there is none

Many have gone mad looking for a solid center,

but there is none.

We think of centering as only a continual narrowing

of focus until we touch the pearl

but in practice it is often a continual expansion

of focus until we become the ocean.

Our center is vast space, boundless awareness

indistinguishable from unconditional love.

Of course I play the fool when I dare allow

consciousness to describe itself!  Isn't that the birth

of the ego, the "I am this" that closed behind us

when we entered the body?

~ Stephen Levine

ripen

It is also good to love: because love is difficult. 

For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps 

the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, 

the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which

 all other work is merely preparation. 

That is why young people, who are beginners in everything, 

are not yet capable of love: it is something they must learn. 

With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered around their solitary, 

anxious, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love. 

But learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and therefore loving, 

for a long time ahead and far on into life, is: solitude, a heightened 

and deepened kind of aloneness for the person who loves. 

Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person 

(for what would a union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent?),

 it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, 

to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person; 

it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him 

and calls him to vast distances. 

Only in this sense, as the task of working on themselves 

("to hearken and to hammer day and night"), may young people 

use the love that is given to them. Merging and surrendering and 

every kind of communion is not for them (who must still, 

for a long, long time, save and gather themselves); it is the ultimate, 

is perhaps that for which human lives are as yet barely large enough.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

from Letter to a Young Poet, #7

art by picasso

all spirits

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits and 

Are melted into air, into thin air:

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve,

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.



~ William Shakespeare
from The Tempest, Prospero's soliloquy
photo by Kristjan Rems

comes naturally to an end

Love is something that is new, fresh, alive. 

It has no yesterday and no tomorrow. 

It is beyond the turmoil of thought.

It is only the innocent mind which knows what love is, 

and the innocent mind can live in the world which is not innocent.

 To find this extraordinary thing which man has sought 

endlessly through sacrifice, through worship, 

through relationship, through sex, 

through every form of pleasure and pain,

 is only possible when thought 

comes to understand itself 

and comes naturally to an end. 

Then love has no opposite, 

then love has no conflict.

~ J. Krishnamurti

from Freedom from the Known

art by van gogh

hearing music at dawn

It is sweet to hear music when the night

Is just retreating from the smoky branches

And the sun's enemies are throwing down their gloves.

Music is always reminding us whom we love,

One or two notes dissolve the auditor's mind

So we are swimming once more in the old river.

We are all failed farmers learning to play whist.

We have a lot of hands to play before midnight.

Someone else will have to worry about time.

I'm always glad when I hear that an old hen

Has been seen crossing the road at dusk.

It means our old teacher is still all right.

We keep remembering Barborossa's life.

A little whiskey fits in well with our lives.

The time of the Depression is not really over.

Poems like this amount to some form of music.

We dance for two hours.  When we look up,

We see that all the musicians have disappeared.

~ Robert Bly

from Talking into the Ear of a Donkey

what did we see today?

Some days we are passive, listening to the incoming waves.

On other days, we are like a light that sweeps

Out over the husky soybean fields all night.

What did we see today?  Horses at the end 

Of their tethering ropes, the wing of affection going over,

Flying bulls glimpsed passing the moon disc.

Rather than arguing about whether Giordano Bruno

Was right or not, it might be better to fall silent

And lose ourselves in the curved energy.

We know how many men live alone in their twenties,

And how many women are married to the wrong person,

And how many fathers and sons are strangers to each other.

It's all right if we keep forgetting the way home.

It's all right if we don't remember when we were born.

It's all right if we write the same poem over and over.

Robert, I don't know why you talk so confidently

About yourself in this way.  There are a lot of shady

Characters in this town, and you are one of them.

~ Robert Bly

from Talking into the Ear of a Donkey

the key

Morning unlocks the lake

as a woman with many keys might

come to open a house

where others are sleeping.

Enjoying the quiet possession.

Wiping the shelves of the mountain

with a lemony rag until they catch.

It is not hers. Those who live

there will claim it with raised voices,

with the closet doors' casual banging.

But for now, a single rowboat

drifts on the silvery water.

The oars are banked, the one sound

drips from the blades and widens

toward the enormous, dark-held shore.

There, the house is dreaming:

a red barrette on a wooden dresser,

somehow important.

~ Jane Hirshfield

from The Lives of the Heart

art by Elizabeth Torak

the winds will blow their own freshness into you

Ansel Adams - Winter Sunrise

"Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, 

places to play in and pray in, 

where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.

...

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. 

Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. 

The winds will blow their own freshness into you, 

and the storms their energy, 

while cares will drop away from you like the leaves of Autumn."

~ John Muir

John Muir was one of the earliest advocates of the national park idea, and its most eloquent spokesman. Born in Dunbar, Scotland, he moved with his family to a Wisconsin farm in 1849. Muir's father, an itinerant Presbyterian minister, treated him harshly and insisted that he memorize the Bible. By age 11, he was able to recite three-quarters of the Old Testament by heart, and all of the New Testament.

Muir studied botany and geology at the University of Wisconsin and had a natural flair for inventions. In 1867, after recovering from a factory accident that left him temporarily blinded for several months, he cut short a promising career in industry to walk from Indiana to Florida, creating botanical sketches on his way. From there he sailed to California and then walked from San Francisco to the Sierra Nevada – the "Range of Light" that would transform his life with his "unconditional surrender" to nature.

After working as a sheepherder in the high country for a season, Muir took a job in the Yosemite Valley in 1869, building a sawmill for James Mason Hutchings. In his free time, he roamed Yosemite, where he developed a scientific theory that the valley had been carved by glaciers. Muir felt a spiritual connection to nature; he believed that mankind is just one part of an interconnected natural world, not its master, and that God is revealed through nature.

Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir at Glacier Point, Yosemite National Park, 1903

To preach his gospel of nature, he moved to Oakland in 1873 to write articles for leading magazines like Overland Monthly, Scribner's and Harper's Magazine. Muir's articles made him nationally famous. He married Louie Wanda Strentzel and turned her family's farm in Martinez, California, into a profitable orchard business. But he grew restless to immerse himself in nature again, and, at Louie's urging, he traveled to Alaska's Glacier Bay and Washington's Mount Rainier. His writings brought national attention to two more places that would eventually become national parks.

Muir would also champion protection of the Petrified Forest and the Grand Canyon in Arizona. He was the public voice for setting aside the high country around Yosemite Valley as a national park in 1890, as well as for General Grant and Sequoia national parks. His efforts to make a large park in the Kings Canyon region of central California would not be successful, but later park supporters would take up the cause.

Muir's three-night camping trip with President Theodore Roosevelt in 1903 could be considered the most significant camping trip in conservation history. He was able to persuade Roosevelt to return Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove to federal protection as part of Yosemite National Park. The trip would have a lasting impact on the president.

Muir's final crusade, to prevent the city of San Francisco from building a dam and creating a massive water reservoir in Yosemite's Hetch Hetchy Valley, ended in bitter defeat with federal approval of the project in 1913. Muir died a year later, on Christmas Eve, at age 76.

Muir was a founder and the first president of the Sierra Club; Muir Woods National Monument, a grove of redwoods north of San Francisco, is named in his honor.

"If you think about all the gains our society has made, from independence to now, it wasn't government. It was activism. People think, 'Oh, Teddy Roosevelt established Yosemite National Park, what a great president.' BS. It was John Muir who invited Roosevelt out and then convinced him to ditch his security and go camping. It was Muir, an activist, a single person." 

~ Yvon Chouinard

 Patagonia founder and outdoor enthusiast

unbelief

Unbelief is good medicine, undoing belief

better:

all beings free to leave their being

and enter silence.

The nameless tree with its forest

of green,

the endless expanse called

sky, beaks and

feathered wings with their urgent

conversations;

all around, the light that sets the vital body

to humming,

and the dark of re-creation:

the world held for us in promise

until it is loosened from

our thinking.

~ Andrew Colliver

from the unpublished manuscript, A Day of Light

with thanks to poetry chaikhana

supposed to be

It is hard to be as popular as we are supposed to be. 

The superego or interior judge has altered its requirements ...

For one who fails to become successful and well-loved, 

punishment is swift and thorough. 

Self-esteem receives a battering from the inside, 

everyone feels insignificant and unseen until, in desperation, 

we finally agree to go on a talk show and tell it all. 

Once that moment is over, 

and universal love has not poured over our heads 

following the program, we fall still farther.

~ Robert Bly

from The Sibling Society

water

I was born in a drouth year. That summer 

my mother waited in the house, enclosed 

in the sun and the dry ceaseless wind, 

for the men to come back in the evenings, 

bringing water from a distant spring. 

veins of leaves ran dry, roots shrank. 

And all my life I have dreaded the return 

of that year, sure that it still is 

somewhere, like a dead enemy's soul. 

 Fear of dust in my mouth is always with me, 

and I am the faithful husband of the rain, 

I love the water of wells and springs 

and the taste of roofs in the water of cisterns. 

I am a dry man whose thirst is praise 

of clouds, and whose mind is something of a cup. 

My sweetness is to wake in the night 

after days of dry heat, hearing the rain.

....

Like the water

of a deep stream,

love is always too much.

We did not make it.

Though we drink till we burst,

we cannot have it all,

or want it all.

In its abundance

it survives our thirst.

In the evening we come down to the shore

to drink our fill,

and sleep,

while it flows

through the regions of the dark.

It does not hold us,

except we keep returning to its rich waters

thirsty.

We enter,

willing to die,

into the commonwealth of its joy.

~ Wendell Berry

soul and the old woman

What is the soul?  Consciousness.  The more awareness, the 

deeper the soul, and when

such essence overflows, you feel a sacredness around.  It's

so simple to tell one who

puts on a robe and pretends to be a dervish from the real

thing.  We know the taste

of pure water.  Words can sound like a poem but not have

any juice, no flavor to

relish.  How long do you look at pictures on a bathhouse

wall?  Soul is what draws

you away from those pictures to talk with the old woman

who sits outside by the door

in the sun.  She's half blind, but she has what soul loves

to flow into.  She's kind, she weeps.

She makes quick personal decision, and laughs so easily.

~ Rumi

version by Coleman Barks

from The Soul of Rumi

art by van gogh

... while you're alive

~ Bill Moyers

 interview with Robert Bly

a delicious disease

~ Ibn Hazm

read by Robert Bly

sight, taste, touch, hearing, stopped

~ St. John of the Cross

read by Robert Bly