Instant Glimpsable Only for an Instant

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Moment. Moment. Moment.

- equal inside you, moment,

the velocitous mountains and cities rising and falling,

songs of children, iridescence even of beetles.

It is not you the locust can strip of all leaf.

Untouchable green at the center,

the wolf too lopes past you and through you as he eats.

Insult to mourn you, you who mourn no one, unable.

Without transformation,

yours the role of the chorus, to whom nothing happens.

The living step forward: choosing to enter, to lose.

I, who am made of you only,

speak these words against your unmasterable instruction -

A knife cannot cut itself open,

yet you ask me both to be you and to know you.

~ Jane Hirshfield

To my granddaughters

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To my granddaughters who visited the Holocaust

Museum on the day of the burial of Yitzhak Rabin

Now you know the worst

we humans have to know

about ourselves, and I am sorry,

for I know that you will be afraid.

To those of our bodies given

without pity to be burned, I know

there is no answer

but loving one another,

even our enemies, and this is hard.

But remember:

when a man of war becomes a man of peace,

he gives a light, divine

though it is also human.

When a man of peace is killed

by a man of war, he gives a light.

You do not have to walk in darkness.

If you will have the courage for love,

you may walk in light. It will be

the light of those who have suffered

for peace. It will be

your light.

~ Wendell Berry

from: A Timbered Choir

I Am Completely Different

I am completely different.

Though I am wearing the same tie as yesterday,

am as poor as yesterday,

as good for nothing as yesterday,

today

I am completely different.

Though I am wearing the same clothes,

am as drunk as yesterday,

living as clumsily as yesterday, nevertheless

today

I am completely different.

Ah ...

I patiently close my eyes

on all the grins and smirks

on all the twisted smiles and horse laughs---

and glimpse then, inside me

one beautiful white butterfly

fluttering towards tomorrow.

~ Kuroda Saburo

so small

With strokes that ring clear and metallic, the hour
to touch me bends down on its way:
my senses are quivering. I feel I've the power-
and I seize on the pliable day.

Not a thing was complete till by me it was eyed,
every kind of becoming stood still.
Now my glances are ripe and there comes like a bride
to each of them just what it will.

There's nothing so small but I love it and choose
to paint it gold-groundly and great
and hold it most precious and know not whose
soul it may liberate...




~ Rainer Maria Rilke

There is a solitude of space

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There is a solitude of space, 

A solitude of sea, 

A solitude of death, but these 

Society shall be, 

Compared with that profounder site, 

That polar privacy, 

A Soul admitted to Itself: 

Finite Infinity.

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~  Emily Dickinson

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Just look

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"Just look down the road and tell me if you can see either of them.”

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“I see nobody on the road” said Alice.

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“I only wish I had such eyes to see Nobody! And at such a distance too!”

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~  Lewis Carroll, from:

 'Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There'

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reblogged from: http://saturnrising.tumblr.com/

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A hand

A hand is not four fingers and a thumb.

Nor is it palm and knuckles,

not ligaments or the fat's yellow pillow,

not tendons, star of the wristbone, meander of veins.

A hand is not the thick thatch of its lines

with their infinite dramas,

nor what it has written,

not on the page,

not on the ecstatic body.

Nor is the hand its meadows of holding, of shaping--

not sponge of rising yeast-bread,

not rotor pin's smoothness,

not ink.

The maple's green hands do not cup

the proliferant rain.

What empties itself falls into the place that is open.

A hand turned upward holds only a single, transparent question.

Unanswerable, humming like bees, it rises, swarms, departs.

~  Jane Hirshfield

Happy Birthday Omar

Hakim Omar Khayyam was born at sunrise on Wednesday May 18 in the year 1048 C.E. at Nishapur. As befitting a sage who mastered astronomy and reformed the calendar, it took a detailed analysis of the stellar and planetary positions described in the horoscope cast at his birth to arrive at this information. This analysis was only accomplished in the twentieth century. Prior to this time even the exact year of Omar’s birth remained in doubt. Details of the analysis as well as an astrological life sketch based on this horoscope are presented in “The Nectar of Grace: ‘Omar Khayyam’s Life and Works” by Swami Govinda Tirtha published in Kitabistan, Allahabad, India by the Government Central Press, Hyderabad-Dn. in 1941. This beautiful labor of love is by far the most comprehensive treatment of the life and works of Omar Khayyam that I have ever come across. This unique and valuable resource is little known in the United States and is difficult to locate.

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Omar is primarily known in the West today for his poetry; usually Edward FitzGerald’s 1859 presentation (rather than translation) which introduced the Rubaiyat to the English speaking world. However, such was the not at all the case during his lifetime. Not until two centuries after Omar’s death did a few quatrains appear under his name. He was known in his own time as a sage, scholar, Hakim (wise man) who had mastered virtually all branches of knowledge of his time – astronomy, astrology, mathematics, medicine, physics, philosophy, religion, jurisprudence - am I leaving anything out? He was a pioneer of free expression, deplored hypocrisy, most certainly was not a drunkard or libertine, and is reported to have had a truly astounding memory!

I sent my soul into the invisible,

Some letter of that after life to spell.

And by and by my soul returned to me

And answered, I myself am heaven and hell.

Dreaming when Dawn's Left Hand was in the Sky

I heard a Voice within the Tavern cry,

"Awake, my Little ones, and fill the Cup

Before Life's Liquor in its Cup be dry."

~ verses from the Rubaiyat

Omar’s revision of the calendar in 1079 C.E. to yield the Jalaali calendar (named after Jalaal-ol-Din Malek -shaah-e Saljuqi, the ruler who commissioned the calendar revision and was Omar’s patron) is accurate to one day in 3770 years, which is superior to the Julian calendar, and was only approached by the Gregorian calendar which we use today. The Gregorian calendar is named after Pope Gregory XIII who introduced the latest changes in 1582 C.E., over 500 years after Omar’s work. The Jalaali calender is a very natural solar calendar based on the spring eqinox as the start of the new year (Norooz). If the exact time of the spring equinox event (Saal-Tahveel) occurs before midday Teheran time that day is 1 Farvardin (new year), otherwise the following day is 1 Farvardin and the preceding month of Esfand is extended by one day.

In mathematics, Omar developed means of solving cubic equations (he identified 13 distinct cases) using an ingenious selection of conic sections. He demonstrated cubic equations that have two solutions, but did not seem to realize that a cubic can have three solutions. He discoursed on the significance of Euclid’s controversial 5thpostulate (the parallel postulate), although he did not grasp that this postulate can be both true and not true – each assumption leading to a valid (i.e. fully consistent) geometry. Omar also seems to have been the first to develop the binomial theorem and determine the binomial coefficients for the case where the exponent is a positive integer.

After a long life filled with accomplishments, honors, and disappointments too, Omar died in Nishapur on Thursday March 23, 1122 C.E. (12 Moharram, 516 AH) at the age of 73. Some references give the year of Omar’s death as 1131 C.E.; however, I’m going to follow Tirtha on this one because I find a depth in his research generally unmatched by others. Omar never married and insofar as we know had no children.

~ Donn A. Allen

What is sorrow for?

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What is sorrow for? It is a storehouse

Where we store wheat, barleey, corn and tears.

We step to the door on a round stone,

And the storehouse feeds all the birds of sorrow.

And I say to myself: Will you have

Sorrow at last? Go on, be cheerful in autumn,

Be stoic, yes, be tranquil, calm;

Or in the valley of sorrows spread your wings.

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~ Robert Bly, from:  'Turkish Pears In August' (2007)

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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)

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If I'm a theologian

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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.
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Look down, look down, and save your soul

by honester dirt, that receives with a lordly

indifference this off-fall of the air.

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~  Wendell Berry

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in the heart of every creature

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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…

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Hidden in the heart of every creature

Exists the Self, subtler that the subtlest,

Greater than the greatest…

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The Self cannot be known through study,

…nor through the intellect,

nor through discourses about it.

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~  Katha Upanishad

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The piece is not actually silent

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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.

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

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

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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

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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.

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~  Terrance Keenan

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