age

.

As some people age 

they kinden.

The apertures

of their eyes widen.

I do not think they weaken;

I think something weak strengthens

until they are more and more it,

like letting in heaven.

But other people are 

mussels or clams, frightened.

Steam or knife blades mean open.

They hear heaven, they think boiled or broken.

.

~ Kay Ryan

from The Best of It

avoiding discord leads to war

.

The goddess of discord, Eris, was naturally not popular in Olympus, and when the gods gave a banquet they were apt to leave her out.  Resenting this deeply, she determined to make trouble... into an important marriage celebration to which she was not invited she threw a golden a golden apple marked "For the Fairest."  Of course all the goddesses wanted it.  Zeus was asked to judge between Aphrodite, Hera, and Pallus Athena, but wisely refused.  He told them that prince Paris was an excellent judge of beauty, and that they should go to him.  He was not asked, however, to gaze at the radiant divinities and choose which seemed to him the fairest, but only to consider the bribes each offered and choose which seemed to him best worth taking.  What men cared about most was set before him.  Hera promised to make him Lord of Europe and Asia, Athena, that he would lead the Trojans to victory against the Greeks and lay Greece in ruins; Aphrodite, that the fairest woman in all the world should be his.  He gave Aphrodite the apple and in doing so, set the stage for the Trojan War.

~ Edith Hamilton

from Mythology - Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes

story originally from The Judgement of Paris which 
is part of the play Trojan Woman by Euripides

human being

.

.

Not Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu

Buddhist, sufi, or zen. Not any religion

or cultural system. I am not from the East

or the West, not out of the ocean or up

from the ground, not natural or ethereal, not

composed of elements at all. I do not exist,

am not an entity in this world or in the next,

did not descend from Adam and Eve or any

origin story. My place is placeless, a trace

of the traceless. Neither body or soul.

I belong to the beloved, have seen the two

worlds as one and that one call to and know,

first, last, outer, inner, only that

breath breathing human being.

~ Rumi

 translated by Coleman Barks

from The Essential Rumi

a woman who was beautiful

.

A woman who was beautiful

one day

removed her face

her head became smooth

blind and deaf

safe from the snares of mirrors

and from looks of love

amid the reeds of the sun

her head hatched by a sparrowhawk

could not be found

secrets much more beautiful

for not having been said

words not written

steps erased

nameless ashes flown away

without marble plaque

desecrating memory

so many wings to break

before nightfall.

~ Alice (Rahon) Paalen

painting of Alice by her husband Wolfgang Paalen

with thanks to leda-swanson

lovers of all your elements?

.

.

And the priestess spoke again and said: 

Speak to us of Reason and Passion.

And he answered, saying:

Your soul is oftentimes a battlefield, upon which your reason 

and your judgment wage war against your passion and your appetite.

Would that I could be the peacemaker in your soul, 

that I might turn the discord and the rivalry of your elements into oneness and melody.

But how shall I, unless you yourselves be also the peacemakers, 

nay, the lovers of all your elements?

Your reason and your passion are the rudder and the sails of your seafaring soul.

If either your sails or your rudder be broken, you can but toss and drift, 

or else be held at a standstill in mid-seas.

For reason, ruling alone, is a force confining; and passion,

 unattended, is a flame that burns to its own destruction.

Therefore let your soul exalt your reason to the height of passion, 

that it may sing;

And let it direct your passion with reason, 

that your passion may live through its own daily resurrection, 

and like the phoenix rise above its own ashes.

I would have you consider your judgment and your appetite 

even as you would two loved guests in your house.

Surely you would not honour one guest above the other; 

for he who is more mindful of one loses the love and the faith of both.

Among the hills, when you sit in the cool shade of the white poplars, 

sharing the peace and serenity of distant fields and meadows -- 

then let your heart say in silence, "God rests in reason."

And when the storm comes, and the mighty wind shakes the forest, 

and thunder and lightning proclaim the majesty of the sky, -- 

then let your heart say in awe, "God moves in passion."

And since you are a breath in God's sphere, 

and a leaf in God's forest, 

you too should rest in reason and move in passion.

.

~ Kahlil Gibran

from The Prophet

with thanks to poetry chaikhana

the tombs of the resurrected

.

.

This was the time which began with his feeling as general and anonymous as a slowly recovering convalescent.  He didn't love anything, unless it could be said that he loved existing.  The humble love that his sheep felt for him was no burden;  like sunlight falling through clouds, it dispersed around him and softly shimmered upon the meadows.  On the innocent trail of their hunger, he walked silently over pastures of the world.  Strangers saw him on the Acropolis, and perhaps for many years he was one of the shepherds in Les Baux, and saw petrified time outlast that noble family which, in spite of all their conquests under the holy numbers seven and three, could not overcome the fatal sixteen-rayed star on their own coat-of-arms.  Or should I imagine him at Orange, resting against the rustic triumphal arch?  Should I see him in the soul-inhabited shade of Alyscamps, where, among the tombs that lie open as the tombs of the resurrected, his glance chases a dragonfly?

.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

translated by Stephen Mitchell

a desire to set himself adrift

.

A river tugs at whatever is within reach, trying to set it afloat and carry it downstream.  Living trees are undermined and washed away.  No piece of driftwood is safe, though stranded high up the bank; the river will rise to it, and away it will go.

The river extends this power of drawing all things with it even to the imagination of those who live on its banks.  Who can long watch the ceaseless lapsing of a river's current without conceiving a desire to set himself adrift, and, like the driftwood which glides past, float with the stream clear to the final ocean.

~ Harlan Hubbard

from Shantyboat - A River Way of Life

reminiscent of Van Gogh's Starry Night,

massive congregations of greenish phytoplankton 

swirl in dark water around Sweden’s Gotland island 

in a satellite picture by the U.S. Geological Survey

to a child dancing in the wind

.

Dance there upon the shore;

What need have you to care

For wind or water’s roar?

And tumble out your hair

That the salt drops have wet;

Being young you have not known

The fool’s triumph, nor yet

Love lost as soon as won,

Nor the best labourer dead

And all the sheaves to bind.

What need have you to dread

The monstrous crying of wind?

II

Has no one said those daring

Kind eyes should be more learn’d?

Or warned you how despairing

The moths are when they are burned,

I could have warned you, but you are young,

So we speak a different tongue.

O you will take whatever’s offered

And dream that all the world’s a friend,

Suffer as your mother suffered,

Be as broken in the end.

But I am old and you are young,

And I speak a barbarous tongue.

~ William Butler Yeats

(13 June 1865 – 28 January 1939)

from Responsibilities and Other Poems, 1916

thanks to woods lot

courting forgetfulness

.

It's hard to know what sort of rough music

Could send our forgetfulness back into the ground,

From which the gravediggers pulled it years ago.

The first moment of the day we court forgetfulness.

Even when we are fully awake, a century can

Go by in the space of a single heartbeat.

The life we lose through forgetfulness resembles

The earth that sticks to the sides of plowshares

And the eggs the hen has abandoned in the woods.

A thousand gifts were given to us in the womb.

We lost hundreds during the forgetfulness of birth,

And we lost the old heaven on the first day of school.

Forgetfulness resembles the snow that weighs down

The fir boughs; behind our house you'll find

A forest going on for hundreds of miles.

It's to our credit that we can remember

So many lines of Rilke, but the purpose of forgetfulness

Is to remember the last time we left this world.

~ Robert Bly

from Talking into the Ear of a Donkey

for Japan

.

to the present visitors

Now we come to the famous classroom 

where every year a fortunate few

in the days of their youth study

autumn forgetting the numbers beforehand

as they have been doing since the words 

were all in Latin no cameras

allowed in here notice the slight breeze 

from the windows here among the trees

and the fragrance at the end of spring

notice the leaves outside the window frames

the new grass in the light of morning

notice the charts of colors on the walls

set in order and the moons in the calendars

the constellations the dark dials

the portraits of flowers still as the tables

here they study what is too far away

ever to grasp and too near to recognize

notice the leaves changing as we watch

then it will be summer and these studies

will be over and then it will be autumn

and most of them will be forgotten

notice the bell in place outside the door

and the dog lying near the foot of the stairs

waiting for a time that she remembers

~ W.S. Merwin

from Present Company

art by van gogh

stranger (excerpt)

.

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

from The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton

art by picasso

get your living by loving

.

The great art of life is how to turn the surplus life of the soul into life for the body - 

so that life be not a failure... 

If I should sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, 

as most appear to do, 

I am sure that for me there would be nothing left worth living for.  

I trust that I shall never thus sell my birthright for a mess of pottage.  

I wish to suggest that a man may be very industrious, and yet not spend his time well.  

There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.  

All great enterprises are self-supporting.  

The poet, for instance, must sustain his body by his poetry, 

as a steam planing mill feeds its boiler with the shavings it makes.  

You must get your living by loving.

.

~ Henry David Thoreau

from his journal, March 13, 1853

art by roderick maclver

the active life -

.

to the present tense

.

By the time you are

by the time you come to be

by the time you read this

by the time you are written

by the time you forget

by the time you are water through fingers

by the time you are taken for granted

by the time it hurts 

by the time it goes on hurting

by the time there are no words for you

by the time you remember

but without names

by the time you are in the papers

and on the telephone

passing unnoticed there too

who is it

to whom you come 

before whose very eyes

you are disappearing

without making yourself known

.

~ W.S. Merwin

from Present Company