nothing I can give you which you have not

Most Noble Contessina:

I salute you. I am your friend, and my love for you goes deep.

There is nothing I can give you which you have not. 
But there is much, very much, that, while I cannot give it, you can take. 
No heaven can come to us unless our hearts find rest in it today. 

Take heaven! 

No peace lies in the future which is not hidden in this present little instant. 

Take peace! 

The gloom of the world is but a shadow. Behind it, yet within our reach, is joy. 

Take Joy! 

There is radiance and glory in darkness, could we but see.
 And to see, we have only to look. I beseech you to look!

Life is so generous a giver. But we, judging its gifts by their covering, 
cast them away as ugly or heavy or hard. Remove the covering, 
and you will find beneath it a living splendor, 
woven of love by wisdom, with power. 

Welcome it, grasp it, and you touch the angel's hand that brings it to you. 
Everything we call a trial, a sorrow or a duty, believe me, 
that angel's hand is there.

The gift is there and the wonder of an overshadowing presence. 
Your joys, too, be not content with them as joys. 
They, too, conceal diviner gifts.

Life is so full of meaning and purpose, so full of beauty beneath its covering, 
that you will find earth but cloaks your heaven. 
Courage then to claim it; that is all! 
But courage you have, and the knowledge that we are pilgrims together, 
wending through unknown country home.

And so, at this time, I greet you, not quite as the world sends greetings, 
but with profound esteem and with the prayer that for you, 
now and forever, the day breaks and shadows flee away.

your servant,

 Fra Giovanni

~ Ernest Temple Hargrove

The name of a certain "16th century monk" is familiar now to millions of people but, he never lived; he was created by an English barrister, Ernest Temple Hargrove.  With the arrival of Christmas season each year, the monk, Fra Giovanni, becomes better known, and his creator drifts farther into obscurity.  This is the way Mr. Hargrove wanted it.  Hargrove was born into a distinguished English family, came to the United States as a young man and spent many years in religious endeavors, particularly in the field of writing.

Before his death in 1939 Hargrove composed a Christmas greeting to a friend, writing in literary style that gave a medieval  flavor to his message.  The greeting took the form of a letter from a monk to an Italian countess.  According to a close friend, G.M.W. Kobbe of New York, Hargrove secured no copyright, feeling that if his greeting carried a real message there should be no impediment to it's circulation. With the passage of years, the letter is now thought of as the perfect Christmas card by a great host of appreciative readers, many of whom believe Fra Giovanni was a real person.

The monk is imaginary but the letter and the message are real.

~ Max L. Christensen - 1997

Ernest Temple Hargrove, of England, married to Amy Virginia Tehula Neresheimer, the daughter of Emil August Neresheimer, NYC diamond broker, on Tuesday, January 18, 1899, Church of the Holy Apostles, NYC.They had at least two children, William A, born in about 1902, and a daughter Joan, born about 1905.Hargrove was a prominent figure in the NY Theosophical Society, and later in life was known to have resided as a caretaker of the Chapel of the Comforter, located at 10 Horation St. in NYC.he eventually died in 1939.

no words

People come a long way to reach Parrot Lake

anxious to ask about practice

this old monk tells them the truth

the gatha that frees you has no words

~ Stonehouse

from The Zen Works of Stonehouse

Poems and Talks of a 14th Century Chinese Hermit

translated by Red Pine

behind the word consciousness

~ Mauro Bergonzi

companion of my heart

You are the companion of my heart

Though my body I offer to those who desire it.

My body is friendly to guests

But you the companion of my heart

Are the guest of my soul.

~ Rabia

(712 - 801)

After a life of hardship, she spontaneously achieved a state of self-realization. 
When asked by Shaikh Hasan al-Basri how she discovered the secret, she responded by stating:

"You know of the how, but I know of the how-less."

the present has abated its urgencies

For people who live in the country there is a charming freedom in such days. One is free of obligations to the ground.  There is no outside work that one ought to do, simply because, with the ground frozen deep and covered with snow, no such work is possible.  Growth has stopped; there is plenty of hay and grain in the barn; the present has abated its urgencies.  The mind may again turn freely to the past and look back on the way it has come.

This morning has been bearing down out of the future toward this bit of riverbank forever. And for perhaps as long, in a sense, my life has been approaching from the opposite direction. The approach of a man's life out of the past is history, and the approach of time out of the future is mystery. Their meeting is the present, and it is consciousness, the only time life is alive. The endless wonder of this meeting is what causes the mind, in its inward liberty of a frozen morning, to turn back and question and remember. The world is full of places. Why is it that I am here?

- Wendell Berry

from The Long-Legged House

photo by Harry Callahan

with thanks to whiskey river

a star on the horizon of my heart

Ever in my life have I sought thee with my songs. 

It was they who led me from door to door, 

and with them have I felt about me, 

searching and touching my world.

It was my songs that taught me all the lessons I ever learnt; 

they showed me secret paths, 

they brought before my sight many a star on the horizon of my heart.

They guided me all the day long to the mysteries of the country of pleasure and pain, 

and, at last, 

to what palace gate have they brought me in the evening at the end of my journey?

~ Rabindranath Tagore

art by van gogh

are animals thinking and feeling?

~ Carl Safina

the green cookstove

A lonely man once sat on a large flat stone.

When he lifted it, he saw a kitchen: a green

Enamel range with big claw feet, familiar.

Someone lives in that room, cooking and cackling.

"I saw her once," Virgil said. "She was Helen's

Younger sister."  Helen's betrayed husband

Sits by the window, peeling garlic cloves,

And throwing crusts to Plymouth Rocks.

We'll never understand this, Somewhere below

The flat stone of the skull, a carnivorous couple

Lives and plans future wars.  Are we innocent?

These wars don't happen by accident - they occur

Too regularly. How often do we lift the plate

At the bottom of our brain and throw some garlic

And grain down to the kitchen?  "Keep cooking,

My dears," "Something good will come of this."

~ Robert Bly

from Morning Poems

who one is

One never knows who one is. 

The others tell you who you are, 

don't they? 

And as you're told so a million times 

if you live a long life, in the end you don't know at all 

who you are. Everyone says something different. 

You yourself also say something 

different each new moment.

~  Thomas Bernhard

first step

The first step in love

is losing your head.

After the petty ego

you then give up your life

and bear the calamity.

With this behind you, proceed:

Polish the ego's rust

from the mirror

of your self

~ Fakhr al-Din Iraqi

from Love's Alchemy

translations by David and Sabrineh Fideler

glow

Not a single soul lacks

a pathway to you.

There's no stone,

no flower-

not a single piece of straw-

lacking your existence.

In every particle of the world,

the moon of your love

causes the heart

of each atom to glow.

~ Muhammad Shirin Maghribi  

from Love's Alchemy

Poems from the Sufi Tradition

translations by David and Sabrineh Fideler

a thousand years of joy - the film trailer

what difference

Some time when the river is ice ask me

mistakes I have made. Ask me whether

what I have done is my life. Others

have come in their slow way into

my thought, and some have tried to help

or to hurt: ask me what difference

their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say.

You and I can turn and look

at the silent river and wait. We know

the current is there, hidden; and there

are comings and goings from miles away

that hold the stillness exactly before us.

What the river says, that is what I say.

~ William Stafford
from Ask Me

what is happening

Instant to instant

we ask, what is happening?

The sound of shattering everywhere,

is it the world, fragmenting at last,

or our own hearts cracking,

the final break-up of ice?

~ Dorothy Walters

from Marrow of Flame

how much

~  Beth Cioffoletti
 louie louie blog

this moment this love

This moment this love comes to rest in me,

many beings in one being.

In one wheat grain a thousand sheaf stacks.

Inside the needle's eye, a turning night of stars.

Listen, if you can stand to.

Union with the friend

means not being who you have been,

being instead silence, a place,

a view where language is inside seeing.

From the wet source

someone cuts a reed to make a flute

The reed sips breath like wine,

sips more, practicing. Now drunk,

it starts the high clear notes.

There is a path from me to you

that I am constantly looking for,

so I try to keep clear and still

as water does with the moon.

We do not have to follow the pressure-flow of wanting.

We can be led by the guide.

Wishes may or may not come true

in this house of disappointment.

Let's push the door open together and leave.

My essence is like the essence of a red wine.

My body is a cup that grieves because it is inside time.

Glass after glass of wine go into my head.

Finally, my head goes into the wine.

~ Rumi

translation by Coleman Barks

from The Big Red Book

A clear midnight

This is thy hour O soul, thy free flight into the wordless,

Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,

Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best,

Night, sleep, death and the stars.

~ Walt Whitman

the wild earth

Even through these trivial crowded days,

I never lose sight of the wild earth on which I live,

of the ravishing perfection of its beauty.

I stand before infinity and look out over a virgin wilderness.

The potential for reproducing fragments

of this in a form worthy of it are endless.

~ Harlan Hubbard

from his journal, January 15, 1987

silent journal

Inaudible consonant inaudible vowel 

The word continues to fall 

in splendor around us 

Window half shadow window half moon 

back yard like a book of snow 

That holds nothing and that nothing holds 

Immaculate text 

not too prescient not too true

~ Charles Wright

from Xionia

forgetting words

A water egret planes down like a page of blank paper

Toward the edge of the noon sky.

Let me, like him, find an island of white reeds

To settle down on, under the wind, forgetting words.

~ Charles Wright

 from T’ang Notebook,
 The Other Side of the River: Poems

it is

Almost noon, the meadow 

Waiting for someone to change it into an other. Not me. 

The horses, Monte and Littlefoot, 

Like it the way it is. 

And this morning, so do I.

~ Charles Wright

from Lightfoot

the night watch

Outdoors, like a false morning,

 Fog washes the pine trees. It 

 Shoulders against the windows,

 Spreading across their surface

 On its way upward. In this 

 Moment between sleep and thought 

 This holding back, I can hear 

 The fog start to rise, the slow 

 Memory of an ocean, 

 And I, like a ship, begin 

 To stir, to lurch in its swell, 

 And to move outward, beyond 

 The steel jetty, the lighthouse, 

 The red-flagged channel buoys,

 --Beyond, at last, sleep even--

 Into a deeper water,

 Pale, oracular, its waves

 Motionless, seagulls absent. 

~ Charles Wright

art by andrew wyeth

wind

There is an otherness inside us 

We never touch, 

no matter how far down our hands reach. 

It is the past, 

with its good looks and Anytime, Anywhere ... 

Our prayers go out to it, our arms go out to it 

Year after year, 

But who can ever remember enough?

...

The life of this world is wind 

Windblown we come, and windblown we go away. 

All that we look on is windfall. 

All we remember is wind.

~ Charles Wright

from The Southern Cross

open

What I want is to open up. I want to know what's inside me. I want everybody to open up. I'm like an imbecile with a can-opener in his hand, wondering where to begin - to open up the earth. I know that underneath the mess everything is marvelous. I'm sure of it.

I know it because I feel so marvelous myself most of the time. And when I feel that way everybody seems marvelous … everybody and everything … even pebbles and pieces of cardboard … a match stick lying in the gutter . . . anything . . . a goat's beard, if you like. That's what I want to write about … and then we're all going to see clearly, see what a staggering, wonderful, beautiful world it is.

~ Henry Miller

from Sexus

the call away

A cold wind flows over the cornfields;

Fleets of blackbirds ride that ocean.

I want to be out of here, go out,

Outdoors, anywhere in wind.

My back against a shed wall, I settle

Down where no one can find me.

I stare out at the box-elder leaves

Moving frond-like in that mysterious water.

What is it that I want? Not money,

Not a large desk, not a house with ten rooms.

This is what I want to do: to sit here,

To take no part, to be called away by wind.

I want to go the new way, build a shack

With one door, sit against the door frame.

After twenty years, you will see on my face

The same expression you see in the grass.

~ Robert Bly 

from Like the New Moon, I Will Live My Life

art by van gogh

a single tree

Not so much time itself

as the changes, 

the constant shifting 

and metamorphosing

of things into 

their opposites,

or, more likely, diminished versions

of themselves.

The cat, grown old,

stumbles about the room,

and doesn't remember the year

she leapt from sill to sill

taking the lace curtains

down as she went.

And the tree,

a blackened scar,

opening its side to weather

minus its most stately branch,

long since taken off

by wind, or lightning,

or something obsessed

with symmetry --

does it recall the winter it stood

alone, unyielding,

against the hammering gale?

Or its abundant leafiness in spring,

its green proclamation

of all that continues

unabated in this world.

~ Dorothy Walters

from Marrow of Flame

The mountains stood in haze

The mountains stood in haze,

The valleys stopped below,

And went or waited as they liked

The river and the sky.

At leisure was the sun.

His interests of fire

A little from remark withdrawn.

The twilight spoke the spire.

So soft upon the scene

The act of evening fell

We felt how neighborly a thing

Was the invisible.

~ Emily Dickinson

the nature of consciousness

~ Robert Spira

something else

Whatever it is hangs over us,

wants us to keep on gliding forward,

as if a compass nestled in the heart,

as if a hidden magnet were always calling to

the bits of iron which swim in the blood,

or a boat was being drawn ahead

by a canal-man, with his steady line and

unwavering eye,

not asking why, just doing it,

even on the days we awaken

amidst the ruins of the spirit,

and have nothing to offer,

except a longing for the smell of hyacinths

and something else we can't fully recall.

~ Dorothy Walters

from Marrow of Flame

who

Whoever went in

naked to the core.

Whoever cast aside

all the armor.

all the fastenings.

Who could breathe air thin as flame.

Drink water pressed from blossoms,

rose petals

or violets.

Whoever stayed in that

darkness so dark

it became a circle of seeing.

Who could hear

the silent flute note

of the stilled wind,

hold rock turning to light.

~ Dorothy Walters

from Marrow of Flame

Uzayr

  

The sons of Uzayr, were looking for their father.

They have grown old, and their father

has miraculously grown young!

They meet him and ask, "Pardon us, sir,

but have you seen Uzayr?  We hear

that he's supposed to be coming along

this road today."  "Yes," says Uzayr,

"he's right behind me."  One of his sons

replies, "That's good news."  The other

falls on the ground.  He has recognized

his father.  "What do you mean news?

We're already inside the sweetness

of his presence."   To the mind

there is such a thing as news, whereas

to inner knowing , it's all in the middle

of its happening.  To doubters, this is

a pain.  To believers, it's gospel.

To the lover and the visionary

it's life as it's being lived.

~ Rumi

Coleman Barks translation

the shiva dance image

~ Aldous Huxley

nothing ahead

Lovers think they're looking for each other,

but there's only one search: wandering

this world is wandering that,

both inside one

transparent sky.  In here there is

no dogma and no heresy.

The miracle of Jesus is himself, not what he said

or did about the future.  Forget the future.

I'd worship someone who could do that.

On the way you may want to look back, or not.

But if you can say, There's nothing ahead,

there will be nothing there.

Stretch your arms

and take hold the cloth of your clothes

with both hands.  The cure for pain is in the pain.

Good and bad are mixed.  If you don't have both,

you don't belong with us.

When one of us gets lost,

is not here, he must be inside us.  There's no

place like that anywhere in the world.

~ Rumi

from The Book of Love

translations by Coleman Barks