earth

.

.

Earth ....

a love song, 

Where could my home be? 

My home is small, goes from place to place, 

It take's my heart away with it, 

Gives me grief, gives me rest; 

My home you are!

~ Hermann Hesse

nothing except what he is

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.

A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.

A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. . . . Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one’s suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness. 

~ Hermann Hesse

from  Trees: Reflections and Poems

a rainy night

A steady stream of almost silent rain

drops on every roof and windowsill

and stretches like a veil

deep over the darkness of the land.

It trickles and tumbles in the wind

with no movement of its own and yet alive.

The fields draw near the clouds.

Even heaven bows to the solid ground.

A rhythmic, subtle song sates the space,

swells, sways, and soaks the night in sorrow

as if a lone violin were delving deep

into dark, secret yearnings

transforming fiery torment into tone

while touching here and there a homeless heart,

which found no words

for its deep longings.

What neither words nor music could express

the wind and rain intone with quiet strength.

They fill the rainy night with a tender lullaby

and the steady rhythms of this song

sustain and cradle and appease

all unheard struggles, all unhealed pain.

~ Hermann Hesse

from Seasons of the Soul

art by Utamaro

burning

                                       

What you call passion is not spiritual force, but friction between the
soul and the outside world. 

Where passion dominates, that does not
signify the presence of greater desire and ambition, but rather the
misdirection of these qualities toward an isolated and false goal, with
a consequent tension and sultriness in the atmosphere. Those who direct
the maximum force of their desires toward the centre, toward true being,
toward perfection, seem quieter than the passionate souls because the
flame of their fervor cannot always be seen. In argument, for example,
they will not shout and wave their arms. But I assure you, they are
nevertheless burning with subdued fires.



~ Hermann Hesse
from The Glass Bead Game 

listen

For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farm boy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.

A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.

A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one’s suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.

~ Hermann Hesse

from Trees, Reflections and Poems

when it is one-sided

.

.

"I have found a thought, Govinda, which you'll again regard as a joke or foolishness, but which is my best thought. It says: The opposite of every truth is just as true! That's like this: any truth can only be expressed and put into words when it is one-sided. Everything is one-sided which can be thought with thoughts and said with words, it's all one-sided, all just one half, all lacks completeness, roundness, oneness. When the exalted Gotama spoke in his teachings of the world, he had to divide it into Sansara and Nirvana, into deception and truth, into suffering and salvation. It cannot be done differently, there is no other way for him who wants to teach. But the world itself, what exists around us and inside of us, is never one-sided. A person or an act is never entirely Sansara or entirely Nirvana, a person is never entirely holy or entirely sinful. It does really seem like this, because we are subject to deception, as if time was something real.

...

I have experienced on my body and on my soul that I needed sin very much, I needed lust, the desire for possessions, vanity, and needed the most shameful despair, in order to learn how to give up all resistance, in order to learn how to love the world, in order to stop comparing it to some world I wished, I imagined, some kind of perfection I had made up, but to leave it as it is and to love it and to enjoy being a part of it.

...

... love, oh Govinda, seems to me to be the most important thing of all. To thoroughly understand the world, to explain it, to despise it, may be the thing great thinkers do. But I'm only interested in being able to love the world, not to despise it, not to hate it and me, to be able to look upon it and me and all beings with love and admiration and great respect.

.

~ Herman Hesse

from  Siddhartha

.

metaphors and symbols

Someone who found the inner path

who, dedicated to deep meditation,

got a glimpse of this essential truth,

that we choose God and World

only as metaphors and symbols.

 Every thought and action then

becomes an inner conversation,

a meeting between God and World.

~ Hermann Hesse

from The Seasons of the Soul

 

lying in the grass

.

Is this everything now, the quick delusions of flowers,

And the down colors of the bright summer meadow,

The soft blue spread of heaven, the bees’ song,

Is this everything only a god’s

Groaning dream,

The cry of unconscious powers for deliverance?

The distant line of the mountain,

That beautifully and courageously rests in the blue,

Is this too only a convulsion,

Only the wild strain of fermenting nature,

Only grief, only agony, only meaningless fumbling,

Never resting, never a blessed movement?

No! Leave me alone, you impure dream

Of the world in suffering!

The dance of tiny insects cradles you in an evening radiance,

The bird’s cry cradles you,

A breath of wind cools my forehead

With consolation.

Leave me alone, you unendurably old human grief!

Let it all be pain.

Let it all be suffering, let it be wretched-

But not this one sweet hour in the summer,

And not the fragrance of the red clover,

And not the deep tender pleasure

In my soul.

~ Hermann Hesse

art by camille pissarro

listen

.

Siddhartha listened.  He was now listening intently, completely absorbed,
 quite empty, taking in everything. He felt that he had now completely
 learned the art of listening.  He had often heard all this before,
 all these numerous voices in the river, but today they  sounded different.

  He could no longer distinguish the different voices - the merry voice
 from the weeping voice, the childish voice from the manly voice.  
They all belonged to each other: the lament of those who yearn, the laughter
 of the wise, the cry of indignation and the groan of the dying. 

 They were all interwoven and interlocked, entwined in a thousand ways.  
And all the voices, all the goals, all the yearning, all the sorrows all the pleasures,
all the good and evil, all of them together was the world.  All of them together
 was the stream of events, the music of life.  When Siddhartha listened attentively
 to this river, to this song of a thousand voices; when he did not listen 
to the sorrow or laughter, when he did not bind his soul to any one
 particular voice and absorb it in his Self, but heard them all, the whole,
 the unity; then the great song of a thousand voices consisted 
of one word: Om - perfection.

"Do you hear?" asked Vasudeva's glance once again.
 Vasudeva's smile was radiant; it hovered brightly in all the wrinkles
 of his old face, as the Om hovered over all the voices of the river. 
 His smile was radiant as he looked at his friend, and now the same smile 
appeared on Siddhartha's face.  His wound was healing, his pain was dispersing; 
his Self had merged into unity.

From that hour Siddhartha ceased to fight against his destiny. 
There shone in his face the serenity of knowledge, of one who is no longer
 confronted with conflict of desires, who has found salvation, 
who is in harmony with the stream of events, with the stream of life,
 full of sympathy and compassion, surrendering himself to the stream,
 belonging to the unity of all things.

.

~ Hermann Hesse

from Siddhartha

translated by Hilda Rosner

you know quite well

.

.

You know quite well, deep within you, 

that there is only a single magic,

a single power, a single salvation...

and that is called loving. 

.

~ Herman Hesse 

.

that secret from the river

..

"Have you also learned that secret from the river; 

that there is no such thing as time?"

That the river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at

the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the current, in the

ocean and in the mountains, everywhere and that the present only

exists for it, not the shadow of the past nor the shadow of the

future.

~ Herman Hesse

from "Siddhartha"

O, how incomprehensible

.

.

O, how incomprehensible everything was, 

and actually sad, 

although it was also beautiful. 

One knew nothing. 

And sometimes it seemed that something never seen yet long desired was about to happen, 

that a veil would drop from it all; 

but then it passed,

 nothing happened,

 the riddle remained unsolved, 

the secret spell unbroken,

 and in the end one grew old and looked cunning . . . or wise

 . . . And still one knew nothing, perhaps, was still waiting and listening.

.
~  Hermann Hesse

.
from: Narcissus and Goldmund

experiences which helped me along the way

.

.

To the few experiences which helped me along the way
toward my life’s true goal I added this new one: the
observation of such configurations [staring at a fire,
tree roots, veins in rock, smoke, clouds, water,
reflections, light, dust, swirling specks of light when
eyes are closed].
The surrender to Nature’s irrational, strangely confused
formations produces in us a feeling of inner harmony with
the force responsible for these phenomena. We soon fall
prey to the temptation of thinking of them as being our
own moods, our own creations, and see the boundaries
seperating us from Nature begin to quiver and dissolve.
We become acquainted with that state of mind in which
we are unable to decide whether the images on our retina
are the result of impressions coming from without or
from within. Nowhere as in this exercise can we discover
so easily and simply to what extent we are creative, to what
extent our soul partakes of the constant creation of
the world. For it is the same indivisible divinity
that is active through us and in Nature, and if the
outside world were to be destroyed, a single one of us
would be capable of rebuilding it: mountain and stream,
tree and leaf, root and flower, yes, every natural
form is latent within us, originates in the soul whose
essence is eternity, whose essence we cannot know but
which most often intimates itself to us as the power
to love and create.
The next time we were together, the organist gave me
an explanation: “We always define the limits of our
personality too narrowly. In general, we count as part
of our personality only that which we can recognise as
being an individual trait or as diverging from the norm.
But we consist of everything the world consists of, each
of us, and just as our body contains the genealogical table
of evolution as far back as the fish and even much further,
so we bear everything in our soul that once was alive in
the soul of men. Every god and devil that ever existed,
be it among the Greeks, Chinese, or Zulus, are within us,
exist as latent possibilities, as wishes, as alternatives.
If the human race were to vanish from the face of the earth
save for one halfway talented child that had received no
education, this child would rediscover the entire course
of evolution, it would be capable of producing everything
once more, gods and demons, paradises, commandments, the
Old and New Testament.”
“Yes, fine,” I replied. “But what is the value of the
individual in that case? Why do we continue striving if
everything has been completed within us?”
“Stop!” exclaimed Pistorius. “There’s an immense
difference between simply carrying the world within us
and being aware of it. A madman can spout ideas that
remind you of Plato, and a pious little seminary student
rethinks deep mythological correspondences found among
the Gnostics or in Zoroaster. But he isn’t aware of them.
He is a tree or stone, at best an animal, as long as he is not
conscious. But as soon as the first spark of recognition
dawns within him he is a human being. You wouldn’t
consider all the bipeds you pass on the street human
beings simply because they walk upright and carry their
young in their bellies nine months! It is obvious how
many of them are fish or sheep, worms or angels, how
many are ants, how many are bees! Well, each one of
them contains the possibility of becoming human, but
only by having an intimation of these possibilities,
partially even by learning to make himself conscious
of them; only in this respect are these possibilities his.

.

~ Herman Hesse

.

a chaos of forms

.

And if ever the suspicion of their manifold being dawns upon men of unusual powers and of unusually delicate perceptions, so that, as all geniuses must, they break through the illusion of the unity of the personality and perceive that the self is made up of a bundle of selves… A man, therefore, who gets so far as making the supposed unity of the self twofold is already almost a genius, in any case a most exceptional and interesting person. In reality, however, every ego, so far from being unity, is in the highest degree a manifold world, a constellated heaven, a chaos of forms, of stages and stages, of inheritances and potentialities. It appears to be a necessity as imperative as a eating or breathing for everyone to be forced to regard this chaos as a unity and to speak of his ego as though it were a onefold and clearly detached and fixed phenomenon. Even the best of us share the delusion.

.

~ Hermann Hesse

.

even the unhappiest life has its sunny moments

.

And even the unhappiest life has its sunny moments and its little flowers of happiness between sand and stone. So it was then with the Steppenwolf too. It cannot be denied that he was generally very unhappy; and he could make others unhappy also, that is, when he loved them or they him. For all who got to love him saw always only the one side of him. Many loved him as a refined and clever and interesting man, and were horrified and disappointed when they had come upon the wolf in him. And they had to because Harry wished, as every sentient being does, to be loved as a whole and therefore it was just with those whose love he most valued that he could least of all conceal and belie the wolf. There were those, however, who loved precisely the wolf in him, the free, the savage, the untamable, the dangerous and strong, and these found it peculiarly disappointing and deplorable when suddenly the wild and wicked wolf was also a man, and had hankerings after goodness and refinement, and wanted to hear Mozart, to read poetry and to cherish human ideals. Usually these were the most disappointed and angry of all; and so it was that the Steppenwolf brought his own dual and divided nature into the destinies of others besides himself whenever he came into contact with them.
.
~ Hermann Hesse 

.

perfect dogma

.

'There is truth, my boy. But the doctrine you desire, absolute, perfect dogma that alone provides wisdom, does not exist. Nor should you long for a perfect doctrine, my friend. Rather, you should long for the perfection of yourself. The deity is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived, not taught.'

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~ Hermann Hesse 

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