gazed--and gazed--but little thought

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I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine

And twinkle on the milky way,

They stretched in never-ending line

Along the margin of a bay:

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,

Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they

Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:

A poet could not but be gay,

In such a jocund company:

I gazed--and gazed--but little thought

What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils.

~ William Wordsworth

thanks to writers almanac

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Leonardo da Vinci

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Leonardo da Vinci

Born: 15 April 1452 in Anchiano in Vinci,

Died:  2 May 1519 at Schloss Clos Lucé Amboise,

Leonardo di ser Piero actually,  

Leonardo, was a painter, sculptor, architect, anatomist, mechanic, engineer and natural philosopher. 

His name suffix "da Vinci" is not a family name, but means from Vinci. 

The birthplace Vinci is a fort or fortified hilltop village,

 located in the Florentine territory, about 30 km west of Florence, near Empoli.

He learned painting from the painter and sculptor Andrea del Verrocchio in Florence where da Vinci later worked independently, before he entered the service in 1482 the Count of Milan. In his time in Milan, da Vinci painted a mural of the Last Supper, and also accomplished much of his scientific work. He returned to Florence in 1503, here he painted the portrait of "Mona Lisa".   His "Last Supper" and "Mona Lisa" are among the most famous and influential paintings of the Renaissance. 

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more on Leonardo: http://www.mos.org/leonardo/

thanks to Semsakrebsler

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annulment of all laws

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The infinite bustle of Nature on a summer's noon,  

or her infinite silence of a summer's night, 

gives utterance to no dogma.  

They do not say to us even with a seer's assurance, 

that this or that law is immutable and so ever and only can the universe exist.  

But they are the indifferent occasion for all things and the annulment of all laws.

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~ Henry David Thoreau

from his journal, 1840

art by roderick maclver

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film by an Afghan - American woman

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The Black Tulip (2010) [ behind the scene promo ]

The film depicts the fictional Mansouri family who start a restaurant in Kabul named The Poet’s Corner, where artists and writers meet.The story centers on Farishta (Cole), a woman who runs the cafe, where they serve wine in teapots and have poetry readings by locals and members of the U.S. military. This ultimately angers the Taliban who begin kidnapping and assassinating family and friends of the cafe

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with thanks to everything Afghanistan

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the best

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When Banzan was walking through a market he over heard a conversation between a butcher and his customer.

"Give me the best piece of meat you have," said the customer.

"Everything in my shop is the best," replied the butcher. 

 "You cannot find here any piece of meat that is not the best."

At these words Banzan became enlightened.

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from Zen Flesh Zen Bones

compiled by Paul Reps and Nyogen Senzaki

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faces

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Have I said it before?  I am learning to see.  Yes, I am beginning. 

 It's still going badly.  But I intend to make the most of my time.

For example, it never occurred to me before how many faces there are.

  There are multitudes of people, but there are many more faces,

 because each person has several of them.  There are people 

who wear the same face for years; naturally it wears out,

 gets dirty, splits at the seams, stretches like gloves worn

 during a long journey.  They are thrifty, uncomplicated people; 

they never change it, never even have it cleaned.  It's good enough,

 they say, and who can convince them of the contrary? Of course, 

since they have several faces, you might wonder what they do

 with the other ones.   They keep them in storage.  Their children will wear them. 

 But sometimes it also happens that their dogs go out wearing them.  

And why not? A face is a face.

Other people change faces incredibly fast, put on one after another,

 and wear them out. At first, they think they have an unlimited supply;

 but when they are barely forty years old they come to their last one.

 There is, to be sure, something tragic about this.  They are not accustomed

 to taking care of faces; their last one is worn through in a week,

 has holes in it, is in many places a thin as paper, and then, little by little,

 the lining shows through, the non-face, and they walk around with that on.

But the woman, the woman: she had completely fallen into herself,

 forward into her hands.  It was on the corner of rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. 

 I began to walk quietly as soon as I saw her.  When poor people 

are thinking, they shouldn't be disturbed.  Perhaps their idea 

will still occur to them.

The street was too empty; its emptiness had gotten bored and pulled my steps

 out from under my feet and clattered around in them, all over the street,

 as if they were wooden clogs.  The woman sat up, frightened, she pulled out

 of herself, too quickly, too violently, so that her face was left in her two hands. 

 I could see it lying there: its hollow form.  It cost me an indescribable effort

 to stay with those two hands, not to look at what had been torn out of them.

  I shuddered to see a face from the inside, but I was much more afraid 

of that bare flayed head waiting there, faceless.

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~ Rainer Maria Rilke

from The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

edited and translated by Stephen Mitchell

art by michael d. edens

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self and the unattainable

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… says Butsugen: There are two kinds of disease the Zen students are liable to suffer from these days: 

(1) Seeking for the donkey while riding on one; and 

(2) Once on it, neglecting to get off it.

You may say that the seeking for the donkey while you are already on it is the greater disease. But, I tell you, it does not take a man of great intelligence to become conscious of the stupidity of seeking for the donkey when you are right on it. The more serious one is not to dare come down from the donkey even after realizing that you are on it, for this induces in you a state of self-complacency and makes you go on riding.

The most important thing in the study of Zen is not to keep on riding on the donkey but to realize that you are the donkey itself, and in fact, that the whole universe is the donkey itself.

~ D.T. Suzuki  

from What is Zen? 

thanks to zen books

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abide continually in the deep center of your spirit

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You have reached a point where your further growth in perfection demands that you do not feed your mind with meditations on the multiple aspects of your being.  In the past, these pious meditations helped you to understand something of God.  They fed your interior affection with a sweet and delightful attraction ... but now it is important that you seriously concentrate on the effort to abide continually in the deep center of your spirit, offering to God that naked blind awareness of your being which I call your first fruits. 

I want you to clearly understand that in this work it is not necessary to inquire into minute details of God's existence any more than of your own.  For there is no name, no experience, and no insight so akin to the everlastingness of God than what you can possess, perceive, and actually experience in the blind loving awareness of this word, is.  ...let your faculties rest from their minute inquiry into the attributes of  his being or yours.  Leave all this behind...

With perseverance in this practice, you will grow increasingly refined in singleness of heart until you are ready to strip, spoil, and utterly unclothe your self-awareness of everything, even the elemental awareness of your own being, so that you might be newly clothed in the gracious stark experience of God as he is in himself.

For this is the way of all real love.  The lover will utterly and completely despoil himself of everything, even his very self, because of the one he loves.  This is the meaning of the words; "Anyone who wishes to love me let him forsake himself."   ...to lose the knowledge and experience of self.  This is essential...

~ The Book of Privy Counseling

edited by william johnston

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Worship the Lord with your substance

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Worship the Lord with your substance

and feed the poor with your first fruits.

Thus shall your barns be filled with abundance 

and your presses run over with wine.

Solomon said this to his son but take it as addressed to yourself, and understand it spiritually...

Thus you can see that by pursuing your meditation to the farthest reaches and ultimate frontiers of  thought, you will find yourself in the end, on the essential ground of being with the naked perception and blind awareness of your own being.  And this is why your being alone can be called the first of your fruits.

So it is, that naked being takes first place among all your fruits, all the others being rooted in it.  But now you have come to a time when you will no longer profit by clothing or gathering into your awareness of naked being, any or all of its particulars, by which I mean your fruits, upon which you have laboriously meditated for so long.  Now it is enough to worship God perfectly with your substance, that is, with the offering of your naked being.  This alone constitutes your first fruits; it will be the unending sacrifice of praise for yourself and for all men that love requires.  

Leave the awareness of your being unclothed of all thoughts about its attributes, and your mind quite empty of all particular details relating to your being or that of any other creature.  For such thoughts will not satisfy your present need,  further your growth, nor bring you and others closer to perfection.  Let them alone.  Truly these meditations are useless to you now.  But this blind, general awareness of your being, conceived in an undivided heart, will satisfy your present need,  further your growth, and bring you and all mankind closer to perfection.  Believe me, it far surpasses the value of any particular thought, no matter how sublime.

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~ The Book of Privy Counseling

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on the occasion of her mothers death - Emily Dickinson

To Louise and Frances Norcross, November, 1882

Dear Cousins, 

I hoped to write you before, but mother's dying almost stunned my spirit. 

I have answered a few inquiries of love, but written little intuitively. She was scarcely the aunt you knew. The great mission of pain had been ratified—cultivated to tenderness by persistent sorrow, so that a larger mother died than had she died before. There was no earthly parting. She slipped from our fingers like a flake gathered by the wind, and is now part of the drift called "the infinite."

We don't know where she is, though so many tell us. 

I believe we shall in some manner be cherished by our Maker—that the One who gave us this remarkable earth has the power to surprise that which He has caused. Beyond that all is silence...

Mother was very beautiful when she had died. Seraphs are solemn artists. The illumination that comes but once paused upon her features, and it seemed like hiding a picture to lay her in the grave; but the grass that received my father will suffice his guest, the one he asked at the altar to visit him all his life.

I cannot tell how Eternity seems. It sweeps around me like a sea...Thank you for remembering me. Remembrance—mighty word. 

"Though gavest it to me from the foundation of the world."

Lovingly, 

Emily

life is never guaranteed to be safe

Architect, photographer, curator and blogger, Ai Weiwei is China's most famous and politically outspoken contemporary artist. As Ai Weiwei's latest work is unveiled in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, Alan Yentob reveals how this most courageous and determined of artists continues to fight for artistic freedom of expression while living under the restrictive shadows of authoritarian rule.

This is one arrest the authorities might live to regret. Its hypocritical that just a few years ago the government was funding Ai’s art, but by last year goons were beating him up and demolishing his brand new art studio in Shanghai. It is likely that arresting him will only increase his appeal and help add to some of the mystique he has cultivated. Whether he’s let go or kept under wraps, either way, Ai Wei Wei won’t be forgotten anytime soon.

sentencings

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A thing too perfect to be remembered:

stone beautiful only when wet.

* 

Blinded by light or black cloth—

so many ways

not to see others suffer.

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Too much longing:

it separates us

like scent from bread,

rust from iron.

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From very far or very close—

the most resolute folds of the mountain are gentle.

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As if putting arms into woolen coat sleeves,

we listen to the murmuring dead.

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Any point of a circle is its start:

desire forgoing fulfillment to go on desiring.

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In a room in which nothing

has happened,

sweet-scented tobacco.

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The very old, hands curling into themselves, remember their parents.

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Think assailable thoughts, or be lonely.

~ Jane Hirshfield

from Poetry (December 2010)

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late ripeness

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Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year,

I felt a door opening in me and I entered

the clarity of early morning.

One after another my former lives were departing,

like ships, together with their sorrow.

And the countries, cities, gardens, the bays of seas

assigned to my brush came closer,

ready now to be described better than they were before.

I was not separated from people,

grief and pity joined us.

We forget – I kept saying – that we are all children of the King.

For where we come from there is no division

into Yes and No, into is, was, and will be.

We were miserable, we used no more than a hundredth part

of the gift we received for our long journey.

Moments from yesterday and from centuries ago – 

a sword blow, the painting of eyelashes before a mirror

of polished metal, a lethal musket shot, a caravel

staving its hull against a reef – they dwell in us,

waiting for a fulfillment.

I knew, always, that I would be a worker in the vineyard,

as are all men and women living at the same time,

whether they are aware of it or not.

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~ Czeslaw Milosz
from Collected Poems, 1931-1987
translation by Robert Hass

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some days we are passive

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Some days we are passive, listening to the incoming waves.

On other days, we are like a light that sweeps

Out over the husky soybean fields all night.

What did we see today? Horses at the end

Of their tethering ropes, the wing of affection going over,

Flying bulls glimpsed passing the moon disc.

Rather than arguing about whether Giordano Bruno

Was right or not, it might be better to fall silent

And lose ourselves in the curved energy.

We know how many men live alone in their twenties,

And how many women are married to the wrong person,

And how many father and sons are strangers to each

other.

It’s all right if we keep forgetting the way home.

It’s all right if we don’t remember when we were born.

It’s all right if we write the same poem over and over.

Robert, I don’t know why you talk so confidently

About yourself in this way. There are a lot of shady

Characters in this town, and you are one of them.

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~ Robert Bly

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how would I paint happiness

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Something sudden, a windfall,

a meteor shower. No -

a flowering tree releasing

all its blossoms at once,

and the one standing beneath it

unexpectedly robed in bloom,

transformed into a stranger

too beautiful to touch.

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~ Lisel Mueller

from Imaginary Paintings

Alive Together: New And Selected Poems

with thanks to whiskey river

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