I could focus on
was the sound of my mom
crying behind him
“Open you eye. Let me look,”
my dad said with hands on my face
I rememeber his fingers were covered in soil
he must have been gardening
when he got the news that I
had been struck by some dark magic
I tried to open my eye
~ I couldn’t.
There was a monster of bark and wood
under my eyelid devouring my sight
one slow cruel chew at a time
with a bit of force
my dad helped me pry
my eye open for a fat second
and I watched with my
left eye how his face
turned grey
“shit…” he said
the light poured into my
right eye like lava
my right eye became fire
~ and I passed out again
the next thing I remember
I was laying in the back
of my parent’s white Zephyr
as they raced me to the hospital
fresh smell of pesticide
my dad had, in fact,
been gardening
poor dad
one minute he was planting carrots at his
garden downtown
the next he was watching his son
through his rearview mirror
convulse in the back of his car
thus is the life of a parent
from turnips to tragedy
in a heartbeat
My head in my moms lap
her hands on my forehead
shaking
my mom loved me
but she was never really
that physically affectionate
so the feel of her hands on my head
was like a comet
rare
comforting
celestial
my nose started bleeding
and I passed out again
woke up a day later
with a eye patch
the size of Panama
it was Easter
but there would be no resurrection
for my sight
the tomb of my vision still
had a stone in front of it
I was devastated ~ destroyed -despondent
a man in a white
coat came in with
a brown clipboard
and told me even though
I had endured a
six hour surgery
that my right eye was
destroyed
“like The Death Star?”
I asked
“I don’t know what that is” the doctor said
I hated him for that answer
how could somebody
of science and medicine
not know what The Death Star is?
It was in that
exact moment that
I learned to never
trust a person who
was big on clipboards
but little on pop culture
since that day
before Easter
when I was eight
when I lost my right eye
the only thing
I can see are the
things that are to
the left of me
~ and the things that are left of me
~and the people that have left me
~ and what little time I have left
I usually couldn’t see anything
right in front of me
now, 38 years later
I am left with
grey hair
~and parents who left me for the great beyond
~ and a right eye that I am left with
that aches every time it rains
~ and I was left with
the memories
of that big stick
~and of David’s face
~and that red chair with my dad
~and that car ride with my mom
~and that doctor
~and everything that came after
all of the good times
~and all of the bad
but here is the biggest
plot twist of it all
well, two plot twists really
1) my “good” eye is beginning to fade
apparently putting all of the strain on a single
eye to take in all of the wonder of the world isn’t
really all that good for it
and (more concerning)
2) my memories are starting to drift
away
away
away
a….w…a…y from me
the details of the past are starting to swirl
and fade and mist and morph
I’m losing my memories
which is terrifying for a guy who has spent
most of his life looking backwards
for a man with one eye
the present has always been
my blind spot
~ and now so is the past
I haven’t been able to see
what’s right in front of me
~ and now I am having a
hard time seeing what’s behind
but here nearly 40-years later
~ despite my fading vision
and my melting ice cube brain
I’m filled with hope
because there are other ways to see
the world then with just my eyes
and there are other ways to experience
the past then just with my mind
turns out
the less I see
the more beauty
I’m starting to witness
&
the less I can remember about yesterday
the more I’m able to able to enjoy the now
this is why I think I became
a poet
I keep getting swaddled up
by every emotion I come into
contact with

with my fading vision
and loosening memory
all of my senses
are now seemingly tied to my heart
it has my ears, eyes, tongue
fingers, nose and brain
my heart is my seeing eye dog
and despite my complaining
it keeps leading me into
wilderness of the human experience
everywhere I go
I’m surrounded by emotion
~ whether it’s mine or someone else’s
I’m like the kid in the movie
“Sixth Sense”
who sees ghosts
but instead of seeing phantoms
I am visited by feelings
they seep under my door
they walk through my walls
they climb down my chimney
it’s relentless
I may not be able to see
or remember anything every well
any more
but I can sure feel
emotions follow me
everywhere I go
a child laughing next to me
in a grocery store line
and suddenly I’m filled
so the the helium of joy
a grieving widow’s tears
always create a stream of my own
~ whether I know her or not
it’s everywhere
the rage
the passion
the joy
the love
the sadness
I can’t escape any
of the emotions of this
world
I feel it all
even if the feelings aren’t mine
sometimes especially they aren’t mine
I can taste it all on my lips
your emotions running
over my skin like bath water
I can sense the world’s emotions
rising up like a bouquet in my nostrils
filling up the dark space in my blindness
overwhelming my cobwebbed memories
I can barely see and I can hardly think
but holy hell
I can sure feel
and now I’ve become a content wanderer
who writes every a poem about
every I emotion that I encounter
on the road of my life
because they are all I have left
many years ago, I woke
up in a hospital bed on
Easter morning thinking
my sight was gone
~ then my heart opened her blazing eyes for the first time and said:
“Don’t worry ~ I got you.”
– john roedel
The Wind, One Brilliant Day
by Antonio Machado
The wind, one brilliant day, called
to my soul with an odor of jasmine.
“In return for the odor of my jasmine,
I’d like all the odor of your roses.”
“I have no roses; all the flowers
in my garden are dead.”
“Well then, I’ll take the withered petals
and the yellow leaves and the waters of the fountain.”
The wind left. And I wept. And I said to myself:
“What have you done with the garden that was entrusted to you?”
/ Deep down, the young are lonelier than the old. /
– Anne Frank
“Nobody is doing anything” is usually a sign of someone not doing anything, because if you’re doing it you’re aware of the others doing it and benefitting from the solidarity and encouragement of their commitment and maybe evidence that doing something might have an effect.
– Rebecca Solnit
i don’t really want to talk about it anymore—
the thing that has grown accustomed to my name, ivy
snaking up my walls, its sticky mouth holding on
refusing to make space for other things. how i water it
every week, give it light
and a place in which to breathe, how i say:
this is all mine.
this is what was done to me.
this is what i have been given.
i vow to keep it alive, to keep taking cuttings to plant in little pots.
in case i begin to forget.
now, at this age
even my words shy away when i call them.
they have always been too honest.
they say: oh no, not this again.
they say: it is time, let it go now.
they say: you are a thousand other stories, not just one.
rip it off the stone, show it just enough mercy to keep
yourself from returning to check its pulse, just enough
mercy to dispose of its body.
let’s tie it up with an old rope, attach it to a new rock.
let’s drop it over the edge, watch it sink.
once and for all, let’s leave it behind.
see how it is November again, pay attention to the light.
you are circling closer to the door, closer to the moment
in which you will have just enough time to say:
wait. so soon? is it already time to go?
in which you will say:
wait. is this really what mattered the most? what i held onto?
stop. please. i am not ready yet.
i only want to remember the things i should have held closer.
— you are a thousand other stories too
– Liezel Graham
There is one true religion and it doesn’t have a name.
– Mark Bittner
I’ve got a tune in my head I can’t let go,
Unlike the landscape, heavy and wan,
Sunk like a stone in the growing night,
Snuffed in the heart like a candle flame that won’t come back.
– Charles Wright
You’re teaching me to live inside the space
between two stanzas and not leave a trace.
(You write and write, but oh what you erase!)
– Marisa de los Santos
How seldom we can see our way to say what we love.
– Richard Jackson
I love poems that have an architectural or sculptural quality, rather than a rhetorical or narrative linking structure. I admire reading poems like that by poets who work in the mode of creating the sort of situation that’s uncovered through the movement of mind in language. I’m really excited about poems constructed in a way that might not be how a person ordinarily thinks, but the poet is a creating a work of art somewhat different from ordinary thought pattern.
– Kazim Ali
The day you forget how to disobey, you lose your soul.
– Osho
HEALING, BEYOND HEALING…
Sometimes, when you heal,
your body gets all ‘better’.
Infections leave. Wounds disappear.
You feel happier. Brighter.
More positive.
Sometimes, healing looks very, very different.
An infection or growth stays.
An old pain resurfaces.
You don’t feel ‘healed’ at all.
You feel worse than ever.
Powerful, uncomfortable feelings emerge.
Rage.
Deep sorrow.
Terrors you never knew were in you.
(Ah, but they were, friend, they were…)
This is healing, too. This falling apart.
This coming alive.
This shattering of repression.
The image of ‘healing’ falls apart.
(The image was false, anyway.)
Trust.
Trust the energies that are moving through you now.
You may feel ‘worse’, yes,
but you are getting better at living.
You are experiencing a deeper kind of healing,
one which doesn’t match the mind’s definitions and fantasies.
This is a reintegration.
A death… and a rebirth.
Darkness emerging into light.
All the bits you ran away from,
coming to you now
for love and acceptance.
Throw away your childhood fantasies of healing.
Fall apart. Lose the future.
Die into the Now.
Break apart for love.
You are whole, even though
your dreams are being shattered.
This is true healing, then:
Recontacting the Wholeness
that you are.
– Jeff Foster
I’m still trying
to convince my shadow
that it chose me
for a reason.
– Ebony Stewart
Ilya Kaminsky:
Novel: you enter someone else’s country and try to live in it.
Poem: suddenly you realize you don’t need any country.
To choose to live as a poet in the modern superstate is in itself a political action.
– Stanley Kunitz
What did I need money for, when I had friends
– Henry Miller
A poet should establish a whole new set of possibilities for the reader and for him- or herself.
– J. H. Prynne
Time Frame
by Jorie Graham
The American experiment will end in 2030 she said
looking into the cards,
the charts, the stars, the mathematics of it, looking
into our palms, into all of our
palms, into the leaves at the
bottom of
the empty cup – searching its emptiness, its piles of dead
bodies or is it grass at the edge
of the field where the abandoned radio is crackling
at the winter-stilled waters, the winter-killed
will of God – in the new world now the old world –
staring quietly without emotion into the rotten meat
in the abandoned shops, moving aside with one easy gesture
the broken furniture, the fourth wall
smashed
& all
the private lives of the highrise apartments
exposed to the city then
wind. Ash everywhere. The sounds of
crying. Loud then
soft. It will not seem like it’s
dying
right away, she said. What is the ‘it’ you refer to I
ask. Is it a place. Is it
an idea. A place is
an idea, an idea is for a while a place. Look
she says, there are
two fates. One is the idea one is the place.
And everywhere I see water.
As in blessing? As in baptism?
As in renewal? No,
as in the meadows disappear under the sea.
Then I heard a sound in the far
distance where her gaze rested. Are those
drums? Are we in the distant past or the distant
future I ask. The witches float in the air
above us. There are three. Of
course there are three. They have returned. No,
your ability to see them
has returned. Your
willingness. She asked for
cold wine and a railway schedule. It was time
she said, to move on, her gaze
looking out at the avenues and smaller streets,
at the silk dresses on the mannequins in
storefronts, all of them, across the
planet, the verandas poking out under the
hemlocks, violin strings crossing from
one century to another, although now I could hear they were
sirens all along,
invisible and desperate the warnings
in their rise & fall –
are you not listening
are you not listening –
yes those are sirens in the streets but here,
up close, in the recording of the
orchestra, the violin solo
has begun, it is screaming from one
ruined soul to another to beware, to pull the
bloody bodies from the invisible
where we are putting them daily –
no, every minute, no,
faster – we are o-
bliterating the one chance we had to be
good. There it is. The word. It brings us up
short. I notice she is gone. The
American project she had said, putting the words
out into the kitchen air with some measure of
kindness. It was not the only one, she sd, but it was
the last one.
After it, time ran out. We both looked out the window
still shocked by the beauty of the moonlight
in this Spring. Are we running out
of Springs I had wanted to
ask. Is the oxygen. Will there be no more open
channels. Can one not live
beneath. A little life in the
morning. Crazed police cars in the distance
but here this sunflower
which seeded itself,
seeded its mathematics & religion in our tiny
backyard,
will do. The creaking
doorhandle we love,
the spider we help come back after each wind
by letting the hanging vine
which needs to be trimmed
just stay – just stay I whisper to myself –
stay under, don’t startle
time, the century
will go by – you can mind
your own business. You can finger the rolled up
leaf, feel its veins, you can watch the engines go by
over all the bridges
above you.
You can remain unassimilated. The
American project she said, will end
in 2030. Said find land away from here. Find
trustworthy water.
Have it in place
by then. I paid her.
I saw the bills go into the pocket
in her purse. Her shoes were so worn.
Her terror was nowhere. I looked at my garden.
It was dry here and there.
The shoots were starting up. Like a
dream they were poking through the rusty
fence.
I am spending my life, I thought. I am un-
prepared. It is running thru
my fingers. The wind is
still wild. My bones hurt sometimes
causing pain. It is not terror.
I feel for the cash in my pocket.
I do not have time to prepare.
I am comfortable.
Time passes and I am still here. I am
getting by. I replace one
calendar with another. I put seed out
for birds and sometimes one
comes. Once I saw two.
The spider is still here. I remember how geese
used to fly over. It meant something.
I remember when there were planes
& I could see them catch the light up there. What a
paradise. Some people had
enough. They were not happy but they were
able to come and go
at will.
They could leave
their houses. At any time. Anytime. And go
where they wished. Sometimes
we shared ideas. It
filled the time. We agreed or we did not.
They were not afraid. I was not
afraid. Summer would come soon.
It would get warmer. It might rain too hard.
When it flooded we worked to fix it.
We did as we saw fit.
Hi neighbour we would say across the fence
to the one tending their portion of the
disaster.
It will be ok again soon,
one of us would say. We were allowed to
speak then. It was permitted.
One of us might dream. One of us might
despair. But we cleaned up the
debris together & the next day sun came
& we were able to sit in it
as long as our hearts desired.
I don’t like people who ask you to follow or believe. I like people who ask you to think independently.
– A. S. Byatt
and what if every time you were asked where you’re from you simply pointed to your heart?
– @marwahelal
I can throw a book across the room but then I gotta go back and pick it up.
– Fred Moten
There is a sweetness of May verging on June that no other time in the whole year can equal. And by sweetness is meant more than flower fragrance or honey taste; this is the greater sweetness of understanding and emotion, the glow of pleasure in being.
– Hal Borland
It is time for us to take off our masks, to step out from behind our personas – whatever they might be: educators, activists, biologists, geologists, writers, farmers, ranchers, and bureaucrats – and admit we are lovers, engaged in an erotics of place. Loving the land. Honoring its mysteries. Acknowledging, embracing the spirit of place – there is nothing more legitimate and there is nothing more true. That is why we are here. That is why we do what we do. There is nothing intellectual about it. We love the land. It is a primal affair…
– Terry Tempest Williams
I wear my wonder
like old running shoes—
not elegant,
not sophisticated,
surprisingly inappropriate
in certain rooms.
I notice how others
sometimes wrinkle their noses
at a blatant sporting of wonder,
thinking, perhaps, I must be oblivious
to the dress code:
stilettos of apathy,
high heels of indifference,
boots of cool reserve.
But dang, this wonder
gets me where I need to go
every inch,
every mile, even
across the room.
When everywhere I step
is broken glass,
wearing this wonder
is the only reason
I can move at all.
– Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, Wonder
The rising hills, the slopes,
of statistics
lie before us.
the steep climb
of everything, going up,
up, as we all
go down.
In the next century
or the one beyond that,
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.
To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children:
stay together
learn the flowers
go light.
– Gary Snyder
You have to leave the city of your comfort
and go into the wilderness of your intuition.
What you’ll discover will be wonderful.
What you’ll discover is yourself.
– Alan Alda
Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.
– Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost
It is possible I never learned the names of birds in order to discover the bird of peace, the bird of paradise, the bird of the soul, the bird of desire. It is possible I avoided learning the names of composers and their music the better to close my eyes and listen to the mystery of all music as an ocean. It may be I have not learned dates in history in order to reach the essence of timelessness. It may be I never learned geography the better to map my own routes and discover my own lands. The unknown was my compass. The unknown was my encyclopedia. The unnamed was my science and progress.
– Anais Nin
This land is a poem of ochre and burnt sand I could never write,
unless paper were the sacrament of sky, and ink the broken line of wild horses staggering the horizon several miles away.
Even then, does anything written ever matter to the earth, wind, and sky?
– Joy Harjo
When the human world feels heavy,
take yourself to the homely arms of oak,
into the whispers of the ocean and find the call of bird.
Let new languages, new sounds, new meanings fill your bones.
Let the beauty of this more than human world settle your frightened heart.
Let your wider community show you, strengthen you, let them tell you stories of the wildness that is seeded from the darkness.
Find the white of blackthorn blossom amidst the bare spaces, the gold of celandine and the song of the bee.
Let rose and hawthorn hold your heart, and nettle strengthen your resolve.
Let dandelion’s medicine speak to you of courage, weaving tales of tenacity and rewilding into your gut.
Find the verdant seedlings grown from death, the young Elder birthed from a breaking.
Watch how the little alchemists, the insects, the fungi and the worms eat the shit and turn it into gold.
You are more than stagnant human in concrete and chaos.
You are wild, wise and ensouled.
Let yourself remember…
– Brigit Anna McNeill
Benedicto: May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you – beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.
– Edward Abbey
In a troubled time, the willingness to proceed like you’re needed is a radical act.
– Stephen Jenkinson
Go gently today, don’t hurry
or think about the next thing. Walk
with the quiet trees, can you believe
how brave they are—how kind?
Model your life
after theirs.
Blow kisses
at yourself in the mirror
especially when
you think you’ve messed up.
Forgive yourself for not meeting your unreasonable
expectations. You are human, not
God—don’t be so arrogant.
Praise fresh air
clean water, good dogs.
Spin
something from joy. Open
a window, even if
it’s cold outside. Sit. Close
your eyes. Breathe. Allow
the river
of it all to pulse
through eyelashes
fingertips, bare toes. Breathe in
breathe out. Breathe until
you feel
your bigness, until the sun
rises in your veins. Breathe
until you stop needing
anything
to be different.
– Julia Fehrenbacher
Please bring strange things.
Please come bringing new things.
Let very old things come into your hands.
Let what you do not know come into your eyes.
Let desert sand harden your feet.
Let the arch of your feet be the mountains.
Let the paths of your fingertips be your maps
and the ways you go be the lines on your palms.
Let there be deep snow in your inbreathing
and your outbreath be the shining of ice.
May your mouth contain the shapes of strange words.
May you smell food cooking you have not eaten.
May the spring of a foreign river be your navel.
May your soul be at home where there are no houses.
Walk carefully, well loved one,
walk mindfully, well loved one,
walk fearlessly, well loved one.
Return with us, return to us,
be always coming home.
– Ursula LeGuin
Leonard Cohen: I think unemployment is the great affliction of man. Even people with jobs are unemployed. In fact, most people with jobs are unemployed. I can say, happily and gratefully, that I am fully employed. Maybe all hard work means is fully employed.
Humans beings always do the most intelligent thing… after they’ve tried every stupid alternative and none of them have worked.
– R. Buckminster Fuller
On Starlit Prairie Road
last night
I thought of you
– Nicholas Pierotti
There is no place for arrogance in the arts, but neither is there room for doubt or a perpetual need for affirmation. If you come to me with doubts about a particular move in a piece, or if you come to me and ask if what you’ve written has truth and power in it, these are doubts I can handle and respect. But if you come to me and moan about whether or not you really have a place in the dance or the theatre or film, I’ll be the first person to pack your bags and walk you to the door. You are either admitting that you lack the talent and the will, or you are just looking for some easy attention. I don’t have time for that. The world doesn’t have time for that. Believe in your worth and work with a will so that others will see it. That’s how it is done; that’s how it was always done.
– Martha Graham
I love the Buddha, I really do. But I am not promoting the religion of “Buddhism” for anyone.
I love just as much Ms. Buddha the Vajrayoginī, Her Holiness the Shekinah, the Great Mother, the blessed Moses, holy Mary, sweet Jesus, brave Khadijah, the holy Muhammad, wise Laozi, insightful Confucius, Radha and Krishna, Uma and Shiva, White Buffalo Woman, Wakan Tanka, Quetzalcoatl, Chalchiuhtlicue, countless shamanic teachers of indigenous peoples, and every single wise and loving grandmother.
So many holy teachers, gods, and saints! They all perform such wonders and benefit so many, opening all kinds of amazing doors for all kinds of beautiful people, each to discover their own divine qualities, their wise intelligence and loving heart.
– Robert A.F Thurman
Any writer who knows what he’s doing isn’t doing very much.
– Nelson Algren
Here be Dragons
by John Flynn
We are sailing on a vessel
‘Cross a sea of space and time
No thought given to the dangers
or the world we leave behind
Though the waters are well charted
Stubbornly we steer this boat
Toward the place upon the map of which
The mapmakers all wrote
Here be dragons
Here be dragons
It is not old superstitions to which
These wise words refer
Not the tales of drunken sailors
But to havoc we’ve observed
Even those who plot our course
Admit these warnings are no sham
The proof is indisputable
They just dont give a damn
Here be dragons
Here be dragons
There are men who worship power
On the bridge of this old ship
With greed as their only compass
And with no care that the trip
Causes misery and death
To those in steerage down below
They crash blindly through the waves
Of desperation though they know
Here be dragons
Here be dragons
Here be dragons here be dragons
Here be dragons yes it’s true
Rising oceans storms and wild fires
Pestilence and famine too
Here be dragons where the poor will die
Or flee to higher ground
We must first take back the ship
Then we must turn this boat around
Here be dragons here be dragons
Deadly dragons to avoid
As the glaciers melt away and earth’s green places are destroyed
We can burn more coal and oil as the air turns thick and brown
Or we can chart a brand new course
And try to turn this boat around
We must first take back the ship
Then we must turn this thing around
Early Spring
We began as mineral.
We emerged into plant life and
into the animal state,
then to being human.
And always we have
forgotten our former states,
except in early spring,
when we dimly recall
being green again.
– Rumi
Yesterday is grainy, thumb-smudged, more
than a little out of focus,
as if a mirror of departures,
As if a spirit house open to the elements–
– Eric Pankey
Three Words
by Li-Young Lee
God-My-Father gave me three words:
O-My-Love
O-My-God
Holy-Holy-Holy.
God-My-Mother’s wounds will never heal.
God-My-Brother is always alone in the library.
Meanwhile, I can’t remember
how many brothers I have.
God-My-Sister, combing the knots out of my hair,
says that’s because
so many brothers died before I learned to count,
and the ones who died after I acquired arithmetic
so exceeded the number of brothers still alive.
God-My-Father gave me three words to live by.
O-My-Love. O-My-God. Holy-Holy-Holy.
Why won’t God-My-Mother’s wounds heal?
Wounding myself doesn’t cauterize her wounds.
Another wound to her won’t seal her open blooms.
Her voice is a flowering tree struck by lightning.
It goes on greening and flowering,
but come petal-fall, its blossoms dropping
thunder so loud I must cover my ears to hear her.
Meanwhile, God-My-Brother spends every afternoon
alone with the books God-My-Father writes.
Some days he looks up
from a page, wearing the very face of horror.
Ask him what’s the matter
and he’ll stare into your eyes and whisper, “Murder!”
He’ll howl, “Murder!” He’ll scream, “Murder!”
Until he’s hoarse or exhausted.
Or until God-My-Sister sits him down,
combs and braids his hair,
and sorts his dreams.
I’m counting out loud all of my brothers’ names,
the living and the dead, on my fingers.
But the list is long,
leading back to the beginning
of the building of the first human cities,
and I keep losing my place and starting over.
Once, I remembered them all
except the first pair.
God-My-Sister says I must never say those names, never
pronounce the names of that first pair of brothers
within earshot of God-My-Brother.
God-My-Father gave me only three words.
How will I ever learn to talk like other people?
God-My-Mother sings, and her voice
comes like winter to break open the seeds.
God-My-Brother spends most of his time alone.
God-My-Sister is the only one
he’ll ever let touch his face.
God-My-Sister, you should see her.
I have so many brothers,
but forever there will be
only one of her, God-My-Sister.
God-My-Father says from those three words
he gave me, all other words descend, branching.
That still leaves me unfit
for conversation, like some deranged bird
you can’t tell is crying in grief or exultation,
all day long repeating,
“O, my God. O, my love. Holy, holy, holy.”
I am Grey. I stand between the candle and the star. We are Grey. We stand between the darkness and the light.
– James McDowell
He who despairs of spring with downcast eye steps on it, unknowingly. He who searches for spring with his knees in the mud finds it, in abundance.
– Aldo Leopold
Why does one begin to write?
Because she wants to rephrase the world,
to take it in and give it back again differently,
so that everything is used
and nothing is lost.
– Nicole Krauss
New Bones
by Lucille Clifton
we will wear
new bones again.
we will leave
these rainy days,
break out through
another mouth
into sun and honey time.
worlds buzz over us like bees,
we be splendid in new bones.
other people think they know
how long life is.
how strong life is.
we know.
Here is the crux of the Zen approach to liberation. The shackles of poverty and oppression are visible to the ordinary eye, and it is not hard to find agreement in sympathy for those thus afflicted. Often, however, people—and peoples—are chained by shackles that they in fact treasure. As one Zen master said, it is hard for people to see anything wrong with what they like, or to see anything good in what they do not like. Another Zen master noted that familiarity itself is a quality that people are generally inclined to like. This means that predilections and habits with which people feel comfortable at a given time may serve them for comfort but may in fact be holding them back from greater capacity for progress and fulfillment.
– Thomas Cleary, Zen Essence
A great gulf yawns now
between me and my retinue,
between craziness and reason
– Seamus Heaney
Travel addiction is a serious problem in our society, and can even be said to be negligent, in our era of reduced carbon footprints. It is so much easier to hop from place to place, than to do the hard work of self-examination, facing our fears, finding our true identity and purpose in life, and creating a bond with place.
I talk about mobility addiction, and the importance of bioregionalism in my book ‘
‘Ancient Spirit Rising.’ Constantly in motion, the mandate of empirical expansion to head West and occupy the “frontier” has been a constant in the Euro-founding of the Americas, culminating in our massive propensity for travel and innovation. As promoted by the conquest agenda of “manifest destiny,” the entitlement to be in motion for business or pleasure is one of our greatest freedoms. The impulse to move around the continent instead of staying in one place is a foundational myth of the Americas, and these massive movements of “globalsapiens” have created a society without roots, or any notion of rootedness. If somewhere or something doesn’t suit us, there is always somewhere or something else that does. (Hopefully! Or if not, keep moving.)
The emphasis on mobility and consumption does not promote sustainability, reciprocity, respect or gratitude for the land, and this neophile dysfunction has been accurately described by various Indigenous scholars as a “predator and prey” relationship. Also, the entire system called “globalization” attacks our localized bonds to the land, and should be rejected in favor of reclaiming a sacred relationship with place, food, soil and community. To restore our world, we need to stay in one place, sink our roots deep, learn about local history, plants and animals, and support healthy, living food systems, local food markets and local farmers committed to ecological practices. We can all play a part in honoring and creating these new systems, for rewilding and re-landing in place ~!
– Pegi Eyers, Where Are You Located?
Chore
My friend turns anything into
prayer. Sweeping the leaves, shaving
his beard, washing dishes —
every act a purging
of what doesn’t serve. Today
I’m folding laundry. I start with jeans,
crisp from the dryer, smoothing the creases
then draping them on wooden hangers.
Shaking wrinkles from the sheets, I square
the corners the way Mother taught.
White T-shirts stacked flat on a shelf,
sundresses on felt hangers, sweaters
nestled in drawers. I find a place
for every blouse, every scarf, until
it feels inevitable. 𝘖𝘳𝘥𝘦𝘳 𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘥𝘢𝘺𝘴 —
the remnant floats up from decades
of Sundays like words of a forgotten song — 𝘪𝘯 𝘠𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘱𝘦𝘢𝘤𝘦. My mantra:
𝘧𝘰𝘭𝘥, 𝘩𝘢𝘯𝘨, 𝘳𝘦𝘱𝘦𝘢𝘵, the hamper
half-empty, the bureau warm
with balled up socks.
– Angela Narciso Torres
Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.
– Mortimer J. Adler
CASSANDRA
There is no joy in being
Cassandra
To see what others are too
Blind to see
To be ridiculed and mocked
For an untimely gift
To be reviled
Ostracized
Shunned
Why is it people
Cannot recognize or understand
The meaning
Of love?
Why would anyone risk so much
If the burden of love
Were not so great?
Truth is love
In the end
And love is truth.
It is a gift many
Take with them to their graves
But they die knowing
The sanctity of their vision
Their solitary, inviolable truth
Was upheld
For the betterment of
All.
– Laurence Overmire
It is alright to take up space in this world: It’s why this spherical expanse exists.
Don’t shrink; don’t avert your eyes; don’t timidly defer; don’t conform; don’t sidestep.
Stand tall. Live wide. There’s room for everyone.
– Subversive Lens
The more I think about language, the more it amazes me that people ever understand each other at all.
– Kurt Gödel
Once you replace negative thoughts with positive ones, you’ll start having positive results.
– Willie Nelson
Their Sex Life
A. R. Ammons
One failure on
Top of another
Woke up this morning with a terrific urge to lie in bed all day and read.
– Raymond Carver
Inland Passage
On the inland passage to Alaska
we entered fjords through sudden
openings between looming stone walls.
In round inflated Zodiacs, we skirted
pale blue icebergs. It was late April.
We crossed a bay, where humpbacked
whales rose and dove, rose
and dove, their curved tails catching
the last gild of sun.
When we came to the glacier,
the small ship stopping an exact specified
distance from this sky-cliff of ice,
it calved a high-rise that collapsed
and shattered the water. Shocked,
we cheered from the deck, yet
the fractured glacier shuddered
inside our bodies, a silent crack
as the mammoth white bone
splintered. And in a Costa Rican
rainforest, we did not see the canopy
slit, admitting too much light
for what’s below to live.
– Veronica Patterson
Self-Compassion
My friend and I snickered the first time
we heard the meditation teacher, a grown man,
call himself honey, with a hand placed
over his heart to illustrate how we too
might become more gentle with ourselves
and our runaway minds. It’s been years
since we sat with legs twisted on cushions,
holding back our laughter, but today
I found myself crouched on the floor again,
not meditating exactly, just agreeing
to be still, saying honey to myself each time
I thought about my husband splayed
on the couch with aching joints and fever
from a tick bite—what if he never gets better?—
or considered the threat of more wildfires,
the possible collapse of the Gulf Stream,
then remembered that in a few more minutes,
I’d have to climb down to the cellar and empty
the bucket I placed beneath a leaky pipe
that can’t be fixed until next week. How long
do any of us really have before the body
begins to break down and empty its mysteries
into the air? Oh honey, I said—for once
without a trace of irony or blush of shame—
the touch of my own hand on my chest
like that of a stranger, oddly comforting
in spite of the facts.
– James Crews
After years of paying our dues—propitiating beggars and gypsies as we wait for our blind date — we are met and spoken for
– Ross Bolleter
“Do you believe in free will?”
“Of course ,” replied Isaac Bashevis Singer, ” I have no choice.”
Whatever you do, it has likely brought delight to fewer people than either contract bridge or the Red Sox.
– Anne Dillard
Put your principles into practice – now. Stop the excuses and the procrastination. This is your life! You aren’t a child anymore. The sooner you set yourself to your spiritual program, the happier you will be. Separate yourself from the mob. Decide to be extraordinary and do what you need to do – now.
– Epictetus
Soon the child’s clear eye is clouded over by ideas and opinions, preconceptions and abstractions. Simple free being becomes encrusted with the burdensome armor of the ego. Not until years later does an instinct come that a vital sense of mystery has been withdrawn. The sun glints through the pines, and the heart is pierced in a moment of beauty and strange pain, like a memory of paradise. After that day … we become seekers.
– Peter Matthiessen
He is conducting the affairs
Of the whole universe
While throwing wild parties
In a tree house – on a limb
In your heart.
– Hafiz
When attachment to the seed concept of “I” expands to articulate itself in terms of “my”, the result is identification – and a world of trouble. Over the course of human history, oceans of blood and tears have been spilled through men and women identifying with groups against other groups. Among the most stubborn of these notions are: “my family,” “my neighborhood,” “my race,” “my ethnicity,” “my country,” “my political party,” “my team,” and what is arguably the most virulent strain of all, “my religion.” No harm comes from acknowledging and respecting our bonds of affiliation, but “pride” in them really signals that we’ve enlisted them into our ego-identity, leaving us vulnerable to defensive-aggressive reactions to perceived threats. Such is the origin of wars and most other human conflict.
– Roshi Bodhin Kjolhede, Attachment, Loss, Pain, and Freedom, Zen Bow
“Premature immaculation”
a funny neologistic phrase describing those whom claim to be enlightened but….
They (these songs) just fall down from space. I’m just as bewhilderd as anybody else as to why I write them.
– Bob Dylan
Over the soft fontanel
Of Ireland. I should wear
Hide shoes, the hair next my skin,
For walking this ground:
I’m out to find that village,
Its low sills fragrant
With ladysmock and celandine,
Marshlights in the summer dark
– Seamus Heaney
Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.
– G. Michael Hopf
You have to leave home to find home.
– Ralph Ellison
The strongest love is the love that can demonstrate its fragility.
– Paulo Coelho
The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.
– James Baldwin
Bush v Gore: a real hinge point in history!
– Chris Hayes
Non merita nome of creatore, se bno Iddio ed iL Poeta.
[None merits the name of creator except God and the Poet].
– Torquato Tasso
Water
A raindrop fell on my hand,
crafted from the Ganges and the Nile,
from the ascended frost of a seal’s whiskers,
from water in broken pots in the cities of Ys and Tyre.
On my index finger
the Caspian Sea isn’t landlocked,
and the Pacific flows meekly into the Rudava,
the one that flew in a cloud over Paris
in seventeen sixty-four
on the seventh of May at three in the morning.
There are not enough lips to pronounce
your transient names, O water.
I would have to say them in every language
pronouncing all the vowels at once,
at the same time keeping silent-for the sake of a lake
that waited in vain for a name,
and is no longer on earth-as it is in the heavens,
whose stars are no longer reflected in it.
Someone was drowning; someone dying
called out for you. That was long ago and yesterday.
You extinguished houses; you carried them off
like trees, forests like cities.
You were in baptismal fonts and in the bathtubs of courtesans,
in kisses, in shrouds.
Eating away at stones, fueling rainbows.
In the sweat and dew of pyramids and lilacs.
How light all this is in the raindrop.
How delicately the world touches me.
Whenever wherever whatever has happened
is written on the waters of Babel.
– Wislawa Szymborska
Over 95% of our body is water.
In order to stay healthy you’ve got to drink good water. …
Water is sacred, air is sacred. Our DNA is made out of the same DNA
as the tree, the tree breaths what we exhale, we need what the tree exhales.
So we have a common destiny with the tree. We are all from the earth,
and when earth, the water, the atmosphere is corrupted
then it will create its own reaction.
The mother is reacting.
– Floyd Red Crow Westerman
…is it possible to eradicate violence in ourselves?
I am asking whether it is possible for a human being living psychologically
in any society to clear violence from himself inwardly?
If it is, the very process will produce a different way of living in this world.
Some of us, in order to rid ourselves of violence, have used a concept,
and ideal, called non-violence, and we think by having an ideal of the opposite
to violence, non-violence, we can get rid of the fact, the actual – but we cannot.
We have had ideals without number, all the sacred books are full of them,
yet we are still violent – so why not deal with violence itself
and forget the word altogether?
If you want to understand the actual you must give your whole attention,
all your energy, to it. That attention and energy are distracted when you create
a fictitious, ideal world. So can you completely banish the ideal?
The man who is really serious, with the urge to find out what truth is,
what love is, has no concept at all.
He lives only in what is.
To investigate the fact of your own anger you must pass no judgement on it,
for the moment you conceive of its opposite you condemn it and therefore
you cannot see it as it is. When you say you dislike or hate someone,
that is a fact, although it sounds terrible. If you look at it, go into it completely,
it ceases, but if you say, “I must not hate; I must have love in my heart,”
then you are living in a hypocritical world with double standards.
To live completely, fully, in the moment is to live with what is,
the actual, without any sense of condemnation or justification –
then you understand it so totally that you are finished with it.
When you see clearly the problem is solved.
– J. Krishnamurti
The power of quiet is great.
It generates the same feelings in everything one encounters.
It vibrates with the cosmic rhythm of oneness.
It is everywhere, available to anyone at any time.
It is us, the force within that makes us stable, trusting, and loving.
It is contemplation contemplating.
Peace is letting go
– returning to the silence that cannot enter the realm of words
because it is too pure to be contained in words.
This is why the tree, the stone, the river, and the mountain are quiet.
– Malidoma Patrice Some
Snow besieges my plank door
I crowd the stove at night.
Although this form exists
It seems as if it doesn’t.
I have no idea where the
Months have gone
Every time I turn around
Another year on earth is over.
– Han-shan Te-ch’ing
Algarve
Sarah Arvio
I won’t go with Jason for the fleece
for all the algae washing on the beach
gray and silver green and silver gray
all the plastic bottles and old twine
beaching up onto a bed of sand
But there’s something rhythmic in the art
an algorithm for an argonaut
an I’ll-go rhythm or I’ll-go-not
I said I’ll go with you anywhere
and I’ll come there too if you are there
for where is anywhere if you are there
the washing of the waves along the beach
all the plant life of the ancient sea
the dune flowers silver gray and blue
These are the ornaments of what I mean
the organza of a revelation
the orgasm of a something-rhythm
in the gauzy morning near the sea
Our good bad all garbled algebra
which is the “binding of the broken parts”
which was the offering of Al-Jabr
ergo I’ll go elsewhere if you are there
You must suggest to me reality—you can never show me reality. The purpose of the painter is simply to reproduce in other minds the impression which a scene has made upon him.
A work of art does not appeal to the intellect. It does not appeal to the moral sense. Its aim is to instruct, not to edify, but to awaken an emotion.
The greatness of art is not in the display of knowledge, or in material accuracy, but in the distinctness with which it conveys the impressions of a personal vital force, that acts spontaneously, without fear or hesitation.
– George Inness
Learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow’s cause.
– Isaiah 1:17
I have all these disconnected realities in my own life, and I see them in other people’s lives.
– Alice Munro
There is nothing as frightening as a stack of blank pieces of paper and the thought that I have to fill them from top to bottom, placing letters one after the other.
– Camilo José Cela
What I write could only be called poetry because there is no other category in which to put it.
– Marianne Moore
If society abolishes poetry it commits spiritual suicide.
– Octavio Paz
Some part of me believes that every poem needs to conclude with a great truth. It’s a high bar to set. It’s definitely wrong. But I’m often trying to find ways to avoid this imagined obligation.
– Rachel Mannheimer
Well the Devil’s in the alley,
mule’s in the stall
Say anything you want to
I have heard it all
– Bob Dylan
Thoughts from Before the Latest War
by Evelyn (Eve) Jessup Bingham
Surely my life would be less stressful if I lived in Sweden. I would be friends with the girls with dragon tattoos, ferreting out sickos and fascists. During the dark winter nights, I would dye my hair white blond and sip pure tundra berry tea from cups hand crafted from far-north forest wood. I would be a vegan there, forsaking roasted reindeer and smoked or pickled fish. It would make sense to eat white mushrooms scented with pine needles for most meals. I would walk everywhere in long brisk strides, particularly to train stations where I might go east to the strange land of the Finns and to Russia, up the river to St. Petersburg to see the palaces of the czars. In midsummer, music would play long into the white nights with dancers of many genders milling around the streets as the sun kisses the horizon and then starts its climb again. Abba music with some sort of Swedish Bjork tones. I would live in a small wooden floored flat with spare furnishings and a colorful wool rug. On Mayday I would cheer along with my fellow residents when the socialists and communists parade through the streets and the old people wave their hand held flags with tears in their eyes, so happy the big wars turned out as they did. I could go back to work in the zinc mines or maybe process paperwork in the ports to help export those beautiful felt dolls with their embroidered aprons and rosy cheeks. I would only own two or three expensive organic flax-cloth draw string pants with coordinated tunics. My clothes would be chosen to cover my own tattoos that would only be revealed to those in real need. The improved wardrobe aspect of the venture, on its own, reduces the stress enough to get the visa process started.
Tuesday
by Fady Joudah
Days been dark
don’t say “in these dark days”
done changed my cones and rods
Sometimes I’m the country
other times the countryside
I put my clothes back on
to take them off again
“Stay angry, little Meg,” Mrs Whatsit whispered. “You will need all your anger now.”
– A Wrinkle in Time
Blue color is everlastingly appointed by the deity to be a source of delight.
– John Ruskin
What is most surprising of all is how much fear there is in school. Why is so little said about it? Perhaps most people do not recognize fear in children when they see it. They can read the grossest signs of fear; they know what the trouble is when a child clings howling to his mother; but the subtler signs of fear are escaping them. It is these signs, in children’s faces, voices, and gestures, in their movements and ways of working, that tell me plainly that most children in school are scared most of the time, many of them very scared. Like good soldiers, they control their fears, live with them, and adjust themselves to them. But the trouble is, and here is a vital difference between school and war, that the adjustments children make to their fears are almost wholly bad, destructive of their intelligence and capacity. The scared fighter may be the best fighter, but the scared learner is always a poor learner.
– John Holt
Try to reason about love,
and you will lose your reason.
– Anton Chekhov
We must begin to catch hold of everything
around us, for nobody knows what we
may need. We have to carry along
the air, even; and the weight we once
thought a burden turns out to form
the pulse of our life and the compass for our brain.
Colors balance our fears, and existence
begins to clog unless our thoughts
can occur unwatched and let a fountain of essential silliness
out through our dreams.
And oh I hope we can still arrange
for the wind to blow, and occasionally
some kind of shock to occur, like rain,
and stray adventures no one cares about —
harmless love, immoderate guffaws on corners,
families crawling around the front room growling,
being bears in the piano cave.
– William Stafford
Enchantment
She said she was taking me to no return.
A smile – minnow small – hovered
in the current of her face. Wing flash
of kingfisher blue dove for it
but she fended with left arm sweep
and a laugh that sheened the king’s feathers
the rest of his fishing days.
And so we walked some hours, and some hours more.
Mountains of bristlecone pine
limestone shards singing white underfoot
and eventually water, charged with mineral immensity
sprang from sagebrush slope and ran spark-footed as a deer.
She led now through corridors of clustered aspen
with paintbrush blooming in clumps among green grass
and tones of sunset just beginning
to chant their spell into the spires of pink granite.
Like spider thread looped around the little finger
her way left no loose ends to lead back.
– Walker Abel
Later, when I was in the Argentine, I used to tell myself that I could not die until I had seen another month of May, here in the mountains. The grass grows knee-high in the meadows and down the centre of the roads between the wheel ruts. If you are with a friend, you walk down the road with the grass between you. In the forest the late beech leaves come out, the greenest leaves in the world. The cows are let out of the stable for the first time. They leap, kick with their hind legs, turn in circles, jump like goats. The month itself is like a homecoming.
– John Berger
Leaving bents fort
For Floyd bringing good
Riding the high plains from Colorado
To Kansas
A whirlwind gaunt and alone crosses the landscape
I drive the truck south toward Oklahoma
Crossing the same path two moon and roman nose
Once wandered
I am on the edge
Barely in America
Somewhere between rage and freedom…
– Lance Henson
Self-Portrait as Artemis
Tarfia Faizullah
It wasn’t long before I rose
into the silk of my night-robes
and swilled the stars
and the beetles
back into sweetness—even my fingernails
carry my likeness, and I smudge
the marrow of myself
into light. I whisper street-
car, ardor, midnight
into the ears of the soldier
so he will forget everything
but the eyes of the night nurse
whose hair shines beneath
the prow of her white cap.
In the end, it is me
he shipwrecks. O arrow.
My arms knot as I pluck
the lone string tauter.
O crossbow. I kneel. He oozes,
and the grasses and red wasp
knock him back from my sight.
The night braids my hair.
I do not dream. I do not glow.
Andrea Gibson:
you will never
have to lose yourself
to win me over
Read one newspaper daily (the morning edition
is the best
for by evening you know that you at least
have lived through another day)
and let the disasters, the unbelievable
yet approved decisions,
soak in.
I don’t need to name the countries,
ours is among them.
What keeps us from falling down, our faces
to the ground; ashamed, ashamed?
– Mary Oliver
Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped.
Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.
– Robert F. Kennedy
You were, when I met you, both things for me: the sensuous and the spiritual. That can never come asunder…
– Paul Celan
The distance between two points increases over time. Disconnecting and fragmenting their connections. This is a painful experience, full of bitterness and resentment that ebbs and flows over memories and nostalgics. But there is a gorgeousness that exists in this like pale watercolours over solid black lines. It will always linger, but it becomes a part of you, for better or worse, keeping you who you are and marking you with scars like brands you can never escape or change but must always grow with. I believe in so many things, but that doesn’t make them passions. So why don’t you tell me who you are?
– Anne Carson
Time has inflicted such sweet cruelty
You are no longer yourself
I am no longer myself
Our restless hearts rush
to meet each other …
as though we had never been apart
You were lost
I was lost
though we walked in step
on the same path
– Guru Dutt
Inside the hardness of the heart, the numbness
of the heart, there lay a smaller heart,
a splinter in your finger, throbbing and pulsing
so you can see how alive you are. God
what a fenestration the heart is.
What strangers see is frontismatter.
An intro to the highlights as we see them.
All our old loves are still there,
impervious and glass-enclosed. You can tap
on the glass and get a rise out of them
because into each life there must be
a ruler and a grid, a little schadenfreude
so it won’t be our hearts breaking.
– Ira Sadoff
It’s been my experience that those who have it all figured out early, usually fall apart later in life. And those who acknowledge their ‘not knowing’ early in life, often end up finding their truest paths later in life, walking them all the way to the end. I’m not talking about the kind of ‘not knowing’ that is ungrounded and reality avoidant. I’m talking about the kind of conscious ‘not knowing’ that is riddled with curiosity, and a genuine willingness to explore and learn from experience. I think of life as a brilliant (or not brilliant) painting. You can finish the painting early, and then pray that life doesn’t turn your canvas upside down (It probably will). Or you can make a commitment to painting it throughout your lifetime—a stroke of wisdom here and there, a splash of color when you least expect, the shaping of the self as an artful work-in-process—getting closer to clarity and wholeness with each lived experience.
– Jeff Brown
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal…
– T.S. Eliot, What the Thunder Said, The Waste Land
A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.
– Isaac Bashevis Singer
In times of rational and primitive fear, hope has to do push-ups out in the parking lot to stay pumped—and it does.
– Anne Lamott
Person of the Playful Star: Tanka [I listen to songs]
I listen to songs
of someone handsome
at the apex of night
the Milky Way overflows
the stars boil over and fall
– From The Forest of Eyes by Tada Chimako
What is meant for you is already yours, nothing could ever take that away from you. Us humans don’t truly know whats best for us most of the time anyway. So whatever is falling away from you… let it. If it’s not showing up with intentions and energies that are equal to yours, it’s not supporting your highest potential.
So take care of your heart, never let other peoples shadows dim your light. Recognize when people are only catering to their own purposes and aren’t interested in growing with you. And save your breathe for those who will fully receive and honor you with full presence.
Those who hurt you and can’t meet you where you’re at, are acting from their own wounded places, and are only revealing their lack of inner work. When you are in true alignment with another being, there will be no room for manipulation, dishonor or apathy. When you are in true alignment, there will be warmth, respect and transparency.
So stand in your power and know your worth even if that means that you have to walk alone. Your light and pure intentions will radiate like a signal from the depth of your soul, attracting those who will lift you up. Let yourself be elevated from the inside out, and soon enough that will reflect from the outside in.
– Cheylynn Marie
Being a global citizen of a living Earth is to return to the ‘great conversation’ with all of its many inhabitants, in both its inner and outer worlds. We can no longer live in isolation, alienated from the very planet that supports and nourishes us both physically and spiritually. We need to learn once again how to respect and listen to the Earth, to its ancient wisdom and spiritual depths. The Earth can teach us how to live in harmony and oneness as part of the great web of life. Once again we can learn how to walk in a sacred manner, experience her wonder and mystery, care for her soul as well as her soil.
Acting from a place of oneness we need to return to a conscious relationship with the Earth as a living being rather than dead matter, which our ancestors understood as having a soul, anima mundi, as its indwelling spiritual consciousness. When we remember our relationship with the Earth as a sacred being we can work together with the forces within nature, the primal powers of creation that shamans and indigenous peoples have long understood as central to our shared well-being. We can no longer afford to ignore or reject this inner dimension of life.
– Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
Words are just places we
stopped on the way
Language hostels
Love is not a word
Love is river, an alien abduction
A million more metaphors
Love is an invitation
to leave all pictures
Memories, like words, can’t hold
Loving happens
Keeps happening
Sings sometimes
Lives are just places we
stopped on the way
Diamonds and coal
Love is not a thing
– George Gorman
The original virtual reality of inner experience is the fulcrum by which life lifts itself out of the materialistic prison of determinism in order to achieve the freedom for value-seeking and value-fulfillment. Our minds have created the influential dimension of living experience, which cannot be adequately described in terms of material causes without obstructing the subtle freedoms making our minds worth having sometimes. Not only human minds but all living centers of experience. Every life has a self, a source of self-motion. In the same ways that our specialized hands and brains evolved out of potentials inherent in the forelimbs and neurons of primordial predecessors, our communicating, reasoning, feeling and questioning ways of being have an ancient heritage. Thanks to the co-creative participation of life in its own evolution, we could discover renewed hope in our human story.
Living, a storied process, not adequately represented by ideas whose abstractness transcends the dramatic unfoldings of living experience. Yet this is what most philosophical ideals do in their quest for the greatest of generalisms. How do we keep magnanimous ideas from flying too high above the touchstones of life? Neither religion nor science can accomplish this. Neither religions wedded to coercive abstractions nor sciences yoked to physical necessities offer much help to the relevant immediacies of personal experience. Human art is more sensitive to the passionate sway of a living experience. But works of art, often too context- and fashion-specific to our dramatic passages, . So I’m focusing on familiar concepts of personal agency that are general enough to apply to all humans yet varied enough to reflect the full range of fulfilling options in living contexts. Because the communicational foundations of life have evolved in tandem with our basic emotional processes.
– Gormans
Maya C. Popa:
Two of my favorites:
“About suffering they were never wrong” (the Old Masters)
“Back out of all this now too much for us”
Auden & Frost
Not being tied to what God looks like, freed us.
– Alice Walker (The Color Purple)
Still dark, and raining hard
on a cold May morning
and yet the early bird
is out there chirping,
chirping its sweet-sour
wooden-pulley notes,
pleased, it would seem,
to be given work,
hauling the heavy bucket of dawn
up from the darkness,
note over note,
and letting us drink.
– Ted Kooser
Spring Dragon
I had been dreaming
of rocks and boulders
rolling and crashing
under the waves
out at sea.
Then, I awoke
and realized
a Spring dragon
was passing overhead.
– Frank Inzan Owen
The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on. If you can change the way people think. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. You can change the way people live their lives.
– Chuck Palahniuk
old letter /
the saudade /
of yours sincerely
– Christopher Calvin
Lew Welch:
Song of a Self
If this is what life is,
Could one of your Gods do it better?
I make what I see, and I make what I hear
with Eye and my animal eye–
with ear and my Auditing Ear…
full
full of my gift
I am never left out and afraid
And this what the song is
(all of you waking and working and going to bed)
I sing what you’d know if you took time to hear,
I know what you’d learn if you had cause to care
Envy my wildness if you will….
full
full of my gift
I am often
left out and afraid
And this all my art is
(that stays at the distance the stage is)
You turn from my songs into another’s arms,
As I, who have taken you all to my heart,
Would sometimes be taken to heart….
full
full of my gift
I am only
left out and afraid
_____________________________________________
Commentary by the Red Monk
Wilderness is a form of sophistication, because it carries within it true knowledge of our place in the world. It doesn’t exclude civilization but prowls through it, knowing when to attend to the needs of the committee and when to drink from a moonlit lake. It will wear a suit and tie when it has to, but refuses to trim its talons or whiskers. Its sensing nature is not afraid of emotion: the old stories are full of grief forests and triumphant returns, banquets and bridges of thorns. Myth tells us that the full gamut of feeling is to be experienced. Wilderness is the capacity to go into joy, sorrow, and anger fully and stay there for as long as needed, regardless of what anyone else thinks. Sometimes, as Lorca says, it means ‘get down on all fours for twenty centuries and eat the grasses of the cemetaries.’ Wilderness carries sobriety as well as exuberance, and has allowed loss to mark its face.
– Martin Shaw
Battlegrounds
Gettysburg National Military Park
Motorcycles and white tour vans speed
between behemoth granite shafts, shove
my body by their force, leave me roadside
and wandering fields. Little is funny
when you’re Chicana and walking
a Civil War site not meant for walking.
Regardless, I ask park rangers and guides
for stories on Mexicans soldiers,
receive shrugs. No evidence in statues
or statistics. In the cemetery, not one
Spanish name. I’m alone in the wine shop.
It’s the same in the post office, the market,
the antique shop with KKK books on display.
In the peach orchard, I prepare a séance,
sit cross-legged in grass, and hold
a smoky quartz to the setting sun.
I invite the unseen to speak. So many dead,
it’s said Confederates were left to rot.
In war, not all bodies are returned home
nor graves marked. I Google “Mexicans
in the Civil War” and uncover layers
to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
and Cinco de Mayo. This is how I meet
ancestors for the first time, heroes
this country decorates in clownish sombreros
and fake mustaches, dishonors for fighting
European empire on shared American land
Power & Money dictate can’t be shared.
Years before this, carrying water gallons
up an Arizona mountain ridge to replenish
supplies in a pass known as “Dead Man’s,”
I wrote messages on bottles to the living,
scanned Sonoran canyons for the lost,
and knew too many would not be found.
A black Sharpie Virgen drawn on hot plastic
became a prayer: may the next officer halt
before cracking her face beneath his boot,
spilling life on to dirt. No, nothing’s funny
when you’re brown in a country you’re taught
isn’t yours, your dead don’t count.
– Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo
To Walk Early
Remember to walk early
when you are most vulnerable to beauty.
Don’t go back to sleep.
Open the door.
On summer days, leave as
the yolk of sun breaks the pink sky.
Don’t miss the field of blue flax.
Bits of blue dapple the new green,
as if to fleck it with sky.
Or the first wild crocus.
Walk along the shore.
Watch the cormorant unfold its wings,
the statue-still blue heron
stretched long on legs thin as reeds.
Or the march of tiny spotted toads
migrating into the world.
Don’t miss the day,
the nesting pair of eagles fly south.
Rabbit Brush and Aspen strike gold.
A lone red duck lingers.
In the deepest days of winter,
put on your heavy coat.
Open the door, step out,
follow the tracks of rabbit and fox.
Don’t go back to sleep
It’s getting late.
– Nancy Jakobsson
Whatever shakes you should without delay, right away, be incorporated into the path ~ Chögyam Trungpa
WHETHER YOU LOVE WHAT YOU LOVE
OR LIVE IN DIVIDED CEASELESS
REVOLT AGAINST IT
WHAT YOU LOVE IS YOUR FATE
– Frank Bidart
I’ve decided to organize my books meteorologically, from those describing the most pleasant weather to those with the worst storms.
Then I can just go to wherever my weather-mood dictates and pull one out to read.
– Will Donnelly
The day is coming when a single carrot, freshly observed, will set off a revolution.
– Paul Cezanne
Ideally we’d stop paying any attention at all to whether people tell us that they love us or not – and concentrate instead on whether or not they know how to be kind.
– The School of Life
Only Once
All which, because it was
flame and song and granted us
joy, we thought we’d do, be, revisit,
turns out to have been what it was
that once, only; every invitation
did not begin
a series, a build-up: the marvelous
did happen in our lives, our stories
are not drab with its absence: but don’t
expect to return for more. Whatever more
there will be will be
unique as those were unique. Try
to acknowledge the next
song in its body — halo of flames as utterly
present, as now or never.
– Denise Levertov
There must be something rotten
in the very core of a social system
which increases its wealth
without diminishing its misery.
– Karl Marx
HOW GREAT INTELLIGENCE FINDS ITS WAY IN THE WORLD
George Gershwin
was a tough kid
fought in the streets
acted out
until he found
the gift of music
in which anger, love,
anything may be said,
said, and felt in the structure
of the bones.
Paul de Man
swindled people
lied
probably committed
bigamy
with one of his students
but found his way
to a calling
in which he mesmerized.
“Must be
I’m getting smarter
all the time.”
my friend Iván
disguised himself
as a librarian
of obscure unpopular languages
so that he could daily pour forth
the immense flood
of words
that “troubled his sleep”
and waking.
others, like Yeats,
threw themselves
into the visionary
and “saw,”
heard masters’
voices.
Larry Eigner
acted the child
to elicit emotion
from people
who did not know
they were his
intellectual
inferiors
just as
the great Einstein
played the fool
for photographers.
in 1976
filmmaker Werner Herzog
made Heart of Glass
in which he hypnotized
all of the actors except for the lead.
the actors spoke their lines…
strangely.
I thought of Ezra Pound’s remark,
“the live man
among the duds”
and of Jack Spicer’s
“de bop de beep
they are all asleep”…
and you––
people wish you
to read your poetry
and to be
on their search committee
because you
are the live woman
among the duds.
I am told
that I
frighten people––
“first, your hair!”––
but you are a woman
and so sweet and kind
and have such a lovely,
caring smile
that even the duds
(who at some level
know they are duds)
feel comfortable
in your presence.
they are being
left in the dust
but they can forget about all that
because you acknowledge them
with such kindness
and consideration.
these are the slights
of genius
the ways in which those
afflicted with the god knowledge
pretend to be
only eccentrics
only strangers
neighbors
who live
(like you and me)
in the ordinary
world.
– Jack Foley
The obsession with our own inadequacies is one of the biggest obstacles on the bodhisattva path ~ Chogyam Trungpa
…when you have love for someone based on needs alone, you become an ocean . . but when you have love for someone because of who they are, who they appear to be in and of themselves, you become an invisible weightless sky, an eternity of infinite wonder, the perfect question, more now than now, more here than here, nowhere.
– via Steve Gurton
Someone I loved once told me that there are fragments within us that are the same age as the Universe, and because we are matter, we can never be destroyed. That a part of us will live forever and ever, and that in making us, the Universe was celebrating itself, we are its living, breathing joy.
– Nikita Gill
You’ll See, All Things Will Be Made New
by Menno Wigman (trans. Judith Wilkinson)
How fortunate that Holland doesn’t exist.
Only a slender land of mist and clay,
only the millions of dead without a grave,
only the ultimatum of the sea.
And what a comfort that there’s no tomorrow,
that there was never any snow or hail
or sun or a spring breeze – nothing at all.
Only the ultimatum of the light.
That was your forecast for today. Sit tight.
Over the years I’ve come to think of memories as tiny living things, microorganisms that swim through the brain until they’ve found the right compartment in which to settle down and rest. If the compartment isn’t available, if there’s no proper label for the memory, it takes up residence somewhere else, gets lodged in a corner and gnaws at you periodically, cropping up at odd times, or in dreams.
– Caroline Knapp
Your heart lifts forever through that blank sky.
– John Updike
We all face our monsters
differently. Just because
I smile while I do it doesn’t
make me any less serious.
– Omar Holmon
It’s our job as writers..It’s our job as environmentally conscious people. To be aware. We’ve got to be aware of our fears. We’ve got to be aware of the history. We’ve got to be aware of all the pitfalls and then fix our vision and grow.
– Camille T. Dungy
No pessimist ever discovered the secrets of the stars, or sailed to an uncharted land, or opened a new heaven to the human spirit.
– Helen Keller
Chögyam Trungpa ~ THE SPIRITUAL PATH
In other words, to make this perfectly clear, the difference between spiritual materialism and transcending spiritual materialism is that in spiritual materialism promises are used like a carrot held up in front of a donkey, luring him into all kinds of journeys; in transcending spiritual materialism, there is no goal. The goal exists in every moment of our life situation, in every moment of our spiritual journey.
All beings are Buddha;
you are the truth, just as you are.
– Zen Roshi, Robert Aitken
Paradise is not a place. It is a condition of the heart. Some travel to all the world’s wondrous places and never truly arrive, for they go with a clenched heart that blinds them to the shallowed muting of their unusual life. Others stay home yet arrive over and again to the most enchanting places and discoveries. For they live with a wide open heart that journeys ever beyond the body as a spirit in love with life. Open your phenomenal heart. Travel beautifully.
– Jaiya John
Our minds are hardwired in many ways to do many things, only half of which from my observations are self-destructive.
– Anne Lamott
Between going and staying
the day wavers,
in love with its own transparency.
The circular afternoon is now a bay
where the world in stillness rocks.
All is visible and all elusive,
all is near and can’t be touched.
Paper, book, pencil, glass,
rest in the shade of their names.
Time throbbing in my temples repeats
the same unchanging syllable of blood.
The light turns the indifferent wall
into a ghostly theater of reflections.
I find myself in the middle of an eye,
watching myself in its blank stare.
The moment scatters. Motionless,
I stay and go: I am a pause.
– Octavio Paz
Of the many men whom I am, whom we are,
I cannot settle on a single one.
They are lost to me under the cover of clothing
They have departed for another city.
When everything seems to be set
to show me off as a man of intelligence,
the fool I keep concealed on my person
takes over my talk and occupies my mouth.
On other occasions, I am dozing in the midst
of people of some distinction,
and when I summon my courageous self,
a coward completely unknown to me
swaddles my poor skeleton
in a thousand tiny reservations.
When a stately home bursts into flames,
instead of the fireman I summon,
an arsonist bursts on the scene,
and he is I. There is nothing I can do.
What must I do to distinguish myself?
How can I put myself together?
All the books I read
lionize dazzling hero figures,
brimming with self-assurance.
I die with envy of them;
and, in films where bullets fly on the wind,
I am left in envy of the cowboys,
left admiring even the horses.
But when I call upon my DASHING BEING,
out comes the same OLD LAZY SELF,
and so I never know just WHO I AM,
nor how many I am, nor WHO WE WILL BE BEING.
I would like to be able to touch a bell
and call up my real self, the truly me,
because if I really need my proper self,
I must not allow myself to disappear.
While I am writing, I am far away;
and when I come back, I have already left.
I should like to see if the same thing happens
to other people as it does to me,
to see if as many people are as I am,
and if they seem the same way to themselves.
When this problem has been thoroughly explored,
I am going to school myself so well in things
that, when I try to explain my problems,
I shall speak, not of self, but of geography.
– Pablo Neruda
If your heart is pure then all of nature is a great book of holy wisdom and sacred doctrine.
– St. Francis of Assisi
HUMILITY
The connection point
between trauma and grace,
That holy moment
where, in the expression of its truthfulness,
a wound finally crowns itself,
When the humiliation
of acting out illusion
doesn’t stop at itself
but gives a deep bow
to move into
what is more real,
That which is discovered
beyond the sacred doors
of each grief,
When the rough ruby
that is the heart
let’s itself be seen
as an unpolished queen
and takes its throne
by claiming
both its mess and its nobility
in choosing
to rule with love
the kingdom of its unfinished pain.
– Chelan Harkin
If no good can come from a decision, then no decision should be made.
– Simon Sinek
Thoughts are free and subject to no rule. On them rests the freedom of man, and they tower above the light of nature…create a new heaven, a new firmament, a new source of energy from which new arts flow.
– Paracelsus
Chögyam Trungpa ~ HELPING THE WORLD TO REFORM
As practitioners of meditation, we have to work with the karmic situation of America (or wherever we live) to start with. A certain reformation can take place by natural force—not necessarily through carrying placards or staging demonstrations. On the other hand, change is not going to happen in an easy or luxurious way. To begin with, we don’t know what the reformation is going to look like. We have to work on our own inspiration. The city could reform. The whole world could reform. Our duty is to help.
How quickly we exile
the truth of love from the love of truth.
– Richard Jackson
That is why the better part of our memory exists outside ourselves, in a blatter of rain, in the smell of an unaired room or of the first crackling brushwood fire in a cold grate: wherever, in short, we happen upon what our mind, having no use for it, had rejected, the last treasure that the past has in store, the richest, that which when all our flow of tears seems to have dried at the source can make us weep again. Outside ourselves, did I say; rather within ourselves, but hidden from our eyes in an oblivion more or less prolonged.
– Marcel Proust
I have seen her walk all dressed in green,
so formed she would have sparked love in a stone,
that love I bear for her very shadow,
so that I wished her, in those fields of grass,
– Dante Alighieri
The ripe grassheads bend in the starlight
in the soft wind, beneath them the darkness
of the grass, fathomless, the long blades
rising out of the well of time. Cars
travel the valley roads below me, their lights
finding the dark, and racing on. Above
their roar is a silence I have suddenly heard,
and felt the country turn under the stars
toward dawn. I am wholly willing to be here
between the bright silent thousands of stars
and the life of the grass pouring out of the ground.
The hill has grown to me like a foot.
Until I lift the earth I cannot move.
– Wendell Berry
I hear the dreams of old friends and lovers,
dreams whose heartbeats break me open:
– Pablo Neruda, Nocturnal Collection
Denim and flannel … no, denim & flannel, for they belonged together like denim & flannel.
– Greg Sellers, Notes from Neruda’s Ghost
Endings are difficult in our culture, a direct corollary of our inability to deal with death in an honorable fashion. Notice the ending of any creative gathering and it will tell you something about what has just happened. What has just happened has been public—now people are going to make a change back to something more private. But is that change in orientation a collapse, into separation, or is it a transition? In a transition, people huddle into small groups to get a last bit of warmth from the fire of connection.
– Randy Jones, Medicine Without An Expiration Date
Falling For (and From) the Sky
It’s hard not to fall in love
with the Nevada sky in May.
She kisses my pale skin
careful not to turn me
the color of her lips.
I blush anyway
and she laughs gently.
Her joy is the sound
of hummingbird wings
vibrating with satisfaction
at the discovery of hidden nectar.
She removes my sunglasses
so I can see her the way
she desires to be seen.
The ecstasy in my eyes
only encourages her.
I’m too shy to tell the sky
that I’ve always been proud
that my eyes are blue,
like her.
My heart throbs with longing
as she edges me closer to explosion
like a planet that ventures
too near the sun.
But just before she burns me,
when it’s clear I can barely
stand her heat anymore,
she pulls the clouds over us,
and washes me with wind.
Her caressing zephyrs
teach me what my sweat is for.
When she gives me goosebumps,
the clouds part, and she begins
the bright cycle all over again.
As the sun sets,
and I feel her pulling away,
the sky reminds me
that this life is only a vapor.
“Evaporate for me,”
she whispers in my ear.
“And, we’ll rise to shine
with the moon and stars.”
But I know, if I was water,
and fell for and from the sky,
I’d only sprinkle like desert rain
after a lingering drought,
and never touch the ground.
– Will Falk
In the age of information overload, expertise is not knowing lots and lots of stuff—rather, it’s the ability to sort the useful from the useless.
– Mark Manson
Loneliness is so much more than a personal mental health issue. It’s a deliberate outcome of American individualism and impedes community interdependence and organizing. The delusion that a person can be an island and everyone having their own screen is why we’re in this hellhole.
– El Norte Recuerda
I am not saying you will
find the meaning of life
in other people. I am saying
that other people are the life
to which you provide the meaning.
– Neil Hilborn
We must not give up. It takes so much time to heal because we are not just healing our own wounds- we are healing the world’s wounds, too. We think we are alone with our ‘stuff’, but we aren’t. With every clearing of our emotional debris, with every foray into a healthier way of being, with every excavation and release of old material, we heal the collective heart. So many of our familial and karmic ancestors had little opportunity to heal their pains. When we heal, their spirits breathe a sigh of relief. We heal them, too.
– Jeff Brown
Tolkien describing places that are evil: no trees grow there
The soul would have no rainbows if the eyes had no tears.
– Native American proverb
Availability bias: You assume the first thing that pops in your head is the best and truest idea you’re going to have.
– @jamieri
Music, dance, singing, lamentation, exuberance—all these seem to be the ever present building blocks of indigenous ritual. When we have an intention and a loosely designed choreography that allows some space for the unexpected, these begin to be the ingredients for healing ritual. The specific details are contributed by Elders, the shamans (with their specialized knowledge) and also by everybody else in some fashion, large or small. Maybe the spirits and the elements do carry out mysterious healings, as the indigenous mind would say.
On the other hand, people have to do a lot of work to create a ritual. And maybe that is part of the formula as well—why rituals actually do produce healing and beauty and practical results: the working together is its own kind of deep involvement in the community of life that is beneficial. If we can understand ritual as being both a creative and a technical collaboration, which invites both the human and non-human members of the neighborhood into an event that works toward healing, we can both liberate ritual from its marginalized position and also revive the vitality which a good ritual always feeds.
It takes a leap of understanding or imagination to conceive of the current situation in the spirit world and in nature. If we truly are meant to be in community, the mechanism of communication, if broken on our side, as indicated by the damage we are causing, is also broken on their side. All parties are supposed to be involved in the project of improving this world, bringing “medicine,” in the largest sense of the word, to what needs healing. While the spirit world has a great competence working with invisible forces, they have the distinct disadvantage, when it comes to doing practical things, of not having bodies or verbal language. We humans are in the opposite position, having powers in this world, but constantly distracted by that very fact from the information that comes from somewhere else.
– Randy Jones, Medicine Without An Expiration Date
The soulful path is taken with steps of peace, love, and joy, where all things are working together for the higher good. The soulful path is Heaven on Earth.
– Dr. Julie Krull
I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.
– Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis
As we co-create nurturance culture let us acknowledge that motherhood is a set up. The role into which we have dumped the entire weight of collapsed community.
– Taj James
The old soul that dwells at the core of each person has a tolerance for chaos and an instinct for survival. Not in the simple biological terms of survival of the fittest, but a complex involvement with hidden aspects of creation. We can only come to know our soul when the chips are down, when there’s nothing else to do but take on a bigger imagination of the cosmos and of our place within it. The return of cosmic order and cosmic sense always happens at the edge of the abyss, on the brink of disaster where life and beauty and meaning are snatched once again from the teeth of chaos.
– Michael Meade, Awakening the Soul
No Black boys die on Mother’s Day. We all here among our grandmothers’ hymns hats and hallelujahs, our blunt-blistered lips touch cheek to make kiss before our heads bow to pray.
– Steven Willis
Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.
– Barbara Kingsolver
Nine tenths of education is encouragement.
– Anatole France
Poetry makes language care because it renders everything intimate.
– John Berger
The world is not real to me until it has been pushed through the mesh of language.
– John Banville
Works of art make rules; rules do not make works of art.
– Claude Debussy
If we only knew how much of other peoples urgency for us to not be honest, is because our honesty chines light on areas they are not willing to address.
We often get stuck responding to toxic positivity, and it’s messengers. This is not your work, if you are looking for peace.
Your work is offering yourself breaks from the explanations of those who won’t hear them. Your work is saving your energy for the pain of being misunderstood and offering hope to an inner understanding.
Your honesty will be refreshing to someone else who is frozen in a story needing a warm invitation to also be open and free.
– Nate Postlethwait
Attentiveness is your main tool in life, and in fiction, or else you’re going to be boring.
– Jim Harrison
Making art is not selfish; it’s for the rest of us. If you don’t do your thing, you are cheating us.
– Kevin Kelly
My favorite piece of riding/ writing/ life advice: Throw your heart over the fence and the horse will follow.
– Siân Griffiths
The pen compels lucidity.
– Robert Stone
A paradox is a genuine reversal of the commonly accepted point of view, one that presents an unacceptable world, thereby eliciting resistance and rejection, and yet, if we make an effort to understand it, it is one that leads to knowledge; eventually it seems to be witty because it has to be admitted that it is true.
– Umberto Eco, On the Shoulders of Giants
THE TRUELOVE
by David Whyte
There is a faith in loving fiercely
the one who is rightfully yours,
especially if you have
waited years and especially
if part of you never believed
you could deserve this
loved and beckoning hand
held out to you this way.
I am thinking of faith now
and the testaments of loneliness
and what we feel we are
worthy of in this world.
Years ago in the Hebrides,
I remember an old man
who walked every morning
on the grey stones
to the shore of baying seals,
who would press his hat
to his chest in the blustering
salt wind and say his prayer
to the turbulent Jesus
hidden in the water,
and I think of the story
of the storm and everyone
waking and seeing
the distant
yet familiar figure
far across the water
calling to them
and how we are all
preparing for that
abrupt waking,
and that calling,
and that moment
we have to say yes,
except it will
not come so grandly
so Biblically
but more subtly
and intimately in the face
of the one you know
you have to love
so that when
we finally step out of the boat
toward them, we find
everything holds
us, and everything confirms
our courage, and if you wanted
to drown you could,
but you don’t
because finally
after all this struggle
and all these years
you simply don’t want to
any more
you’ve simply had enough
of drowning
and you want to live and you
want to love and you will
walk across any territory
and any darkness
however fluid and however
dangerous to take the
one hand you know
belongs in yours.
To love without knowing how to love wounds the person we love.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
Obviously, a rigid, blinkered, absolutist world view is the easiest to keep hold of, whereas the fluid, uncertain, metamorphic picture I’ve always carried about is rather more vulnerable. Yet I must cling with all my might to … my own soul; must hold on to its mischievous, iconoclastic, out-of-step clown-instincts, no matter how great the storm. And if that plunges me into contradiction and paradox, so be it; I’ve lived in that messy ocean all my life. I’ve fished in it for my art. This turbulent sea was the sea outside my bedroom window in Bombay. It is the sea by which I was born, and which I carry within me wherever I go.
– Salman Rushdie
Portion of this yew
Is a man my grandsire knew,
Bosomed here at its foot:
This branch may be his wife,
A ruddy human life
Now turned to a green shoot.
These grasses must be made
Of her who often prayed,
Last century, for repose;
And the fair girl long ago
Whom I often tried to know
May be entering this rose.
So, they are not underground,
But as nerves and veins abound
In the growths of upper air,
And they feel the sun and rain,
And the energy again
That made them what they were!
– Thomas Hardy, Transformations
I had nothing else to do. Writing gave me something to do every day.
– William S. Burroughs
THE SACRED HEART OF TRAUMA
Sometimes things don’t go our way. A loved one dies. An unexpected result comes. A relationship falls apart in a way we never could have foreseen. An infection returns. A business venture dissolves overnight. An attack comes out of the blue, shattering a body or a dream, or both. Something that seemed so solid and real yesterday turns out to be much less than what it seemed.
And a part of us cracks open. For a moment, all of our mind-made defences crumble. We are new-borns again, no longer invulnerable to the overwhelming glory and horror of creation. We are faced with the awesomeness of own impotence before the vastness of the cosmos, without the protection of ego. For a moment, we touch and our touched by the unfathomable mystery underlying all things. Impermanence bursts through the gaps in an outdated reality, and the sheer groundlessness of existence, the uncontrollability of events, the unpredictability of our emotional world, becomes obvious once again. Our eyes are open. Ancient teachings are alive. What is born must die. What is here will soon be gone. The very ground we stand on can open up at any moment. There is nowhere truly safe to stand. What is real? What can be trusted in this life? What is worth living for?
And we recoil. It’s all too much, the hugeness of experience. Quick, get back to normal. Quick, grab onto something solid, something manageable. Fix something. Seek something. Control something. Get a grip on something. Get an answer. Medicate. Work it all out. Distract yourself – with substances, with religion, with platitudes, with more and more and more experience.
Rather than face the unexplored terrors lurking in the deep, we fix our eyes once again on the surfaces. We shut out the greater terror of an uncontrollable existence by focussing on the things in life we think we have some control over. We block out our pain, and try to get back to normal, back to work, back to ‘reality’.
But normality is the problem, not the solution, and the old reality was too limited anyway. Life, in its infinite intelligence, was only trying to crack us open. We had become too small, too limited, too numb, too preoccupied with our own lives, trapped in our own stories, lulled to sleep by the comforts of modernity. In our pursuit of the positive, we had buried all that we had come to see as negative – the pain, the sorrows, the longings, the fears, the terrors, the paradoxes. These very natural energies we had pushed into the deep so that we could function, and be productive, and ‘fit in’. We thought we were ‘happy’. Yet our happiness had become so contingent, and our joy so dependent, and our contentment so very superficial. It was the kind of contentment that could break apart at any moment. And it did, for life seeks wholeness and nothing less.
And we are being called now to question everything. Everything.
Pain is not a block to healing, but a doorway. Grief is not a mistake but a portal. Even anger contains a path. And our deepest longings are not faults, but parts of ourselves that just want to be met.
Wounds open to be healed, held, be given loving attention.
Our suffering and the suffering of loved ones can often seem so random, so meaningless, so pointless, so cruel, so uncontrollable, and we rush to cover up our pain, hide it, deny it, or just pretend that we are ‘over’ it. As spiritual seekers, we may pretend that we have gone beyond, or transcended, or even completely annihilated our humanness. That we are invulnerable. That we feel nothing anymore except unending bliss. That we are so very enlightened, so very perfect.
But in the end you cannot hide yourself from yourself, because on some level you always know exactly where you’ve hidden yourself. The ‘enlightened me’ is the greatest lie of all. Where would the ‘unenlightened me’ hide?
No experience is inherently traumatic, no experience is truly unmanageable, but sometimes experiences can release volcanic energies in ourselves that we had repressed, pushed down, refused to integrate in our rush to be a consistent and solid and normal ‘self’. In trying to hold ourselves together, we had actually torn ourselves apart.
And now life has come to the rescue, with its love of wholeness. The terrors, the rages, the confusion, the unfathomable joys that we were never able to hold, have been released. Sometimes life triggers an explosion in us… and we rush to contain ourselves again.
Here is an invitation to remain uncontained a little while longer. Be a little more inconsistent, a little more of a mess. There is dignity in falling apart.
Bow to all of the ancient energies that are now flowing through you. An old life is falling away, a new life has not yet coagulated, and you stand now on holy ground, full of raging life and possibility, broken open but alive to these lost parts of yourself, in touch with joys and pains you thought you would never feel again, energies you had repressed since childhood or even before.
Your suffering is not a mistake, or a punishment, and ultimately it is not even yours. We all suffer. We all get ill, get old, and die, at least in our physical forms, and our physical forms are holy. We all experience loss, and wonder why. We all lose control, or wonder if we ever had control. We are all faced with situations we never would have planned, choices we never wanted to make, things that seem unwanted now, circumstances that just feel ‘wrong’.
But in the midst of the unwanted, if we can slow down, and breathe, and come out of the story of “how it was supposed to be”, and turn towards the present moment, we may find things that are okay, even wanted, even sacred, even healing. And we may begin to realize that we are not alone in our struggle. We are connected to all of humanity. Our suffering is our rite of passage, and many others have been on this journey. We walk in the footsteps of our ancestors. We are being invited to love ourselves even more fiercely, connect with our breath more deeply, feel the kind of compassion for ourselves and each other that we never would have felt if things had continued to ‘go our way’. Whose way, anyway? And why did we expect that things would continue to go our way, in a world of impermanence and constant change? Did we really believe that we were in charge? Can a wave control the vastness of the ocean? Did we lose our humility, our sense of proportion?
We are not in control. Everything is dying from the moment it is born, as the Buddha taught. Everything is made of crystal. And therein lies our greatest sorrow and deepest depression, but also our greatest potential for joy and liberation. We learn to get out of our own way, and embrace the way things really are. We learn to love life as it is, and let go of our outdated fantasies. We learn that real joy is not an escape from pain, but the willingness to feel it, and real contentment means opening ourselves up to even the most profound grief. If we can touch our own sorrows, we can touch the sorrows of all humanity. This is not wallowing, or indulging – this is waking up, the opening of eyes, the birth of true compassion.
We allow even our deepest traumas to teach us about love, and compassion, and slowness, and remind us of the preciousness of each and every moment of life. We allow life to break our hearts wide open to Truth. Everything is burning, as the Buddha taught, and to cling to outdated pictures of reality only breeds great sorrow.
We knew so much, and now we know less, and that is not a loss, but our freedom. And there is something within us that is never traumatised, something ever-present and trustworthy, something that survives even the most intense sensations, that holds and releases trauma as the heart pumps its blood…
– Jeff Foster
Learning without thinking is useless.
Thinking without learning is dangerous.
– Confucius, The Analects
One must become the way the garden feels.
– Haraada of Tofuku-j
I wonder if the trickster isn’t beckoning at the wilds beyond our fences, wanting us to dance between the binary.
– Dr. Bayo Akomolafe
First Night
by Menno Wigman (trans. David Colmer)
Earth, a virtuous body has now arrived.
An overwhelming sun rose in it once,
Its eyes shone brightly like a long July,
A breath of mellow twilight filled its lungs,
A spellbound moon traversed its breast.
The palms of its hands felt water and stroked pets.
The soles of its feet kissed beaches and rocks. Insight.
A strange insight formed in its head, its tongue
Grew sharp, its fingers found the fists they held,
It fought for bread, for money, honours, light and sex.
You can read an awful lot of books about it.
You can even write your own. Earth, don’t be hard
On this man who had at least a hundred keys,
But not a map or compass for this blind path,
And now has come to spend his first night here.
AXIOMS FOR LIFE
by Francesqua Darling
1. If you have to talk to more than one person about the same problem over and over (including your therapist), you don’t want help, you want attention. Attention asks why. Help asks how, and gets to work.
2. You will feel amazing when your confidence is fuelled by self-belief instead of validation from others.
3. Peace feels so much better than driving yourself nuts trying to understand why something happened as it did. There are thousands of reasons and your life is not long enough to find the answers to all your whys. Peace is loving the mystery.
4. It seems counter-intuitive that true power is found in relaxation, in letting go, in joy and pleasure. The opposite of this is force. The key to true power lies in releasing resistance to what IS. It is really, really relaxing.
5. The best part about being authentic, which is a deep intimacy with yourself, is that there is no image to sustain. You will delight many and disturb others, and none of it will concern the truth of YOU.
6. If it is meant for you, it will be for you. You never have to force, convince, or manipulate life or other people. If you don’t have what you want, it is likely you are not being you, so what is for you cannot come to you.
Pray for external peace, and for new conditions to arise. I’m quite encouraged by how many people in the world really agree about this. It’s very heartwarming. Pray for new conditions to come; pray for peace treaties and cease fires to be signed; pray for soldiers to return to their homes in good health, and for refugees to be able to go back to their own homes. Pray for countries to be in the hands of their own citizens; pray for them to be able to decide their future and have the liberty and the government that they choose. One person’s prayers might not have much strength. But I think if thousands and thousands and thousands pray for better conditions to come in the world—not just in Europe but all over the world—I think Buddhas and Bodhisattvas can actually make things be that way. In that way, new conditions can arise. And then, slowly, slowly, internal conditions will also change, because ultimately it is the internal conditions of beings minds’ that shape the outer conditions of the world. When our own minds are in harmony, there’s greater harmony in the world.
– Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche
One advantage in keeping a diary is that you become aware with reassuring clarity of the changes which you constantly suffer.
One of the first signs of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die. This life appears unbearable, another unattainable. One is no longer ashamed of wanting to die; one asks to be moved from the old cell, which one hates, to a new one, which one only in time will come to hate. In this, there is also a residue of belief that during the move the master will chance to come along the corridor, look at the prisoner and say: “This man is not to be locked up again, He is to come with me.”
Only our concept of time makes it possible for us to speak of the Day of Judgment by that name, in reality, it is a summary court in perpetual session.
People who walk across dark bridges, past saints, with dim, small lights. Clouds which move across grey skies past churches with towers darkened in the dusk. One who leans against granite railing gazing into the evening waters, His hands resting on old stones.
Self-control means wanting to be effective at some random point in the infinite radiations of my spiritual existence.
– Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks
Is there no way out
of the mind?
– Sylvia Plath
In the midst of that which is broken, things grow and become whole. In the midst of hardship, life takes root.
– T. Thorn Coyle
I wish there was more talk about soul. We’ve largely given up such talk, in favor of commerce, politics, the talk of people who expect answers, results. I’ve said in a poem, “the normal condition of the soul is to be starved.” If this is true, those of us who are vigilant about our souls are trying to feed them. Save them? Faust gambled with his soul, which suggests that we should be using different currency when we gamble. But it seems to me that gambling, at its healthiest, is one way of activating the soul, nudging it from its hungry sleep. I’m speaking about gambling in its most reductive form: taking a chance. The act of taking a chance is energizing. The art of the act of taking a chance can lead to the sublime. Like the time I saw Paco Camino exhibit perfect grace – a series of slow, exact moves – with an erratic bull in Madrid. Or Miles Davis, years ago at a club, riding an impulse beyond himself. Surely those folks who play their lives and their work eminently safe don’t often put themselves in the position where they can be startled or enlarged. Don’t put themselves near enough to the realm of the unknown where discovery resides, and joy has been rumored to appear. The realm of the unknown is contiguous to the realm of failure. The gambler, deep down, has made a pact with failure. He’ll accept it because it has interesting neighbors.
– Stephen Dunn, Walking Light
Word of the day is ‘ipsedixitism’ (19th century): the insistence that something is ‘fact’ because someone else said so.
[There is a] phrase that “What needs healing in this world can only be healed in the Other World, and what needs healing in the Other World can only be healed in this world.” By the time an historical injury or injustice has travelled through family systems, it is “too late” for healing, unless that healing can be done by the descendants of those so injured. But if those living people can do something about what has just been passed down unconsciously, they have effectively healed something in the world of ancestors.
Conversely, the energy it takes to undo a contemporary injury or injustice is not within the capacity of the “only human” world without some sort of intervention or involvement by the “unseen and immaterial” world. If your mind can’t quite stretch that far, it is just fine to begin thinking about the Other World initially as a metaphor describing the hidden world of the imaginal and emotional, and consider how the unmeasurable, nevertheless, has real effects on our lives.
– Randy Jones, Medicine Without An Expiration Date
A wise woman who was traveling in the mountains found a precious stone in a stream. The next day she met another traveler who was hungry, and the wise woman opened her bag to share her food.
The hungry traveler saw the precious stone and asked the woman to give it to him. She did so without hesitation. The traveler left, rejoicing in his good fortune. He knew the stone was worth enough to give him security for a lifetime. But a few days later he came back to return the stone to the wise woman.
“I’ve been thinking,” he said, “I know how valuable the stone is, but I give it back in the hope that you can give me something even more precious. Please give me what you have within you that enabled you to give me the stone.”
– The Wise Woman’s Stone, Author Unknown
Chögyam Trungpa ~ THE CONFIDENT WARRIOR
The confident warrior conducts himself with gentleness, fearlessness, and intelligence. Gentleness is the warm quality of the human heart. Because of the warmth of his heart the warrior’s confidence is not too hard or brittle. Rather it has a vulnerable, open and soft quality. It is our gentleness which allows us to feel warmth and kindness and to fall in love. But at the same time we are not completely tender. We are tough as well as soft. We are fearless as well as gentle. The warrior meets the world with a slight sense of detachment, a sense of distance and precision. This aspect of confidence is the natural instinct of fearlessness which allows the warrior to meet challenges without losing his integrity. Finally our confidence expresses itself as innate intelligence, which raises ordinary gentleness and fearlessness to the level of warriorship. In other words, it is intelligence that prevents gentleness from becoming cheap romanticism without any vision, and fearlessness from becoming purely macho. Intelligence is our sense of wakeful inquisitiveness toward the world. It is what allows us to appreciate and take delight in the vivid qualities of the world around us.
The Mother of Light
So to become
what we have lost together
Not a memory so much
as the wick on which it flames
This darkness in us
is the mother of light
We hear it speaking, crooning
lifting us to the breast, the flower
and we don’t ask why
We pass love around
eat of its body
play in the flames
but only find each other
in the dark
– George Gorman
Why I Love Thee?
Why I love thee?
Ask why the seawind wanders,
Why the shore is aflush with the tide,
Why the moon through heaven meanders;
Like seafaring ships that ride
On a sullen, motionless deep;
Why the seabirds are fluttering the strand
Where the waves sing themselves to sleep
And starshine lives in the curves of the sand.
– Sadakichi Hartmann
Solitude matters, and for some people, it’s the air they breathe.
– Susan Cain
The Portable Grandmother
I carry her
around my bone
I see her
wooden spoon in hand
mixing flour
into generations
of bread
humming a song
from old Russia
into the soup
You can’t make something
from nothing, she said
She built a home
from chicken bones
bits of onion, carrot
words, stories
years like
wind across the Steppe
I hear her
knitting
tick and tick
punctuate my waking
ravel up the day
and tickle me to sleep
She gives me apples with honey
a place to be from
a people to belong to
She makes the shifting world
solid
Her calm voice
pushes back the night
endures all
demands fealty
Her gray ghost
weighty as platinum
I carry her
around my bone
– Lorrie Wolfe
Talking About New Orleans
Talking about New Orleans
About deforestation & the flood of vodun paraphernalia
the Congo line losing its Congo
the funeral bands losing their funding
the killer winds humming intertribal warfare hums into
two storm-surges
touching down tonguing the ground
three thousand times in a circle of grief
four thousand times on a levee of lips
five thousand times between a fema of fangs
everything fiendish, fetid, funky, swollen, overheated
and splashed with blood & guts & drops of urinated gin
in syncopation with me
riding through on a refrigerator covered with
asphalt chips with pieces of ragtime music charts
torn photo mug shots & pulverized turtle shells from Biloxi
me bumping against a million-dollar oil rig
me in a ghost town floating on a river on top of a river
me with a hundred ton of crab legs
and no evacuation plan
me in a battered tree barking & howling with abandoned dogs
my cheeks stained with dried suicide kisses
my isolation rising with a rainbow of human corpse &
fecal rat bones
where is that fire chief in his big hat
where are the fucking pumps
the rescue boats
& the famous coalition of bullhorns calling out names
hey I want my red life jacket now
& I need some sacred sandbags
some fix-the-levee-powder
some blood-pressure-support-juice
some get-it-together-dust
some lucky-rooftop-charms &
some magic-helicopter-blades
I’m not prepared
to live on the bottom of the water like Oshun
I don’t have a house built on stilts
I can’t cross the sea like Olokun
I’m not equipped to walk on water like Marie Laveau
or swim away from a Titanic situation like Mr. Shine
Send in those paddling engineers
I’m inside of my insides
& I need to distinguish
between the nightmare, the mirage,
the dream and the hallucination
Give me statistics
how many residents died while waiting
how many drowned
how many suffocated
how many were dehydrated
how many were separated
how many are missing
how many had babies
and anyway
who’s in charge of this confusion
this gulf coast engulfment
this displacement
this superdome shelter
this stench of stank
this demolition order
this crowded convention center chaos
making me crave solitary confinement
Am I on my own
exhausted from fighting racist policies
exhausted from fighting off sex offenders
exhausted from fighting for cots for tents for trailers
for a way out of this anxiety this fear this emptiness
this avoidance this unequal opportunity world of
disappointments accumulating in my undocumented eye
of no return tickets
Is this freedom is this global warming is this the new identity
me riding on a refrigerator through contaminated debris
talking to no one in particular
about a storm that became a hurricane
& a hurricane that got violent and started
eyeballing & whistling & stretching toward
a category three domination that caught me in
the numbness of my own consciousness
unprepared, unprotected and
made more vulnerable to destabilization
by the corporate installation of human greed, human poverty
human invention of racism & human neglect of the environment
I mean even Buddy Bolden came back to say
move to higher ground
because a hurricane will not
rearrange its creativity for you
& the river will meet the ocean in
the lake of your flesh again
so move to higher ground
and let your jungle find its new defense
let the smell of your wisdom restore the power of pure air
& let your intoxicated shoreline rumble above & beyond the
water-marks of disaster
I’m speaking of New Orleans of deportation
of belching bulldozers of poisonous snakes
of bruised bodies of instability and madness
mechanism of indifference and process of elimination
I’m talking about transformation about death re-entering life with
Bonne chance, bon ton roulé, bonjour & bonne vie in New Orleans, bon
– Jayne Cortez
Had my youth
fished
picked
hui’ed out of me
grew up quickly
once we left Kāneohe,
shoved like pou into Waikīkī
and so far
from my ancestors
it’s no surprise
I have little in the way
of good memory
– Ngaio Simmons
I was happy to be alone. The bright, high-altitude sun slanted through the spires of pines, and the first burst of wildflowers—wild candytuft, golden peavine, mariposa lily—caught the light, burning through the darkest patches of forest.
– Nathaniel Brodie
Consider the lilies of the field,
the blue banks of camas opening
into acres of sky along the road.
Would the longing to lie down
and be washed by that beauty
abate if you knew their usefulness,
how the natives ground their bulbs
for flour, how the settlers’ hogs
uprooted them, grunting in gleeful
oblivion as the flowers fell?
And you—what of your rushed
and useful life?
Imagine setting it all down—
papers, plans, appointments, everything—
leaving only a note:
Gone
to the fields
to be lovely.
Be back
when I’m through
with blooming.
– Lynne Ungar
A tree nowhere offers a straight line or a regular curve, but who doubts that root, trunk, boughs, and leaves embody geometry?
– George Iles
I stretch truths where I see fit. I’m a writer.
– Colleen Hoover, Verity
Expect God evenly in all things.
– Meister Eckhart
Fate is purpose seen from the other end of life. When engaged with the true aim of one’s life, looking back can be revelatory. In the end, very little is lost. Once the key is found and the door of the self opens, it all makes sense; the ascents and descents, even the tragedies and failures can be revalued. When the door between the worlds begins to swing, the values of time and place are altered and everything can have renewed meaning.
– Michael Meade, Awakening the Soul
i pledge allegiance to the
group text i pledge allegiance
to laughter & to all the boys
i have a crush on i pledge
allegiance to my spearmint plant
to my split ends to my grandfather’s brain and gray left eye
– Safia Elhillo, Self-Portrait With No Flag
The End of Poetry
by Ada Limon
Enough of osseous and chickadee and sunflower
and snowshoes, maple and seeds, samara and shoot,
enough chiaroscuro, enough of thus and prophecy
and the stoic farmer and faith and our father and tis
of thee, enough of bosom and bud, skin and god
not forgetting and star bodies and frozen birds,
enough of the will to go on and not go on or how
a certain light does a certain thing, enough
of the kneeling and the rising and the looking
inward and the looking up, enough of the gun,
the drama, and the acquaintance’s suicide, the long-lost
letter on the dresser, enough of the longing and
the ego and the obliteration of ego, enough
of the mother and the child and the father and the child
and enough of the pointing to the world, weary
and desperate, enough of the brutal and the border,
enough of can you see me, can you hear me, enough
I am human, enough I am alone and I am desperate,
enough of the animal saving me, enough of the high
water, enough sorrow, enough of the air and its ease,
I am asking you to touch me.
I typically arrive three years too late.
I wish I had been able to sit
in that white, aromatic kitchen and look you in the face
but I was not ready. I was still on my way.
– Mikko Harvey
The number of hours we have together is actually not so large. Please linger near the door uncomfortably instead of just leaving. Please forget your scarf in my life and come back later for it.
– Mikko Harvey
When you read fifty poems in a row and don’t fall in love with any of them, then suddenly one comes out of nowhere and sweeps you off your feet—that poem has something to teach you about what it is you love about poetry,
– Mikko Harvey
Bury your heart in some deep green hollow
Or hide it up in a kind old tree
Better still, give it the swallow
When she goes over the sea.
– Charlotte Mew
But what I felt with you was different. I was aware of a part of myself I’d never seen in a mirror or in anyone else’s eyes. It was all around me–there in the current of the river, there in the flying shadows of our hands. It seemed time was moving through us, racing through us, and we were together standing still.
– Howard Axelrod
Most of what makes a book ‘good’ is that we’re reading it at the right moment for us.
– The School of Life
The Use of Fiction
by Naomi Shihab Nye
A boy claims he saw you on a bicycle last week,
touring his neighborhood. “West Cypress Street!” he shouts,
as if your being there and his seeing you
were some sort of benediction.
To be alive, to be standing outside
on a tender February evening . . .
“It was a blue bicycle, ma’am, your braid was flying,
I said hello and you laughed, remember?”
You almost tell him your bicycle seat is thick with dust,
the tires have been flat for months.
But his face, that radiant flower, says you are his friend,
he has told his mother your name.
Maybe this is a clear marble
he will hide in his sock drawer for months.
So who now, in a universe of figures,
would deny West Cypress Street,
throwing up clouds into this literal sky?
“Yes, amigo”–hand on shoulder–
“It was I.”
Older now, you find holiness in anything
that continues, dream after dream.
– Naomi Shihab Nye
Everybody talks about luck. I talk about luck. We all need it, and we all have bits of it. The people who have more of it–the people who find more of it in corners and in people and in projects–are the ones who know how to accept it, and who feel they deserve it. Luck is a lot like love or friendship: You have to believe that you deserve it when it’s offered, and you have to have the strength, the will, the kindness to return it. There are a lot of people in the world who don’t think enough of themselves to be loved or helped or enlightened. Needless to say, I urge people to not be that kind of person. Open yourself up to all that you need by opening yourself up to offering it to others. The world turns and everyone gets lucky.
– Ruth Gordon, interview with James Grissom, 1984
The funny bone is universal.
– Bernard Malamud
I’m not real, but shapes are real,
but I’m not shapes, but I’m not a forest
of shapes. not magenta. not hornets. not
handfuls of green, or green glass.
– Nora Claire Miller
Science tells us what we can know, but what we can know is little, and if we forget how much we cannot know we become insensitive to many things of very great importance. Theology, on the other hand, induces a dogmatic belief that we have knowledge where in fact we have ignorance, and by doing so generates a kind of impertinent insolence towards the universe. Uncertainty, in the presence of vivid hopes and fears, is painful, but must be endured if we wish to live without the support of comforting fairy tales.
– Bertrand Russell
Dwi wedi dod yn ôl at fy nghoed.
This Welsh phrase, translated as “I have returned to my senses” (or “I am back in my right mind”) literally means, “I have come back to my trees”.
– Robert Moss
We live in a culture in which intelligence is denied relevance altogether, in a search for radical innocence, or is defended as an instrument of authority and repression. In my view, the only intelligence worth defending is critical, dialectical, skeptical, desimplifying.
– Susan Sontag
“A TIME FOR EVERY PURPOSE UNDER HEAVEN”
Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 is a strange little passage that rejects any rigid moral absolutes. Instead, Ecclesiastes says “To everything there is a season and a time for every purpose under heaven.”
“THE SABBATH WAS MADE FOR HUMANS NOT HUMANS FOR THE SABBATH”
Fundamentalists sometimes attack progressives as “humanists.” In Mark 2:27 Jesus defends those who place human need over religious institutions. He says the Sabbath (perhaps a metaphor for all religion) was always intended to serve human beings not the other way around. The Sabbath was understood as a call to value human rights and ecological sustainability over religious rules and institutions long before Christianity.
“LITERALISM KILLS”
2 Corinthians 3:6 says, “God has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant—not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.” If Christianity is to be a religion of love it must come from internalized compassion not heartless and mindless obedience to an external law.
“THE NEW COVENANT OF CHRISTIANITY DOES NOT DISPLACE JUDAISM”
The “new” covenant was being talked about long before Christianity. Jeremiah and Isaiah both spoke of a new covenant for Israel that would be written in people’s hearts and minds not just in external codes (See Jeremiah 31:31-38)
“JUSTICE IS NOT LIMITED BY ANY BORDER”
Leviticus 19: 34 says, “The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am your God.” Deuteronomy 27:19 goes even further, “Cursed is anyone who withholds justice from the foreigner, the orphan or the widow.” Capitalistic Christian nationalism completely rejects this foundation.
YOU CAN’T LOVE GOD AND HATE PEOPLE
The First Epistle of John says in chapter 4 that we can’t love God and be indifferent to human beings. “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ and hates a member of their human family, that person is a liar; for one who does not love their human family whom they have seen cannot love God whom they have not seen. And this commandment we have from Jesus: whoever loves God must also love their human family”
“WHOEVER HAS LOVE HAS GOD”
The Epistle of John also says, “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.” In other words, a loving Atheist is closer to the message of Christ than a loveless Christian.
Though the sound overpowers,
Sing again, with your dear voice revealing
A tone
Of some world far from ours,
Where music and moonlight and feeling
Are one.
– Percy Bysshe Shelley
So Many Constellations
translated by Pierre Joris
So many constellations, dis-
played to us. I was,
when I looked at you—when?—
outside with
the other worlds.
O, these paths, galactic,
O this hour that billowed
the nights over to us into
the burden of our names. It is,
I know, not true,
that we lived, a mere
breath blindly moved between
there and not-there and sometimes,
comet-like an eye whizzed
toward extinguished matter, in the canyons,
there where it burned out, stood
tit-gorgeous time, along
which grew up and down
& away what
is or was or will be—,
I know,
I know and you know, we knew,
we didn’t know, for we
were there and not there,
and sometimes, when
only Nothingness stood between us, we
found truly together.
– Paul Celan
Not interested in ‘defense of poetry’ argument. Poetry is a primal ancient force and art form. It has been here long before our individual lifetimes & will stay long after.
What we need is to defend ourselves *with* it. A tune to walk to as long as one still walks
– @ilya_poet
The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but rather the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.
– Glenn Gould
I believe that we learn by practice. Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing dancing or to learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the same. In each, it is the performance of a dedicated precise set of acts, physical or intellectual, from which comes shape of achievement, a sense of one’s being, a satisfaction of spirit. One becomes, in some area, an athlete of God. Practice means to perform, over and over again in the face of all obstacles, some act of vision, of faith, of desire. Practice is a means of inviting the perfection desired.
– Martha Graham
Chögyam Trungpa ~ IGNORANCE
Ignorance is the sense of having one particular aim and object and goal in mind. And that aim and object, that goal-mindedness, becomes extremely overwhelming, so you fail to see the situation around you. That seems to be the ignorance. Your mind is highly pre-coccupied with what you want, so you fail to see what is.
I was having a conversation today with one of the Super Cool Unique People in my life about the idea of manifesting the people we need around us.
I think about this a lot because many of my friends are always just manifesting exactly the people they need in their lives at the right time. I, by contrast, am unusually bad at hiring and finding the right people the first time. So I was talking to my friend about wishing she could help me manifest a person for this role I’d been needing to fill for a while because she’s great at it.
I complained, “I can never manifest people! People always manifest me.”
And then we laughed. But the more I think about it, I realize that’s exactly what happens!
I am surrounded by amazing manifesters because they all manifested me. I have an unusually biased sample/expectation about this because I tend to show up in other people’s lives exactly when they need me.
So I guess I should, like, capitalize on this or something and hope that conveniently a really great Berkeley local executive assistant (and a nanny) really need me in their lives?
I wonder what sorts of things a Professional Manfest-ee is supposed to do.
– J Li
Among the great things which are found among us the existence of Nothing is the greatest.
– Leonardo Da Vinci, Notebooks
You do not heal ‘from’ trauma.
You simply come to know yourself
as Life Itself.
And you turn towards the wounded place.
And you flush it with attention,
which is Love.
And maybe the wound will always be with you.
Maybe you will always walk with the hurt.
But now, you hold it. It doesn’t hold you.
You are the container, not the contained.
It doesn’t control you any longer, the wound.
Because it is drenched in awareness now.
Drenched in You.
Loved by You.
Even celebrated by You.
You do not heal ‘from’ trauma.
You find healing ‘in’ the trauma.
You find yourself at trauma’s sacred core.
The One who is always present.
The One who can bear
even the most intense feeling states.
And survive.
The Indestructible One.
The Infinite One.
The Powerful One.
You.
– Jeff Foster
Ghost Minnows
It was supposed to be spring.
But there were brittle whispers
through the scrub oak and sage.
Locust wings stirred, withered,
ticked, tock’d, and kept time
for an eternal drought.
A tang hung in the air.
Brown shadows shuffled on the ridgeline.
The forest knew there was fire
when the tallest trees tasted screams
– smoke on the wind – in their leaves.
Thirsty and alone as I was,
I didn’t hear the crackling groans
above the hum of constant combustion.
I didn’t smell what the trees tasted
until the sun burned the dirt,
scorched my face red, and said:
“the difference between dust and ash
is an undying flame.”
I didn’t know I was lost, either,
until ghost minnows in a dead creek
found me floating belly up,
in dust and ash, downstream.
I watched as their gills
fluttered with memories of rain,
and their silver fins flicked
only the rumors of snowmelt.
Those minnows saved me.
Then renewed their endless journeys
against empty currents.
It took me a long time,
watching the inferno’s reflection
on a few scales of fish skin
to learn the minnows’ lesson:
you’re only dead if you forget.
– Will Falk
I was so far from
everything I wanted
to be the moment
I finally made up my
mind to get better.
– Topaz Winters
…The only thing different in us
from them
is we have an even more
stubborn resistance
but ultimately
we are impelled
by the same irresistible force
to completely self-destruct
into a New and Improved
Yet to be Discovered Marvel.
Do your best to allow this —
you too were made for wings.
Stubborn Resistance
by Chelan Harkin
Then
The afternoon was a medium.
You made it to the beach. You made to it
an invertebrate overture. Lay down slug
-like, slit belly, what gave.
You were entering what then was called
the universal. A bit
pendulous. You felt a motion that wasn’t
negative pulling you toward the ancient texts
you had discovered floating in some sewage.
They were from the heyday of psychology.
You laughed at this. An animal filament
flickered at the edge of sea. By sea
they had meant mind. You laughed at this.
You observed frothing something. Universal. Stung
your toes. Something universal at the edge you nip
your toes in. Something universal this way you become.
– Aditi Machado
THE WAKE OF DESTRUCTION
The world would be a far better place
If decisions were based upon
What is good for humanity, instead of
What is good for the bottom line.
How difficult would it be –
To shift our way of thinking?
Revolutionary.
A complete reversal of fortune.
But it is after all
What the future requires
Our selfish commodities no longer
Worth the price.
The world is much smaller than it used to be
The old ways of ignoring those around us
Prevent us now from seeing the truth
Of who we are and must become.
– Laurence Overmire
In a traditional culture, everyone knows the cultural vocabulary and grammar of the mythic imagery that is used to create that ritual. Here in a modern setting, even the idea of participating rather than watching is actually a whole skill set—you can announce it, and people will do their best to contribute, but really understanding some of the more subtle differences between the two attitudes will only be achieved by practice.
Because of this general lack of knowledge, some kind of introduction to the idea of ritual is necessary, and then when people arrive, that introduction needs to be gone over in some fashion. There is an art to opening the group and making the various people, and the spirits they are carrying, welcome. Sometimes, it might be necessary to do a prayer at the beginning in order to accomplish that, but other times it might be necessary to talk, and go over the general plan to calm people’s concerns. On another occasion, music and song might be necessary to get the energy going on a creative and enthusiastic track.
– Randy Jones, Medicine Without An Expiration Date
Who’s going to give you the authority to feel that what you notice is important?
It will have to be you.
– Verlyn Klinkenborg
The Flame Tree
My neighbor has decided to poison the flame tree.
He is right, of course.
The tree is over 20 years old, huge, spreading,
and the termites have worn jagged roads clear to its top.
It’s clearly a danger
tilting toward our house—
some fickle wind
my neighbor says could blow it over.
Every fañomnåkan, it sends out its bursts of orange blossoms;
it blooms and blooms and blooms relentlessly,
the flares it sends shooting out into space
more stunning than fireworks
through the window
where my mother
riveted to a bed, doomed by her body to a colorless spot,
gazes out, her head on a pillow—
might have seemed like forever to her who used to climb green mountain sides—
and watches that tree full of sparrows
chittering
chattering
flitting here and there
and the outlandish blazing petals
steadfastly singing against the blue sky.
My neighbor, true to his word,
injected a poisonous brew bought at Home Depot into the trunk of the tree,
the toxic river
traveling up up up following the termite trails to the heart
of the fire.
He is right, of course.
The tree came back the following year,
its clusters unflinchingly parading their bursts of rebellious orange.
But the poison had done its work—
see, where there was a canopy of flames
there are now just a handful here and there,
one spray in particular desperately
reaching out
like a fist full of beauty
to the window
where she
used to watch for its return.
– Evelyn Flores
Live in the sunshine,
swim in the sea, drink the wild air.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The presence of everyone
inclines toward revealing
what’s holy that’s shared in kind
The cynic whispers
“Nothing excuses this”
The dreamer warbles
“Everything’s redeeming this”
Hand in hand
we walk through fires
somehow believing
without knowing how
the truth that is between us
– George Gorman
We are the only mammals besides cetaceans and a few other aquatic mammals whose babies, when born underwater, will float to the top, waiting until they get there to start breathing. This is why we can successfully give birth to our children in the water. Our newborns have special subcutaneous fat cells that float them! If another primate, a dog, or any land mammal were dumb enough to give birth in a pond, a lake or a sea, its newborns would quickly sink to the bottom and die. We are the only semi-aquatic ape. So it’s no wonder that nearly every human child of any age, if not traumatized by water, is happier and more contented playing in and around bodies of water than in any other place.
– George Gorman
Revelation never comes as a fern uncoiling / a frond in mist; it comes when I trip on a root, / slap a mosquito on my arm.
– Arthur Sze, Earthshine, The Glass Constellation
What a strange demented feeling it gives me when I realize that I have spent whole days before this inkstone, with nothing better to do, jotting down at random whatever nonsensical thoughts have entered my head.
– Yoshida Kenkō
As you know, the practical advantages of being able to write out your thoughts fluently are very great. For one thing, when you are used to writing them out, they present themselves, one after another. When you are not used to writing them out, they mill around among themselves usually and you see nothing but heads and tails of them when you sit down to get them on paper.
– Ted Hughes
KPFA RECOLLECTION
I am old I remember
when KPFA’s programs
didn’t have to end on time
A half hour show could be
25 minutes or
35 minutes
The powers that were
felt that the show’s requirements
were more important
than adherence to a predetermined
“schedule”
I followed two such shows:
Jaime de Angulo
and Alan Watts
I never knew
exactly when my show would start
I would have
a little extra time
or a little less.
I didn’t mind.
I liked the spirit of anarchy
that prevailed
and I could improvise.
Those days are gone gone gone
as are many of the people who were there
when I began.
I understand
that their voices
are still somewhere
sounding in the universe
where they made shows
that demonstrated
*radical, elemental
freedom*
and I am with them
still wondering what time
Jaime and Alan
might end
their fascinating
ear-caressing
shows
so I might
speak
and join their freedom song.
– Jack Foley
Honest Words
Every time we speak for real
and understanding’s born,
we make new sounds
that only feelings can.
So when we meet,
without pretense
or coercive rhyme,
we weave those sounds between.
Still learning here,
through eyes and ears and
dreams and honest words,
to mean what matters now.
– George Gorman
We will work to save only what we first love.
– Jane Hirshfield
On the Strength of All Conviction and the Stamina of Love
Sometimes I think
we could have gone on.
All of us. Trying. Forever.
But they didn’t fill
the desert with pyramids.
They just built some. Some.
They’re not still out there,
building them now. Everyone,
everywhere, gets up, and goes home.
Yet we must not
Diabolize time. Right?
We must not curse the passage of time.
– Jennifer Michael Hecht, The Next Ancient World
In the absence of ritual, humans live in nostalgia.
– Gabriel Keczan
Each one of us matters, has a role to play, and makes a difference. Each one of us must take responsibility for our own lives, and above all, show respect and love for living things around us, especially each other.
– Jane Goodall
Diane Seuss
Ballad, in Sestets
I would like to have better ideas
than the ideas I have.
There is an idea I’m reaching for
but like a jar on the top shelf
and no stepstool, I can’t leap
to it.
Whatever it is, I can’t leap to it.
I have been in large spaces.
Spaces too cavernous for ideas.
Too enormous, with rock faces,
cliffs and towers of sheer red
rock,
or enormous Virgin Marys, flying
buttresses, naves, transepts, rose
windows, chancels, stratospheric
crucifixes, where ideas
are snuffed out like altar
candles.
Snuffed and alone in cavernous spaces.
Alone, a misnomer. A word whose
definition I had to find in a dictionary.
Language comes hard. Silence corsets
me. In other words, I can’t reach it,
the jar
on the shelf, or climb the sheer face
of the rock stained red by sunset,
or corner and pocket the miniscule
priest. It’s beyond what I’m made of.
It matters how and where you are made,
and what
materials were at hand for the makers.
To say that I am alone is a misnomer.
Whatever I am, alone
doesn’t cover it. What I am, I
am subsumed by it. It is
pleasant
to be without edges. To be a cloud
in a voluminous sky. I have been
in minimal spaces. Closer to anthill
than cavern or villa. Or tucked inside
the incalculable. A bead swallowed
by a whale,
sloughed-off sequin in a warehouse.
A jelly jar, a jar filled with pigs’ feet,
lost in the giant’s pantry.
Once there was a honeymoon.
The bride swang, or swung, out over
deep water.
No bells rang or rung.
It was a honeymoon, a minor chord
tucked inside a philharmonic.
It was cold and dark and wind and stars.
The closest neighbors were far.
They shone,
they shined their headlights
in the window of the shack, the hovel,
the villa, and delivered unto the couple
a loaf of bread still warm
from the kiln, from a witch’s oven,
and soft
and golden-crusted and steam
rising from it like a blowhole blowing
spray or a chimney or pipe
blowing smoke, or a newborn birthed
in an icy field, steam spiraling
from the gash
of its open mouth like it had just taken
a drag from its first cigarette
and exhaled the smoke into the jar
of air, it’s inexplicable,
there is no theory or idea or blanket
to cover it.
Diane Seuss
Ballad Without Music
I dreamed I wrote a book called Outside the Twat System.
I dyed my hair to match the book cover.
There was a dinner before the reading in New York.
At the table sat luminaries.
Famous, beautiful, handsome.
I don’t know where to put my personality.
Do I have a personality?
It was one of those dinners where the food is too expensive.
The food is too expensive but you’re starving.
At the reading someone famous yelled out a request.
It was for a poem about nipples.
I was wearing a skirt, out of character for me.
I think I’m supposed to feel delighted.
I do feel delighted but something lurks beneath it.
Something lurks like a frog waiting for flies.
Later, at the hotel, the bed was king-sized.
King-sized decorative pillows you had to move off the bed.
I placed them on the decorative chair.
Others have slept here, I thought, feeling squeamish.
Squeamish, but I was tired.
My purple hair splayed out on the pillow.
I should be lonely, I thought.
I could have been happily married.
Some people are happily married.
I thought back to two creeps.
Two creeps who gave me good advice.
One said you can’t prevent the unpreventable.
You can’t prevent the unpreventable but you can tolerate what comes.
The other said Diane, you are in danger.
You are in danger of becoming an artifact.
On the airplane the next morning I had a realization.
I am one of those as if personalities.
It’s as if I’m gregarious but I’m not.
It’s as if I’m an open book but my book is on lockdown.
I don’t believe this was always the case.
I didn’t start faking it until 5th grade.
In 5th grade I started borrowing my best friend’s clothes.
I realized beauty was a matter of income and opportunity.
In 7th grade I landed the hottest boy in school.
In 8th grade he dumped me and I peroxided an orange streak in my hair.
In high school I was pursued by the drama teacher.
He wanted me to act in his plays, so I did.
I acted, and my allegiances began to shift.
I switched lanes.
Whatever life was supposed to be, I was aiming for something else.
I aimed, but I stumbled.
I stumbled so often I got a permanent limp.
There was a life, and then there was an inner life.
There was an inner life, and then there was an afterlife.
There was an afterlife, and then there were ideas about the afterlife.
When I finally lived alone, I became a body moving through empty rooms.
I became a mind whose only encumbrance was exhaustion.
When I washed my hands, I shut my eyes.
Everything disappeared but my hands in warm water, scrubbing.
I wondered if this is happiness.
I can hear the furnace click on and off.
I can hear the wind try to spiral down the chimney.
I am a homeowner, mortgaged to the rafters.
Yesterday I saw a mouse, generally minding its own business.
I am writing a book called Outside the Twat System.
For every magical belief, an aspect of embodiment goes unfulfilled.
– Jack Adam Weber
If you talk to the animals they will talk with you and you will know each other. If you do not talk to them you will not know them and what you do not know, you will fear. What one fears, one destroys.
– Chief Dan George, Tsleil-Waututh Nation
Is it insane to listen to the same music over and over and over again when you are writing something? I really hope not.
– Jessica Francis Kane
Children must never work for our love; they must rest in it.
– Gordon Neufeld
Writing is a bit like psychoanalysis. You’re supposed to go where it’s psychically troubling.
– Edward Hirsch
Embodied Intelligence
That fundamental intelligence, what I call embodied intelligence, is a savior because it always tells the truth. Your thinking mind can come up with all kinds of terrible, crippling fantasies and delusions and fears and phobias and compulsions. So, instead of being led by that mind, we’re using this embodied intelligence.
It’s a feeling sense. It tells you where you are, it tells you when you’re getting stressed, it tells you when your mind is taking over and taking you to difficult places. The body intelligence is always here, always present. Unless there’s something that needs to be engaged with, it’s naturally quite warm, open and relaxed.
– Ajahn Sucitto
Sabbath Poem 2005 XV1
I am hardly an ornithologist,
nevertheless I live among the birds
and on the best days my mind
is with them, partaking of their nature
which is earthly and airy.
I live with the heavenly swallows
who fly for joy (to live, yes, but also for joy)
as they pass again and again over
the river, feeding, drinking, bathing
joyfully as they fly.
Sometimes my thoughts are up there
with the yellow-throated warbler, high
among the white branches and gray-green
foliage of the sycamores, singing
as he feeds among the lights and shadows.
A ringing in my ears from hearing
too many of the wrong things
surrounds my head some days
like a helmet, and yet I hear the birds
singing: the song sparrow by the water,
the mockingbird, the ecstasy of whose song
flings him into the air.
Song comes from a source unseen
as if from a stirring leaf, but I know
the note before I see the bird.
It is a Carolina wren whose goodcheer
never falters all year long.
Into the heat, into the smells
of horse sweat, man sweat, wilting
foliage, stirred earth,
the song of the wood thrush flows
cool from the deep shade.
I hear the sounds of wings.
What man can abide the rule
of “the market” when he hears,
in his waking, in his sleep,
the sound of wings?
In the night I hear the owls
thrilling near and far;
it is my dream that calls,
my dream that answers.
Sometimes as I sit quiet
on my porch above the river
a warbler will present himself,
parula or yellow-throated or prothonotary,
perfect beauty in finest detail,
seemingly as unaware
of me as I am aware of him.
Or, one never knows quite when,
the waxwings suddenly appear
numerous and quiet, not there
it seems until one looks,
as though called forth, like angels,
by one’s willingness for them to be.
Or it has come to be September
and the blackbirds are flocking.
They pass through the riverbank trees
in one direction erratically
like leaves in the wind.
Or it is June. The martins are nesting.
The he-bird has the fiercest
countenance I have ever seen. He drops
out of the sky as a stone falls
and then he breaks his fall and alights
light on the housetop
as though gravity were not.
Think of it! To fly
by mere gift, without the clamor
and stain of our inert metal,
in perfect trust.
It is the Sabbath of the birds
that so moves me. They belong
in their ever-returning song, in their flight,
in their faith in the upholding air,
to the Original World. They are above us
and yet of us, for those who fly
fall, like those who walk.
– Wendell Berry
Because there is no principle of love,
you and I ride horses to a curve in the lake.
Because we are ever-expanding cosmic bodies,
but do not understand physics,
my horse will be named Dakota, and yours
Chip, and when he bends his head to drink,
the forces of memory and dark energy
erupt from the water like cattails. When we say love,
we only know how for a few moments.
And keep insisting on different versions
of the same story. Chaos, or better,
the original emptiness, is always a constant.
One horse bellows and the other answers
with a clip of her shoe
on a nearby stone. Because suffering
is difficult to define, the lake is this blue
only once. The horses toss the reins from their necks.
They have been here a long time,
and know only the old ways.
When we return home, we keep trying different ways
to feel the same.
– Jenny Molberg
I need distance and solitude to sort through the recovered debris of memory and recapture what I can of my lost past. It’s when I’m gone that the details, like segments of a mosaic, come together and turn into images, scenes, narratives. Being away, I can smell the smoke from fall fires and the wet odor of the soil in the fields, and conjure up in their totality the days when my school went to a collective farm to dig potatoes. I can feel the frosty air biting my cheeks when I pull my sled up the hill and keep riding it down until it gets dark, and my toes feel cold and numb in the thick woolen red and blue socks my grandmother knitted whose tops stuck out of my ungainly dark brown boots polished each Sunday morning by my father
– Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough
When I wake I drag with me shreds of dreams that beg to be written … from very early on I passed from writing to living, as from dreaming to waking.
– Julio Cortázar
Writers are made — forged, really, in a kiln of their own madness and insecurities — over the course of many, many moons. The writer you are when you begin is not the same writer you become.
– Chuck Wendig
The only thing that keeps me going is the belief that the interior work matters to the collective
– Dana Levin
Tall nettles cover up, as they have done
These many springs, the rusty harrow, the plough
Long worn out, and the roller made of stone:
Only the elm butt tops the nettles now.
This corner of the farmyard I like most:
As well as any bloom upon a flower
I like the dust on the nettles, never lost
Except to prove the sweetness of a shower.
– Edward Thomas
“That old Chinese proverb?
‘The wind got up in the night and took our plans away.’
‘Yes, and it’s a good thing. Unpredictably. Constanin Brâncuși, I used this at the end of yoga the other night. Well he had this theory about life. How it has to be in constant ferment. Can’t be safe. Always changing. His sculptures depended on that alone, he said. We have to be a bit more like sour-dough starter. It’s hard to explain but you get what I mean don’t you?”
– Gillian Mears, Here is the Heartflower
The World in May is Leafing Out
It’s Matisse on a bicycle. It’s
a great blue heron coloring
outside the lines. The show’s
turned over to the aftermath
of buds. You can love
never thinking
this cliché could turn
to ice. Even nice
can be profound
as worry, even
the creek over the rotting log,
the pansy in the moss-covered
pot. The birds bulge
with song. Mary Cassatt
throws open her windows.
Monet drags his pallet,
sits and waits for the paint
to spill across the patina
of his failing sight. Eric Satie
makes his joyous cling
and clang a counterpoint
to dazzle. The earth is rising
in shoots and sprays.
The sky’s as new as rain.
The stubborn doors swing open.
– Jack Ridl
It is so profoundly, comforting and beautiful, the minuet of old friendships.
– Anne Lamott
Delusion hides itself
in our most prized forms of conditioning –
spirituality and religion.
– Adyashanti
On the journey of the warrior-bodhisattva, the path goes down, not up, as if the mountain pointed toward the earth instead of the sky. Instead of transcending the suffering of all creatures, we move toward turbulence and doubt however we can. We explore the reality and unpredictability of insecurity and pain, and we try not to push it away. If it takes years, if it takes lifetimes, we let it be as it is. At our own pace, without speed or aggression, we move down and down and down. With us move millions of others, companions in awakening from fear.
– Pema Chodron
Participation. That’s what’s going to save the human race.
– Pete Seeger
Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.
– John Lubbock
When we primarily prioritize our own needs, we move toward isolating ourselves from the larger world, disconnecting from everything outside of this small self. But when we make even little efforts to serve others and take on their needs our priority, even just for a short moment, such a choice brings grace to our presence, and helps us feel part
of a larger world. We feel enriched by our connection. It may be inconvenient not to be able to get home right away, or to whatever thing we have to do
next, but in the long run, bringing joy to others will bring joy to our own lives. Our
grace will bring out the grace in others, which in turn will increase our own grace.
Our life and others’ lives will be intertwined with a sense of mutual appreciation,
respect, and friendship.
– Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche
I’ve said before that every craftsman
searches for what’s not there
to practice his craft.
A builder looks for the rotten hole
where the roof caved in. A water-carrier
picks the empty pot. A carpenter
stops at the house with no door.
Workers rush toward some hint
of emptiness, which they then
start to fill. Their hope, though,
is for emptiness, so don’t think
you must avoid it. It contains
what you need!
Dear soul, if you were not friends
with the vast nothing inside,
why would you always be casting you net
into it, and waiting so patiently?
This invisible ocean has given you such abundance,
but still you call it “death”,
that which provides you sustenance and work.
God has allowed some magical reversal to occur,
so that you see the scorpion pit
as an object of desire,
and all the beautiful expanse around it,
as dangerous and swarming with snakes.
This is how strange your fear of death
and emptiness is, and how perverse
the attachment to what you want.
Now that you’ve heard me
on your misapprehensions, dear friend,
listen to Attar’s story on the same subject.
He strung the pearls of this
about King Mahmud, how among the spoils
of his Indian campaign there was a Hindu boy,
whom he adopted as a son. He educated
and provided royally for the boy
and later made him vice-regent, seated
on a gold throne beside himself.
One day he found the young man weeping..
“Why are you crying? You’re the companion
of an emperor! The entire nation is ranged out
before you like stars that you can command!”
The young man replied, “I am remembering
my mother and father, and how they
scared me as a child with threats of you!
‘Uh-oh, he’s headed for King Mahmud’s court!
Nothing could be more hellish!’ Where are they now
when they should see me sitting here?”
This incident is about your fear of changing.
You are the Hindu boy. Mahmud, which means
Praise to the End, is the spirit’s
poverty or emptiness.
The mother and father are your attachment
to beliefs and blood ties
and desires and comforting habits.
Don’t listen to them!
They seem to protect
but they imprison.
They are your worst enemies.
They make you afraid
of living in emptiness.
– Rumi
Everything I don’t understand this evening is blooming.
– Bronwen Tate
The thoughtful soul to solitude retires.
– Omar Khayyam
Toni Morrison said, “It’s easy, and it’s seductive, to assume that data is really knowledge. Or that information is, indeed, wisdom. Or that knowledge can exist without data. And how easy, and how effortlessly, one can parade and disguise itself as another.”
Where have you gone, old pages? Where in so many windless places
have you flown?
– Nicholas Pierotti
It was exalted,
for it was humble.
Knocking at the door
of extinction,
it became existent.
– Shaykh Sa’adi Shirazi
Something by Andrea Cohen
Something went wrong.
That’s what the machine
says when I call to say
my paper didn’t arrive.
Machines are trained
by people, so they’re
smart, they know a thing
or fifty trillion. Did you miss
your Sunday delivery?
it asks. I did, I say. I
miss everything, I say,
because it’s a machine and
it has to listen, or at least
it has to not hang up
without trying to understand
why I called, which means
trying to correct what
went wrong. Let me
see if I got this right,
the voice says, you
missed your Sunday paper?
Yes, I say, but also I
miss my childhood and fairy
tales, like Eden. I miss sweet
Rob Roys with strangers.
I’m sorry, the machine says.
I’m having trouble understanding.
Did you miss today’s paper?
Yes, I say, but that’s not
the half of it. Sometimes
I just feel like half
of me, and even that
feels like too much. I’m
having trouble understanding,
the machine repeats, its
syllables halted, as if
trying to mimic an empath.
I’m having trouble understanding
too, I say. I used to understand
so much: photosynthesis, the
human heart, I’d even
memorized the Krebs cycle,
but now all I remember
is lifting the golden coil
of the kitchen phone to maneuver
under my mother’s conversations.
It was like lifting
the horizon. There’s
a silence, and the machine
asks: Are you still there? In
a few words, please describe
your issue. Where do I begin
being a minimalist? Time,
I say, I’ve got a problem
with that. Also, loss, and
attachment. That’s pretty
much it, and the news in its sky-
blue sleeve is meant to be
a distraction, isn’t it? I ask.
More silence, and then:
You miss your mother?
a voice asks. It’s
a human voice.
Me too, she says.
Once a country is habituated to liars,
it takes generations to get the truth back.
– Gore Vidal
Any book that you pick up as a reader is a printed circuit for your own life to flow through.
– E. L. Doctorow
The Opposite of Nostalgia
by Eric Gamalinda
You are running away from everyone
who loves you,
from your family,
from old lovers, from friends.
They run after you with accumulations
of a former life, copper earrings,
plates of noodles, banners
of many lost revolutions.
You love to say the trees are naked now
because it never happens
in your country. This is a mystery
from which you will never
recover. And yes, the trees are naked now,
everything that still breathes in them
lies silent and stark
and waiting. You love October most
of all, how there is no word
for so much splendor.
This, too, is a source
of consolation. Between you and memory
everything is water. Names of the dead,
or saints, or history.
There is a realm in which
—no, forget it,
it’s still too early to make anyone understand.
A man drives a stake
through his own heart
and afterwards the opposite of nostalgia
begins to make sense: he stops raking the leaves
and the leaves take over
and again he has learned
to let go.
It was impossible to make it through the tragedy/ Without poetry. What are we without winds becoming words?
– Joy Harjo, Becoming Seventy
Dmitry Blizniuk
WALLS TREMBLING LIKE HORSES
The sounds grow;
they are the teeth of a vehemently rotating circular saw.
And the bomber
folds the sky like a book,
cuts the sky in two,
and you, seized with terror,
shrivel up into “I,” into “We,”
like into a lifeboat sent by God,
but you are too big to squeeze in.
Quickly and rudely, you cover your mom with your body.
Your stunned guardian angel
blindly thumps its wings against the linoleum,
like an albatross on the deck.
Where are you? Are you still here?
Still alive?
My dear people.
The sky bursts with explosions.
The sky gets filled with pink manganese solution.
The oblong eyes of the beast of the horizon.
It’s the trepanation of the despairing city
with pneumatic picks.
The walls of your house tremble like horses
that caught the smell of a wolf.
translated from Russian by Sergey Gerasimov
It’s not that Hebrideans don’t like ferry jokes. They crack ferry jokes all the time. They just want some ferries to make jokes about.
– Roger Hutchinson
i too have kissed
my ear to the earth
listening for the quiet
lovers it’s pulled there.
– Kevin Kantor
Although Love
is a sweet madness,
Yet all infirmities it heals.
Saints and sages
have passed through it,
LOVE … both to God
and man appeals.
– Hazrat Inayat Khan
People strengthen each other when they work together, and an entitity is formed without personality having to be blotted out by the collaboration.
– Vincent van Gogh
if you pass your night
and merge it with dawn
for the sake of heart
what do you think will happen
if the entire world
is covered with blossoms
you have labored to plant
what do you think will happen
if the elixir of life
that has been hidden in the dark
fills the desert and towns
what do you think will happen
if because of
your generosity and love
a few humans find their lives
what do you think will happen
if you pour an entire jar
filled with joyous wine
on the head of those already drunk
what do you think will happen
go my friend
bestow your love
even on your enemies
if you touch their hearts
what do you think will happen
– maulana rumi
I wasn’t trying to write literature, I just put it down on paper to gain a foothold, to get a grip on my life.
– Herta Müller
When something’s going on,
something else is going on.
Notice the something else, too.
– William Stafford
Does actual dialogue still occur between people or only juxtaposed monologues?
– #edwordsmyth
Time is the original author.
She writes with wind, sunshine, snow.
She writes on ocean floors and stone.
She scribbles on my body,
rewrites my brain,
and tattoos poems –
smile line by smile line –
on my face.
Her words are not always beautiful,
rarely what I want to see.
Sometimes I try to argue with her,
tell her to shut up,
take her ink somewhere else.
But she’s never wrong, never quits,
and simply does not care
about being correct.
Time, I hope my smile shows,
like the best poetry,
like the growing lines on my face,
only ever worries about being true.
– Will Falk
The Conditional
by Ada Limón
Say tomorrow doesn’t come.
Say the moon becomes an icy pit.
Say the sweet-gum tree is petrified.
Say the sun’s a foul black tire fire.
Say the owl’s eyes are pinpricks.
Say the raccoon’s a hot tar stain.
Say the shirt’s plastic ditch-litter.
Say the kitchen’s a cow’s corpse.
Say we never get to see it: bright
future, stuck like a bum star, never
coming close, never dazzling.
Say we never meet her. Never him.
Say we spend our last moments staring
at each other, hands knotted together,
clutching the dog, watching the sky burn.
Say, It doesn’t matter. Say, That would be
enough. Say you’d still want this: us alive,
right here, feeling lucky.
We cannot live without the night,
gossamer veils of emptiness.
The Goddess is black,
but each pore of her body
emits a rainbow.
Motionless, she watches
beyond care, yet flows
like a river of healing.
Doesn’t dark energy circle us all
like Mother Raven?
Take root in your grief.
That is where the sun is born.
Ascend through a bolder falling.
Her womb is immaculate silence.
Her void is moist with stars.
Yet she who cradles them all
has become your breath.
Haven’t I told you there is wine
in the void between thoughts,
Joy and sorrow mingled in one cup?
Now taste, and who knows
if tonight you might not finally
embrace the fierce beauty
of your beaten heart?
– Fred LaMotte
There is neither spirit nor matter in the world; the stuff of the universe is spirit-matter. No other substance but this could produce the human molecule. I know very well that this idea of spirit-matter is regarded as a hybrid monster, a verbal exorcism of a duality which remains unresolved in its terms. But I remain convinced that the objections made to it arise from the mere fact that few people can make up their minds to abandon an old point of view and take the risk of a new idea…
– Teilhard de Chardin
The articulation of painful memories, including the literature and art that arises out of political upheaval, is integral to the formation, preservation, and integration of collective memory
– Melissa Febos
LIGHTNING FROM THE GENOME
99.9% of our genes are identical
One human to another
What difference, then is
One-tenth of a percent?
Enough to justify
Hatred, jealousy, contempt
War?
In one-tenth of one percent
We lodge the miseries of the
Human race
Proclaim ourselves better and
Best
Conquer and divide
According to divine rights of
A primitive mind
Unable to distinguish
Reason from insanity.
– Laurence Overmire
Disappointment
can bring you
closer to yourself.
Closer to your breath.
To the weight of your body upon the Earth.
To the sounds of the afternoon.
To the evening’s song.
You’ve been lost in your head, friend.
Return to the heart now.
Soften into the moment.
Return Home.
Let expectations melt.
Into silence.
Into a new beginning.
– Jeff Foster
Rain Light by W.S. Merwin
All day the stars watch from long ago
my mother said I am going now
when you are alone you will be all right
whether or not you know you will know
look at the old house in the dawn rain
all the flowers are forms of water
the sun reminds them through a white cloud
touches the patchwork spread on the hill
the washed colors of the afterlife
that lived there long before you were born
see how they wake without a question
even though the whole world is burning
– W.S. Merwin
I am not even concerned with being original. Trying to be original is very dangerous.
– Javier Marías
I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it?
What is true for writing and for love relationships is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don’t know where it will end.
– Michel Foucault
From climate futurist Alex Steffen – “it’s important to live when we are. Being native to now, I think, is our deepest responsibility in the face of all this. And being at home in the world we actually inhabit means refusing to consign ourselves to living in the ruins of continuity, but instead realizing we live in the rising foundations of a future that actually works. It may be a fierce, wild, unrecognizable future, but that doesn’t mean it’s a broken future. Indeed, it’s the present that’s broken beyond redemption.”
This Isthmus of Isness – a poem about God
No longer can I fake it
No longer can I pretend
No longer can I fool myself and others that when I say “God”
I mean what they think I’m supposed to mean.
No longer can I talk about a god six steps removed, as if God were the A-Team of attorneys, advertisers, and agents who write the contracts, book the guests, and place the products on Megatainment Tonight, where tinsel toothed theological celebrities talk about the forced formulas and the predictably vapid romantic plot twists on doctrinal scripted Soap operas – televised services for sheeple to vicariously experience romance through the Days of Other people’s Lives.
No longer can I have truck with meta.
No longer can I talk about those who talk about talking about God.
The God I know can’t be contractually codified. Can’t be be corralled. Can’t be contained. Can’t be colored within the lines.
For Her, lines are but loose, liminal laughter
– an impish, invisible, isthmus.
The God I know and love is as close to me as my very breath, is breath, is the One who breathes my breath back and forth as lovers do
She’s my Lover who gazes into me as She breathes in my far-out freaky fantasies and fears; breathes out Her peace, …sweetly saying chill the F out.., and smiles.
The God I know gently appears to me within moments of closing my eyes, in the kaleidoscope of colors that shift and shape, an organic, living, ever-changing northern-lighted nebulaic star womb constantly birthing and ever re-purposing degrading x-rays, dissolving stardust, and particle decay
at once like witnessing fractaled, fluorescent photosynthesis taking place through a microscope, and then morphing to mesmerizing meandering mayan meandros zagging double-helixed key patterns in phosphorescent webbing, and then to a fleet of yellow subatomicmarines becoming playful purple porpoises cruising various depths of churning rainbow mirroring ocean waves as viewed from a cosmic telescope located on a moon in a distant galaxy while perky persieds sprightly shower across its glitter gilded misty muslin lens.
But far more than my deep revering awe for this amazing artful Goddess is the strangely warmed feeling of sweetly loving presence and intimately caring closeness that She has for me – and for you.
She’s there. Right there.
For us all. Loving. Always.
He’s the one Who is.
They’re Isness itself
– and so are you.
I bow before thee.
– roger wolsey
Writing What I’ve Seen
All things that live
must make a living.
There’s nothing got
without some getting.
From fabled beast to feeble bug
each schemes to make its way.
The Buddha, or the Taoist sage?
Unending in his labor;
and morning’s herald, the rooster, too
can he not cock-a-doodle-do?
I hunger, so I plot to eat;
I’m cold, and would be robed….
But great grand schemes will get you grief.
Take what you need, that’s all.
A light craft takes the wind
and skims the water lightly.
– Yuan Mei
We see, often, too often, what we want to see. Even the bellowing specter of self-made hell must be fussed over like a fetish, as precious and potent as any great work of art. We choose to commit ourselves to it, if only because, like the Big Dipper, it is what we revisit each night, the habit by which we familiarize the dark. The Promethean gift of our imagination is found at the heart of most tragedy, the real weapon discovered at the crime scene. Why would we fashion such horrors?
How did this happen that the very organ of our humanness – as nostril is to dog, as sonar is to bat, as pupil is to owl – would dead-end us with confusion, false information, self obsession? Would an elephant hang itself with its trunk?
We project – at the very least – to anticipate and taste what we can not touch, molecule to molecule, and – at the very best – to live out the Golden Rule, heart to heart. We each spend a lifetime struggling to bridge our detachment, to belong, at last – to know the Other.
So what gives? Why do we do such a dismal job of it?
How do we become so dazzled, so blinded?
– Bia Lowe
Say This
by Lucia Perillo
I live a small life, barely bigger than a speck,
barely more than a blip on the radar sweep
though it is not nothing, as the garter snake
climbs the rock rose shrub and the squirrel creeps
on bramble thorns. Not nothing to the crows
who heckle from the crowns of the last light’s trees
winterstripped of green, except for the boles
that ivy winds each hour round. See, the world is busy
and the world is quick, barely time for a spider
to suck the juice from a hawk moth’s head
so it can use the moth as a spindle that it wraps in fiber
while the moth constricts until it’s thin as a stick
you might think was nothing, a random bit
caught in a web coming loose from the window frame, in wind.
I think we are unhappy
because we are walking
conundrums. All of us puzzles
with round pieces and sharp edges.
So lost and so sure.
– L.E. Bowman
Awakening is messy
You don’t transcend
into some paradisiacal,
elitist inner garden
It doesn’t perfect you.
You first come into
all the reasons you’ve so wanted
to stay asleep
And there are many
very good reasons.
We awaken to all the reasons
we’ve so wanted
to disassociate from our bodies,
those storehouses of pain and God—
to enter through either door
is to have stripped from you
the illusion of smallness.
Sleeping was relatively painless,
in its numbed way.
To awaken, really,
is to begin to feel.
As we feel through more pain
we feel more compassion.
Awakening is bit by bit
coming out of denial
around all the reasons you’ve needed
to wield
that terrible tool of “othering”—
because so much
was unbearable
inside of our own self.
Awakening is staying
in the fire
of what used to be unbearable
as we burn off judgments
about ourselves.
It is diving into the cracks
in our hearts
rather than mortaring them
It does not look like being
perfectly empowered,
seamlessly composed—
It’s to commit with all your heart
to no longer take out your helplessness
on anyone else.
Awakening has nothing to do
with stern, stoic spirituality
It has nothing to do
with finally being aloof enough
to not be impacted by the gifts
of your beautiful feelings
Awakening doesn’t come
from spiritual mastery defined
as overcoming enough of our shortcomings.
It’s found in doing our fumbling best
to grow into arms strong and loving enough
to hold and hug our aching humanity.
Awakening isn’t only for special people.
We’re all on our way
toward coming out of the sleep cycle
Awakening is the at times compass-less
and often inglorious
inner odyssey
toward the rough ruby of all that is true
in our hearts
through a tangled history of acquired conditioning
of all that we are not.
Awakening is messy.
Be not fooled:
the myth that awakening
looks anything like spiritual perfectionism
is perhaps the best sleeping pill.
– Chelan Harkin
What would happen
if we could be as satisfied
by the tiny sprout
emerging from the ground
as we are about a big promotion?
As infatuated
with the newly opened daffodil
as we might be with a new lover?
What if we tuned in
to the detail of a leaf
or the mood of the forest
after a rain
as closely as we notice
our own shortcomings?
How do we re-sensitize our hearts
to feel the staggering love
poured upon the world
from the blush of each sunset?
How do we prioritize
our gratitude
so that instead of consuming
the whole earth
in a way that will never fill us
a single dew drop
could satisfy our thirsts?
Every part of us is an antenna for beauty,
a receptor for divine tenderness—
what if we didn’t need so much stimulus
to connect with that and live again?
What might it be like
if we could take the hierarchy
out of experience,
judging some moments as worthy
and insensitively tromping over others?
And instead, began to walk slowly
and with bare feet
over every precious moment
of our lives
kissing the earth
with our soles
in the practice of being
so replete
with sacred wonder
and quenched with the recognition
that nothing about ourselves
or this life
requires even a drop
of enhancement.
– Chelan Harkin
I do so little
because the drive
of the world
is so much
It meets me, going
the other way
through me
And when there is silence
all naked I sit here
trying to hold my breath
– Larry EIgner
And objects are reborn on paper, true to life and more than true to life, beautiful and more than beautiful, strange and endowed with an enthusiastic vitality, like the soul of the author. Out of nature has been distilled fantasy. All the stuffs with which memory is encumbered are classified and arranged in order, and harmonized and subjected to that compulsory formalization which results from a childish perceptiveness–that is to say, a perceptiveness acute and magical by reason of its simplicity!
– Charles Baudelaire
The present is not marked off from a past that it has replaced or a future that will, in turn, replace it; it rather gathers the past and future into itself, like refractions in a crystal ball.
– Tim Ingold
In authentic haiku there is a flow of quality out of the living foundations of the world.
– Robert Spiess
Sonnet Composed of Wants
I’m sorry that language is the best we’ve got.
Let’s get this out of the way: I can’t please
your hunger, there will be no epiphany. I don’t
even know your face. Here: small symbols who’s
sounds we agree upon, have built a little grocery
market for you, take what you want: something
clever about the moon, endless nightcaps without
shame, the first half of the dream you can never
remember; the delight in familiar
is worthless. Really, try to explain the difference
between an ocean, and Lake Huron, without
comparing size or salt
– Sean Cho A.
We have a tendency to think in terms of doing and not in terms of being. We think that when we’re not doing anything, we’re wasting our time. But that’s not true. Our time is first of all for us to be. To be what? To be alive, to be peaceful, to be joyful, to be loving. And this is what the world needs the most. We all need to train ourselves in our way of being, and that is the ground for all action. Our quality of being determines our quality of doing.
– Thích Nhất Hạnh
INNER OR OUTER
why talk about internal
and external?
the sky has not heard about it.
The ocean does not know it.
This way of speaking
might be used
for some practical purposes
but it does not align with
the lyrics of life.
The heart is laughing at this.
It does not have inner or outer
It is one with all.
Human body and cosmic
body surge within each other –
half of our body is
the sky and the
galaxies and the stars –
the other half is the earth
and minerals
and vegetation and
everything that
comes out of the earth –
life is made of day and night,
laughter and sorrow –
listen.
there is a divine playfulness
within us and around us
exchanging secret messages –
you don’t have to do
anything.
simply remain open
to this invitation –
sometimes if you can sit
and do absolutely nothing
the highest form of cosmic
transaction happens.
The atoms in our being
dance to the music
of rainbows on the sky.
our stability becomes
reliable only when we realize
that we are one with
everything –
my heartbeat responds
to the heartbeat
of the sky.
Nourishment
does not just come
from food –
It also comes from
touching the ground
with a bare foot –
it comes from
human kindness and
fresh air and sunlight.
– Guthema Roba
As a bee seeks nectar from all kinds of flowers, seek teachings everywhere. Like a deer that finds a quiet place to graze, seek seclusion to digest all that you have gathered. Like a mad one beyond all limits, go where you please and live like a lion, completely free of all fear.
– Dzogchen Tantra
More and more of us flakes off until there’s nothing left but light.
– Mark Nepo
Many people believe that eliminating the apparent causes of fear will eliminate it, but fear, like beauty, is part of the world. The fear of fear results in the growth of terror as well as a loss of the beauty and wonder of the world. By fearing fear, we create the room for terror and panic to grow. People become blinded by fear, driven by anxieties, and increasingly ruled by phobias and obsessions. When we fail to recognize how fear works in the world, we become ruled by it. The point is not to become paralyzed with foreboding or be caught in the panic that can grip the collective and cause people to run blindly in the wrong direction. The point is to willingly go where most fear to go, to follow where the fear might lead and face the ways that the world roars at us.
– Michael Meade
I always start out with an idea that becomes a question I don’t have answers to.
– Toni Morrison, The Art of Fiction
I will not start writing again except when I notice that the last book is no longer sufficient to express or order my relationship with the world.
– Yves Bonnefoy
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
I would not sacrifice my soul
for all the beauty of this world.
There is only one thing
for which I would risk everything:
an I-don’t-know-what
that lies hidden
in the heart of the Mystery.
The taste of finite pleasure
leads nowhere.
All it does is exhaust the appetite
and ravage the palate.
And so, I would not sacrifice my soul
for all the sweetness of this world.
But I would risk everything
for an I-don’t-know-what
that lies hidden
in the heart of the Mystery.
The generous heart
does not collapse into the easy things,
but rises up in adversity.
It settles for nothing.
Faith lifts it higher and higher.
Such a heart savors
an I-don’t-know-what
found only in the heart of the Mystery.
The soul that God has touched
burns with love-longing.
Her tastes have been transfigured.
Ordinary pleasures sicken her.
She is like a person with a fever;
nothing tastes good anymore.
All she wants
is an I-don’t-know-what
locked in the heart of
the Mystery. . . .
I will never lose myself
for anything the senses can taste,
nor for anything the mind can grasp,
no matter how sublime,
how delicious.
I will not pause for beauty,
I will not linger over grace.
I am bound for
an I-don’t-know-what
deep within the heart of the Mystery.
– John of the Cross
from Glosa á lo Divino
translated by Mirabai Starr
All I can say of it–it’s just to be giving, giving all you’re life, finding the music and giving it away. God maybe punishes a man for wanting too much, but He don’t punish a man for giving. Maybe He even fixes it so that what you give away, it’s the mostest thing you’ve got.
– Sidney Bechet
Think about how many band breakups you’re familiar with—that were caused by unrestrained egos, differences in creative vision, or personality clashes.
Now imagine there is a band that consists of 100,000 members from across the globe.
What is the chance this band would stay together for longer than seventeen hours?
It’s the exact same chance your favorite conspiracy theory is true.
– Subversive Lens
Overheard:
You will know the country you live in is in decline when majority of conversation is about its past rather than its future.
– @ilya_poet
Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.
– Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life
Samsara is difficult to escape from not because we are imprisoned by demons or some such, but because we hold on to its familiarity, and to our misunderstanding of self, and because we don’t know how to rest in discomfort in order to go beyond the identity we’ve spent a whole life time building up.” – Dungse Jampal Norbu
For Mauna a Wākea
by Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio
It’s been 300 days since I first laid in your arms
First felt the chill of your kiss on my skin
You brought me to the thin line between life and death
Between frostbite and heat exhaustion
You taught me balance
Patience
Compassion
And when you stretched your arms around us
You taught us safety
What it meant to create security with our own bodies
Voices
So for you
I am every child who imagined someday you’d be free
I am every prayer laid at your feet
These days
I am hundreds of miles away
But you still visit me in my dreams
We share ceremony with Niolopua
And in that realm
You keep all my secrets
All my fears
All I am too afraid or ashamed to say out loud
For my fellow kiaʻi
It’s been 300 days since we marked the boundaries
Lined our jurisdictions with the trembling tenor of our collective voice
Since we began to feed each other
In food
In spirit
In care
For you
I am everything that cannot be broken
I am your first pinky promise
I am the incoming swell
I am every bit of love you taught me to lay at her feet
I am songs between stories, between tears
I am the water we fought to protect
That we shared
Together
In the bitter cold of night
When we worried
No one else was coming
The secret powers of nature are generally discovered unsolicited.
– Hans Christian Andersen
“Some Women Are Tricky Like the Dao”
O Lady Night-Lantern,
how you trick me so.
You tempt me
to take to the road, late,
so that I may find you.
First you are in front of me,
then you scurry away.
After many long steps
walking in the forest-dark,
you guide me home
and it is here
where you were waiting for me
all along.
– Frank Larue Owen
You can ask of land, as of weight, how much there is, but not what it is like. But where land is thus quantitative and homogenous, the landscape is qualitative and heterogeneous. Supposing that you are standing outdoors, it is what you see all around: a contoured and textured surface replete with diverse objects—living and non-living, natural and artificial […] Thus at any particular moment, you can ask of a landscape what it is like, but not how much of it there is. For the landscape is plenum, there are no holes in it that remain to be filled in, so that every infill is in reality a reworking […] one should not overlook ‘the powerful fact that life must be lived admidst that which was made before.’
– Tim Ingold
Landscape is a window through which you see what you thought.
– Rod Padgett
If memory acts as one of the framing devices for landscape, then landscape equally delimits memory. Landscape acts as the horizon or border that connects certain scenes, events or stories into a structured composition that is connected to the particular place. The relationship is dual: landscape sustains memory while memory keeps the landscape from altering too much.
– Liina Unt
Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it’s a feather bed.
– Terence McKenna
A lot of people think that [a little boy] who goes to primary school knows more than Pythagoras did, simply because he can repeat parrotwise that the earth moves round the sun. In actual fact, he no longer looks up at the heavens.
– Simone Weil, The Need for Roots
Afraid
by Langston Hughes
We cry among the skyscrapers
As our ancestors
Cried among the palms in Africa
Because we are alone,
It is night,
And we’re afraid.
Our bones know the way of things. Our guts understand what baffles the mind. The soul or spirit is often most clearly manifest in the sensations and language of the body. We feel called towards or driven away by people, places, and things at the gut/bone level. The head can then clarify or obscure this information, or choose to work with or against this body-knowledge.
– Aidan Wachter
There’s a deep and interesting kind of troubling that poems do, which is to say: ‘This is what you think you’re certain of, and I’m going to show you how that’s not enough. There’s something more that might be even more rewarding if you’re willing to let go of what you already know.’
– Tracy K. Smith
People do not see you, / They invent you and accuse you.
– Hélène Cixous
Roads around mountains
cause we can’t drive
through
That’s Poetry
to Me.
– Eileen Myles, Uppity
The coming of life cannot be fended off; its departure cannot be stopped. How pitiful the men of the world, who think that simply nourishing the body is enough to preserve life!”
– Zhuangzi
Aging is peculiar, I don’t think you should be lied to about it. You have a moment of relevancy – when the books, clothes, bars, technology – when everything is speaking directly to you, expressing you exactly. You move toward the edge of the circle and then you’re abruptly outside the circle. Now what to do with that? Do you stay, peering backward? Or do you walk away?
– Stephanie Danler
To Those Born After
I
To the cities I came in a time of disorder
That was ruled by hunger.
I sheltered with the people in a time of uproar
And then I joined in their rebellion.
That’s how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth.
I ate my dinners between the battles,
I lay down to sleep among the murderers,
I didn’t care for much for love
And for nature’s beauties I had little patience.
That’s how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth.
The city streets all led to foul swamps in my time,
My speech betrayed me to the butchers.
I could do only little
But without me those that ruled could not sleep so easily:
That’s what I hoped.
That’s how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth.
Our forces were slight and small,
Our goal lay in the far distance
Clearly in our sights,
If for me myself beyond my reaching.
That’s how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth.
II
You who will come to the surface
From the flood that’s overwhelmed us and drowned us all
Must think, when you speak of our weakness in times of darkness
That you’ve not had to face:
Days when we were used to changing countries
More often than shoes,
Through the war of the classes despairing
That there was only injustice and no outrage.
Even so we realised
Hatred of oppression still distorts the features,
Anger at injustice still makes voices raised and ugly.
Oh we, who wished to lay for the foundations for peace and friendliness,
Could never be friendly ourselves.
And in the future when no longer
Do human beings still treat themselves as animals,
Look back on us with indulgence.
– Bertolt Brecht
Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also more hard to bear. The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say My tooth is aching than to say My heart is broken.
– C. S. Lewis
They are not brave, the days when we are twenty-one. They are full of little cowardices, little fears without foundation, and we are so easily bruised, so swiftly wounded, one falls to the first barbed word. To-day, wrapped in the complacent armor of approaching middle age, the infinitesimal pricks of day by day brush one but lightly and are soon forgotten, but then—how a careless word would linger, becoming a fiery stigma, and how a look, a glance over a shoulder, branded themselves as things eternal.
– Daphne du Maurier
AS THE POEMS GO
as the poems go into the thousands you
realize that you’ve created very
little.
it comes down to the rain, the sunlight,
the traffic, the nights and the days of the
years, the faces.
leaving this will be easier than living
it, typing one more line now as
a man plays a piano through the radio,
the best writers have said very
little
and the worst,
far too much.
– Charles Bukowski
A person cannot coast along in old destructive habits year after year and accept whatever comes along. A person must stand up on her own two legs and walk. Get off the bus and go get on another. Climb out of the ditch and cross the road. Find the road that’s where you want to go. … The only sermon that counts is the one that is formed by our actions. She would quit drinking and thereby show Kyle life is what you make it. A person can grab hold of her life and change things for the better. This happens all the time. We are not chips of wood drifting down the stream of time. We have oars.
– Garrison Keillor, Pontoon: A Lake Wobegon Novel
New World Orders
by Carol Ann Sokoloff
Cover your smile
This is a war on joy
Singing is forbidden
Be fearful
Of your family,
Your friends.
Stay alone
And safe
Say nothing.
sea of the poem (an annex so we may dream backwards)
by Raquel Salas Rivera
the arc
which of these waters is yours?
i ask the sand,
but she ungratefully
says nothing.
which of these mountains do i owe?
i ask the sky,
but he is spoiled
and won’t answer.
how many rivers are left?
i ask the ceiba,
but she acts deep,
stays speechless.
how much more pain comes our way?
i ask the pitirres,
but it’s been a while
since they responded.
how much is a cluster worth?
i ask the tree,
but he is stuck-up
and bears no price.
how many bestial boricuas fill a dream?
i ask the night
that masterless shines
and laughingly answers,
there’s room for us all.
WESAK (FULL MOON OF THE BUDDHA)
Don’t worry, restless cricket.
Don’t worry, dragonfly
who can’t get quite still
on your sunlit cattail.
Don’t worry, implacable
circling hawk, skittish rabbit,
obsessed politician.
Nor you, sleepless seed,
smoldering all Winter
with desire.
I have surrendered on your behalf.
I have immersed you in the beauty
of this breath.
A bud cannot imagine what a petal is.
The apple was the pain inside a flower.
Neither stamen nor pistil, leaf nor pollen
have any “I” who can say, “I am a rose.”
Therefor enjoy your voice, O you
who have been selved!
Your ego is beautiful.
It speaks for those who cannot.
You are the song of a wanderer
heard in a dream.
Let there be no outrage
in the space between your thoughts,
only a well of compassion
healing the darkness around you
for a thousand light-years.
Now listen to the stream
of nectar oozing up your root.
Be a scarlet poppy royally adorned,
dancing in the meadow of your body
with a troubadour whose lips
are parted, but whose name
is never quite spoken.
The time will come when gazing is fire.
When you see beyond the night
and burn away the most intimate veil,
the gossamer difference
between inside and out.
Then the moon is only the moon.
The cricket delights in rubbing its wings.
Your silence outshines singing.
The time of the fallen apple will come,
sweet juices bubbling in the sun.
That was the pain inside the flower.
Now the worm appears.
All that remains is a hole.
Yet we need holes to fill with music.
Dear friend, in all that vanishes, still,
you can taste the one clear sap.
Call it sorrow. Call it joy.
– Fred LaMotte
THE DRUID’S SPELL
Powers grow stronger
In the rising fires of year upon year
A witches’ brew of words
Taking flight in hob-gob fantasy
O the spirit conjured
Soars
Far beyond this earthly veil
Mastering at last
The cunning depths of gargoyled nature
Hail! You harbingers of the Great Dark
Mystery
The night enraptured by the day
Seize the wand from these gnarled fingers
Cast your spell in the ancient tongue
This is the rite, avaunt the wrong
The flesh falling
The dream revealed
A sparkle of dust to sweep the floor.
– Laurence Overmire, from The Ghost of Rabbie Burns
Persecution is used in theology, not in arithmetic, because in arithmetic there is knowledge, but in theology there is only opinion.
– Bertrand Russell
What appears to justify persecution is dogmatic belief. Kindliness and tolerance only prevail in proportion as dogmatic belief decays.
– Bertrand Russell
“Where your fear is, there is your task.”
“The cave you fear to enter
holds the treasure you seek.”
“A man who has not passed through the inferno
of his passions has never overcome them.”
“Man’s task is to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious.”
“Our heart glows, and secret unrest gnaws at the root of our being. Dealing with the unconscious has become a question of life for us.”
“There is no coming to consciousness without pain.”
“To confront a person with their own shadow
is to show them their own light.”
“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
“Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams;
who looks inside, awakes.”
– Carl Gustav Jung
SKYE LOST
There is a thought that comes to me
On Skye
As the wind whips through the heather
Swaying on the purple hillside
Peaks of long knowing
Cloaked in the mists of time lost days
I try to hold on, to keep what is evident
In mind
But the drift of the place is old
And the uselessness of trying to be
Present gives way to a solitude that
Isn’t of this time and place
Something takes hold of me
Steals my breath
Carries it out to sea
Every last piece of myself
Broken
Collected somewhere
Perhaps
On some fantastical shore
Perhaps
Perhaps then
If I can find it
I can find myself
But for this moment
I am gone
I am nothing
I never was
And nothing matters
Not even me.
– Laurence Overmire, The Ghost of Rabbie Burns
Those who speak seldom
Of love,
Rarely carry any wood to the flame!
It is those that speak of nothing else,
That give names to things common,
And sacred!
– Eric Cockrell
As it becomes clear that religion, science, business, psychotherapy and politics are incapable of significantly improving the human lot, many find hope for the future much harder to come by. We’re feeling the frustration and despair of a species whose pain and turmoil too often lead to disappointment and despair. Yet the forces of nature that have given rise to the great dramas of life are bigger and stronger in the long run than our dilemmas. Seeing beyond chronic righteousness and punishment by tapping into the wealth of the collaborative diversity of the living, we’ll get back in cahoots with the ways of life, whose guidance is more time-tested than our current domineering practices. Such aims that don’t spring from the living seeds of mutually benefit only do more harm than good.
– Kathryn Schulz
Chögyam Trungpa ~ ONE THING AT A TIME
We are not extraordinary mental acrobats. We are not all that well trained. And even an extraordinarily well-trained mind could not manage many things at once—not even two. But because things are very simple and direct, we can focus on, be aware and mindful of, one thing at a time. That one-pointedness, that bare attention, seems to be the basic point
Every time you grab at love you will lose a snowflake of your memory.
– Leonard Cohen
Mystery and clarity arrive together.
– Rachel Eliza Griffith
From “On Nature”
BY EMPEDOCLES
TRANSLATED BY DAN BEACHY-QUICK
Never in the whole-holy-All is anywhere empty—
and never can more come to be than is.
From nothing, nothing comes—
to die utterly away is impossible, unheard of—
wherever you push on eternity, eternity is always there.
Earth gives of earth, air of air.
In the no-world below many fires burn.
Aether’s long roots plunge beneath the earth.
Only those with roots densely tangled send up
their spray of scattered shoots, birthing blooms above.
… and so the tall trees lay their eggs, the wild olives first.
… and fig juice curdles and binds white milk.
… and what is lawful for all is a thread pulled tight
through the wide aether, the boundless sun’s bright ray.
… saffron’s bright streak on linen.
… never to say there is in life only one path.
Translated from the Greek
The world moves awkwardly.
Not in fixed algorithms, but in broken equations. Not in straight lines, but in drunken fractals. She unfolds in messy, less-than-linear, promiscuous patterns, in cross-fertilizing dalliances, in haptic involutions, in thickening palimpsests. In monstrous becomings and gaping holes. In not-knowings and experimentation. In spontaneous trials and magical causalities.
The very condition for the apparent sanity of the everyday is an enchanted madness.
The old Newtonian-Cartesian-Copernican premises that hinted at the centrality of man, the self-evident nature of truth and techno-utopian conquests must now meet a vast sprawling body of disciplining microbes and careening lichens and stoic barnacles and howling wolf and musky moon and quacking duck.
Tattooed on every rock face, every fecund leaf, every pregnant cloud is the warning that there are no homecomings that are not already takeoff points or troubling sites of departure and no projects of restoration that are not actually regenerative attempts to sidestep the stunning spontaneity and vitality of the world.
For us, gestating embryos in this womb of modernity, the quest for community begins with an affinity with the monstrous, with the mangled, with the unexpected, with confusion, with the dark.
– Bayo Akomolafe
How many times
must I hear Buddha say,
“breathe in, breathe out,”
before I can do it myself?
I got tired of being spiritual.
So I came home.
Built a fire.
Made coffee.
Took out my mother’s cup
and ran my fingers over the cracks
of brown in blue.
Came home to hug you.
Fur on fur.
I got tired of being spiritual.
So I came back to Being.
– Fred LaMotte
The sun can only be seen by the light
of the sun. The more a man or woman knows,
the greater the bewilderment, the closer
to the sun the more dazzled, until a point
is reached where one no longer is.
A mystic knows without knowledge, without
intuition or information, without contemplation
or description or revelation. Mystics
are not themselves. They do not exist
in selves. They move as they are moved,
talk as words come, see with sight
that enters their eyes.
*
Let every action be in harmony with your soul
and its soul-place, but don’t parade
those doings down the street
on the end of a stick! Keep quiet and secret with soul-work.
Don’t worry so much about your body.
God sewed that robe. Leave it as it is.
Be more deeply courageous.
Change your soul.
– Attar
The Unclassifiables
At a round table they sat, called a truce
to discuss the indestructible world
and meditate upon eternal things
Like triplets, separated at birth
each possessed a portion of their truth
yet only made sense in unison
Tired of jockeying for position
addressing mind, body or spirit, alone
they came, like jealous gods, to save us
Unable to shirk their messianic callings
together they preached liberation,
through odes to joy and manuals of love
With myth and parable, the defiant muse
reminded us of the art of being present
and then how to vanish without a trace
More variations on the old themes: of exile,
homecoming, how to cut to the essence
of our humanity and unquenchable thirst
In the corner of a small bookshop, they convened
Philosophy, Spirituality and Poetry
temporarily reconciled to share their wisdoms.
– YL
They said things like,
‘Aren’t they built to survive
that environment?’ And perhaps,
this is the best analogy
for my depression.
– Rudy Francisco
I always liked people who were older. Of course, every year it gets harder to find them.
– Fran Lebowitz
I dislike your speaking of yourselves as though you were the only [ones] who know and taught the Gospel; …But what I most dislike is your littleness of love…your want [lack] of union…your want of meekness, gentleness, long suffering; your impatience of contradiction; your counting every [person] your enemy that reproves or admonishes you in love; your bigotry and narrowness of spirit, loving in a manner only those that love you…your censoriousness… of all who do not agree with you; in a word, your divisive spirit.
– John Wesley
Observe your own body. It breathes. You breathe when you are asleep, when you are no longer conscious of your own ideas of self-identity. Who, then, is breathing? The collection of information that you mistakenly think is you is not the protagonist in this drama called the breath. In fact, you are not breathing; breath is naturally happening to you. You can purposely end your own life, but you cannot purposely keep your own life going. The expression, ‘my life’ is actually an oxymoron, a result of ignorance and mistaken assumption. You don’t possess life; life expresses itself through you. Your body is a flower that life let bloom, a phenomenon created by life.
– Ilchi Lee
This afternoon a flock of doves
settled on my porch. Their silence took the shape
of all I ever wanted to say. Today, the miracle
we want aches inside the trees. Why believe
anything except what is unbelievable?
[…] Now the leaves
turn into messages that are simply impossible to read.
The roots turn into roads as they break through
the surface. How can I even know what I mean?
Beneath the hem of night the rain falls asleep
on the grass. We have to turn into each other.
One heart inside the other’s heart. One love. One word.
Inside us, our shadows will walk into water,
the water will walk into the sky. Blind. Faithful.
Inside us the music turns into a flock of birds.
Theirs is a song whose promise we must believe
the way the moon believes the earth, the fire believes
the wood, that is, for no reason, for no reason at all
– Richard Jackson
Isn’t it better to have your heart broken than to have it wither up? Before it could be broken it must have felt something splendid. That would be worth the pain.
– L.M. Montgomery
Spring Storm
The sky has given over
its bitterness.
Out of the dark change
all day long
rain falls and falls
as if it would never end.
Still the snow keeps
its hold on the ground.
But water, water
from a thousand runnels!
It collects swiftly,
dappled with black
cuts a way for itself
through green ice in the gutters.
Drop after drop it falls
from the withered grass-stems
of the overhanging embankment.
– William Carlos Williams
I want the world to heal so badly. Sometimes I don’t know what to say except that.
– Andrea Gibson
The Other Side of the River
On the other side of the river
there is a flame
a flame
burning May
burning August
when the pagoda tree blooms, the professor with lentigo bows to her
when orange blossoms fall, an heir of graceful demeanor waves to her
and smiles
yet on the other side of the river she remains, still burning
like the underwater glistening of red coral
like a red straw hat blown away in the breeze
when I saw her yesterday she was totally still, looking to the sky
and today she lowers her head to watch the river
if it were overcast and raining, what would she do there on that side
of the river?
—her flame would not go out
a poet looks to her
a farmer looks to her
a Dialectical Materialist looks to her
she is on the other side of the river, burning
burning May
burning August
– Xi Chaun
Do not say you didn’t try.
Remember: You did the best
you could in the situation
you were in with the
materials you had.
– Blythe Baird
OF POEMS, POETS AND POETRY
A poem is but a piece
Of a much greater entity
A living, breathing human being
The part is interesting in and of
Itself
But how much more can we understand
How much more can our minds expand
When we encounter and consider other
Vestiges
Related, but obscure
That encapsulate the experience
Of so many inconsequential
Molecules strung together in a
Moment of time
You think the part, the piece
Is so significant
Little man (or woman) that
You are
Never daring to believe
That just beyond that
Ink pen’s point
Lifted to its finish
Is a whole other
World
A galaxy turning in upon
Itself
In a Universe flying straight on
To infinity
The poem is the thing
That dangles just in front
Of your eyes
And prevents
Your self
From seeing.
– Laurence Overmire
i was thinking of a poem and then i read gregory orr’s question: “do words outlast the world they describe?” good to think of this because yes, they do, of course they do, and that’s the melancholy of life. words are sometimes the only thing that remains, like the visible light from a star long dead. like with god for example. it’s all passings and remainings. but it’s not all necessarily in vain. think of it: could you live without the things of the sky? alive or dead?
– Hune Margulies
“Nothing is wrong with you,” some say.
They’re right, but not right enough.
The evidence of your healing
abides in the center of your sickness.
The truth of your love
lives amidst your hard heartedness.
Your grace, your blessedness
can be found surrounded by a sea of unworthiness.
We peer into the shadow
not to heal it or be redeemed,
but to discover our soul,
our connection to humanity,
to Earth and ALL.
– David Bedrick
The Fear of God
If you should rise from Nowhere up to Somewhere,
From being No one up to being Someone,
Be sure to keep repeating to yourself
You owe it to an arbitrary god
Whose mercy to you rather than to others
Won’t bear too critical examination.
Stay unassuming. If for lack of license
To wear the uniform of who you are,
You should be tempted to make up for it
In a subordinating look or toe,
Beware of coming too much to the surface
And using for apparel what was meant
To be the curtain of the inmost soul.
– Robert Frost
Mercury in Retrograde
Astronomers tell astrologists
that retrograde is an optical illusion.
Planets do not move backwards.
But it is easy to be fooled
when it is easier to accuse
celestial bodies than those
who break, beat, and bash
Earth’s body in front of our
starry eyes.
It’s not that the sun,
the moon, and the stars disagree
that they exert an influence
on your life.
Sunburnt skin,
pale, pasty, bloated bodies
drowned in rising tides,
staring blankly at the moon,
and anyone who has tried
to find the stars
despite city lights
can tell you that.
The planets will tell you, however,
that the sun burns hotter
because a hole has been ripped
in Earth’s atmosphere.
The oceans swell
with the sweat of a feverish world
long-infected with spiritual viruses,
delusional hope, and
the rejection of plain reality.
Mercury, so often blamed,
is busy being the messenger of the gods,
and simply does not have time
to turn back, to switch his spin,
to truly be in retrograde.
He may pause, though,
for just a moment, to remind us
who it was that built those city lights
that stifled the stars, in the first place.
So the sun, moon, and stars
watch the murder of their sister,
Earth, and gently suggest:
It might not be optical illusions
causing your grief, exhaustion,
and stress.
– Will Falk
It’s impossible sometimes to make your way
through the undergrowth—think of Desoto,
Think of Cabeza de Vaca hacking down briars
with a sword of blinding Toledo steel,
A sword, mind you! In Toledo they’ve made that metal
since 500 BC, and de Vaca was a god, or so he said
To save his own hash, but even he was helpless
before a wall of poison ivy, broken to sweat and spit
By impervious mandevilla. It’s a new continent every time,
you’re a stranger, nothing knows how shining
And vital you are, and every time you get stuck
In a bank of crappy fetterbush, you think of homo erectus
Broaching the cedars of Lebanon that are high and lifted up
but fire comes out of the brambles. You want to speak
Like an angel of the clean cartography of your mind,
but what comes out of your mouth is a tangled mess
Of thorned clichés.
– T. R. Hummer
Otherwise Smooth
by Rosmarie Waldrop
1
How daily my life. How tiny the impurities around which words might accrue. Worlds. Whorls. Pearls? Once I stood in a town where nothing was left unchanged but the clouds driven from the east. Now I learn from the sea. Always the same, always different, brackish body, uncertain. The unusual I hold at bay by taking pictures. To let it accrue to memory without having to experience it? Do we live this way, walking, as if we could, on thin air? But the sycamore stands in the yard all day and all night. And now, though still lifeless in appearance, quickens. Roots gripping farther down.
3
Are we never able to touch it? The immediate between the ticks of the watch, the lighthouse flashes, one nerve impulse and the next? Not even with our eyes? A cosmic storm slips between my fingers without the least pressure exerted on the skin. Stream. Thin. Clean. Wind. Only once it’s past I latch on. Old light, of dead galaxies. Only once we’ve said “I” with all that follows do we become aware of pure experience, mute like a newborn’s smile. But then it’s already over. We console ourselves with knowing the difference, which we call history.
9
Grave, tomb, menhir, dolmen, cromlech, cairn, pyramid, coffin, black-box. The earth our mother. Caught in a movement that doesn’t seem to take place. With fields enough no end to plain. And bursting with buds. Death gleans no electric charge. No meaning. Only a window slammed shut. I keep circling. One excessive, emphatic quote: no space not crushing, no rain not maddening, no state not a vastation. And yet. Already so many pear trees blossom. Unscroll patches of soft velvet. The hand touches and lingers.
Water in Love
How to love like water loves
when it’s impossible to even taste
all the ghostly sediments
each time you take a sip
Impossible to savor
the salt in your blood
the light and island shorelines
in each living cell
When even the plainest mouthful
tastes more of you than you of it
Sweetest of absences
that frees in wave after wave
debris of thought like the dead,
the drowned, the vanished, and yet
sails your lips
on a voyage toward another’s, plying
all luck and regret
Worship, splash, guzzle, or forget
It clears any difference
Stone washer and mountain dissolver
that will
outlive us, even the memory of
all any eyes touched
Wasp and cactus in a desert
Comet through outer space
Sleep among all the cloud-shepherds’ children
A love so perpetually current
it doesn’t care that you love
without even knowing you love
what you couldn’t survive
three days without
How to love like that: wild
dream-sparkler and meticulous architect
of every snowflake
Wise, ebullient, and generous
as the rain
Deepest of miracles
for a time
borrowing and replenishing
a self
overflowing with fate
– Ed Bok Lee
When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities
by Chen Chen
To be a good
ex/current friend for R. To be one last
inspired way to get back at R. To be relationship
advice for L. To be advice
for my mother. To be a more comfortable
hospital bed for my mother. To be
no more hospital beds. To be, in my spare time,
America for my uncle, who wants to be China
for me. To be a country of trafficless roads
& a sports car for my aunt, who likes to go
fast. To be a cyclone
of laughter when my parents say
their new coworker is like that, they can tell
because he wears pink socks, see, you don’t, so you can’t,
can’t be one of them. To be the one
my parents raised me to be—
a season from the planet
of planet-sized storms.
To be a backpack of PB&J & every
thing I know, for my brothers, who are becoming
their own storms. To be, for me, nobody,
homebody, body in bed watching TV. To go 2D
& be a painting, an amateur’s hilltop & stars,
simple decoration for the new apartment
with you. To be close, J.,
to everything that is close to you—
blue blanket, red cup, green shoes
with pink laces.
To be the blue & the red.
The green, the hot pink.
You can’t artificially make yourself blossom!! Any effort in that direction is ultimately fake and something like hot house ventures, not organic development. We need to trust that wherever we are now and whatever challenges we have are on the way of full becoming. Pot bound or deeply pruned we can trust that our deep roots are alive and supporting us into eventual full growth and flowering.
– Gunilla Norris
Sadness and anger, please forgive me.
I used to run from you.
I imagined that you were ‘bad’.
Or ‘unhealthy’. Or ‘unspiritual’.
Or a sign of weakness.
Or a fault of ‘ego’ or the ‘separate self’.
Or shameful.
No. No. I was wrong. You are life itself.
You belong.
I bow to you now.
I breathe into you.
I give you my breath.
Sadness, you help keep my heart open.
You remind me to let go, in each moment.
You are a beautiful release.
You help me befriend death and impermanence.
Anger, you remind me of my power.
You rise spontaneously to protect the organism.
You help me speak up without fear.
Speak truth. Speak out against falsehood.
Walk this path with courage.
Protect those I love.
Sadness and anger, please forgive me.
You are inseparable from the sacredness.
You are deeply accepted now.
In my vastness.
– Jeff Foster
Life is short and we have never too much time for gladdening the hearts of those who are traveling the dark journey with us. Oh, be swift to love, make haste to be kind.
– Henri Frederic Amiel
The Tree Sparrows
by Joseph O. Legaspi
We suffer through blinding equatorial heat,
refusing to unfold the suspended bamboo shade
nested by a pair of hardworking, cheerless sparrows.
We’ve watched them fly in-and-out of their double
entryways, dried grass, twigs clamped in their beaks.
They skip, nestle in their woodsy tunnel punctured
with light, we presume, not total darkness, their eggs
aglow like lunar orbs. What is a home? How easily
it can be destroyed: the untying of traditional ropes,
pull, the scroll-unraveling. For want of a sweltering
living room to be thrown into relief by shadow.
The sunning couple perch open-winged, tube lofty
as in Aristophanes’ city of birds, home made sturdy
by creature logic and faith that it will all remain afloat.
Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes…
– Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Practice Wisdom
Give silence
enough room to expand
so those old temptresses of
growth, productivity & worthiness
don’t run away
with your peace.
Seek out practice wisdom
in all its messy,
uncomfortable nuances.
Sometimes voices in old
tired stories need to fade so
new chapters have room to bloom.
– Heidi Barr, Slouching Toward Radiance
Think how quiet a book is on a shelf, he said, just sitting there, unopened. Then think what happens when you open it.
– Ali Smith
If you play any part in getting money from the worker and giving it over to the owner, then you are an upright and true citizen. But if you play any part in getting money from the owner and giving it over to the worker, of course, the loud speakers and printed pages yell and scream that you are a wild man running loose with a pocket full of atom bombs and a head full of communist ideas.
– Woody Guthrie
Ram Dass Was Right
Stop thinking William. Stop considering
the possibilities of everything:
There’s just here, now. That dandelion root
needs to be plucked before it goes to seed
reach down and pull it out. Pick up a leaf
of lemon balm and rub it on your skin
it smells so fresh. It smells of vibrant life.
Some early strawberries are turning ripe
reach down and take one. Savor the deep red
savor the form and taste and the delight
you feel standing here among the trees
surrounded by birdsong and beating wings
surrounded by the blossom-scented breeze
warmed by the midmay sun. Stop thinking. Watch
the way the surface ripples of the pond
move through the circled water lily leaves
see how the koi are gliding underneath
the mirrored surface of the lotus pond.
– Bill Lantry
Myself, I long for love and light. But must it come so cruel, must it be so bright?
– Leonard Cohen
butterfly
let me ask you
about poetry
– Basho
The wind is taking the night apart, she says.
The wind is dismantling
the leaves, the branches, the minutes, our listening,
and finding more and more
moving pieces to index:
our hands, our mouths, our voices, recurring stairs.
– Li-Young Lee
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
Home is behind, the world ahead,
And there are many paths to tread
Through shadows to the edge of night,
Until the stars are all alight.
The world behind and home ahead,
We’ll wander back to home and bed.
Mist and twilight, cloud and shade,
Away shall fade! Away shall fade.
– JRR Tolkien
Reflective thinking turns experience into insight.
– John C. Maxwell
She asks if I have ever watched someone take a shovel & chisel the ground until it fits only them & what they can carry in their arms to heaven.
– Hanif Abdurraqib
One must never
give up the quest
to resurrect
the
lost
It is only
the red chambered juice
that stains immortality
The grains that wave in waves
The sea that constantly
murmurs and whispers
its answers
in the
shell of your ear
she’ll be back
you just haven’t met her yet
– Nicholas Pierotti
I’m always happier when surrounded by American accents than British ones.
– Geoff Dyer
Chögyam Trungpa ~ BUDDHA IS EVERYWHERE
Buddha can’t be avoided. Buddha is everywhere. Enlightenment possibilities are all over the place. Whether you’re going to get married tomorrow, whether you’re going to die tomorrow, whatever you may feel, that familiar…awake quality is everywhere, all the time….From this point of view, everything is a footprint of Buddha, anything that goes on, whether we regard it as sublime or ridiculous. Everything we do—breathing, farting, getting mosquito bites, having fantastic ideas about reality, thinking clever thoughts, flushing the toilet—whatever occurs is a footprint.
We could fight war and all its excrescences by releasing, each day, the love that is shackled inside us, and giving it a chance to live. . . . Ultimately, we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, more and more peace, and to reflect it toward others. And the more peace there is in us, the more peace there will also be in our troubled world.
– Etty Hillesum
Writers, beware! No matter how carefully we craft our work, no matter how dutifully we prepare it for publication, our reader remains a wild and wily creature, lurking in the margin like a ghostly snow leopard.
– Eric LeMay
That we go numb along the way is to be expected. Even the bravest among us, who give their lives to care for others, go numb with fatigue, when the heart can take in no more, when we need time to digest all we meet. Overloaded and overwhelmed, we start to pull back from the world, so we can internalize what the world keeps giving us. Perhaps the noblest private act is the unheralded effort to return: to open our hearts once they’ve closed, to open our souls once they’ve shied away, to soften our minds once they’ve been hardened by the storms of our day.
– Mark Nepo
Emotions pass over us like waves, sometimes slamming us to the shore. If we give in to them a bit, and let them have their way with us for a moment, sure, there will be froth and foam and churning, and stuff may get tossed up that was buried in the deep long ago. And an entire set of waves might follow the first. Still, every jetty and breakwater will eventually be worn to sand. Let the waves wash over you: there is no point resisting the tides.
– Gil Hedley, Integral Anatomy
Sun of Honey
Preparing my daily rounds
after days of rain.
New sun climbs
the high garden wall,
piano notes
drip off ivy
each tapped leaf
a pressed key.
– – –
The still bright day
glissades and chords
two voices —
girl and man —
caress an aria.
Sudden heat on my cheek
love of this honey-sunned world.
I can’t move.
Pierced by beauty
as if swarmed
by bees,
everything just
this moment
arrived.
– Peter Coyote
I thought growing up would be
this rising from everything
old and earthly,
not these faltering steps out the door
every day, then back again.
– Catherine Anderson
The desire to go home . . . is a desire to be whole, to know where you are, to be the point of intersection of all the lines drawn through all the stars, to be the constellation-maker and the center of the world, that center called love. To awaken from sleep, to rest from awakening, to tame the animal, to let the soul go wild, to shelter in darkness and blaze with light, to cease to speak and be perfectly understood.
– Rebecca Solnit
You are indeed carrying within yourself the potential to visualize, to design, and to create for yourself an utterly satisfying, joyful, and pure lifestyle. Discipline yourself to attain it, but accept that which comes to you with deep trust, and as long as it comes from your own will, from your own inner need, accept it, and do not hate anything.
– Rainer Maria Rilke (Letters to a Young Poet)
A healthy soul must do two things for us. First, it must put some fire in our veins, keep us energized, vibrant, living with zest and full of hope as we sense that life is, ultimately beautiful and worth living … Second, a healthy soul has to keep us fixed together. It has to continually give us a sense of who we are, where we came from, where we are going, and what sense there is in all of this.
– Ronald Rolheiser
The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same form of mental pathology does not make these people sane.
– Erich Fromm
Narrow minds devoid of imagination. Intolerance, theories cut off from reality, empty terminology, usurped ideals, inflexible systems. Those are the things that really frighten me. What I absolutely fear and loathe.
– Haruki Murakami
If you’ll excuse a brief history lesson: most people didn’t experience ‘the sixties’ until the seventies. Which meant, logically, that most people in the sixties were still experiencing the fifties–or, in my case, bits of both decades side by side. Which made things rather confusing.
– Julian Barnes
Why put them through the danger of the fire? And then, I heard, as though it spoke, the voice of the guardian-head: “Each piece must go through the fire. The cowl, the wings, the pneuma, the source, the flow. All must go the way that I have gone. Each may crack in the process, as I have cracked. But look, the crack has healed. I did not break. Without the fire, the piece is untested, unlived, raw. Each must go through the fire.
– Marion Woodman
…And if you’re waiting
for the moment
this poem pivots
into joy, I’m sorry,
it’s not coming this time,
I thought it might
here in this quiet kitchen,
but it didn’t
and that’s all right.
– Keith Leonard
…I was my own
storm once, so young
and eager to raise the sail
of my wanting, and I just wanted
to tell you I love this old boat,
this settled-in thing.
– Keith Leonard
The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful … Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.
– Milan Kundera
Many of us have been running all our lives. We have the feeling that we need to run – into the future, away from the past, out from wherever we are. In truth, we don’t need to go anywhere. We just need to sit down and look deeply to discover that the whole cosmos is right here within us. Our body is a wonder containing all kinds of information. To understand ourselves is to understand the whole cosmos.
– Thich Nhat Hanh, The Art of Living
The tragedy in the lives of most of us is that we go through life walking down a high-walled lane with people of our own kind, the same economic situation, the same national background and education and religious outlook. And beyond those walls, all humanity lies, unknown and unseen, and untouched by our restricted and impoverished lives.
– Florence Luscomb, architect and suffragist
The uniqueness of Zen Meditation (zazen) lies in this: that the mind is freed from bondage to all thought forms, visions, objects, and imaginings, however sacred or elevating, and brought to a state of absolute emptiness, from which alone it may one day perceive its own true nature, or the nature of the universe.
– Roshi Philip Kapleau
Sometimes a Wild God
Sometimes a wild god comes to the table.
He is awkward and does not know the ways
Of porcelain, of fork and mustard and silver.
His voice makes vinegar from wine.
When the wild god arrives at the door,
You will probably fear him.
He reminds you of something dark
That you might have dreamt,
Or the secret you do not wish to be shared.
He will not ring the doorbell;
Instead he scrapes with his fingers
Leaving blood on the paintwork,
Though primroses grow
In circles round his feet.
You do not want to let him in.
You are very busy.
It is late, or early, and besides…
You cannot look at him straight
Because he makes you want to cry.
The dog barks.
The wild god smiles,
Holds out his hand.
The dog licks his wounds
And leads him inside.
The wild god stands in your kitchen.
Ivy is taking over your sideboard;
Mistletoe has moved into the lampshades
And wrens have begun to sing
An old song in the mouth of your kettle.
‘I haven’t much,’ you say
And give him the worst of your food.
He sits at the table, bleeding.
He coughs up foxes.
There are otters in his eyes.
When your wife calls down,
You close the door and
Tell her it’s fine.
You will not let her see
The strange guest at your table.
The wild god asks for whiskey
And you pour a glass for him,
Then a glass for yourself.
Three snakes are beginning to nest
In your voicebox. You cough.
Oh, limitless space.
Oh, eternal mystery.
Oh, endless cycles of death and birth.
Oh, miracle of life.
Oh, the wondrous dance of it all.
You cough again,
Expectorate the snakes and
Water down the whiskey,
Wondering how you got so old
And where your passion went.
The wild god reaches into a bag
Made of moles and nightingale-skin.
He pulls out a two-reeded pipe,
Raises an eyebrow
And all the birds begin to sing.
The fox leaps into your eyes.
Otters rush from the darkness.
The snakes pour through your body.
Your dog howls and upstairs
Your wife both exults and weeps at once.
The wild god dances with your dog.
You dance with the sparrows.
A white stag pulls up a stool
And bellows hymns to enchantments.
A pelican leaps from chair to chair.
In the distance, warriors pour from their tombs.
Ancient gold grows like grass in the fields.
Everyone dreams the words to long-forgotten songs.
The hills echo and the grey stones ring
With laughter and madness and pain.
In the middle of the dance,
The house takes off from the ground.
Clouds climb through the windows;
Lightning pounds its fists on the table.
The moon leans in through the window.
The wild god points to your side.
You are bleeding heavily.
You have been bleeding for a long time,
Possibly since you were born.
There is a bear in the wound.
‘Why did you leave me to die?’
Asks the wild god and you say:
‘I was busy surviving.
The shops were all closed;
I didn’t know how. I’m sorry.’
Listen to them:
The fox in your neck and
The snakes in your arms and
The wren and the sparrow and the deer…
The great un-nameable beasts
In your liver and your kidneys and your heart…
There is a symphony of howling.
A cacophony of dissent.
The wild god nods his head and
You wake on the floor holding a knife,
A bottle and a handful of black fur.
Your dog is asleep on the table.
Your wife is stirring, far above.
Your cheeks are wet with tears;
Your mouth aches from laughter or shouting.
A black bear is sitting by the fire.
Sometimes a wild god comes to the table.
He is awkward and does not know the ways
Of porcelain, of fork and mustard and silver.
His voice makes vinegar from wine
And brings the dead to life.
– Tom Hirons, Poet and Storyteller
…because the traveler’s past changes according to the route he has followed: not the immediate past, that is, to which each day that goes by adds a day, but the more remote past. Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.
– Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
Depending on all their diverse borrowings, they yet lodge securely in the one and only selfsame body. They forget all about their livers and gallbladders, cast away their eyes and ears, reversing and returning, ending and beginning, knowing no start or finish. Oblivious, they drift uncommitted beyond the dust and grime, far-flung and unfettered in the great work of doing nothing in particular.
– Zhuangzi, Sixth Inner Chapter
And, if I may say it in a very condensed way, it is precisely the godlike in ourselves that we are ambivalent about, fascinated by and fearful of, motivated to and defensive against. This is one aspect of the basic human predicament, that we are simultaneously worms and gods.
– Abraham Maslow