When I speak of darkness, I mean the absence of knowledge

.

And so to stand firmly and avoid pitfalls, 

keep to the path you are on.  

Let your longing relentlessly beat upon the  cloud of unknowing 

that lies between you and your God.  

Pierce that cloud with the keen shaft of your love, 

spurn the thought of anything less, 

and do not give up this work for anything.  

.

For the contemplative work of love by itself will eventually heal you...

.

And so diligently persevere until you feel joy in it.  For in the beginning it is usual to feel nothing but a kind of darkness about your mind, or as it were, a cloud of unknowing.  You will seem to know nothing and to feel nothing except a naked intent toward God in the depths of your being.  Try as you might, this darkness and this cloud will remain between you and your God.  You will feel frustrated, for your mind will be unable to grasp him, and you heart will not relish the delight of his love.  But learn to be at home in this darkness. Return to it as often as you can, letting your spirit cry out to him whom you love.  

.

the fourteenth century anonymous author,

the Cloud of Unknowing

.

awaken...a meadow of delight

.

On the day when

The weight deadens

On your shoulders

And you stumble,

May the clay dance

To balance you.

And when your eyes

Freeze behind

The gray window

And the ghost of loss gets into you,

May a flock of colors,

Indigo, red, green

and azure blue,

Come to awaken in you

A meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays

In the curragh of thought

And a stain of ocean

Blackens beneath you,

May there come across the waters

A path of yellow moonlight

To bring you safely home.

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,

May the clarity of light be yours,

May the fluency of the ocean be yours,

May the protection of the ancestors be yours.

And, so may a slow

Wind work these words

Of love around you,

An invisible cloak

To mind your life.

. 

~ John O'Donohue

from To Bless the Space Between Us

.

[you who never arrived]

You who never arrived

in my arms, Beloved, who were lost

from the start,

I don't even know what songs

would please you, I have given up trying

to recognize you in the surging wave of the next 

moment.  All the immense 

images in me - the far-off, deeply-felt landscape,

cities, towers, and bridges, and un-

suspected turns in the path,

and those powerful lands that were once

pulsing with the life of the gods -

all rise within me to mean

you, who forever elude me.

You, Beloved, who are all 

the gardens I have ever gazed at,

longing.  An open window

in a country house -, and you almost

stepped out, pensive, to meet me.  Streets that I chanced upon, -

you had just walked down them and vanished.

And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors

were still dizzy with your presence and, startled, gave back

my too-sudden image.  Who knows?  perhaps the same

bird echoed through both of us 

yesterday, separate, in the evening...

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

from the Uncollected Poems

translated by Stephen Mitchell

.

Dusk in the Country

.

.

The riddle silently sees its image. It spins evening

among the motionless reeds.

There is a frailty no one notices

there, in the web of grass.

.

Silent cattle stare with green eyes.

They mosey in evening calm down to the water.

And the lake holds its immense spoon

up to all the mouths.

.

~ Harry Edmund Martinson

translation by Robert Bly

art by the author

.

.

beneath the seen

.

Is this the largest organism in the world? 

This 2,400-acre (9.7 km2) site in eastern Oregon
 had a contiguous growth of mycelium 
estimated at 1,665 football fields in size 
and 2,200 years old, this one fungus has killed the forest
 above it several times over, and in so doing has built deeper soil layers
 that allow the growth of ever-larger stands of trees. 
Mushroom-forming forest fungi are unique
 in that their mycelial mats can achieve
 such massive proportions.

.

~ from Wikipedia

.

Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome.
 It's true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears
 above the ground lasts only a single summer. 

Then it withers away - an ephemeral apparition. 
When we think of the unending growth and decay of life
 and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity.
 Yet I have never lost the sense of something that lives
 and endures beneath the eternal flux. What we see is blossom, 
which passes. The rhizome remains.

~ Carl Jung

from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Your desiring cannot

.

.

Love is not condescending, never that,

nor books, nor any marking on paper,

nor what people say of each other.

.

Love is a tree

with branches reaching into eternity

and roots set deep in eternity,

and no trunk.

.

Have you seen it? The mind cannot.

Your desiring cannot.

.

The longing you feel for this love

comes from inside you.

.

When you become the Friend,

your longing will be as the man in the ocean

who holds to a piece of wood.

.

Eventually, wood, man, and ocean

become one swaying being,

Shams Tabriz, the secret of God.

.

~ Rumi

.

once, more intimate

.

.

Yet in the alert, warm animal there lies

the pain and burden of an enormous sadness.

For it too feels the presence of what often 

overwhelms us: a memory, as if

the element we keep pressing toward was once

more intimate, more true, and our communion

infinitely tender.  Here all is distance;

there it was breath.  After that first home,

the second seems ambiguous and drafty.

.

Oh bliss of the tiny creature which remains

forever inside the womb that was its shelter;

joy of the gnat which, still within, leaps up

even at its marriage: for everything is womb.

And look at the half-assurance of the bird,

which knows both inner and outer, from its source,

as if it were the soul of an Etruscan,

flown out of a dead man received inside a space,

but with his reclining image as the lid.

And how bewildered is any womb-born creature

that has to fly.  As if terrified and fleeing

from itself, it zigzags through the air, the way

a crack runs through a teacup.  So the bat 

quivers across the porcelain of evening.

.

And we: spectators, always, everywhere,

turned toward the world of objects, never outward.

It fills us.  We arrange it.  It breaks down.

We rearrange it, then break down ourselves.

.

Who has twisted us around like this, so that

no matter what we do, we are in the posture

of someone going away? Just as, upon

the farthest hill, which shows him his whole valley

one last time, he turns, stops, lingers -,

so we live here, forever taking leave.

.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

excerpt from the Duino Elegies

.

Knowing Nothing

.

Love is not the reason.

Love is the lure,

the thin goat staked out in the clearing.

The lion has stalked

the village for a long time.

It does not want the goat,

who stands thin and bleating,

tied to its bit of wood.

The goat is not the reason

The reason is the lion,

whose one desire is to enter -

Not the goat, which is

only the lure, only excuse,

but the one burning life

it has hunted for a long time

disguised as hunger.  Disguised as love.

Which is not the reason.

Or would you think

that the bones of a lion reason?

Would you think that the tongue?

The lion does not want the goat,

it wants only to live.  Alone if it must.

In pain if it must.  Knowing nothing.

Like the goat, it wants only to live.

Like love. Or would you think that the heart?

~ Jane Hirshfield

from Lives of the Heart

.

A Month of Days and Nights

.

Days that could have
been anything,
night that could have been anything,
turned with the leaves.

Then, someone played
the piano -
halting,
unpracticed, and perfect.

I listened to pity
and lowered my head in shame.
Ashamed not at my tears,
or even at what has been wasted,
but to have been dry-eyed so long.

~ Jane Hirshfield
from The lives of the Heart


.

stay with that silence

...

There was a time we lost ourselves in others,

a time we ate the best of foods.

There was time we relied on the intellect,

a time we looked for fortune

but all this had no value in the end.

.

For a mouthful of food and some bitter herbs

we went everywhere,

we made so many plans

one day it was Rome,

the next day it was Africa.

.

We entered a raging battlefield, for what?

a few crumbs of bread.

.

Lose your soul in God's love, I swear

there is no other way.

.

Stay with that silence.

I once ran toward the knowledge of this world;

now the papers are packed, the pens are broken

O Saaqi, bring on the wine!

.

~ Rumi

from A Garden Beyond Paradise

version by Jonathan Star

.

Autumn Quince

.

How sad they are,

the promises we never return to.

They stay in our mouths,

roughen the tongue, lead lives of their own.

Houses built and unwittingly lived in;

a succession of milk bottles brought to the door

every morning and taken inside.

.

And which one is real?

The music in the composer's ear

or the lapsed piece the orchestra plays?

The world is a blurred version of itself --

marred, lovely, and flawed.

It is enough.

.

~ Jane Hirshfield

from Of Gravity & Angels

.

from "Among School Children"

.

.

Labour is blossoming or dancing where

The body is not bruised to pleasure soul.

Nor beauty born out of its own despair,

Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.

O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,

Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

.

~ W. B. Yeats

.

Be still

.

.

Be still.

Listen to the stones of the wall.

be silent, they try

To speak your

.

Name.

Listen

To the living walls.

Who are you?

Who

Are you? Whose

Silence are you?

.

Who (be quiet)

Are you (as these stones

Are quiet). Do not

Think of what you are

Still less of

What you may one day be.

Rather

Be what you are (but who?) be

The unthinkable one

You do not know.

.

~ Thomas Merton

excerpt from In Silence

.

emptiness and freedom

.

.

What can I say about the emptiness and freedom 

into whose door I entered for that half-minute, 

which was enough for a lifetime, 

because it was a new life altogether?  

.

There is nothing with which to compare it.  

I could call it nothingness, 

but it is an infinitely fruitful freedom, 

to lack all things and to lack my self 

in the fresh air of that happiness 

that seems to be above all modes of being.  

.

Don't let me build any more walls around it, or I will shut myself out.

.

~ Thomas Merton

from Dialogues with Silence

sketch by the author

.

I wearied myself searching

I wearied myself searching for the friend

With efforts beyond my strength

I came to the door

And saw how powerfully the locks were bolted

And the longing in me became that strong

And then I saw that I was gazing from within the presence

Only after that waiting and giving up all trying

Did Lalla flow out from where I knelt

~ Lalla