faces

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Have I said it before?  I am learning to see.  Yes, I am beginning. 

 It's still going badly.  But I intend to make the most of my time.

For example, it never occurred to me before how many faces there are.

  There are multitudes of people, but there are many more faces,

 because each person has several of them.  There are people 

who wear the same face for years; naturally it wears out,

 gets dirty, splits at the seams, stretches like gloves worn

 during a long journey.  They are thrifty, uncomplicated people; 

they never change it, never even have it cleaned.  It's good enough,

 they say, and who can convince them of the contrary? Of course, 

since they have several faces, you might wonder what they do

 with the other ones.   They keep them in storage.  Their children will wear them. 

 But sometimes it also happens that their dogs go out wearing them.  

And why not? A face is a face.

Other people change faces incredibly fast, put on one after another,

 and wear them out. At first, they think they have an unlimited supply;

 but when they are barely forty years old they come to their last one.

 There is, to be sure, something tragic about this.  They are not accustomed

 to taking care of faces; their last one is worn through in a week,

 has holes in it, is in many places a thin as paper, and then, little by little,

 the lining shows through, the non-face, and they walk around with that on.

But the woman, the woman: she had completely fallen into herself,

 forward into her hands.  It was on the corner of rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. 

 I began to walk quietly as soon as I saw her.  When poor people 

are thinking, they shouldn't be disturbed.  Perhaps their idea 

will still occur to them.

The street was too empty; its emptiness had gotten bored and pulled my steps

 out from under my feet and clattered around in them, all over the street,

 as if they were wooden clogs.  The woman sat up, frightened, she pulled out

 of herself, too quickly, too violently, so that her face was left in her two hands. 

 I could see it lying there: its hollow form.  It cost me an indescribable effort

 to stay with those two hands, not to look at what had been torn out of them.

  I shuddered to see a face from the inside, but I was much more afraid 

of that bare flayed head waiting there, faceless.

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~ Rainer Maria Rilke

from The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

edited and translated by Stephen Mitchell

art by michael d. edens

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self and the unattainable

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… says Butsugen: There are two kinds of disease the Zen students are liable to suffer from these days: 

(1) Seeking for the donkey while riding on one; and 

(2) Once on it, neglecting to get off it.

You may say that the seeking for the donkey while you are already on it is the greater disease. But, I tell you, it does not take a man of great intelligence to become conscious of the stupidity of seeking for the donkey when you are right on it. The more serious one is not to dare come down from the donkey even after realizing that you are on it, for this induces in you a state of self-complacency and makes you go on riding.

The most important thing in the study of Zen is not to keep on riding on the donkey but to realize that you are the donkey itself, and in fact, that the whole universe is the donkey itself.

~ D.T. Suzuki  

from What is Zen? 

thanks to zen books

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abide continually in the deep center of your spirit

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You have reached a point where your further growth in perfection demands that you do not feed your mind with meditations on the multiple aspects of your being.  In the past, these pious meditations helped you to understand something of God.  They fed your interior affection with a sweet and delightful attraction ... but now it is important that you seriously concentrate on the effort to abide continually in the deep center of your spirit, offering to God that naked blind awareness of your being which I call your first fruits. 

I want you to clearly understand that in this work it is not necessary to inquire into minute details of God's existence any more than of your own.  For there is no name, no experience, and no insight so akin to the everlastingness of God than what you can possess, perceive, and actually experience in the blind loving awareness of this word, is.  ...let your faculties rest from their minute inquiry into the attributes of  his being or yours.  Leave all this behind...

With perseverance in this practice, you will grow increasingly refined in singleness of heart until you are ready to strip, spoil, and utterly unclothe your self-awareness of everything, even the elemental awareness of your own being, so that you might be newly clothed in the gracious stark experience of God as he is in himself.

For this is the way of all real love.  The lover will utterly and completely despoil himself of everything, even his very self, because of the one he loves.  This is the meaning of the words; "Anyone who wishes to love me let him forsake himself."   ...to lose the knowledge and experience of self.  This is essential...

~ The Book of Privy Counseling

edited by william johnston

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Worship the Lord with your substance

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Worship the Lord with your substance

and feed the poor with your first fruits.

Thus shall your barns be filled with abundance 

and your presses run over with wine.

Solomon said this to his son but take it as addressed to yourself, and understand it spiritually...

Thus you can see that by pursuing your meditation to the farthest reaches and ultimate frontiers of  thought, you will find yourself in the end, on the essential ground of being with the naked perception and blind awareness of your own being.  And this is why your being alone can be called the first of your fruits.

So it is, that naked being takes first place among all your fruits, all the others being rooted in it.  But now you have come to a time when you will no longer profit by clothing or gathering into your awareness of naked being, any or all of its particulars, by which I mean your fruits, upon which you have laboriously meditated for so long.  Now it is enough to worship God perfectly with your substance, that is, with the offering of your naked being.  This alone constitutes your first fruits; it will be the unending sacrifice of praise for yourself and for all men that love requires.  

Leave the awareness of your being unclothed of all thoughts about its attributes, and your mind quite empty of all particular details relating to your being or that of any other creature.  For such thoughts will not satisfy your present need,  further your growth, nor bring you and others closer to perfection.  Let them alone.  Truly these meditations are useless to you now.  But this blind, general awareness of your being, conceived in an undivided heart, will satisfy your present need,  further your growth, and bring you and all mankind closer to perfection.  Believe me, it far surpasses the value of any particular thought, no matter how sublime.

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~ The Book of Privy Counseling

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on the occasion of her mothers death - Emily Dickinson

To Louise and Frances Norcross, November, 1882

Dear Cousins, 

I hoped to write you before, but mother's dying almost stunned my spirit. 

I have answered a few inquiries of love, but written little intuitively. She was scarcely the aunt you knew. The great mission of pain had been ratified—cultivated to tenderness by persistent sorrow, so that a larger mother died than had she died before. There was no earthly parting. She slipped from our fingers like a flake gathered by the wind, and is now part of the drift called "the infinite."

We don't know where she is, though so many tell us. 

I believe we shall in some manner be cherished by our Maker—that the One who gave us this remarkable earth has the power to surprise that which He has caused. Beyond that all is silence...

Mother was very beautiful when she had died. Seraphs are solemn artists. The illumination that comes but once paused upon her features, and it seemed like hiding a picture to lay her in the grave; but the grass that received my father will suffice his guest, the one he asked at the altar to visit him all his life.

I cannot tell how Eternity seems. It sweeps around me like a sea...Thank you for remembering me. Remembrance—mighty word. 

"Though gavest it to me from the foundation of the world."

Lovingly, 

Emily

life is never guaranteed to be safe

Architect, photographer, curator and blogger, Ai Weiwei is China's most famous and politically outspoken contemporary artist. As Ai Weiwei's latest work is unveiled in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, Alan Yentob reveals how this most courageous and determined of artists continues to fight for artistic freedom of expression while living under the restrictive shadows of authoritarian rule.

This is one arrest the authorities might live to regret. Its hypocritical that just a few years ago the government was funding Ai’s art, but by last year goons were beating him up and demolishing his brand new art studio in Shanghai. It is likely that arresting him will only increase his appeal and help add to some of the mystique he has cultivated. Whether he’s let go or kept under wraps, either way, Ai Wei Wei won’t be forgotten anytime soon.

sentencings

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A thing too perfect to be remembered:

stone beautiful only when wet.

* 

Blinded by light or black cloth—

so many ways

not to see others suffer.

*

Too much longing:

it separates us

like scent from bread,

rust from iron.

*

From very far or very close—

the most resolute folds of the mountain are gentle.

*

As if putting arms into woolen coat sleeves,

we listen to the murmuring dead.

*

Any point of a circle is its start:

desire forgoing fulfillment to go on desiring.

*

In a room in which nothing

has happened,

sweet-scented tobacco.

*

The very old, hands curling into themselves, remember their parents.

*

Think assailable thoughts, or be lonely.

~ Jane Hirshfield

from Poetry (December 2010)

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late ripeness

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Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year,

I felt a door opening in me and I entered

the clarity of early morning.

One after another my former lives were departing,

like ships, together with their sorrow.

And the countries, cities, gardens, the bays of seas

assigned to my brush came closer,

ready now to be described better than they were before.

I was not separated from people,

grief and pity joined us.

We forget – I kept saying – that we are all children of the King.

For where we come from there is no division

into Yes and No, into is, was, and will be.

We were miserable, we used no more than a hundredth part

of the gift we received for our long journey.

Moments from yesterday and from centuries ago – 

a sword blow, the painting of eyelashes before a mirror

of polished metal, a lethal musket shot, a caravel

staving its hull against a reef – they dwell in us,

waiting for a fulfillment.

I knew, always, that I would be a worker in the vineyard,

as are all men and women living at the same time,

whether they are aware of it or not.

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~ Czeslaw Milosz
from Collected Poems, 1931-1987
translation by Robert Hass

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some days we are passive

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Some days we are passive, listening to the incoming waves.

On other days, we are like a light that sweeps

Out over the husky soybean fields all night.

What did we see today? Horses at the end

Of their tethering ropes, the wing of affection going over,

Flying bulls glimpsed passing the moon disc.

Rather than arguing about whether Giordano Bruno

Was right or not, it might be better to fall silent

And lose ourselves in the curved energy.

We know how many men live alone in their twenties,

And how many women are married to the wrong person,

And how many father and sons are strangers to each

other.

It’s all right if we keep forgetting the way home.

It’s all right if we don’t remember when we were born.

It’s all right if we write the same poem over and over.

Robert, I don’t know why you talk so confidently

About yourself in this way. There are a lot of shady

Characters in this town, and you are one of them.

.

~ Robert Bly

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how would I paint happiness

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Something sudden, a windfall,

a meteor shower. No -

a flowering tree releasing

all its blossoms at once,

and the one standing beneath it

unexpectedly robed in bloom,

transformed into a stranger

too beautiful to touch.

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~ Lisel Mueller

from Imaginary Paintings

Alive Together: New And Selected Poems

with thanks to whiskey river

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investigate what the mind is and it will disappear

Investigate what the mind is and it will disappear, 

There is no such thing as 'mind' apart from 'thought.' 

There is no use removing doubts. 

If we clear one doubt another arises, 

and there will be no end of doubts. 

All doubts will cease only 
when the doubter and his source have been found. 

Seek for the source of the doubter, 

and you will find that he is really non-existent. 

Doubter ceasing, doubts will cease.

~ Ramana Maharshi

you, darkness, that I come from

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You, darkness, that I come from,

I love you more than all the fires

that fence in the world,

for the fire makes a circle of light for everyone

and then no one outside learns of you.

But the darkness pulls in everything-

shapes and fires, animals and myself,

how easily it gathers them! -

powers and people-

and it is possible a great presence is moving near me.

I have faith in nights.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

photo:  passport picture

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a blessing for weddings

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Today when persimmons ripen

Today when fox-kits come out of their den into snow

Today when the spotted egg releases its wren song

Today when the maple sets down its red leaves

Today when windows keep their promise to open

Today when fire keeps its promise to warm

Today when someone you love has died

or someone you never met has died

Today when someone you love has been born

or someone you will not meet has been born

Today when rain leaps to the waiting of roots in their dryness

Today when starlight bends to the roofs of the hungry and tired

Today when someone sits long inside his last sorrow

Today when someone steps into the heat of her first embrace

Today, let this light bless you

With these friends let it bless you

With snow-scent and lavender bless you

Let the vow of this day keep itself wildly and wholly

Spoken and silent, surprise you inside your ears

Sleeping and waking, unfold itself inside your eyes

Let its fierceness and tenderness hold you

Let its vastness be undisguised in all your days

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~ Jane Hirshfield

from Tricycle magazine

art by chagall

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explanations topple

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Explanations topple into their events, 

merely other events, smaller and less

significant.  They disappear, or die away 

like little cries at sundown, and the old trees 

receive the night again in dignity

and patience, present beyond the complex

lineages of cause and effect, each one

lost to us in what it is. For us, the privilege

is only to see, within the long shade,

the present standing of what has come and is

to come: the straight trunks aspiring

between earth and sky, bearing upon all years

the year's new leaves.

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~ Wendell Berry

from A Timbered Choir

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the Russians

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The Russians had few doctors on the front line.

My father's job was this: after the battle

Was over, he'd walk among the men hit,

Sit down and ask: 'Would you like to die on your

Own in a few hours, or should I finish it?'

Most said, 'Don't leave me.' The two would have

A cigarette. He'd take out his small notebook—

We had no dogtags, you know— and write the man's

Name down, his wife's, his children, his address, and what

He wanted to say. When the the cigarette was done,

The soldier would turn his head to the side. My father

Finished off four hundred men that way during the war.

He never went crazy. They were his people.

He came to Toronto. My father in the summers

Would stand on the lawn with a hose, watering

The grass that way. It took a long time. He'd talk

To the moon, to the wind. 'I can hear you growing'—

He'd say to the grass. 'We come and go.

We're no different from each other. We are all

Part of something. We have a home.' When I was thirteen,

I said, 'Dad, do you know they've invented sprinklers

Now?' He went on watering the grass.

'This is my life. Just shut up if you don't understand it.'

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~ Robert Bly

photo by Dmitri Bal'termants

with thanks to  when pen and paper meet

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