readings

~ William Stafford

traveling through

Death is a favour to us,
But our scales have lost their balance.
The impermanence of the body
Should give us great clarity, deepening the wonder in our
Senses and eyes
Of this mysterious existence we share
And surely are just traveling through.

If I were in the tavern tonight,
Hafiz would call for drinks
And as the Master poured, I would be reminded
That all I know of life and myself is that
We are just a mid-air flight of golden wine
Between His Pitcher and His cup.


If I were in the tavern tonight,
I would buy freely for everyone in this world
Because our marriage with the Cruel Beauty
Of time and space cannot endure very long.


Death is a favour to us,
But our minds have lost their balance.
The miraculous existence and impermanence of
Form
Always makes the illumined ones
Laugh and sing.





~ Hafiz

from  The subject tonight is Love –  poems of Hafiz
Versions by Daniel Ladinsky

time will come

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.





~ Derek Walcott

why is there a fear of death?

.

Questioner:  The fact of death stares everybody in the face,

 yet its mystery is never solved.  Must it always be so?

Krishnamurti:  Why is there a fear of death? 

 When we cling to continuity, there is the fear of death.

 Incomplete action brings the fear of death. 

 There is a fear of death as long as there is the desire for continuity

 in character, continuity in action, in capacity, in the name, and so on.

  As long as there is action seeking a result, there must be the thinker 

who is seeking continuity.  Fear comes into being when this continuity 

is threatened through death.  So, there is fear of death as long

 as there is the desire for continuity. 

     That which continues disintegrates.  Any form of continuity, 

however noble, is a process of disintegration.  In continuity there is never renewal, 

and only in renewal is there freedom from the fear of death.  If we see the truth 

of this, then we will see the truth in the false.  Then there would be the liberation 

from the false.  Then there would be no fear of death.  Thus living, experiencing,

 is in the present and not a means of continuity.

     Is it possible to live from moment to moment with renewal?

  There is renewal only in ending and not in continuity.  In the interval 

between the ending and the beginning of another problem,

 there is renewal.

     Death, the state of non-continuity, the state of rebirth, is the unknown.

  Death is the unknown.  The mind, which is the result of continuity,

 cannot know the unknown.  It can know only the known.  It can only act

 and have its being in the known, which is continuous.  So the known is in fear

 of the unknown.  The known can never know the unknown, and so death 

remains the mystery.  If there is an ending from moment to moment,

 from day to day, in this ending the unknown comes into being.

     Immortality is not the continuation of "me".  The me and the mine is of time,

 the result of action towards an end.  So there is no relationship between the me

 and the mine and that which is immortal, timeless.  We would like to think 

there is a relationship, but this is an illusion.  That which is immeasurable 

cannot be caught in the net of time.

     There is fear of death where there is search for fulfillment. 

 Fulfillment has no ending.  Desire is constantly seeking and changing

 the object of fulfillment, and so it is caught in the net of time. 

 So the search for self-fulfillment is another form of continuity, 

and frustration seeks death as a means of continuity.  Truth is not continuous. 

 Truth is a state of being, and being is action without time.  This being

 can be experienced only when desire, which gives birth to continuity,

 is wholly and completely understood.  Thought is founded on the past,

 so thought cannot know the unknown, the immeasurable.  

The thought process must come to an end.  

Then only the unknowable comes into being.

.

~ J. Krishnamurti

from a talk in Bombay March 14 1948

art by Klimt

silence shall be my answer

All things change and die and disappear.

Questions arrive, assume their actuality, and disappear.

In this hour I shall cease to ask them 

and silence shall be my answer.

The world that Your love created,

that the heat has distorted,

that my mind is always misinterpreting,

shall cease to interfere with our voices.

~ Thomas Merton

from Dialogues with Silence

.

The true contemplative is not one who prepares his mind for a particular message
 that he wants or expects to hear, but is one who remains empty
 because he knows that he can never expect to anticipate the words 
that will transform his darkness into light.  He does not even anticipate
 a special kind of transformation.  He does not demand light instead of darkness.
  He waits in silence, and, when he is "answered," it is not so much by a word
 that bursts into his silence.  It is by his silence itself, suddenly, inexplicably
 revealing itself to him as a word of great power, full of the voice of God.

from The Climate of Monastic Prayer

(one of last books he prepared for publication)

sketch by the author

when we no longer know what to do

It may be that when we no longer know what to do

we have come to our real work,

and that when we no longer know which way to go

we have come to our real journey.

~  Wendell Berry

how to be

Make a place to sit down.

Sit down.  Be quiet.

You must depend upon

affection,  reading,  knowledge,

skill -- more of each

than you have  -- inspiration,

work,  growing older,  patience,

for patience joins time

to eternity.  Any readers

who like your work,

doubt their judgment.

Breathe with unconditional breath

the unconditioned air.

Shun electric wire.

Communicate slowly.  Live

a three - differential life;

Stay away from anything

that obscures the place it is in.

There are no unsacred places;

there are only sacred places

and desecrated places.

Accept what comes from silence.

Make the best you can of it.

Of the little words that come

out of silence,  like prayers

prayed back to the one who prays

make a poem that does not disturb

the silence from which it came.

~ Wendell Berry

photo - Sitting Bull

by F.A. Rinehart

a journey of one inch

And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, 

no matter how long, 

but only by a spiritual journey, 

a journey of one inch, 

very arduous and humbling and joyful, 

by which we arrive at the ground at our feet, 

and learn to be at home.

~ Wendell Berry

(Collected Poems)

photo by: Kathleen Connally

the language we’ve inherited

The language we’ve inherited confuses (this). 
We say “my” body and “your” body and “his”
 body and “her” body, but it isn’t that way. … 

This Cartesian “Me,” this autonomous little homunculus 
who sits behind our eyeballs looking out through them 
in order to pass judgment on the affairs of the world,
 is just completely ridiculous. 

This self-appointed little editor of reality
 is just an impossible fiction that collapses
 the moment one examines it.

~ Robert M. Pirsig
from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

opposites

.

With all its eyes the natural world looks out

into the Open.  Only our eyes are turned 

backward, and surround plant, animal, child 

like traps, as they emerge into their freedom.

We know what is really out there only from

the animal's gaze;

 for we take the very young

child and force it around, so that it sees

objects - not the Open, which is so

deep in animals' faces.  Free from death.

We, only, can see death; the free animal

has its decline in back of it, forever,

and God in front, and when it moves, it moves

already in eternity, like a fountain.

Never, not for a single day, do we have 

before us that pure space into which flowers 

endlessly open. Always there is World

and never Nowhere without the No: that pure

unseparated element which one breathes

without desire and endlessly knows. 

 A child 

may wander there for hours, through the timeless

stillness, may get lost in it and be 

shaken back. Or someone dies and is it.

For , nearing death, one doesn't see death; but stares

beyond, perhaps with an animal's vast gaze.

Lovers, if the beloved were not there

blocking the view, are close to it, and marvel...

As if by some mistake, it opens for them

behind each other.. But neither can move past

the other, and it changes back to World.

Forever turned toward objects, we see in them

the mere reflection of the realm of freedom,

which we have dimmed. Or when some animal

mutely, serenely, looks us through and through.

That is what fate means: to be opposite,

to be opposite and nothing else, forever.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

excerpt from the Duino Elegies, #8
translated by Stephen Mitchell
photo by shreve stockton

.

habit - fear - security - exclusion

.

 For if we think of this existence of the individual as a larger or smaller room,
 it appears evident that most people learn to know only a corner of their room, 
a place by the window, a strip of floor on which they walk up and down. 


Thus they have a certain security. And yet that dangerous insecurity
 is so much more human which drives the prisoners in Poe’s stories
 to feel out the shapes of their horrible dungeons 
and not be strangers to the
 unspeakable terror of their abode.

We, however, are not prisoners. No traps or snares are set about us, 
and there is nothing which should intimidate or worry us.
 We are set down in life as in the element to which we best correspond,
 and over and above this we have through thousands of years 
of accommodation become so like this life, that when we hold still
 we are, through a happy mimicry, scarcely to be distinguished
 from all that surrounds us. 


We have no reason to mistrust our world, 
for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, 
those abysses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them.
 And if only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels
 us that we must always hold to the difficult, then that which now still seems
 to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful.


 How should we be able to forget those ancient myths about dragons
 that at the last moment turn into princesses; 


perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting 
to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its 
deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Coltrane - compassion

~ John Coltrane

The divine force — God, as Coltrane defined it —

 breathes through us all, said Coltrane, 

and the last years of his life can be seen as an attempt —

 sometimes a struggle —

 to breathe God through his horn.

“Once you become aware of this force for unity in life,” 

wrote Coltrane in the liner notes for 1965’s Meditations,

 his acknowledged follow-up to A Love Supreme.

 “You can’t forget it. It becomes part of everything you do… 

my goal in meditating on this through music however remains… 

to uplift people as much as I can. To inspire them

 to realize more and more their capacities for

 living meaningful lives.”

 comments by Sean Murphy

compassion

~ Joseph Goldstein

for oneself

The first being one must have compassion for
is oneself.
You can't be a witness to your thoughts
with a chip on your shoulder or an axe to grind.

Ramana Maharshi said,
"If people would stop wailing alas I am a sinner
and use all that energy to get on with it
they would all be enlightened."

He also said,
"When you're cleaning up the outer temple
before going to the inner temple,
don't stop to read everything
you're going to throw away..."

 

art by William Russell Nowicki

 

apple

.

I wake and remembered 

nothing of what I was dreaming

The day grew light, then dark again — 

In all its rich hours, what happened? 

A few weeds pulled, a few cold flowers 

carried inside for the vase. 

A little reading. A little tidying and sweeping.

I had vowed to do nothing I did not wish 

to do that day, and kept my promise.

Once, a certain hope came close 

and then departed. Passed by me in its familiar 

shawl, scented with iodine woodsmoke.

I did not speak to it, nor it to me. 

Yet still the habit of warmth traveled 

between us, like an apple shared by old friends —

One takes a bite, then the other. 

They do this until it is gone.

~ Jane Hirshfield

you live like this

You live like this,
 sheltered,
 in a delicate world,
 and you believe you are living. 

Then you read a book… 
or you take a trip…
 and you discover
 that you are not living, 
that you are hibernating. 

The symptoms of hibernating
 are easily detectable: first, restlessness. 
The second symptom 
(when hibernating becomes dangerous 
and might degenerate into death):
 absence of pleasure. 
That is all.

 It appears like an innocuous illness. 
Monotony, boredom, death. 
Millions live like this (or die like this) 
without knowing it. 

They work in offices. 
They drive a car. 
They picnic with their families. 
They raise children.
 And then 
some shock treatment takes place, 
a person, a book, a song,
 and it awakens them and saves them from death.

~ Anaïs Nin

from The Diary of Anaïs Nin

to love myself

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

 

the way of the heart - Rumi

in the kingdom of insecurity

As the under-secretary leans forward and draws an X

her earrings dangle like the sword above Damocles,

As a speckled butterfly turns invisible against the earth

the demon merges with the opened newspaper.

A helmet worn by no one seizes power.

A mother tortoise escapes, flying underwater.

~ Tomas Transtromer

from The Sorrow Gondola

translations by Michael McGriff and Mikaela Grassl

at the center

The Master is not trapped in opposites. His this is also a that. 

He sees that life becomes death and death becomes life,

 that right has a kernel of wrong within it and wrong a kernel of right,

 that the true turns into the false and the false into the true. 

He understands that nothing is absolute,

 that since every point of view depends on the viewer, 

affirmation and denial are equally beside the point. 

The place where the this and the that are not opposed to each other

 is called "the pivot of the Tao." When we find this pivot, we find ourselves

 at the center of the circle, and here we sit, serene, 

while Yes and No keep chasing each other

 around the circumference, endlessly. 

Mind can only create the qualities of good and bad by comparing. 

Remove the comparison, and there go the qualities. 

What remains is the pure unknown: ungraspable object,

 ungraspable subject, and the clear light of awareness 

streaming through. The pivot of the Tao

 is the mind free of its thoughts.

 It doesn't believe that this is a this

 or that that is a that. 

Let Yes and No sprint around the circumference

 toward a finish line that doesn't exist. How can they stop trying

 to win the argument of life until you stop? When you do, 

you realize that you were the only one running.

 Yes was you,

 No was you, 

the whole circumference, with its colored banners,

 its pom-pom girls and frenzied crowds - that was you as well.

 At the center, the eyes open and again

 it's the sweet morning of the world. There's nothing here

 to limit you, no one here to draw a circumference.

 In fact, there's no one here - 

not even you.

~ Stephen Mitchell
from The Second Book of the Tao

art by Master Shen-Long
with thanks to Love is a Place

grace

~ Kraig Kenning

Andaluza

~ Anne Gastinel & Pablo Marques

perfect accord

Some people who play solos quite well simply are no good at accompanying.  

It takes a special something to know when to keep in the background 

and when to play out to give the soloist support and when, 

occasionally, the piano has a real solo passage or phrase ... 

The thing is to think of the piece as a whole, 

not as a violin part with an accompanying piano part, 

but as one piece of music.  

You feel as if you were playing the violin part yourself, 

you are in such perfect accord with the violinist.

~ Anna Hubbard

in this letter to Mia Cunningham, Anna describes her experience of playing with Harlan.  

It might as easily describe the art of  living graciously with others.

from "Anna Hubbard - Out of the Shadows"

by Mia Cunningham

Anna and Mia,1956

(Mia left)

Blessing

Blessed be the longing that brought you here and that quicken your soul with wonder.
May you have the courage to befriend your eternal longing.
May you enjoy the critical and creative companionship of the question "Who am I?" and may it brighten your longing.
May a secret Providence guide your thought and shelter your feeling.
May your mind inhabit your life with the same sureness with which your body belongs to the world.
May the sense of something absent enlarge your life.
May your soul be as free as the ever-new waves of the sea.
May you succumb to the danger of growth.
May you live in the neighborhood of wonder.
May you belong to love with the wildness of Dance.
May you know that you are ever embraced in the kind circle of God.





~ John O'Donohue

 

the longing

The sweetest thing in all my life 

has been the longing - to reach the Mountain, 

to find the place where all the beauty came from - 

my country, the place where I ought to have been born. 

Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? 

The longing for home? 

For indeed it now feels not like going, 

but like going back.

~ C.S. Lewis

a secret thread

 

 

 

You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. 

You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them,

 though you cannot put it into words: but most of your friends do not see it at all,

 and often wonder why, liking this, you should also like that.

 

 Again, you have stood 

before some landscape, which seems to embody what you have been looking for

 all your life; and then turned to the friend at your side who appears to be seeing 

what you saw - but at the first words a gulf yawns between you, and you realize

that this landscape means something totally different to him, that he is pursuing 

an alien vision and cares nothing for the ineffable suggestion by which you 

are transported.

 

 Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret

 attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of - something, not to 

be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, 

the smell of cut wood in the workshop

 or the clap-clap of water against the boat’s side?


Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet

 another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain 

even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, 

and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences

 between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood 

to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. 

 

 

All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints

 of it - tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away

 just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest - if there ever

 came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself 

you would know it.

 

 Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say

 “Here at last is the thing I was made for.” We cannot tell each other about it. 

It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable

 want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends

 or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, 

when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are,

 this is. If we lose this, we lose all.

~ C.S. Lewis
from The Problem of Pain

art by Stushie

with thanks to Love is a Place

 

 

 

from Saint Francis and the Sow

The bud

stands for all things,

even for those things that don’t flower,

for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;   

though sometimes it is necessary

to reteach a thing its loveliness,

to put a hand on its brow

of the flower

and retell it in words and in touch

it is lovely

until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;  

~ Galway Kinnell 

water and ice

There is no place to put the mind. 

A certain person once said, "No matter where I put my mind,

 my intentions are held in check in the place where my mind goes,

 and I lose to my opponent. Because of that, I place my mind 

just below my navel and do not let it wander. Then am I able to change

 according to the actions of my opponent." This is reasonable.

 But viewed from the highest standpoint of Buddhism, putting the mind 

just below the navel and not allowing it to wander is a low level

 of understanding, not a high one. It is at the level of discipline 

and training. It is at the level of seriousness. Or of Mencius' saying,

 "Seek after the lost mind." This is not the highest level either.

 It has the sense of seriousness. As for the "lost mind,"

 I have written about this elsewhere, and you can take a look at it there. 

If you consider putting your mind below your navel and not letting it wander, 

your mind will be taken by the mind that thinks of this plan.

You will have no ability to move ahead and will be exceptionally unfree.

 This leads to the next question, "If putting my mind below my navel

 leaves me unable to function and without freedom, it is of no use.

 In what part of my body, then, should I put my mind?" I answered,

 "If you put it in your right hand, it will be taken by the right hand

 and your body will lack its functioning. If you put your mind in the eye, 

it will be taken by the eye, and your body will lack its functioning.

 If you put your mind in your right foot, your mind will be taken by

 the right foot and your body will lack its functioning.

 "No matter where you put it, if you put the mind in on place,

 the rest of your body will lack its functioning."

 "Well, then, where does one put his mind." I answered,

 "If you don't put it anywhere, it will go to all parts of your body

 and extend throughout its entirety. In this way, when it enters your hand,

 it will realize the hand's function. When it enters your foot, it will realize

 the foot's function. When it enters your eye, 

it will realize the eye's function. 



Putting the mind in one place is called falling into onesidedness.

 One-sidedness is said to be bias in one place. Correctness is in moving

 about anywhere. The Correct Mind shows itself by extending the mind 

throughout the body. It not biased in any one place. When the mind is biased

 in one place and lacking in another, it is called a one-sided mind.

 One-sidedness is despicable. To be arrested by anything, no matter what, 

is falling into one-sidedness and is despised by those travelling the Way. 


The Right Mind is the mind that does not remain in one place. 

It is the mind that stretches throughout the entire body and self.

 The Confused Mind is the mind that, thinking something over,

 congeals in one place. When the Right Mind congeals and settles

 in one place, it becomes what is called the Confused Mind. 

When the Right Mind is lost, it is lacking in function here and there.

 For this reason, it is important not to lose it. In not remaining in one place,

 the Right Mind is like water. The Confused Mind is like ice, 

and ice is unable to wash hands or head. When ice is melted, it becomes water 

and flows everywhere, and it can wash the hands, the feet or anything else. 

If the mind congeals in one place and remains with one thing,

 it is like frozen water and is unable to be used freely: ice that can wash 

neither hands nor feet. When the mind is The Unfettered Mind –

 Writings of the Zen Master to the Sword Master melted and is used like water,

 extending throughout the body, it can be sent wherever one wants to send it.

 This is the Right Mind. 

~ Takuan Soho

from The Unfettered Mind:

 writings of the Zen Master to the Sword Master 
translated by William Scott Wilson