The Hermit at Dawn

Early in the morning the hermit wakes, hearing

The roots of the fir tree stir beneath his floor.

Someone is there. that strength buried

In earth carries up the summer world. When

A man loves a woman, he nourishes her.

Dancers strew the lawn with the light of their feet.

When a woman loves the earth, she nourishes it.

Earth nourishes what no one can see.

~  Robert Bly 
from Turkish Pears In August (2007)

.

If I'm a theologian

.

If I'm a theologian 

I am one to the extent I have learned to duck

when the small, haughty doctrines fly overhead,

dropping their loads of whitewash at random

 on the faces of those who look toward Heaven.
.

Look down, look down, and save your soul

by honester dirt, that receives with a lordly

indifference this off-fall of the air.

.

~  Wendell Berry

.

in the heart of every creature

.

.

The all-knowing Self was never born,

nor will it die. Beyond cause and effect,

This Self is eternal and immutable.

When the body dies, the Self does not die…

.

Hidden in the heart of every creature

Exists the Self, subtler that the subtlest,

Greater than the greatest…

.

The Self cannot be known through study,

…nor through the intellect,

nor through discourses about it.

.

~  Katha Upanishad

.

The piece is not actually silent

.

.

The piece is not actually silent 

[there will never be silence until death comes which never comes];

 it is full of sound,

 but sounds which I do not think of beforehand, 

which I hear for the first time the same time others hear. 

What we hear is determined by our own emptiness, 

our own receptivity; 

we receive to the extent we are empty to do so.

 If one is full, 

or in the course of its performance becomes full of an idea[...], then it is just that.

.

~ John Cage, responding to a detractor of 4'33", recalled by Christian Wolff

.

reblogged from: http://crowwithnomouth-jesse.blogspot.com/

.

a far green country

Frodo kissed Merry and Pippin, and last of all Sam, 
and went aboard; and the sails were drawn up, 
and the wind blew, and slowly the ship slipped down
 the long grey firth; and the light of the glass 
of Galadriel that Frodo bore glimmered and was lost.

 And the ship went out into the High Sea 
and passed on into the West, until at last on a night of rain 
Frodo smelled a sweet fragrance on the air and heard the sound
 of singing that came over the water. And then it seemed to him
 that as in his dream in the house of Bombadil, the grey rain-curtain
 turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, 
and he beheld white shores and beyond them
 a far green country under a swift sunrise.

But to Sam the evening deepened to darkness 
as he stood at the Haven; and as he looked
 at the grey sea he saw only a shadow
 on the waters that was soon lost in the West.

~  J.R.R. Tolkien 
from: 'The Lord of the Rings'

It is not skill

.

.

It is not skill, knowledge, intellect,
good luck or bad, but choosing
to feel the strange notes
of our wildness,
for there is not nothingness
despite the easy magic
of despair.

.
~  Terrance Keenan

.

question and answer

.

.

question and answer
beginning and end
post and comment
fits and starts
.
these all dissolve
beautifully into one
(a one with no parts)
when we let go
of our heads
and enter our hearts

.

~ Benjamin Dean

.

the grip of life

Say "death" and the whole room freezes--
even the couches stop moving,
even the lamps.
Like a squirrel suddenly aware it is being looked at.

Say the word continuously,
and things begin to go forward.
Your life takes on
the jerky texture of an old film strip.

Continue saying it, hold it moment after moment inside the mouth,
it becomes another syllable.
A shopping mall swirls around the corpse of a beetle.

Death is voracious, it swallows all the living.
Life is voracious, it swallows all the dead.
neither is ever satisfied, neither is ever filled,
each swallows and swallows the world.

The grip of life is as strong as the grip of death.

(but the vanished, the vanished beloved, o where?)



~ Jane Hirshfield

Unto our very selves we are abridged

.

.

Whether we write or speak or do but look 

We are ever unapparent. What we are 

Cannot be transfused into word or book. 

Our soul from us is infinitely far. 

However much we give our thoughts the will 

To be our soul and gesture it abroad, 

Our hearts are incommunicable still. 

In what we show ourselves we are ignored. 

The abyss from soul to soul cannot be bridged 

By any skill of thought or trick of seeming. 

Unto our very selves we are abridged 

When we would utter to our thought our being. 

We are our dreams of ourselves, souls by gleams, 

And each to each other dreams of others’ dreams.

.

~ Fernando Pessoa 

.

A Letter (to Ed McClanahan)

.

.

Dear Ed,

.

I dreamed that you and I were sent to Hell.

The place we went to was not fiery

or cold, was not Dante's Hell or Milton's,

but was, even so, as true a Hell as any.

It was a place unalterably public

in which crowds of people were rushing

in weary frenzy this way and that,

as when classes change in a university

or at quitting time in a city street,

except that this place was wider far

than we could see, and the crowd as large 

as the place.  In that crowd every one

was alone.  Every one was hurrying.

Nobody was sitting down.  Nobody

was standing around.  All were rushing

so uniformly frantic, that to average them

would have stood them still.  It was a place 

deeply disturbed.  We thought, you and I,

that we might get across and come out

on the other side, if we stayed together,

only if we stayed together.  The other side

would be a clear day in a place we would know.

We joined hands and hurried along,

snatching each other through small openings 

in the throng.  But the place was full

of dire distractions, dire satisfactions.

We were torn apart, and I found you 

breakfasting upon a huge fried egg.

I snatched you away: "Ed! Come on!"

And then, still susceptible, I met

a lady whose luster no hell could dim.

She took all my thought.  But then,

in the midst of my delight, my fear

returned: "Oh! Damn it all! Where's Ed?"

I fled, searching, and found you again.

We went on together.  How this ended

I do not know.  I woke before it could end.

But, old friend, I want to tell you

how fine it was, what a durable

nucleus of joy it gave my fright

to force that horrid way with you, how

heavenly, let us say, in spite of Hell.

.

P.S.

Do you want to know shy

you were distracted by an egg, and I

by a beautiful lady?  That's Hell.

.

~ Wendell Berry

.

The body is a single creature

God, how I hate names

of the body's chemicals and anatomy,

the frore and glum department

of its parts, each alone in the scattering

of the experts of Babel.

The body

is a single creature, whole

its life is one, never less that one, or more,

so is its world, and so

are two bodies in their love for one another

one.  In ignorance of this

we talk ourselves to death.

~  Wendell Berry

The abyss of no-meaning

.

.

The abyss of no-meaning-what

can prevail against it?  Love

for the water in its standing

fall through the hill's wrist

from the town down to the river.

There is no love but this,

and it extends from Heaven

to the land destroyed,

to the hurt man in his cage,

to the dead man in his grave.

.

~ Wendell Berry

.

Sorrows of the Moon

.

.

Tonight the moon dreams in a deeper languidness,
And, like a beauty on her cushions, lies at rest;
While drifting off to sleep, a tentative caress
Seeks, with a gentle hand, the contour of her breast;
.
As on a crest above her silken avalanche,
Dying, she yields herself to an unending swoon,
And sees a pallid vision everywhere she’d glance,
In the azure sky where blossoms have been strewn.
.
When sometime, in her weariness, upon her sphere
She might permit herself to sheda furtive tear,
A poet of great piety, a foe of sleep,
.
Catches in the hollow of his hand that tear,
An opal fragment, iridescent as a star;
Within his heart, far from the sun, it’s buried deep.
.
~  Charles Baudelaire 
.

This is what you shall do

.

.

This is what you shall do:
Love the earth and sun and the animals,
Despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks,
Stand up for the stupid and crazy,
Devote your income and labors to others,
Hate tyrants, argue not concerning God,
Have patience and indulgence toward the people,
Take off your hat to nothing known or unknown,
Or to any man or number of men,
Go freely with powerful uneducated persons,
And with the young and with the mothers of families,
Read these leaves in the open air,
Every season of every year of your life,
Reexamine all you have been told,
At school at church or in any book,
Dismiss whatever insults your own soul,
And your very flesh shall be a great poem,
And have the richest fluency not only in its words,
But in the silent lines of its lips and face,
And between the lashes of your eyes,
And in every motion and joint of your body.

.

~  Walt Whitman

.

the thorns

.

.

I was a child. I remember, I used to pick

once, wild roses.

They has so many thorns,

but I didn’t wanted to break them.

I thought they were - buds,

and they are going to bloom.

.

I met you, then. Oh, how many,

how many thorns you had!

but I didn’t wanted to undress you -

I thought they will bloom.

.

Today, everything passes

in front of my eyes and I smile.

I smile and I wander through valleys

Playful, in the blowing of the wind.

I was a child.

.

~   Lucian Blaga

.