The law is the husk of faith

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The highest good is not to seek to do good,
but to allow yourself to become it.
The ordinary person seeks to do good things,
and finds that they can not do them continually.
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The Master does not force virtue on others,
thus she is able to accomplish her task.
The ordinary person who uses force,
will find that they accomplish nothing.
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The kind person acts from the heart,
and accomplishes a multitude of things.
The righteous person acts out of pity,
yet leaves many things undone.
The moral person will act out of duty,
and when no one will respond
will roll up his sleeves and use force.
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When the Tao is forgotten, there is righteousness.
When righteousness is forgotten, there is morality.
When morality is forgotten, there is the law.
The law is the husk of faith,
and trust is the beginning of chaos.
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Our basic understandings are not from the Tao
because they come from the depths of our misunderstanding.
The master abides in the fruit and not in the husk.
She dwells in the Tao,
and not with the things that hide it.
This is how she increases in wisdom.
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~ Tao Teh Ching, by Lao Tzu

Drink your tea slowly

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Drink your tea slowly and reverently,
as if it is the axis
on which the world earth revolves
– slowly, evenly, without
rushing toward the future;
Live the actual moment.
Only this moment is life.


~ Thich Nhat Hanh

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I will not leave you.

You worry that I will leave you.

I will not leave you.

Only strangers travel.

Owning everything,

I have no where to go.

~Leonard Cohen

Thoreau's Journal

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Each town should have a park, or rather a primitive forest, of five hundred or a thousand acres, where a stick should never be cut for fuel, a common possession forever, for instruction and recreation. We hear of cow commons and ministerial lots, but we want men-commons and lay lots, inalienable forever. Let us keep the New World new, preserve all the advantages of living in the country. There is meadow and pasture and wood-lot for the town’s poor. Why not a forest and huckleberry field for the town’s rich? All Walden Wood might have been preserved for our park forever, with Walden in its midst, and the Easterbrooks Country, an unoccupied area of some four square miles, might have been our huckleberry-field. If any owners of these tracts are about to leave the world without natural heirs who need or deserve to be specially remembered, they will do wisely to abandon their possession to all, and not will them to some individual who perhaps has enough already. As some give to Harvard College or another institution, why might not another give a forest or huckleberry-field to Concord? A town is an institution which deserves to be remembered. We boast of our system of education, but why stop at schoolmasters and schoolhouses? We are all schoolmasters, and our schoolhouse is the universe. To attend chiefly to the desk or schoolhouse while we neglect the scenery in which it is placed is absurd. If we do not look out we shall find our fine schoolhouse standing in a cow-yard at last.

~ Henry David Thoreau

moving ahead

Once more my deeper life goes on with more strength,

as if the banks through which it moves had widened out.

Trees and stones seem more like me each day,

and the paintings I see seem more seen into:

with my senses, as with the birds, I climb

into the windy heaven out of the oak,

and in the ponds broken off from the blue sky

my feeling sinks, as if standing on fishes.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

translation by Robert Bly

To be great be entire

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To be great be entire:

Of what is yours nothing 

exaggerate or exclude

Be whole in each thing. Put all that you are

Into the least you do

Like that on each place the whole moon

Shines for she lives aloft.

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~ Fernando Pessoa

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Her face was in a bed of hair

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Her face was in a bed of hair,

Like flowers in a plot-

Her hand was whiter than the sperm

That feeds the sacred light.

Her tongue more tender than the tune

That totters in the leaves-

Who hears may be incredulous,

Who witnesses, believes.

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~ Emily Dickinson

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the cure

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Love is the cure,
for your pain will keep giving birth to more pain
until your eyes constantly exhale love
as effortlessly as your body yields its scent.


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~ Rumi

 

 

 

 

here is a smile and a gentleness

There is a smile and a gentleness

inside. When I learned the name

 

and address of that, I went to where

you sell perfume. I begged you not

 

to trouble me so with longing. Come

out and play! Flirt more naturally.

 

Teach me how to kiss. On the ground

a spread blanket, flame that's caught

 

and burning well, cumin seeds browning,

I am inside all of this with my soul.

 

 

 

 

~ Rumi

all which isn't singing is mere talking

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all which isn't singing is mere talking
and all talking's talking to oneself
(whether that oneself be sought or seeking
master or disciple sheep or wolf)
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gush to it as diety or devil
-toss in sobs and reasons threats and smiles
name it cruel fair or blessed evil-
it is you (ne i)nobody else
.
drive dumb mankind dizzy with haranguing
-you are deafened every mother's son-
all is merely talk which isn't singing
and all talking's to oneself alone
.
but the very song of(as mountains
feel and lovers)singing is silence
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~ e.e.cummings


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From the Wizard of Oz

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Somewhere, over the rainbow, way up high.
There's a land that I heard of
Once in a lullaby.
Somewhere, over the rainbow, skies are blue.
And the dreams that you dare to dream
Really do come true.
Someday I'll wish upon a star and wake up where the clouds are far Behind me.
Where troubles melt like lemon drops,
Away above the chimney tops.
That's where you'll find me.
Somewhere, over the rainbow, bluebirds fly.
Birds fly over the rainbow,
Why then - oh, why can't I?
If happy little bluebirds fly beyond the rainbow,
Why, oh, why can't I?

~ music by Harold Arlen and lyrics by E.Y. Harburg

-click title to hear the song

it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
How should we be able to forget about those ancient myths 

that are at the beginning of all peoples, 

the 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.

 
So you must not be frightened...if a sadness rises up before you

 larger than any you have ever seen; if a restiveness,

 like light and cloud shadow, passes over your hands

 and over all that you do. You must think that something 

is taking place in you, that life has not forgotten you,

 that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall.

 

 

 

 
~ Rainer Maria Rilke

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It is too clear and so it is hard to see.
A fool once searched for fire with a lighted lantern.
Had he known what fire was,
He could have cooked his rice much sooner.
~ Mumon

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in conversation with David Sylvester

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You see, all art has now become completely a game by which man distracts himself; and you may say it has always been like that, but now it's entirely a game. And I think that is the way things have changed, and what is fascinating now is that it's going to become much more difficult for the artist, because he really must deepen the game to be any good at all.

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~ Francis Bacon 

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The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious

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The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery -- even if mixed with fear -- that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man...
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~ Albert Einstein, 1931


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