Stranger

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When no one listens

To the quiet trees

When no one notices

The sun in the pool.

Where no one feels

The first drop of rain

Or sees the last star

Or hails the first morning

Of a giant world

Where peace begins

And rages end:

One bird sits still

Watching the work of God:

One turning leaf,

Two falling blossoms,

Ten circles upon the pond.

One cloud upon the hillside,

Two shadows in the valley

And the light strikes home.

Now dawn commands the capture

Of the tallest fortune,

The surrender

Of no less marvelous prize!

Closer and clearer

Than any wordy master,

Thou inward Stranger

Whom I have never seen,

Deeper and cleaner

Than the clamorous ocean,

Seize up my silence

Hold me in Thy Hand!

Now act is waste

And suffering undone

Laws become prodigals

Limits are torn down

For envy has no property

And passion is none.

Look, the vast Light stands still

Our cleanest Light is One!

~ Thomas Merton

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Excerpts from extemporaneous talks in Ojai California

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Oak Grove High School in Ojai, California, founded by J. Krishnamurti in 1975
It is a pre-K through grade 12 private school offering a small, intimate, inquiry-based day and boarding program that blends college preparatory academics with deep exploration of life’s issues. Teachers support open-minded and spirited discussion, encourage inquiry, and strive to develop in each student a self-reflective capacity that leads to inner honesty, independence and integrity. Graduates go on to college having developed a global perspective, sensitivity toward the environment and human relations, and exceptional critical thinking skills.    www.oakgroveschool.com 

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Everywhere society is conditioning the individual, and this conditioning takes the form of self-improvement, which is really the perpetuation of the 'me', the ego, in different forms.  Self-improvement may be gross, or it may be very, very refined when it becomes the practice of virtue, goodness, the so-called love of one's neighbor, but essentially it is the continuance of the 'me', which is a product of the conditioning influences of society.  All your endeavor has gone into becoming something, either here, if you can make it, or if not, in another world; but it is the same urge, the same drive to maintain and continue the self.

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August 7th, 1955

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If one is capable of studying, watching oneself, one begins to discover how cumulative memory is acting on everything one sees; one is forever evaluating, discarding or accepting, condemning or justifying, so one's experience is always within the field of the known, of the conditioned.  But without cumulative memory as a directive, most of us feel lost, we feel frightened, and so we are incapable of observing ourselves as we are.  When there is the accumulative process, which is the cultivation of memory, our observation of ourselves becomes very superficial.  Memory is helpful in directing, improving oneself, but in self-improvement there can never be a revolution, a radical transformation. It is only when the sense of self-improvement completely ceases, but not by volition, that there is a possibility of something transcendental, something totally new coming into being.

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August 21st, 1955

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If we can discover from what the sense of domination springs, that discovery may answer the question of why we are violent.

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 August 27th, 1955

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Being free of society implies not being ambitious, not being covetous, not being competitive; it implies being nothing in relation to that society which is striving to be something.  But you see, it is very difficult to accept that because you may be trodden on, you may be pushed aside; you will have nothing.  In that nothingness there is sanity, not in the other...  As long as one wants to be part of this society, one must breed insanity, wars, destruction, and misery; but to free oneself from this society - the society of violence, of wealth, of position, of success - requires patience, inquiry, discovery, not the reading of books, the chasing after teachers, psychologists, and all the rest of it.

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August 28th, 1955

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~ J. Krishnamurti

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not moving even one step

The rain falling too lightly to shape

an audible house, and audible tree,

blind, soaking, the old horse waits in his pasture.

He knows the field for exactly what it is:

his limitless mare, his beloved.

Even the mallards sleep in her red body maned

in thistles, hooved in the new green shallows of spring.

Slow rain streams from fetlocks, hips, the lowered head,

while she stands in the place beside him that no one sees.

The muzzles almost touch.

How silently the heart pivots on its hinge.

~ Jane Hirshfield

from The Lives of the Heart

Listening

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What is the deep listening?  Sama is

a greeting from the secret ones inside

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the heart, a letter.  The branches of 

your intelligence grow new leaves in

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the wind of this listening.  The body

reaches a peace.  Rooster sound comes,

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reminding you of your love for dawn.

The reed flute and the singer's lips:

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the knack of how spirit breathes into

us becomes as simple and ordinary as

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eating and drinking.  The dead rise with 

the pleasure of listening.  If someone

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can't hear a trumpet melody, sprinkle

dirt on his head and declare him dead.

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Listen, and feel the beauty of your

separation, the unsayable absence.

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There's a moon inside every human being.

Learn to be companions with it.  Give

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more of your life to this listening.  As

brightness is to time, so you are to

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the one who talks to the deep ear in

your chest.  I should sell my tongue

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and buy a thousand ears when that

one steps near and begins to speak.

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~ Rumi

from The Glance

translated by Coleman Barks

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When the Cat Stole the Milk

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Well there it is.  There's nothing to do.

The cat steals the milk and it's gone.

Then the cat steals you, and you're found

Days later, with milk on your face.

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That implies that you become whoever

Steals you.  The trees steal a man,

And an old birch becomes his wife

And they live together in the woods.

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Some of us have always wanted

God to steal us.  Then our friends

Would call each other, and print

Posters, and we would never be found.

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~ Robert Bly

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People Like Us

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There are more like us. All over the world

There are confused people, who can't remember

The name of their dog when they wake up, and people

Who love God but can't remember where

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He was when they went to sleep.  It's

All right.  The world cleanses itself this way.

A wrong number occurs to you in the middle

Of the night, you dial it, it rings just in time

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To save the house.  And the second-story man

Gets the wrong address, where the insomniac lives,

And he's lonely, and they talk, and the thief

Goes back to college.  Even in graduate school,

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You can wander into the wrong classroom,

And hear great poems lovingly spoken

By the wrong professor.  And you find your soul,

And greatness has a defender, and even in death

you're safe.

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Robert Bly

for James Wright

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Words the Dreamer Spoke to my Father in Maine

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Ocean light as we wake reminds us how dark

Our old house is.  That's home.  Like Hamlet,

One visit to Wittenberg is enough, and we'll soon be

Back in crazy Denmark.  I dreamt I stood

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In a machine shop; my dead father stands beside me.

We talk, but his eyes remain on my chest.

I say to him for the first him:"Oh look at me

When we talk." I could see cubbyholes

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With dark tools, and a rough floor stained with oil.

Clotted windows, cobwebs, a black vise.

But sunlight outside our windows speaks of ocean

Light, bone light, Labrador light, prairie light.

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It's the same light that glints off swords, and shines

From Idaho rivers some days, and from the thin

Face just before death. I say to my father,

"We could be there if we could lift our eyes."

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~ Robert Bly

from Morning Poems

photo by Kathleen Connally

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But the silence in the mind

But the silence in the mind

is when we live best, within

listening distance of the silence

we call God.  This is the deep 

calling to deep of the psalm-

writer, the bottomless ocean

We launch the armada of

our thoughts on, never arriving.

It is a presence, then,

whose margins are our margins;

that calls us out over our 

own fathoms.  What to do

but draw a little nearer to

such ubiquity by remaining still?

~ R. S. Thomas

calmly and smoothly

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The soul, then, being thus inwardly recollected in God or before God,

 now and then becomes so sweetly attentive to the goodness of her well-beloved,

that her attention seems not to her to be attention, so purely and delicately is it exercised;

 as it happens to certain rivers, which glide so calmly and smoothly 

that beholders and such as float upon them, seem neither to see nor feel any motion,

 because the waters are not seen to ripple or flow at all.

 

 

~ Saint Francis de Sales

from An Introduction to the Devout Life

 

 

The spring woods hastening now

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The spring woods hastening now

To overshadow him,

He's passing in to where

He can't see out.  It charms

Mere eyesight to believe

The nearest thing not trees

Is the sky, into which 

The trees reach, opening

Their luminous new leaves.

Burdened only by 

A weightless shawl of shade

The lighted leaves let fall,

He seems to move within

A form unpatterned to 

His eye or mind, design

Betokened to his thought

By leafshapes tossed about.

Ways untranslatable

To human tongue or hand

Seem tangled here, and yet

Are brought to light, are brought

To life, and thought finds rest

Beneath a brightened tree

In which, unseen, a warbler

Feeds and sins.  His song's

Small shapely melody

Comes down irregularly,

As all light's givings come.

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~ Wendell Berry
photo by Kathleen Connally

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the light changes

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Can I see the buds that are swelling 

in the woods on the slopes

on the far side of the valley? I can't,

of course, nor can I see 

the twinleafs and anemones

that are blooming over there

bright-scattered above the dead

leaves.  But the swelling buds

and little blossoms make

a new softness in the light

that is visible all the way here.

The trees, the hills that were stark

in the old cold become now

tender, and the light changes.

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~ Wendell Berry

Given

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Song of the Barren Orange Tree

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Woodcutter.

Cut my shadow from me.

Free me from the torment 

of seeing myself without fruit.

Why was I born among mirrors?

The day walks in circles around me,

and the night copies me

in all its stars.

I want to live without seeing myself.

And I will dream that ants

and thistleburrs are my

leaves and my birds.

Woodcutter.

Cut my shadow from me.

Free me from the torment

of seeing myself without fruit.

~ Federico Garcia Lorca

from The Selected Poems of Federico Garcia Lorca

translated by W.S. Merwin

Things to Think

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Think in ways you've never thought before.

If the phone rings, think of it as carrying a message

Larger than anything you've ever heard,

Vaster than a hundred lines of Yeats.

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Think that someone may bring a bear to your door,

Maybe wounded and deranged; or think that a moose

Has risen out of the lake, and he's carrying on his antlers

A child of your own whom you've never seen.

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When someone knocks on the door, think that he's about

To give you something large: tell you you're forgiven,

Or that it's not necessary to work all the time, or that it's

Been decided that if you lie down no one will die.

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~ Robert Bly

from Morning Poems

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the essence of beauty

You know when you see something like a marvelous mountain against the blue sky, the vivid, bright, clear, unpolluted snow, the majesty of it drives all your thoughts, your concerns, your problems away.  Have you noticed that?  You say, 'How beautiful it is', and for two seconds perhaps, or for even a minute, you are absolutely silent.  The grandeur of it drives away for that second, the pettiness of ourselves.  So that immensity has taken us over.  Like a child occupied with an intricate toy for an hour; he won't talk, he won't make any noise, he is completely absorbed in that.  The toy has absorbed him.  So the mountain absorbs you and therefore for the second, or the minute, you are absolutely quiet, which means there is no self.  Now, without being absorbed by something - either a toy, a mountain, a face, or an idea - to be completely without the me in oneself, is the essence of beauty.

J. Krishnamurti

from a talk in Saanen, July 18th 1978

My Doubts on Going to Visit a New Friend

I'm glad that a white horse grazes in that meadow

Outside your kitchen window; even when it rains

There's still someone there.  And it rains often

In the mountains.

I have to ask myself what kind of friend I can be.

You'll want to know whether I do dishes,

Or know my share of stories, or any Wallace

Stevens poems be heart.

I know that I won't talk all the time, or steal

Money, or complain about my room,

Or undermine you, or speak disparagingly

Of your family.

I am afraid there'll be a moment when 

I fail you, friend; I will turn slightly

Away, our eyes will not meet, and out in the field

There will be no one.

Robert Bly

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