no form - not a thing

 

True intelligence operates silently.

Stillness is where creativity and

solutions to problems

are found.

Wisdom comes with the ability to be still.

Just look and just listen.

No more is needed.

Being still, looking, and listening

activates the non-conceptual

intelligence within you.

Let stillness direct your

words and actions.

When you look and listen in this way,

you may become aware of a subtle and at

first perhaps hardly noticeable sense of calm.

Some people feel it as a

stillness in the background.

Others call it peace.

When consciousness is no longer

totally absorbed by thinking,

some of it remains in its formless,

unconditioned, original state.

This is inner space.

Stillness is the only thing in

this world that has no form.

But then, it is not really a thing,

and it is not of this world.

Become at ease with the

state of 'not knowing.

~ Eckhart Tolle 

from A New Earth

art by Odilon Redon

with thanks to Tao of Photography

like the small hole by the path-side something lives in

Like the small hole by the path-side something lives in,

in me lives I do not know the names of,

nor the fates of,

nor the hungers of or what they eat.

They eat of me.

Of small and blemished apples in low fields of me

whose rocky streams and droughts I do not drink.

And in my streets - the narrow ones,

unlabeled on the self-map -

they follow stairs down music ears can't follow,

and in my tongue borrowed by darkness,

in hours uncounted by the self-clock,

they speak in restless syllables of other losses, other loves.

There too have been the hard extinctions,

missing birds once feasted on and feasting.

There too must be machines

like loud ideas with tungsten bits that grind the day,

A few escape, A mercy,

They leave behind

small holes that something unweighed by the self-scale lives in.

~ Jane Hirshfield 

from The Beauty

Fremont rock painting from San Raphael Swell

2000-1000 BC Caves Painting

(Dove that ventured outside)

.

Dove that ventured outside,     flying far from the dovecote:

housed and protected again,     one with the day, the night,

knows what serenity is,     for she has felt her wings

pass through all distance and fear     in the course of her wanderings.

The doves that remained at home,     never exposed to loss,

innocent and secure,     cannot know tenderness;

only the won-back heart      can ever be satisfied: free,

through all is has given up,     to rejoice in its mastery.

Being arches itself     over the vast abyss.

Ah the ball that we dared,     that we hurled into infinite space,

doesn't it fill our hands     differently with its return:

heavier by the weight     of where it has been.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

translation by Stephen Mitchell

from: The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

one loss

One loss

folds itself inside another.

It is like the origami

held inside a plain sheet of paper

Not creased yet.

Not yet more heavy.

The hand stays steady.

~ Jane Hirshfield

from Come Thief