face to face

The human face is the icon of creation.

Each person also has an inner face, which is always sensed but never seen. 

The heart is the inner face of your life. 

The human journey strives to make this inner face beautiful. 

It is here that love gathers within you. 

Love is absolutely vital for a human life. 

For love alone can awaken what is divine within you. 

In love, you grow and come home to your self. 

When you learn to love and to let yourself be loved, 

you come home to the hearth of your own spirit. 

A world lies hidden behind each human face. When you look at some faces, you can see the turbulence of the infinite beginning to gather to the surface. Suddenly...their gaze becomes the vehicle of some primal inner presence. The human face carries mystery and is the exposure point of the mystery of the individual life. It is where the private inner world of a person protrudes into the anonymous world. Your face is the icon of your life. In the human face, a life looks out at the world and also looks in on itself. When a persons life has been bleak, much of its negativity can remain unhealed...the bleakness lodges in the face ... instead of being a warm presence, has hardened into a mask. Yet one also encounters the opposite, namely, the beautiful presence of an old face deeply lined ...that has retained a lovely innocence.

.

~ John O'Donohue

a sadness fell upon me

Only now and again a sadness fell upon me,

and I started up from my dream and felt a sweet

trace of a strange fragrance in the south wind.

That vague sweetness made my heart ache with

longing and it seemed to me that it was the eager 

breath of the summer seeking for its completion.

I knew not then that it was so near, that it was 

mine, and that this perfect sweetness had 

blossomed in the depth of my own heart.

~ Gitanjali

translated from original Bengali by Tagore

from the Tao Te Ching

Nothing in the world,
Is as yielding and receptive as water;
Yet in attacking the firm and inflexible,
Nothing triumphs so well.
Because of what it is not, 
This becomes easy.
The receptive triumphs over the inflexible;
The yielding triumphs over the rigid.
.
-Lao Tzu

On the Road Home

It was when I said,

"There is no such thing as the truth,"

That the grapes seemed fatter.

The fox ran out of his hole.

You...You said,

"There are many truths,

But they are not parts of a truth."

Then the tree, at night, began to change,

Smoking through green and smoking blue.

We were two figures in a wood.

We said we stood alone.

It was when I said.

"Words are not forms of a single word.

In the sum of the parts, there are only the parts.

The world must be measured by the eye";

It was when you said,

"The idols have seen lots of poverty,

Snakes and gold and lice,

But not the truth";

It was at that time, that the silence was largest

And longest, the night was roundest,

The fragrance of the autumn warmest,

Closest and strongest.

~ Wallace Stevens

The Snow Man

.

One must have a mind of winter

To regard the frost and the boughs

Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

.

And have been cold a long time

To behold the junipers shagged with ice,

The spruces rough in the distant glitter

.

Of the January sun ; and not to think

Of any misery in the sound of the wind,

In the sound of a few leaves,

.

Which is the sound of the land

Full of the same wind

That is blowing in the same bare place

.

For the listener, who listens in the snow,

And, nothing himself, beholds

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

.

~ Wallace Stevens

Animals

.

At dawn a knot of sea-lions lies off the shore
In the slow swell between the rock and the cliff,
Sharp flippers lifted, or great-eyed heads, as they roll in the sea,
Bigger than draft-horses, and barking like dogs
Their all-night song. It makes me wonder a little
That life near kin to human, intelligent, hot-blooded, idle and 
     singing, can float at ease
In the ice-cold midwinter water. Then, yellow dawn
Colors the south, I think about the rapid and furious lives
     in the sun :
They have little to do with ours; they have nothing to do with
     oxygen and salted water ; they would look monstrous
If we could see them : the beautiful passionate bodies of living
    flame, batlike flapping and screaming,
Tortured with burning lust and acute awareness, that ride the
     storm-tides
Of the great fire-globe. They are animals, as we are. There are
     many other chemistries of animal life
Besides the slow oxidation of carbohydrates and amino-acids.
.
~ Robinson Jeffers

seeker of truth

follow no path

all paths lead where

truth is here

~ e.e. cummings

I dwell in Possibility

.
I dwell in Possibility--
A fairer House than Prose--
More numerous of Windows--
Superior--for Doors--
.
Of Chambers as the Cedars--
Impregnable of Eye--
And for an Everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky--
.
Of Visitors--the fairest--
For Occupation--This--
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise--

.

~ Emily Dickinson

Thoreau's Journal

...

The obstacles which the heart meets with are like granite blocks which one alone cannot move. She who was as the morning light to me is now neither the morning star nor the evening star. We meet but to find each other further asunder, and the oftener we meet the more rapid our divergence. So a star of the first magnitude pales in the heavens, not from any fault in the observer’s eye nor from any fault in itself, perchance, but because its progress in its own system has put a greater distance between.

...

~ Henry David Thoreau

magic words

In the very earliest time,

when both people and animals lived on earth,

a person could become an animal if he wanted to

and an animal could become a human being.

Sometimes they were people

and sometimes animals

and there was no difference.

All spoke the same language.

That was the time when words were like magic.

The human mind had mysterious powers.

A word spoken by chance

might have strange consequences.

It would suddenly come alive

and what people wanted to happen could happen—

all you had to do was say it.

Nobody can explain this:

That's the way it was.

~ after Nalungiaq

from The Angelic Poems

.
Before they ripen into diffused spirits
angels are leaf-stalks
and their wings begonia leaves
with dark surfaces
and red glitterings within.
Slowly, very slowly, they emerge out of the flower-pot
of the body,
take on the face of Bill or Bob,
pierce through the cool bower 
of the world and ascend like the promise
of a harmonious end;
on their lips shine
the last bubbles of our breathing,
those droplets 
of our unrelieved loneliness.
.
~ Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke

We come unsighted

.

We come, unsighted, in the dark,
to the great feast of lovers
where nothing is withheld.
That we are there we know
by touch, by inner sight.
They all are here, who by
their giving take, by taking
give, who by their living
love, and by loving live.
.
~ Wendell Berry

To a Stranger

Passing stranger! you do not know
How longingly I look upon you,
You must be he I was seeking,
Or she I was seeking
(It comes to me as a dream)

I have somewhere surely
Lived a life of joy with you,
All is recall'd as we flit by each other,
Fluid, affectionate, chaste, matured,

You grew up with me,
Were a boy with me or a girl with me,
I ate with you and slept with you, your body has become
not yours only nor left my body mine only,

You give me the pleasure of your eyes,
face, flesh as we pass,
You take of my beard, breast, hands,
in return,

I am not to speak to you, I am to think of you
when I sit alone or wake at night, alone
I am to wait, I do not doubt I am to meet you again
I am to see to it that I do not lose you.






~ Walt Whitman

Seventh Day Seventh Month

.

Tangle together like painted

Clouds on a screen, then,

Thighs enlaced, heads together

On the pillow we sing softly

To the full moon and watch time pass.

The declining moon marks the hours.

Suddenly we are seized by grief and fear.

Three o’clock in the morning

Has gone by but we cannot

Get enough of one another. Insatiable

Passion, night swift as the shuttle

In the loom. Oh heaven, what is

Your price for one more hour?

~ Kuan Yun She

if

.

 

 

If we are peaceful.

If we are happy.

We can smile and blossom

Like a flower.

 

And everyone

In our family,

Our entire society

Will benefit

From our peace.

 

 

 

~ Thich Nhat Hanh