Saturday, March 3, 2018

the way it is








There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.
 
 
 
~ William Stafford 


the smile






Galen, the great physician, asked one of his assistants
to give him a certain medicine.

"Master, that medicine is for crazy people!
You're far from needing that!"

Galen: "Yesterday a madman turned and smiled at me,
did his eyebrows up and down, and touched my  sleeve.
He wouldn't have done that if he hadn't recognized 
in me someone congenial."

Anyone that feels drawn,
for however short a time, to anyone else,
those two share a common consciousness.

It's only in the grave that unlike beings associate.
A wise man once remarked, "I saw a crow and a stork
flying together, and I couldn't understand it,
until I investigated and found what they shared.
They were both lame."



~ Rumi
from Rumi's Little Book of Love and Laughter
version bu Coleman Barks
photo by Sean Thomas


Tuesday, February 27, 2018

what we can learn from water







~ Raymond Tang

Monday, February 19, 2018

bring the jewel back






The purpose of the journey is compassion.

When you have come past the pairs of opposites, you have reached compassion. 
The goal is to bring the jewel back to the world, 
to join the two things together.
The separateness apparent in the world is secondary.

Beyond that world of opposites is an unseen,
 but experienced, unity and identity in us all. 



~ Joseph Campbell
from The Hero’s Journey (On Living in the World)


Tuesday, February 13, 2018

Christianity and Unknowing










~ Richard Rohr

Saturday, February 3, 2018

the dark night








In the delicious night,
In privacy, where no one saw me,
Nor did I see one thing,
I had no light or guide
But the fire that burned inside my chest.

That fire showed me
The way more clearly than the blaze of noon
To where, waiting for me,
Was the One I knew so well,
In that place where no one ever is.

Oh night, sweet guider,
Oh night more marvelous than dawn!
Oh night which joins
The lover and the beloved
So that the lover and beloved change bodies!

In my chest full of flowers,
Flowering wholly and only for Him,
There He remained sleeping;
I cared for Him there,
And the fan of the high cedars cooled Him.

The wind played with
His hair, and that wind from the high
Towers struck me on the neck
With its sober hand;
Sight, taste, touch, hearing stopped.

I stood still, I forgot who I was,
My face leaning against Him,
Everything stopped, abandoned me,
My worldliness was gone, forgotten
Among the white lilies.




~ St. John of the Cross
from The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross 
version by Robert Bly
photo by imogene cunningham

Wednesday, January 31, 2018

wei wu wei: "action without action" or "effortless doing"







The deep secrecy of my own being is often hidden from me by my own estimate of what I am. My idea of what I am is falsified by my admiration for what I do. And my illusions about myself are bred by contagion from the illusions of other men. We all seek to imitate one another's imagined greatness.
If I do not know who I am, it is because I think I am the sort of person everyone around me wants to be. Perhaps I have never asked myself whether I really wanted to become what everybody else seems to want to become. Perhaps if I only realized that I do not admire what everyone seems to admire, I would really begin to live after all. I would be liberated from the painful duty of saying what I really do not think.





~ Thomas Merton

with thanks to whiskey river

Sunday, January 28, 2018

a vast similitude





On the beach at night alone,
As the old mother sways her to and fro singing her husky song,
As I watch the bright stars shining, I think a thought of the clef of the universes 
and of the future.

A vast similitude interlocks all,
All spheres, grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons, planets,
All distances of place however wide,
All distances of time, all inanimate forms,
All souls, all living bodies though they be ever so different, or in different worlds,
All gaseous, watery, vegetable, mineral processes, the fishes, the brutes,
All nations, colors, barbarisms, civilizations, languages,
All identities that have existed or may exist on this globe, or any globe,
All lives and deaths, all of the past, present, future,
.
This vast similitude spans them, and always has spann’d,
And shall forever span them and compactly hold and enclose them.




~ Walt Whitman
photo by chertkova svetlana




Wednesday, January 24, 2018

recommended





A refreshing vision our intimate connection with each other
and life itself.

~  by Gregory Boyle 

 

Saturday, January 20, 2018

the art of dying - training for nonviolence






Just as one must learn the art of killing in the training for violence, 
so one must learn the art of dying in the training for nonviolence. 

Violence does not mean emancipation from fear, 
but discovering the means of combating the cause for fear. 

The votary of nonviolence has to cultivate the capacity for sacrifice 
of the highest type in order to be free from fear. 

He reckons not if he should lose his land, his wealth, his life. 
Whoever has not overcome all fear cannot practice nonviolence to perfection. 




~ Mohandas K. Gandhi
art by picasso



the chance of humming






A
man
standing on two logs in a river
might do all right floating with the current
while humming in the
now.

Though
if one log is tied to a camel,
who is also heading south along the bank - at the same pace -
all could still be well
with the 
world

unless the camel
thinks he forgot something, and
abruptly turns upstream,
then

uh-oh.

Most minds
do not live in the present
and can stick to a reasonable plan; most minds abruptly turn
and undermine the

chance
of
humming.


~ Rumi
translation by Daniel Ladinsky
from Love Poems from God
watercolor by Kim Novak



Monday, January 15, 2018

Love


...


Love is the strongest force the world possesses,
and yet it is the humblest imaginable

...

~ Mahatma Gandhi

Saturday, January 13, 2018

mansion





So it came time
for me to cede myself
and I chose
the wind
to be delivered to

The wind was glad
and said it needed all
the body
it could get
to show its motions with

and wanted to know
willingly as I hoped it would
if it could do
something in return
to show its gratitude

When the tree of my bones
rises from the skin I said
come and whirlwinding
stroll my dust
around the plain

so I can see
how the ocotillo does
and how saguaro-wren is
and when you fall
with evening

fall with me here
where we can watch
the closing up of day
and think how morning breaks



~ A. R. Ammons
art by Jill Kuhn
 with thanks to Death Deconstructed






when we pray alone







We are brought thick desserts, and we rarely refuse them
We worship devoutly when we’re with others.
Hours we sit, though we get up quickly
after a few minutes, when we pray alone.
We hurry down the gullet of our wantings.

But these qualities can change,
as minerals in the ground rise inside trees
and become tree, as a plant faces an animal
and enters the animal, so a human
can put down the heavy
body baggage and
be light. 


~Rumi
 version by Coleman Barks
from The Essential Rumi
 

Tuesday, January 9, 2018

Ripeness





Ripeness is
what falls away with ease.
Not only the heavy apple,
the pear,
but also the dried brown strands
of autumn iris from their core.

To let your body
love this world
that gave itself to your care
in all of its ripeness,
with ease,
and will take itself from you
in equal ripeness and ease,
is also harvest.

And however sharply
you are tested --
this sorrow, that great love --
it too will leave on that clean knife.




~ Jane Hirshfield
(The October Palace)