silent

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A person made dazed

by the cup of love

forgets all other joys.

 

He speaks with remembrance

in his innermost soul-

and then falls silent

to outer disputes.

 

 

 

 

 

~ 'Ala'  al-Dawala Simnani 

 

 

epitaph

Having lived long in time,
he lives now in timelessness
without sorrow, made perfect
by our never finished love,
by our compassion and forgiveness,
and by his happiness in receiving
these gifts we give. Here in time
we are added to one another forever.




~ Wendell Berry
from The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry

 

 

this morning

 

 

 

 

 

 

. . . This morning, when I looked
at a lily, just beginning to open,
its long, slender pouch tipped
with soft, curling-back lips, and I could peek just
slightly in, and see the clasping
interior, the cache of pollen,
and smell the extreme sweetness, I thought they were
shyly saying Mary's body,
he came from the blossom of a woman, he was born
in the beauty of her lily.

 

 

 

~ Sharon Olds 

for a moment

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Across the highway a heron stands
in the flooded field. It stands
as if lost in thought, on one leg, careless,
as if the field belongs to herons.
The air is clear and quiet.
Snow melts on this second fair day.
Mother and daughter,
we sit in the parking lot
with doughnuts and coffee.
We are silent.
For a moment the wall between us
opens to the universe;
then closes.
And you go on saying
you do not want to repeat my life.

 

 

 

 

~ Ruth Stone

 

 

 

the envoy

One day in that room, a small rat.

Two days later, a snake.

.

Who, seeing me enter,

whipped the long stripe of his

body under the bed,

then curled like a docile house-pet.

I don't know how either came or left.

Later, the flashlight found nothing.

For a year I watched

as something -- terror? happiness? grief? --

entered and then left my body.

Not knowing how it came in.

Not knowing how it went out.

It hung where words could not reach it.

It slept where light could not go.

Its scent was neither snake nor rat,

neither sensualist nor ascetic.

There are openings in our lives

of which we know nothing.

Through them

the belled herds travel at will,

long-legged and thirsty, covered with foreign dust.

~  Jane Hirshfield

from Given Sugar, Given Salt

calm, ease

 

 

 

 

 

~  Thich Nhat Hanh

 

 

 

 

faint traces

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reflecting over seventy years,

I am tired of judging right from wrong.

Faint traces of a path trodden in deep night snow.

A stick of incense under the rickety window.

 

 

 

 

 

~ Ryokan

from Sky Above, Great Wind

The Life and Poetry of Zen Master Ryokan

by Kazuaki Tanahashi

 

 

 

every step

 

 

 

 

 

 

Treading along in this dreamlike, illusory realm,

Without looking for the traces I may have left;

A cuckoo's song beckons me to return home,

Hearing this, I tilt my head to see

Who has told me to turn back:

But do not as me where I am going,

As I travel in this limitless world,

Where every step I take is my home.

 

 

 

 

~ Dogen

 from The Zen Poetry of Dogen

 

 

 

a small boat drifting

 

 

 

 

 In the heart of the night,

 The moonlight framing

A small boat drifting,

Tossed not by the waves

Nor swayed by the breeze. 

 

 

 

 

~ Dogen

from The Zen Poetry of Dogen

 

 

acceptance and expansion

 

 

 Suzuki Roshi said that renunciation is not giving up the things of the world,

 but accepting that they go away.

 

 An acceptance of impermanence helps us learn how to die. 

It also reveals the flip side of loss, which is that letting go is an act of generosity.

 We let go of old grudges, and give ourselves peace. We let go of fixed views,

 and give ourselves to not knowing. 

 

We let go of self-sufficiency and give ourselves to the care of others.

 We let go of clinging and give ourselves to gratitude.

 We let go of control and give ourselves to surrender.

"Surrender is not the same thing as letting go. 

Normally, we think of letting go as a release often accompanied by a sense of freedom

 from previous restraints.

 

 Surrender is more about expansion. There is a freedom in surrender,

 but it is not really about setting something down or distancing ourselves from an object,

 person, or experience, as it is with letting go. 

 

With surrender, we are free because we have expanded into a spaciousness,

 a boundless quality of being that can include but not be constrained by

 the previously limiting beliefs that once defined us, keeping us separate and apart.

 

 We release the fruitless habit of clinging to changing objects as a source of happiness.

 

 In surrender, we are reconstituted. We are no longer enslaved by our pasts.

 No longer imprisoned by our former identities. We become intimate 

with the inner truth of our essential nature.

 

 In surrender, 

we feel ourselves not gaining distance, but rather coming closer.

 

 

 

 

 

~ Frank Ostaseski

from The Five Invitations

art by by Antony Gormley

 

the man who didn't know

.

There was a man who didn't know what was his.

He thought as a boy that some demon forced him

To wear "his" clothes and live in "his" room

And sit on "his" chair and be the child of "his" parents.

Each time he sat down to dinner, it happened again.

His own birthday party belonged to someone else.

And - was it sweet potatoes that he liked? -

He should resist them.  Whose plate is this?

This man will be like a lean-to attached

To a house.  It doesn't have a foundation.

This man is helpful and hostile in each moment.

This man leans toward you and leans away.

He's charming, this man who doesn't know what is his.

.

~ Robert Bly

from Morning Poems

photo by Lisa Kristine

my friend

 

 

I loved my friend.
He went away from me.
There's nothing more to say.
The poem ends,
Soft as it began,—
I loved my friend

 

 

 

 

 

~ Langston Hughes

from The Weary Blues 

with thanks to love is a place

 

 

 

 

 

 

in our sadnesses

.

It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, 

which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living.

 Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; 

because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away

 from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition 

where we cannot remain standing. 

 
That is why the sadness passes: the new presence inside us,

 the presence that has been added, has entered our heart,

 has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer even there, – 

is already in our bloodstream. And we don’t know what it was. 

We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, 

and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes. 

We can’t say who has come, perhaps we will never know, 

but many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way

 in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens. 

 
And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad:

 because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment 

when our future steps into us is so much closer to life

 than that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to us

 as if from outside. The quieter we are, the more patient and open 

we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence

 can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, 

the more it becomes our fate.

 

 

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

.

speech from the heart - mindful listening

 

 

 

If one is to do good,
it must be done in the minute particulars.
General good is the plea of the hypocrite,
the scoundrel and the flatterer.

 

~ William Blake


Pay attention when you speak the rest of the time, the best you're able, 

and listen to your heart. See if you can begin practicing 

letting your words come from your heart.

 

 A good clue for this is if you're in a conversation that lasts more than five minutes, 

so you've been talking for awhile, pause, or wake up for a second

 in the middle of it, and ask inside, "Now, what does my heart really want to say?" 

You're having this conversation. "What's in there that really wants to be said?

 Maybe I won't see this person ever again. What do I really want to say?" 

That can begin to empower your speech, to transform it 

from automatic pilot to the place where you start to wake up.

 It's fantastic. It's really wonderful to work with.


Most of us value integrity. It really lights up the heart

 to think about living in a way that comes from inside, 

where our actions, our words, and our inner being are connected. 

It's very precious. In the Buddhist tradition they're given as training precepts,

 training precepts which we practice. It's not some God -- given law that we must follow,

 but precepts which we begin to practice -- 

to begin to learn to live our life from our hearts, 

to live our life, as I said, with an uprightness of heart.

 


Only when the inner dialogue stops

 can the hidden parts of ourselves be seen and revealed.

~ Carlos Castenada 

as Don Juan

 

 

What we call the beginning is often the end,
and to make an end is a beginning,
To make a beginning.
the end is where we start from
and every phrase and sentence that is right,
where every word is at home,
taking its place to support the others,
the word neither dissident nor ostentatious.
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
the common word exact with vulgarity,
the formal word precise but not pedantic,
the complete consort dancing together.

When every phrase and every sentence
is an end and a beginning,
every poem an epitaph,
and any action is a step to the block,
to the fire, down the sea's throat,
or to an illegible stone,
that's where we start.
We die with the dying.
See them depart and we go with them,
and we are born with the dead.
See, they're returned and bring us with them.


~ T.S. Eliot
from Four Quartets

 

 

The Buddha outlined a practice for staying mindful

 of how another person is addressing us, without getting caught up in our own reactivity, 

remaining compassionate for their welfare, with a mind of lovingkindness.

... there are five courses of speech that others may

use when they address you: their speech may be timely or

untimely, true or untrue, gentle or harsh, connected with

good or with harm, spoken with a mind of lovingkindness

or with inner hate....

 

you should train yourselves thus:

Our minds will remain unaffected, and we shall utter no

evil words; we shall abide compassionate for their welfare,

with a mind of lovingkindness...

 

 ~ Buddha

~ Joseph Goldstein

excerpts taken from various talks

 

how rarely I have stopped to thank the steady effort

A person speaking

pauses, lets in

a little silence-portion with the words.

It is like an hour.

Any hour. This one.

Something happens, much does not.

Or as always, everything happens:

the standing walls keep

standing with their whole attention.

A noisy crow call lowers and lifts its branch,

the crow scent enters the leaves, enters the bark,

like stirred-in honey gone into the tea.

How rarely I have stopped to thank

the steady effort of the world to stay the world.

To thank the furnish of green

and abandon of yellow. The ancient Sumerians

called the beloved “Honey,” as we do.

Said also, “Borrowed bread is not returned.”

Like them, we pay love’s tax to bees,

we go on arranging the old notes in different orders.

Desire inside A C A G G A T.

Forgiveness in G T A C T T.

In a world of space and time, arrangement matters.

An hour has no front or back,

except to those whose eyes face forward,

whose tears blur thought and stars.

Five genes, in a certain arrangement,

will spend this life unrooted, grazing.

It has to do with how the animal body comes into being,

the same whether ant or camel.

What then does such unfolded code understand,

if it finds in its mouth the word important —

the thing that can be carried, or the thing that cannot,

or the way they keep trading places,

grief and gladness, the comic, the glum, the dead, the living.

Last night, the big Sumerian moon

clambered into the house empty-handed

and left empty-handed,

not thief, not lover, not tortoise, just looking around,

shuffling its soft, blind slippers over the floor.

This felt, to me, important, and so I looked back with both hands

open, palms unblinking.

What caused the fire, we ask, meaning, lightning, wiring, matches.

How precisely and unbidden

oxygen slips itself into, between those thick words.

~  Jane Hirshfield

from the New York Times

print on April 15, 2012, on page SR6 of the 

New York edition with the headline: Tax Break. 

a deeper generosity

Forgiveness is one of the really difficult things in life.  
The logic of receiving hurt seems to run in the direction of never forgetting
 either the hurt or the hurter.  When you forgive, some deeper, 
divine generosity takes you over.  When you can forgive, then you are free.  

When you cannot forgive, you are a prisoner of the hurt done to you.  
If you are really disappointed in someone and you become embittered, 
you become incarcerated inside that feeling.  Only the the grace of forgiveness 
can break the straight logic of hurt and embitterment.  It gives you a way out,
 because it places the conflict on a completely different level.  In a strange way,
 it keeps the whole conflict human.  You begin to see and understand the conditions, 
circumstances, or weakness that made the other person act as she did.

...

Why are we so reluctant to leave our inner prisons?  
There is the security of the confinement and limitation that we know.  
We are often willing to endure the searing sense of forsakenness and distance
 which limitation brings rather than risking the
 step out into the field of the unknown. 

~ John O'Donohue

from Eternal Echoes

art by Leah Dorion

of generosity

What is required is a willingness to look 

deeply at one's present moments, 

no matter what they hold, 

in a spirit of generosity,

 kindness towards oneself, 

and openness toward 

what might be possible. 

~ Jon Kabat-Zinn

the happiness of every living thing

 

 

 

What we really want to do is serve happiness.
We want everyone to be happy, never unhappy even for a moment.
We want the animals to be happy. The happiness of every living thing is what we want.
We want it very much but we cannot bring it about.

We cannot make even one individual happy.
It seems that this thing that we want most of all is out of our reach.
But we were born to serve happiness and we do serve it.
The confusion is due to our lack of awareness of real happiness. 

Happiness is pervasive.
It is everywhere. And everywhere the same.
And it is forever.

When people are really happy they say:

 'This will last forever even after death', and that is true.
When we are unhappy it is because something is covering our minds

 and we are not able to be aware of happiness. 

 

When the difficulty is past we find happiness again.
It is not that happiness is all around us. That is not it at all.
It is not this or that or in this or that.

It is an abstract thing.
Happiness is unattached. Always the same.

 It does not appear and disappear.

 It is not sometimes more and sometimes less.

 It is our awareness of happiness that goes up and down.
Happiness is our real condition.
It is reality.
It is life.
…
When we see life we call it beauty. It is magnificent - wonderful.
We may be looking at the ocean when we are aware of beauty

 but it is not the ocean. We may be in the desert and we say

 that we are aware of the 'living desert' but it is not the desert.

Life is ever present in the desert and everywhere, forever.
By awareness of life we are inspired to live.

Life is consciousness of life itself.





~ Agnes Martin
from Agnes Martin, Paintings, Writings, Remembrances 

by Arne Glimcherersity 

 

 prepared for a lecture at the Univ of New

 Mexico, Santa Fe 1979

 

art by van gogh

with thanks to being silently drawn

 

 

on loving-kindness

 

 

He who is skilled in good, and wishes to
attain that state of Peace, should act thus:
he should be able, upright, perfectly upright,
amenable to corrections, gentle and humble.

He should be contented, easy to support,
unbusy, simple in livelihood,
with senses controlled, discreet,
not impudent, and not greedily attached to families.

He would not commit any slight misdeeds
that other wise men might find fault in him.
May all beings be well and safe,
may their hearts rejoice.

Whatever beings there are —
weak or strong, long or short,
big, medium-sized or small, subtle or gross,

Those visible or invisible,
residing near or far, those that have come to be
or have yet to come, (without exceptions)
may all beings be joyful.

Let one not deceive nor despise
another person, anywhere at all.
In anger and ill-will,
let him not wish any harm to another.

Just as a mother would protect her
only child with her own life,
even so, let him cultivate boundless thoughts
of loving kindness towards all beings.

Let him cultivate boundless thoughts
of loving kindness towards the whole world —
above, below and all around,
unobstructed, free from hatred and enmity.

Whether standing, walking, seated
or lying down, as long as he is awake,
he should develop this mindfulness.
This they say, is the divine abiding here.

Not erroneous with views,
endowed with virtues and insight,
with sensual desires abandoned,
he would come no more to be conceived in a womb.

 

~ the Buddha

 Metta Sutta

photo by Michael Marcoux

 

milkweed

.


While I stood here, in the open, lost in myself,
I must have looked a long time
Down the corn rows, beyond grass,
The small house.
White walls, animals lumbering toward the barn.
I look down now. It is all changed.
Whatever it was I lost, whatever I wept for
Was a wild, gentle thing, the small dark eyes
Loving me in secret.
It is here. At the touch of my hand,
The air fills with delicate creatures
From the other world.


~ James Wright

a blessing

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota, 

Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass. 

And the eyes of those two Indian ponies 

Darken with kindness. 

They have come gladly out of the willows 

To welcome my friend and me. 

We step over the barbed wire into the pasture 

Where they have been grazing all day, alone. 

They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness 

That we have come. 

They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other. 

There is no loneliness like theirs. 

At home once more, 

They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness. 

I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms, 

For she has walked over to me 

And nuzzled my left hand. 

She is black and white, 

Her mane falls wild on her forehead, 

And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear 

That is delicate as the skin over a girl's wrist. 

Suddenly I realize 

That if I stepped out of my body I would break 

Into blossom.

~ James Wright

from Above the River

today's stupidity

.

.

Natural, reckless, correct skill;

Yesterday's clarity is today's stupidity

The universe has dark and light, entrust oneself to change

One time, shade the eyes and gaze afar at the road of heaven.

~ Ikkyu

from Ikkyū and The Crazy Cloud Anthology : A Zen Poet of Medieval Japan 

by Sonja Arntzen

with thanks to crow with no mouth

any road

its logical; if you're not going anywhere

any road is the right one 

~ Ikkyu Sojun (1394 -1481)

.

he was known his teaching and for his erotic poems and revolutionary shakuhachi music. 

he founded what became known as the "Red Thread," or erotic school of Zen.

the iron grinder

 

 

 

 

They were like two mirrors facing each other.

Who sees, who is seen?

Seeing each other like this,
they experienced the recognition everyone craves -
to be seen exactly as we are,

nothing more,

and nothing less.

Seen like this,

all the many forms in the world
are the same
as one's own hand,

one's own face.




~ Liu Tiemo
from Women of the Way
by Sallie Tisdale

with thanks to being silently drawn

 

 

what is brought into being?

 

 

 

What is it that we are creating together?

 
We exchange a few words and a presence is born. 

 
We pass in the street for a fleeting instant,
and something new comes into being. 

 
Sitting across the table together, a guest arrives.

 
What guest has been invited to join us? 

 
What is brought into being? 

 

 

 

 
– Shanti Natania Grace

 from The Intrinsic Heart

 

 

judge like a king, and choose the purest

 

God has given us a dark wine so potent that,
drinking it, we leave the two worlds. 

 
God has put into the form of hashish a power
to deliver the taster from self-consciousness. 

 
God has made sleep so
that it erases every thought. 

 
God made Majnun love Layla so much that
just her dog would cause confusion in him. 

 
There are thousands of wines
that can take over our minds.
Don’t think all ecstasies
are the same!

 
Jesus was lost in his love for God.
His donkey was drunk with barley. 

 
Drink from the presence of saints,
not from those other jars. 

 
Every object, every being,
is a jar full of delight.
Be a connoisseur,
and taste with caution. 

 
Any wine will get you high.
Judge like a king, and choose the purest,
the ones unadulterated with fear,
or some urgency about “what’s needed.” 

 
Drink the wine that moves you
as a camel moves when it’s been untied,
and is just ambling about. 

 

 

 

 

~ Rumi
Translated by Coleman Barks
from The Essential Rumi