remembering

Rather the flying bird, leaving no trace

Than the going beast

Marking the earth with his track.

The bird flies by and forgets

(As is only right). The beast

Where he no longer is

(And is therefore no use)

Marks that he was there before

(Which is also no use).

For to remember is to betray

Nature, since the nature of yesterday

Is not nature.

What has been, is nothing.

Remembering

Is failure to see.

Move on, bird, move on, teach me

To move on.

~ Fernando Pessoa

translation by Thomas Merton

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Envy: An Assay

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A mother sings to her infant,

Most beautiful in all the world, and you stand helpless.

Wind outside the window,

looking in with shackled ankles, wrists.

Your fate is to be yourself, both punishment and crime.

Yet you, too, had a mother. Had two sisters.

A photo shows the bone structure's slow shifting:

your face, small, blurred with something almost sorrow,

peers between them.

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~ Jane Hirshfield

from After

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to exist clearly

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Last evening a city man

Was talking in the hotel door

To everyone, including me.

.

He talked of justice, of the struggle to obtain

Justice, of the workers

Suffering: of unending work

Of hungry men, of rich men turning

Their backs to it all.

.

Then, looking at me, he saw me with tears

In my eyes.  He smiled, happy,

Thinking I felt the same hatred he felt

And the compassion

He claimed to feel.

.

(But I was hardly listening to him.

What do I care about people

And what they suffer, or suppose they suffer?

Let them be like me - they will not suffer.

All the ill in the world comes from people interfering

With one another:

Wanting to do good, wanting to do evil.

Our soul, heaven and earth, these are enough:

To want more is to lose these and be wretched.)

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What I was thinking when this friend of man

Spoke (and this moved me to weep)

Was that the far murmur of cowbells

In the evening air

Was nothing like small chapel bells

Where flowers and brooks might have heard Mass

Along with simple souls

Simple as mine.

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(Praise be to God I am not good and have

The natural selfishness of flowers

And rivers, going on their way

Concerned only, and not knowing it,

To flower and go.

This is the only mission in the world:

This - to exist clearly

And to know how

Without thinking about it.)

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The man fell silent,

He viewed the setting sun.

But what have sunsets to do

With haters and lovers?

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~ Thomas Merton

from the Portuguese of Fernando Pessoa

#8, of twelve poems from The Keeper of Flocks

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life partakes of the freshness

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Our zest for the river did not wane...

We went on in much the same way, in surroundings which had become familiar, 

with not even a flood to make the year memorable.

.  

Ruts, however, are worn only in traveled ways on land: 

a river life partakes of the freshness of the river itself.  

.

Each rise and fall affords a new outlook 

and gives to a well-known shore the feel of one 

at which you have just landed for the first time...

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~ Harlan Hubbard

from Shantyboat Journal

edited by Don Wallis

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the current

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For a long time some of us

lie in the marshes like dark coats

forgetting that we are water

.

dust gathers all day on our closed lids

weeds grow up through us

.

but the eels keep trying to tell us 

writing over and over in our mud

our heavenly names

.

and through us a thin cold current

never sleeps

.

its glassy feet move on until they find stones

.

then cloud fish call to it again

your heart is safe with us

.

bright fish flock to it again touch it

with their mouths say yes

have vanished

.

yes and black flukes wave to it

from the Lethe of whales

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~ W.S. Merwin

from Migration, The Carrier of Ladders 1970

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Hesitation: An Assay

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Sometimes only a slowing

so momentary it can scarcely be seen -

as if a dog

chasing something large and swift and important,

were distracted by the white tremor of an overhead moth.

.

Other times a full lifetime tentative, lost.

.

The line of the roof in a child's crayoned drawing

can show a hesitation almost fatal.

The rain

comes to it hard or less hard,

knowing nothing of hesitations's rake-toothed debate

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And the two lovers

now concealed around the corner?

They fool no one, not even themselves,

pausing in their own shadows outside a locked door.

.

If pleasure requires prolonging, then these lovers.

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Yet slowness alone is not to be confused

with the scent of the plum tree just before it opens.

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~ Jane Hirshfield

from After


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our own limits transgressed

We need the tonic of wildness, 

to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow hen lurk, 

and hear the booming of the snipe; 

to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder 

and more solitary fowl builds her nest, 

and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground.  

At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, 

we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, 

that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed 

by us because it is unfathomable. 

We can never have enough of nature.  

We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, 

vast and titanic features, the seacoast with its wrecks, 

the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, 

the thunder cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets.

We need to witness our own limits transgressed, 

and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.

  

~ Thoreau

from Walden, "Spring," 1854

photo above by Kathleen Connally

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True freedom

.

.

True freedom and the end of suffering is living in such

a way as if you had completely chosen whatever

you feel or experience at this moment.

This inner alignment with Now is the end of suffering.

Is suffering really necessary? Yes and no.

If you had not suffered as you have, 

there would be no depth to you as a human being, 

no humility, no compassion.

You would not be reading this now. 

Suffering cracks open the shell of ego, 

and then comes a point when it has served its purpose.

Suffering is necessary until you realize it is unnecessary.

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~ Eckhart Tolle

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I am fishing with the one who made the river

.

.

When I go out on the water at night, and as I bait hooks, watch Cassiopeia, rising in the eastern sky, draw up her fishingline, Perseus with the misty Pleiads as bait and bright Venus caught, and then all grow dim in the faint beginning light of dawn, then I feel that I am fishing with the one who made the river and set her flowing.  I feel its length and sinuous flowing, fed by swift streams in the wooded eastern mountains; and somewhere, through a country unknown to me except by hearsay, past the mouths of new rivers and towns known only by name, it will at last enter an ocean and lose its identity, as I will too, at the end of my devious flowing.

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~ Harlan Hubbard

from Shantyboat Journal

edited by Don Wallis

dog still barking at midnight

.

.

It has come to this:

three ants, seemingly separate, seemingly aimless,

wandering on a shelf.

.

They've appeared and disappeared for days between jars and bottles.

Luckless, they move without pausing.

.

A single breath-puff could send any one to the floor.

How distant they must be from the nest -

yet none consults with another,

none turns to the others for reassurance or warmth.

.

In their cold bodies: calcium, carbons, a trace of nickel.

.

Inexhaustible solitude, how did you come so far

to waver on the slim antennae of these my sisters?

.

~ Jane Hirshfield

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the promise

.

.

Mysteriously they entered, those few minutes.

Mysteriously, they left.

As if the great dog of confusion guarding my heart,

who is always sleepless, suddenly slept.

It was not any awakening of the large, not so much as that,

only a stepping back from the petty.

I gazed at the range of blue mountains,

I drank from the stream.  Tossed in a small stone from the bank.

Whatever direction the fates of my life might travel, I trusted.

Even the greedy direction, even the grieving, trusted.

There was nothing left to be saved from, bliss nor danger.

The dogs tail wagged a little in his dream.

.

~ Jane Hirshfield

from After

photo by shreve stockton

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That Time of Year thou mayst in me Behold

.

That time of year thou mayst in me behold 

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang 

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, 

Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. 

In me thou see'st the twilight of such day 

As after sunset fadeth in the west, 

Which by and by black night doth take away, 

Death's second self, that seals up all in rest. 

In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire 

That on the ashes of his youth doth lie, 

As the death-bed whereon it must expire, 

Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by. 

This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong, 

To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

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~ William Shakespeare

sonnet LXXIII

woman in red coat

.

Some questions cannot be answered.

They become familiar weights in the hand,

round stones pulled from the pocket,

unyielding and cool.

Your fingers travel their surfaces,

lose themselves finally

in the braille of the durable world.

Look out of any window, it's the same --

the yellow leaves, the wintering light.

A truck passes, piled deep in cut wood.

A woman, in a red wool coat,

sees you watching and quickly looks away.

.

~ Jane Hirshfield 

from Of Gravity and Angels

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Let life happen

.

For one human being to love another; 

that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, 

the ultimate, the last test and proof, 

the work for which all other work is but preparation. 

.

I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: 

that each protects the solitude of the other. 

This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love: 

the more they give, the more they possess.

.

There are no classes in life for beginners; 

right away you are always asked to deal with what is most difficult.

.

Believe that with your feelings and your work you are taking part in the greatest; 

the more strongly you cultivate this belief, 

the more will reality and the world go forth from it. 

If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; 

blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; 

for the Creator, there is no poverty.

.

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. 

The deepest experience of the creator is feminine, 

for it is experience of receiving and bearing.

.

The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens. 

Let life happen to you. 

Believe me: life is in the right, always.

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~ Rainer Maria Rilke

thanks to http://paulocoelhoblog.com/

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just now

.

In the morning as the storm begins to blow away

the clear sky appears for a moment and it seems to me

that there has been something simpler than I could ever believe

simpler than I could have begun to find words for

not patient not even waiting no more hidden

than the air itself that became part of me for a while

with every breath and remained with me unnoticed

something that was here unnamed unknown in the days

and the nights not separate from them

not separate from them as they came and were gone

it must have been here neither early nor late then

by what name can I address it now holding out my thanks

.

~ W.S. Merwin
from The Pupil
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