secret places

.

.

Lovers find secret places inside this violent world

where they make transactions with beauty.

.

Reason says, Nonsense.

I have walked and measured the walls here.

There are no places like that.

.

Love says, There are.

.

Reason set up a market and begins doing business.

Love has more hidden work.

.

Hallaj steps away from the pulpit

and climbs the stairs of the gallows.

.

Lovers feel a truth inside themselves

that rational people keep denying.

.

It is reasonable to say, Surrender is just an idea

that keeps people from living their lives.

.

Love responds, No.

This thinking is what is dangerous.

.

Using language obscures what Shams came to give.

out of low word-clouds into burning silence.

.

~ Rumi

from The Big Red Book

translations by Coleman Barks

the adamantine perfection of desire

Nothing more strong 

than to be helpless before desire.

No reason,

the simplified heart whispers,

the argument over,

only This.

No longer choosing anything but assent.

Its bowl scraped clean to the bottom,

the skull-bone cup no longer horrifies,

but, rimmed in silver, shines.

A spotted dog follows a bitch in heat.

Gray geese flying past us, crying.

The living cannot help but love the world.

~ Jane Hirshfield

from Each Happiness Ringed by Lions

beauty is integral to being

.

Part of what it means to be, 

is to be beautiful.  

Beauty is not super-added to things: it is one of the springs of their reality.  

It is not that which effects a luscious response in perceivers;

 it is the interior geometry of things, making them perceptible as forms.

~ Francesca Aran Murphy

photo by albert koetsier 

.

wonderment and a delicious trouble

.

.

This is the spirit that Beauty must ever induce, wonderment and a delicious trouble, longing and love and a trembling that is all delight.  For the unseen all this may be felt as for the seen;  and this is the Soul's feel for it, every Soul in some degree, but those the more deeply that are the more truly apt to this higher love - just as all take delight in the beauty of the body but all are not stung as sharply , and those only that feel the keener wound are known as Lovers.  These Lovers, then, lovers of the beauty outside of sense, must be made to declare themselves.

.

~ Plotinus

from the Enneads 

woodcut by Harlan Hubbard

.


.

.

beautiful beyond being

.

That, beautiful beyond being, is said to be Beauty - for

It gives beauty from itself in a manner appropriate to each,

It causes the consonance and splendour of all,

It flashes forth upon all, after the manner of light , the

Beauty producing gifts of its flowing ray,

It calls to itself,

When it is called beauty.

.

~ Pseudo-Dionysius

from The Divine Names

.

to being late

.

Again again you are

the right time after all

.

not according to 

however we planned it

.

unforeseen and yet

only too well known

mislaid horizon

where we come to ourselves

as though we had been expected

.

you are where it appears now

and will stay from now on 

in its own good time

it was you we came to 

in the first place

hearing voices around us

before we knew what they said

.

but you always surprise us 

it is you that we 

hurry to

while you go on waiting

to the end of space

.

and when we get to you

we stop and listen

trying to hear whether

you are still there

.

~ W.S. Merwin

from Present Company

.

remember

You who worry with travel plans,

read again the place in the Qur'an

where Moses is taking the Jewish nation out of slavery.

You so frantic to have more money,

recall what they abandoned to wander in the wilderness.

You who feel hurt by some neglect,

remember the pavilions and houses they left behind.

You that lead the community through difficulties,

read about the abundant fountains

they walked away from to have freedom.

You who dress in clothes that appear to have elegant meaning,

you with so much charm,

remember how your face will decay to dirt.

You with lots of property, read again,

They left their gardens and the quietly running streams.

You who smile at a funerals going by,

you that love language, measure the wind in stanzas,

and recall the exodus, the wandering forty-year sacrifice.

Remember Egypt.

~ Rumi

from The Big Red Book

translations by Coleman Barks

like a holy face held in my dark hands

Lord, the great cities are lost and rotting.

Their time is running out...

The people there live harsh and heavy,

crowded together, weary of their own routines.

Beyond them waits and breathes your earth,

but where they are it cannot reach them.

Their children waste their days

on doorsteps, always in the same shadow.

They don't know that somewhere 

wind is blowing through a field of flowers.

The young girls have only strangers to parade before,

and no one sees them truly;

so, chilled,

they close.

And in back rooms they live out the nagging years 

of disappointed motherhood.  Their dying is long

and hard to finish:  hard to surrender

what you never received.

Their exit has no grace or mystery.

It's a little death, hanging dry and measly

like a fruit inside them that never ripened.

III, 4/5

God, give us each our own death,

the dying that proceeds 

from each of our lives:

.

the way we loved,

the meanings we made,

our need.

III, 6

For we are only the rind and the leaf.

The great death, that each of us carries inside,

is the fruit.

Everything enfolds it.

III,7

I thank you, deep power

that works me ever more lightly

in ways I can't make out.

The day's labor grows simple now,

and like a holy face

held in my dark hands.

I, 62

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

excerpts from The Book of Poverty and Death

translation by anita barrows and joanna macy

.

to help those who need it

.

USA Red Cross: http://american.redcross.org/site/PageServer?pagename=ntld_main&s_src=RSG00100E013&s_subsrc=ONR_MainDonateButton

Canada Red Cross: http://www.redcross.ca/article.asp?id=2372&tid=032

United Kingdom Red Cross: http://www.redcross.org.uk/Donate-Now/Make-a-single-donation/Japan-Tsunami-Appeal

Australia Red Cross: http://www.redcross.org.au/japan2011.htm

New Zealand Red Cross: http://www.redcross.org.nz/donate (Note: due to the recent quake in New Zealand, you will need to choose the Japan earthquake donation in the drop-down box).

German Red Cross: http://www.drk.de/weltweit/asien-nahost/japan-hilfe-nach-erdbeben.html

.

http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/donate/overview.cfm

.

ask much

.

.

Ask much, the voice suggested, and I startled.

Feeling my body like the trembling body of a horse

tied to its tree while the strange noise

passes over its ears.

I who in extremity had always wanted less,

even of eating, of sleeping.

Agile, the voice did not speak again, but waited.

"Want more" -

a cure for longing I had not thought of.

But that is how it is with wells.

Whatever is taken refills to the steady level.

The voice agreed, though softly, to quiet the feet of the horse:

A cup taken out, a cup reappears; a bucketful taken, a bucket.

.

~ Jane Hirshfield

from After

.

the bell zygmunt

.

.

For fertility, a new bride is lifted to touch it with her left hand,

or possibly kiss it.

The sound close in, my friend told me later, is almost silent.

.

At ten kilometers, even those who have never heard it know what it is.

.

If you stand near during thunder, she said,

you will hear a reply.

.

She who cooked lamb and loved wine and wild-mushroom pastas.

She who when I saw her last was silent as the great Zygmunt mostly is,

a ventilator's clapper between her dry lips.

.

Because I could, I spoke.  She laid her palm on my cheek to answer.

And soon again, to say it was time to leave.

.

I put my lips near the place a tube went into

the back of one hand.

The kiss - as if it knew what I did not yet - both full and formal.

.

As one would kiss the ring of a cardinal, or the rim

of that cold iron bell, whose speech can mean "Great joy,"

or - equally - "The city is burning. Come."

.

~ Jane Hirshfield

from After

.

eternity

.

Exultation is the going

Of an inland soul to sea,

Past the houses - past the headlands -

into deep Eternity -

.

Bred as we, among the mountains,

Can the sailor understand

The divine intoxication

Of the first league out from land?

.

~ Emily Dickinson

.

who has looked long on naked beauty may never return to the world

.

.

I thought that there were two rules in life— 

never count the cost and

 never do anything unless you can do it wholeheartedly. 

.

Now is the time to live.

.

.

~ Everett Ruess

with thanks once again to rebel girl

photo of Everett by Dorothea Lange
art by the author
song by Dave Alvin

.

Beauty isolated is terrible and unbearable, 

and the unclouded sight other kills the beholder. 

His only refuge is in insignificant things, 

in labor that keeps the mind from thought, 

and in companionship that gives back to the ego some of its former virility. 
.

But he who has looked long 

on naked beauty may never return to the world, 

and though he should try, he will find 

its occupation empty and vain, 

and human intercourse purposeless and futile. 

Alone and lost, he must die on the altar of beauty.

.

.

unapproachable by any path

.

.

I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. That is my point of view, and I adhere to that absolutely and unconditionally. Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or to coerce people along any particular path. If you first understand that, then you will see how impossible it is to organize a belief. A belief is purely an individual matter, and you cannot and must not organize it. If you do, it becomes dead, crystallized; it becomes a creed, a sect, a religion, to be imposed on others. This is what everyone throughout the world is attempting to do. Truth is narrowed down and made a plaything for those who are weak, for those who are only momentarily discontented. Truth cannot be brought down, rather the individual must make the effort to ascend to it. You cannot bring the mountain-top to the valley. If you would attain to the mountain-top you must pass through the valley, climb the steeps, unafraid of the dangerous precipices. You must climb towards the Truth, it cannot be "stepped down" or organized for you. Interest in ideas is mainly sustained by organizations, but organizations only awaken interest from without. Interest, which is not born out of love of Truth for its own sake, but aroused by an organization, is of no value. The organization becomes a framework into which its members can conveniently fit. They no longer strive after Truth or the mountain-top, but rather carve for themselves a convenient niche in which they put themselves, or let the organization place them, and consider that the organization will thereby lead them to Truth.

.

~ J. Krishnamurti

from a talk given in 1929, 

when he dissolved the Order of the Star of the East

.

taking up the pilgrim's staff

.

.

There will be no rest in the houses:

the stir

of departure -

someone being carried to his grave,

and another, taking up the pilgrim's staff,

to ask in unknown places for the path

where he knows you are waiting.

.

So many are drawn now to move toward you,

the roads are never empty.

There are so many 

we can't make out their faces

or know their names,

and when they finally reach you

they are tired.

.

I have seen them moving like a tide.

Since then, I think the winds themselves

are stirred by the blowing of their cloaks,

and subside again when they lie down,

.

so great is their going across the plains.

.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

from The Book of Pilgrimage, II,27

.