the in-turning flower of the fig

.

.

Within her dark robes

the nun is silent,

passion kept

between herself

and the largeness.

She moves

no differently

down granite stairs,

continues to sew poorly.

Questioned,

she would deny all.

.

~ Jane Hirshfield

from The Lives of the Heart

.

cure

.

It is less the medicine than the doctor that cures.

 

It is less the doctor than the organic consciousness that heals.

 

Always the organic consciousness is responsible for illness and for its cure.

 

The doctor inspires, gives the impulsion that leads to health, 

the medicine helps or hinders locally to that end.

 

Medicine-only is an attempt at healing despite the organic consciousness.

~ Wei Wu Wei

from Fingers Pointing Towards the Moon

Vincent

Vincent Willem van Gogh

Born March 30, 1853 in Groot-Zundert (today Zundert) in Breda, the Netherlands, 

Died, 29 July 1890 in Auvers-sur-Oise, France,

is one of the founders of modern painting. 

He left (according to current knowledge) 864 paintings and 1000 drawings,

which are all done in the last decade of his life. 

His major work is stylistically Post-Impressionism

exerted strong influence on later artists, particularly the Fauves and Expressionists. 

During his lifetime he sold only a few images, 

Belinda Thomson: Van Gogh - Paintings - The Masterpieces, p. 84

Some quotes by Vincent van Gogh:

.The more you love,

the more active you will be ....

Many a man has a big fire in his soul;

and no one comes to warm up to it ....

I want to flush, easily, seriously;

I want more soul and more love and more heart ....

Conversion is necessary

as the renewal of the leaves in the spring ....

.

with thanks to Semsakrebsler

.

lost in thought

.

interpretation 

is the beginning 

of misery

.

~ Benjamin Dean

more at zen poems

.

when love itself comes to kiss you

When love itself comes to kiss you,

don't hold back!  When the king

goes hunting, the forest smiles.

Now the king has become the place

and all the players, prey, bystander,

bow, arrow, hand and release.  How

does that feel?  Last night's dream

enters these open eyes.  When we die

and turn to dust, each particle will

be the whole.  You hear a mote whirl

taking form?  My music.  Love, calm,

patient.  The Friend has waded down

into existence, gotten stuck, and 

will not be seen again outside of

this.  We sometimes make spiderwebs

of smoke and saliva, fragile thought -

packets.  Leave thinking to the one

who gave intelligence .  In silence

there is eloquence.  Stop weaving,

and watch how the pattern improves.

~ Rumi

from the soul of Rumi

translations by Coleman Barks

photo by elliot erwitt

only the lowest servant of the kingdom, is worthy to become its ruler

Water is the softest and most yielding substance.

Yet nothing is better than water,

for overcoming the hard and rigid,

because nothing can compete with it.

Everyone knows that the soft and yielding

overcomes the rigid and hard,

but few can put this knowledge into practice.

Therefore the Master says:

"Only he who is the lowest servant of the kingdom,

is worthy to become its ruler.

He who is willing to tackle the most unpleasant tasks,

is the best ruler in the world."

True sayings seem contradictory.

~ Lao Tzu

from the Tao Te Ching

lingering in happiness

.

.

After rain after many days without rain,

it stays cool, private and cleansed, under the trees,

and the dampness there, married now to gravity,

falls branch to branch, leaf to leaf, down to the ground

.

where it will disappear - but not, of course, vanish

except to our eyes.  The roots of the oaks will have their share,

and the white threads of the grasses, and the cushion of moss;

a few drops, round as pearls, will enter the mole's tunnel;

.

and soon so many small stones, buried for a thousand years,

will feel themselves being touched.

.

~ Mary Oliver

from Why I wake early

.

If only for once it were still

If only for once it were still.

If the not quite right and the why this

could be muted, and the neighbor's laughter,

and the static my senses make -

if all of it didn't keep me from coming awake -

Then in one vast thousandfold thought

I could think you up to where thinking ends.

I could possess you,

even for the brevity of a smile,

to offer you 

to all that lives,

in gladness.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

from The Book of Monastic Life, I,7

the great longing

Here I sit between my brother the mountain and my sister the sea.

We three are one in loneliness, and the love that binds us together

 is deep and strong and strange.  Nay, it is deeper than my sister's depth

 and stronger than my brother's strength,

 and stranger than the strangeness of my madness.

Aeons upon aeons have passed since the first grey dawn made us

 visible to one another; and though we have seen the birth and the fullness

 and the death of many world, we are still eager and young.

We are  young and eager and yet we are mateless and unvisited, 

and though we lie in unbroken half embrace, we are uncomforted. 

 And what comfort is there for controlled desire and unspent passion?  

Whence shall come the flaming god to warm my sister's bed?  

And what she-torrent shall quench my brother's fire? 

And who is the woman that shall command my heart?

In the stillness of the night my sister murmurs in her sleep

 the fire-god's unknown name, and my brother call 

afar upon the cool and distant goddess. 

 But upon whom I call in my sleep I know not

Here I sit between my brother the mountain and my sister the sea. 

 We three are one in loneliness, and the love 

that binds us together is deep and strong and strange.

~ Kahlil Gibran

from Poems, Parables and Drawings

drawing by the author

for a time of change

The mind of time is hard to read.

We can never predict what it will bring,

Nor even from all that is already gone

Can we say what form it finally takes;

For time gathers its moments secretly.

Often we only know it's time to change

When a force has built inside the heart

That leaves us uneasy as we are.

Perhaps the work we do has lost its soul

Or the love where we once belonged

Calls nothing alive in us anymore.

We drift through this gray, increasing nowhere

Until we stand before a threshold we know

We have to cross to come alive once more.

May we have the courage to take the step

Into the unknown that beckons us;

Trust that a richer life awaits us there,

That we will lose nothing

But what has already died;

Feel the deeper knowing in us sure

Of all that is about to be born beyond

The pale frames where we stayed confined,

Not realizing how such vacant endurance

Was bleaching our soul's desire.

~ John O'Donohue

from To Bless the Space Between Us

the remains

.

.

I empty myself of the names of others.

I empty my pockets, I empty my shoes and leave them beside

the road. At night I turn back the clocks; I open the family

album and look at myself as a boy.

.

What good does it do? The hours have done their job.

I say my own name. I say goodbye.

The words follow each other downwind.

I love my wife but send her away.

.

My parents rise out of their thrones

into the milky rooms of clouds. How can I sing?

Time tells me what I am. I change and I am the same.

I empty myself of my life and my life remains.

.

~ Mark Strand

with thanks to melancholynotes

.

a man receives only what he is ready to receive

.

.

A man receives only what he is ready to receive,

whether physically or intellectually or morally,

as animals conceive at certain seasons their kind only.

We hear and apprehend only what we already half know.

.

~ Henry David Thoreau

from a journal entry, 1860

art by Roderick Maclver

from Thoreau and the Art of Life

.

.

pure no-thing

.

God is pure no-thing,

concealed in now and here:

the less you reach for him,

the more he will appear.

.

~ Angelus Silesius

.

.

For the raindrop, joy is in entering the river

.

For the raindrop, joy is in entering the river -

Unbearable pain becomes its own cure.

Travel far enough into sorrow, tears turn to sighing;

In this way we learn how water can die into air.

When, after heavy rain, the stormclouds disperse,

Is it not that they've wept themselves clear to the end?

If you want to know a miracle, how wind can polish a mirror,

Look: the shining glass grows green in spring.

It's the rose's unfolding, Ghalib, that creates the desire to see -

In every color and circumstance, may the eyes be open for what comes.

~ Ghalib (1797-1869)

so many skins

A human being has so many skins inside, 

covering the depths of the heart. 

 

We know so many things, but we don’t know ourselves! 

Why, thirty or forty skins or hides,

as thick and hard as an ox’s or a bear’s, 

cover the soul. 

 

Go into your own ground and learn to know yourself there. 

 

 

 

~ Meister Eckhart

ecstasy: Czechoslovakia, 1933

.

The actress was only seventeen

and so the director arranged

to have her pricked lightly with pins

at the needed moments.

.

~ Jane Hirshfield

I write these words to delay

What can I do with these thoughts,

given me as a dog is given her flock?

Or perhaps it is the reverse -

my life the unruly sheep, being herded.

At night,

all lie down on the mountain grasses,

while mirror sheep, a mirror guard-dog

follow one another through rock outcrops,

across narrow streams.  The drink and graze by starlight.

This morning, waking to unaccustomed calmness,

I write these words to stay in that silent, unfevered existence,

to delay the other words that are waiting.

~ Jane Hirshfield

from After

his name is God-with-them

.

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth ...

Here God lives among men.

He will make his home among them; 

they shall be his people and he will be their God;

his name is God-with-them.

He will wipe away all tears from their eyes;

there will be no more death, and no more mourning and sadness. 

 The world of the past has gone.

Then the One sitting on the throne spoke:

Now I am making the whole of creation new...

.

~ Revelations 21: 1-5

.

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

to finding again

.

.

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

.

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

.