Sunday, March 20, 2011

the longing for beauty





For beauty is the cause of harmony, of sympathy, of community.
Beauty unites all things and is the source of all things. 
It is the great creating cause which bestirs the world 
and holds all things in existence by the longing inside them to have beauty.  
And there it is ahead of all as...the Beloved ...toward which all things move, 
since it is the longing for beauty which actually brings them into being.




~ Pseudo-Dionysius
from The Divine Names



Saturday, March 19, 2011

to finding again

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.
Everything else must have changed
must be different
by the time you appear
more than ever the same
.
taking me by surprise
in my difference
my age
long after I had come 
to the end 
of believing in you
to the end of hope
.
which was not even 
the first of the changes
.
when I imagined 
that I was forgetting you
you did not even need memory
to remain there
letting the years vanish
the miles depart
.
nothing surprising in that
.
even longing
does not need memory
to know what to reach for 
.
and nothing surprises you
who were always there
wherever it was
.
beyond belief

.
~ W.S. Merwin
from Present Company

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secret places

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.
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 

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wonderment and a delicious trouble

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.
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
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.



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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

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Thursday, March 17, 2011

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

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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

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Wednesday, March 16, 2011

to help those who need it

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

ask much

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.
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

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Monday, March 14, 2011

the bell zygmunt

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.
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

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Sunday, March 13, 2011

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

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Saturday, March 12, 2011

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





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.

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.

.

.
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.

.



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