the wind

The day we die

the wind comes down

to take away

our footprints.

The wind makes dust

to cover up

the markings we left

while walking.

For otherwise 

the thing would seem

as if we were

still living.

Therefore the wind

is he who comes

to blow away

our footprints.

~ Southern Bushmen

from A Book of Luminous Things

edited by Czeslaw Milosz 

 

sufficient

Strong and content I travel the open road.

The earth, that is sufficient,

I do not want the constellations any nearer,

I know they are very well where they are,

I know they suffice for those who belong to them.

You road I enter upon and look around, I believe you are not all that is here,

I believe that much unseen is also here.

All seems beautiful to me,

I can repeat over to men and women You have done such good to me I would do the same to you,

I will recruit for myself and you as I go,

I will scatter myself among men and women as I go,

I will toss a new gladness and roughness among them,

Whoever denies me it shall not trouble me,

Whoever accepts me he or she shall be blessed and shall bless me.

Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons,

It is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.

Here is the test of wisdom,

Wisdom is not finally tested in schools,

Wisdom cannot be pass’d from one having it to another not having it,

Wisdom is of the soul, is not susceptible of proof, is its own proof,

Applies to all stages and objects and qualities and is content,

Is the certainty of the reality and immortality of things, and the excellence of things;

Something there is in the float of the sight of things that provokes it out of the soul.

Now I re-examine philosophies and religions,

They may prove well in lecture-rooms, yet not prove at all under the spacious clouds and along the landscape and flowing currents.

Here is realization,

Here is a man tallied—he realizes here what he has in him,

The past, the future, majesty, love—if they are vacant of you, you are vacant of them.

Only the kernel of every object nourishes;

Where is he who tears off the husks for you and me?

Where is he that undoes stratagems and envelopes for you and me?

The efflux of the soul is happiness, here is happiness,

I think it pervades the open air, waiting at all times,

Now it flows unto us, we are rightly charged.

Here rises the fluid and attaching character,

The fluid and attaching character is the freshness and sweetness of man and woman,

(The herbs of the morning sprout no fresher and sweeter every day out of the roots of themselves, than it sprouts fresh and sweet continually out of itself.)

Toward the fluid and attaching character exudes the sweat of the love of young and old,

From it falls distill’d the charm that mocks beauty and attainments,

Toward it heaves the shuddering longing ache of contact.

~ Walt Whitman
excerpts from Song of the Open Road 


 

half life

We walk through half our life

as if it were a fever dream

barely touching the ground

our eyes half open

our heart half closed.

Not half knowing who we are

we watch the ghost of us drift

from room to room

through friends and lovers

never quite as real as advertised.

Not saying half we mean

or meaning half we say

we dream ourselves

from birth to birth

seeking some true self.

Until the fever breaks

and the heart can not abide

a moment longer

as the rest of us awakens,

summoned from the dream,

not half caring for anything but love.

- Stephen Levine

from Breaking the Drought

kinship

~ Homeboy Industries

perishable

The nimble ovenbird, the dignity of pears,

The simplicity of oars, the imperishable

Engines inside slim fir seeds, all of these

Make clear how much we want the impermanent

To be permanent.  We want the hermit wren

To keep her eggs even during the storm.

But that's impossible. We are perishable;

Friends, we are salty, impermanent kingdoms.

~ Robert Bly

from Talking into the Ear of a Donkey

 

in time a man disappears

In time a man disappears

from his lifelong fields, from 

the streams he has walked beside,

from the woods where he sat and waited.

Thinking of this, he seems to 

miss himself in those places

as if always he has been there.

But first he must disappear,

and this he foresees with hope,

with thanks.  Let others come.

.

~ Wendell Berry

from Leavings

.

small beauties

After she’s gone to camp, in the early
evening I clear our girl’s breakfast dishes
from the rosewood table, and find a dinky
crystallized pool of maple syrup, the
grains standing there, round, in the night, I
rub it with my fingertip
as if I could read it, this raised dot of
amber sugar, and this time,
when I think of my father, I wonder why
I think of my father, of the Vulcan blood-red
glass in his hand, or his black hair gleaming like a
broken-open coal. I think I learned to
love the little things about him
because of all the big things
I could not love, no one could, it would be wrong to.
So when I fix on this image of resin
or sweep together with the heel of my hand a
pile of my son’s sunburn peels like
insect wings, where I peeled his back the night before camp, 

I am doing something I learned early to do, I am
paying attention to small beauties,
whatever I have - as if it were our duty to
find things to love, to bind ourselves to this world. 

 

 

 

--Sharon Olds

 'Little Things' from The Gold Cell

 

can you

2nd century BC Ink-on-silk manuscript of the Tao Te Ching

Can you keep your soul in its body,
hold fast to the one,
and so learn to be whole?
Can you center your energy,
be soft, tender,
and so learn to be a baby?

Can you keep the deep water still and clear,
so it reflects without blurring?
Can you love people and run things,
and do so by not doing?

Opening, closing the Gate of Heaven,
can you be like a bird with her nestlings?
Piercing bright through the cosmos,
can you know by not knowing?

To give birth, to nourish,
to bear and not to own,
to act and not lay claim,
to lead and not to rule:
this is mysterious power.

~   Lao Tzu

 from Tao Te Ching

 version by Ursula K. Le Guin

with thanks to brain pickings

the single face

The world is no more than the Beloved's single face;

In the desire of the One to know its own beauty, we exist.

Each place, each moment, sings its particular song of not-being and being.

Without reason, the clear glass equally mirrors wisdom and madness.

Those who claim knowledge are wrong; prayer just leads to trance;

Appearance and faith are mere lees in the Unknowing Wine.

Wherever the Footprint is found,

that handful of dust holds the oneness of worlds.

This earth, burnished by hearing the Name, is so certain of Love

That the sky bends unceasingly down, to greet its own light.

~ Ghalib

translated by Jane Hirshfield

from The Enlightened Heart,

An anthology of sacred poetry edited

by Stephen Mitchell

photo by eliot porter

not anyone

The true person is
Not anyone in particular;
But, like the deep blue color
Of the limitless sky,
It is everyone, everywhere in the world.

~  Eihei Dogen

with thanks to poetry chaikhana

skin around the organ

What we often forget is that thought is to be used
to correct life. It's not a way of life.

If you make thought the center of your life,
you're not going to live it.

So, what you have to do is be this kind of hysterical, emotional, vibrant creature
who lives at the top of his lungs for a lifetime and then
corrects around the edges so that he doesn't go insane
or drive his friends mad.

Thought is the skin around the organ.
The organ is full of blood and a beating heart,
a soul and the exaltation of being alive!




~ Ray Bradbury

the smoke of ideas

The full beauty of the mountain is not seen until 

you consent to the impossible paradox:

 it is... 

and is not.... 

When nothing more needs to be said,

 the smoke of ideas clears, 

the mountain is seen.

 ~ Thomas Merton
with thanks to louie,louie

how to lose power

~ Jean Vanier

the empty boat

He who rules men lives in confusion;

He who is ruled by men lives in sorrow.

Yao therefore desired

Neither to influence others

Nor be influenced by them.

The way to get clear of confusion

And free of sorrow

Is to live with Tao

In the land of the great Void.

If a man is crossing a river

And an empty boat collides with his own skiff,

Even though he be a bad-tempered man

He will not become very angry.

But if he sees a man in the boat,

He will shout at him to steer clear.

If the shout is not heard, he will shout again,

And yet again, and begin cursing.

And all because there is somebody in the boat.

Yet if the boat were empty,

He would not be shouting, and not angry.

If you can empty your own boat 

Crossing the river of the world,

No one will oppose you,

No one will seek to harm you.

The straight tree is the first to be cut down,

The spring of clear water is the first to be drained dry.

If you wish to improve your wisdom

And shame the ignorant,

To cultivate your character

And outshine others;

A light will shine around you

As if you had swallowed the sun and the moon:

You will not avoid calamity.

A wise man has said:

"He who is content with himself

Has done a worthless work.

Achievement is the beginning of failure.

Fame is the beginning of disgrace."

Who can free himself from achievement

And from fame, descend and be lost

Amid the masses of men?

He will flow like Tao, unseen,

He will go about like Life itself

With no name and no home.

Simple is he, without distinction.

To all appearances he is a fool.

His steps leave no trace.  He has no power.

He achieves nothing, has no reputation.

Since he judges no one

No one judges him.

Such is the perfect man:

His boat is empty.

~ Chuang Tzu

translation by Thomas Merton
from The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton

art by Nancy Poucher

To deliver oneself up,
to hand oneself over,
entrust oneself completely to the silence
of a wide landscape of woods and hills,
or sea and desert; to sit still while
the sun comes up over the land
and fills its silences with light.

...few are willing to belong completely
to such silence, to let it soak into their bones,
to breathe nothing but silence, to feed
on silence, and to turn the very substance of their life
into a living and vigilant silence.



~ Thomas Merton
from Thoughts in Solitude

the sacred dimension

The natural way of being after death of a loved one is suffering at first, then there is a deepening. In that deepening, you go to a place where there is no death. And the fact that you felt that means you went deep enough, to the place where there is no death. Conditioned as your mind is by society, the contemporary world that you live in, which knows nothing about that dimension – your mind then tells you that there is something wrong with this. Your mind says “I should not be feeling peace, that is not what one feels in a situation like this”. But that’s a conditioned thought by the culture that you live in. So instead we can recognize when this happens, when that thought comes – recognize it as a conditioned thought that is not true.  

It doesn't mean that the waves of sadness don’t come back from time to time. But in between the waves of sadness, you sense there is peace. As you sense that peace, you sense the essence of your children as well – the timeless essence. So death is a very sacred thing – not just a dreadful thing. When you react to the loss of form, that’s dreadful.

When you go deep enough to the formless, the dreadful is no longer dreadful, it’s sacred. Then you will experience the two levels, when somebody dies who is close to you. Yes it’s dreadful on the level of form. It’s sacred on the deeper level. Death can enable you to find that dimension in yourself. You’re helping countless other humans if you find that dimension in yourself – the sacred dimension of life. Death can help you find the sacred dimension of life – where life is indestructible.

Surrender can open that door for you. Complete acceptance of it. So honor that sacred dimension and realize that what your mind is saying, that it isn't right, is just a form of conditioning – it isn’t the truth. It is supremely right.

This is always the window into the formless. As you accept it, surrender. Because the form is gone, your mind becomes still when you surrender to death. It’s not through explanations that you accept death. You can have explanations, mental explanations that say, well, he or she will move on or reincarnate, or go to some place of rest. That can be comforting, but you can go to a deeper place than that, where you don’t need explanations – a state of immediate realization of the sacredness of death, because what opens up when the form dissolves is life beyond form. That is the only thing that is sacred. That is the sacred dimension.

~ Eckhart Tolle

if you open yourself

Nature uses few words:

when the gale blows, it will not last long;

when it rains hard, it lasts but a little while;

What causes these to happen? Heaven and Earth.

Why do we humans go on endlessly about little

when nature does much in a little time?

If you open yourself to the Tao,

you and Tao become one.

If you open yourself to Virtue,

then you can become virtuous.

If you open yourself to loss,

then you will become lost.

If you open yourself to the Tao,

the Tao will eagerly welcome you.

If you open yourself to virtue,

virtue will become a part of you.

If you open yourself to loss,

the lost are glad to see you.

"When you do not trust people,

people will become untrustworthy."

~ Lao Tzu

from the Tao Te Ching, 23

translation by j.h. mcdonald

what the heart cannot forget

Everything remembers something. The rock, its fiery bed,
cooling and fissuring into cracked pieces, the rub
of watery fingers along its edge.


The cloud remembers being elephant, camel, giraffe,
remembers being a veil over the face of the sun,
gathering itself together for the fall.


The turtle remembers the sea, sliding over and under
its belly, remembers legs like wings, escaping down
the sand under the beaks of savage birds.


The tree remembers the story of each ring, the years
of drought, the floods, the way things came
walking slowly towards it long ago.


And the skin remembers its scars, and the bone aches
where it was broken. The feet remember the dance,
and the arms remember lifting up the child.


The heart remembers everything it loved and gave away,
everything it lost and found again, and everyone
it loved, the heart cannot forget.




~ Joyce Sutphen
from Coming Back to the Body

present, above time

These roses under my window make no
reference to former roses or to better ones;
they are for what they are;
they exist with God to-day.

There is no time to them.
There is simply the rose; it is perfect in
every moment of its existence.

Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts;
in the full-blown flower, there is no more;
in the leafless root, there is no less.

Its nature is satisfied, and it satisfies nature,
in all moments alike.
There is no time to it.

But man postpones or remembers;
he does not live in the present, but with
reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of
the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe
to foresee the future.

He cannot be happy and strong until he too
lives with nature in the present, above time.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

 from Self-Reliance, an 1841 essay

witness

You often say, "I would give, but only to the deserving."

The trees in your orchard say not so, nor the flocks in your pasture.

They give that they may live, for to withhold is to perish.

Surely he who is worthy to receive his days and his nights, is worthy of all else from you.

And he who has deserved to drink from the ocean of life deserves to fill his cup from your little stream.

And what desert greater shall there be, than that which lies in the courage and the confidence, nay the charity, of receiving?

And who are you that men should rend their bosom and unveil their pride, that you may see their wealth naked and their pride unabashed?

See first that you yourself deserve to be a giver, and and instrument of giving.

For in truth it is life that gives unto life -- while you, who deem yourself a giver, are but a witness.

~ Kahlil Gibran

from The Prophet

unawakened gifts

Those who are willing to stand out and take the risk of following their gifts place a mirror to our unawakened gifts. To know they are there, day in day out, at the frontiers of their own limitations and vision, probing further into new possibility, enduring at lonely thresholds in the hope of discovery, to know they are willing to risk everything is both disturbing and comforting.

In a small town near us there was a lovely writer and musician who lived a rather bohemian life; he was given sometimes to the drink but he had a beautiful, awakened mind.  He was a kind of 'undercover mystic' and many people, especially young people, came to talk to him when they felt their minds troubling them... I once asked him how he had managed to live alone on that edge.  He said: 'I was a very young man when I first felt the burn of that old mystical flame within me. I realized immediately what an adventure and danger it would be and that there was no going back. On that day I made a bargain with myself, the bargain was; no matter what came I would always remain best friends with myself.  I am old now but I never broke that bargain.'

~ John O'Donohue

from The Invisible Embrace, Beauty

Who would have thought my shriveled heart
Could have recovered greenness?

~ George Herbert

 

doubts and loves

From the place where we are right 

Flowers will never grow 

In the spring. 

The place where we are right 

Is hard and trampled 

Like a yard. 

But doubts and loves 

Dig up the world 

Like a mole, a plow. 

And a whisper will be heard in the place 

Where the ruined 

House once stood. 

~ Yehudi Amichai

(from: The Selected Poetry of Yehudi Amichai, 

translation by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell)

photo by Eliot Porter.

wherever we taste

.

A wife loves her husband not for his own sake, 
dear, but because the Self lives in him.

The husband loves his wife not for her own sake, 
dear, but because the Self lives in her.

Children are loved not for their own sake, 
but because the Self lives in them.

Everything is loved not for its own sake, 
but because the Self lives in it.

This Self has to be realized.

Hear about this Self.

As a lump of salt thrown in water dissolves 

and cannot be taken out again,

 though wherever we taste, the water it is salty,

 even so, beloved,

 the separate self dissolves in the sea of pure consciousness,

 infinite and immortal. 

 Separateness arises from identifying the Self with the body,

 which is made up of the elements;

 when this physical identification dissolves,

 there can be no more separate self.

~ from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad

.

music and survival

~ Alice Herz-Sommer

At age 110, Alice Herz-Sommer the world’s oldest pianist and oldest holocaust survivor, retains an unshakeable faith in the beauty of life and humanity, not unlike an awestruck child. She maintains that even the bad is beautiful, for it is part of life. To this day, Alice lives alone in her North London home, and practices the piano each day for two hours in the morning and two in the afternoon. People from everywhere come to listen outside of her building. She is the ‘lady in number six’. To claim that music is and has always been her salvation would be an understatement, in Alice’s own words:

“I felt that this is the only thing which helps me to have hope… a sort of religion, actually.

Music is God."

"I knew that even in this very difficult situation, there are beautiful moments... even the bad is beautiful."

 [ also known as Alice Sommer (26 November 1903 – 23 February 2014), was a Prague-born Jewish pianist, music teacher, and supercentenarian who survived Theresienstadt concentration camp. She lived for 40 years in Israel, before migrating to London in 1986, where she resided until her death, and at the age of 110 was the world's oldest known Holocaust survivor until Yisrael Kristal was recognized as such. Kristal was also a Holocaust survivor, and was born two months before Herz-Sommer ]

~ from Wikipedia

glide

The soul, then, being thus inwardly recollected in

God or before God, now and then becomes so

sweetly attentive to the goodness of her well-beloved,

that her attention seems not to her to be attention, so

purely and delicately is it exercised; as it happens

to certain rivers, which glide so calmly and smoothly that

beholders and such as float upon them, seem neither to 

see not feel any motion, because the waters are not

seen to ripple or flow at all.

~ Saint Francis de Sales

from An Introduction to the Devout Life 

silence and meditation

One day some people came to a solitary monk  . 

They asked him:

"What is the meaning of silence and meditation? "

The monk was just the scooping of water 

from a deep well. 

He said to his visitors: 

"Look into the well. What do you see?" 

The people looked into the deep well and responded: 

"We see nothing!"

The monk put down his bucket. 

After a short while, he urged the people once more: 

"Look into the well! 

What do you see now? " 

The people looked down again: 

"Now we see ourselves!" 

"You could not see anything," replied the monk, 

"Because the water was restless as your life. 

But now it's quiet. 

This is what the silence gives us : one sees himself "

Then the monk told the people to wait a while. 

Finally, he asked them: 

"And now look again into the well. 

What do you see? " 

The man looked down.

"Now we see the stones on the bottom of the well." 

The monk said: 

"This is the experience of silence and meditation. 

If you wait long enough, you can see the reason of all things. "

~ author unknown

inner wildness

Our bodies are wild. The involuntary quick turn of the head at a shout, 
the vertigo at looking off a precipice, the heart-in-the-throat 
in a moment of danger, the catch of the breath, the quiet moments 
relaxing, staring, reflecting – all universal responses of this mammal body… 

The body does not require the intercession of some conscious intellect 
to make it breathe, to keep the heart beating. It is to a great extent self-regulating,
 it is a life of its own. The world is our consciousness, and it surrounds us.
 There are more things in the mind, in the imagination, 
than ‘you’ can keep track of – thoughts, memories, images,
 angers, delights, rise unbidden. The depths of the mind, the unconscious, 
are our inner wilderness areas, and that is where a bobcat is right now. 

I do not mean personal bobcats in personal psyches, but the bobcat that roams
 from dream to dream. The conscious agenda-planning ego occupies
 a very tiny territory, a little cubicle somewhere near the gate, keeping track
 of some of what goes in and out, and the rest takes care of itself. 
The body is, so to speak, in the mind. They are both wild.

~ Gary Snyder

from The Practice of the Wild

kindness

 



I used to be libertarian. I used to be atheist. I used to want America to be more atheist libertarian.
All my voting, preaching, discussing and complaining reflected those desires. I'm still libertarian and atheist, and now I'm vegan to boot, but none of that matters any more. I no longer care.
All I want out of America now is kindness. That's all. The past few years have filled too many of our friends and neighbors with hate, and it breaks my heart. Some people started acting hateful, crazy and nasty so that they could win, and then people who disagreed with them acted the same way. They disagree in content but agree wholeheartedly in tone. 

So many of us now agree with the message of hate, and play "ideology" as team sports. The message doesn't matter when the medium is hate. My friends who work on TV, people I love personally, are using a tone and a meanness in their jobs that they never used before. Is hate where the money is? I don't know if fighting fire with fire actually works, but I do know that fighting hate with hate never works. 

It makes me cry. I've read about family members not invited to Thanksgiving because of political disagreements! The Clash sang "anger can be power" and I believed it. Maybe I still believe it, but maybe I don't want power any more. Can't we replace the word "evil" with the word "wrong?" Everyone is wrong sometimes and nobody is evil ever. The America I want is kind to people who are wrong. 

I'm like a dog, I don't hear words anymore, I just hear tone. Anyone whose tone is kind will get my complete support. Libertarian, Democrat, Republican, Socialist, Green . . . anything else you got. I've always been left out of team sports. I don't want to win enough. I'm not part of a team, I'm part of humanity. I want kindness. There's no other team for me. Let's love each other, and then discuss how to run our country together. 

~ Penn Jillette, of Penn & Teller

 with thanks to fivebranchtree