exclude nothing

.

We must assume our existence as broadly as we in any way can; 

everything, even the unheard-of, must be possible in it. 

That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us:

to have courage for the most strange, 

the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter. 

That mankind has in this sense been cowardly has done life endless harm; 

the experiences that are called "visions," the whole so-called "spirit-world," 

death, all those things that are so closely akin to us, 

have by daily parrying been so crowded out of life 

that the senses with which we could have grasped them are atrophied. 

 But fear of the inexplicable has not alone impoverished the existence of the individual; 

the relationship between one human being and another has also been cramped by it, 

as though it had been lifted out of the riverbed of endless possibilities 

and set down in a fallow spot on the bank, to which nothing happens. 

For it is not inertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves 

from case to case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed: 

it is shyness before any sort of new, unforeseeable experience 

with which one does not think oneself able to cope. 

But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, 

not even the most enigmatical, will live the relation to another as something alive 

and will himself draw exhaustively from his own existence. 

For if we think of this existence of the individual as a larger or smaller room,

 it appears evident that most people learn to know only a corner of their room, 

a place by the window, a strip of floor on which they walk up and down. 

Thus they have a certain security. 

And yet that dangerous insecurity is so much more human 

which drives the prisoners in Poe's stories to feel out the shapes of their horrible dungeons 

and not be strangers to the unspeakable terror of their abode. 

We, however, are not prisoners. 

No traps or snares are set about us, 

and there is nothing which should intimidate or worry us. 

We are set down in life as in the element to which we best correspond, 

and over and above this we have through thousands of years of accommodation 

become so like this life, that when we hold still we are, through a happy mimicry, 

scarcely to be distinguished from all that surrounds us. 

We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. 

Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abuses belong to us; 

are dangers at hand, we must try to love them. 

And if only we arrange our life according to that principle 

which counsels us that we must always hold to the difficult, 

then that which now still seems to us the most alien 

will become what we most trust and find most faithful. 

How should we be able to forget those ancient myths about dragons 

that at the last moment turn into princesses; 

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. 

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

the hawk in his nest

.

It's all right if this suffering goes on for years. 

It's all right if the hawk never finds his own nest.

It's all right if we never receive the love we want. 

It's all right if we listen to the sitar for hours.

It doesn't matter how softly the musician plays.

Sooner or later the melody will say it all. 

It doesn't matter if we regret our crimes or not.

The mice will carry all our defeats into Asia,

And the Tuva throat-singers will tell the whole story. 

It's all right if we can't remain cheerful all day.

The task we have accepted is to go down

To renew our friendship with the ruined things. 

It's all right if people think we are idiots.

It's all right if we lie face down on the earth.

It's all right if we open the coffin and climb in. 

It's not our fault that things have gone wrong.

Let's agree it was Saturn and the other old men

Who have arranged these series of defeats for us.

~ Robert Bly

from Talking into the Ear of a Donkey

the darkness that comes with every infinite fall

.

You see, I want a lot.

Perhaps I want everything:

the darkness that comes with every infinite fall

and the shivering blaze of every step up.

So many live on and want nothing

and are raised to the rank of prince

by the slippery ease of their light judgments.

But what you love to see are faces

that so work and feel thirst…

You have not grown old, and it is not too late

to dive into your increasing depths

where life calmly gives out its own secret.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

maturity

.

A level of mental maturity is reached 

when nothing external is of any value 

and the heart is ready to relinquish all. 

Then the real has a chance and it grasps it. 

Delays, if any, are caused by the mind unwilling to see or to discard.

~ Nisargadatta Maharaj

silence and solitude

.

Trusting this more penumbral dimension brings us to new places in the human adventure. 

 But we have to let go in order to be; 

we have to stop forcing ourselves, 

or we will never enter our own belonging. 

 There is something ancient at work in us creating novelty. 

 In fact, you need very little in order to develop a real sense of your own spiritual individuality. 

 One of the things that is absolutely essential is silence, the other is solitude.

~ John O'Donohue

from Anam Cara

it depends on you

If in your heart you make

a manger for his birth,

then God will once again

become a child on earth.

~ Angelus Silesius

abundant heart

.

Because the pelicans circle and dive, the fish

Because the cows are fat, the rains

Because the tree is heavy with pears, the earth

Because the woman grows thin, the heart

~ Jane Hirshfield

from The Lives of the Heart

heaven is only present

.

Hell is timely, for Hell is the thought

that Hell will go on, on and on, without end.

Heaven is only present, instantaneous and eternal,

a mayfly, a blue dayflower, a life entirely given,

complete forever in its hour.

~ Wendell Berry

from Leavings

silent in the moonlight

.

Silent in the moonlight, no beginning or end.

Alone, and not alone.  A man and a woman lie

On open ground, under an antelope robe.

They sleep under animal skin, looking up

At the old, clear stars.  How many years?

The robe thrown over them, rough

Where they sleep.  Outside, the moon, the plains

Silent in the moonlight, no beginning or end.

~ Robert Bly

from Talking into the Ear of a Donkey

a sybil

.

Long before our time they called her old,

But she'd walk down the same road every day.

Her age became too much to say

In years — and, like a forest's, would be told 

In centuries. She comes to stand at dusk — 

Her spot each time the same — and to foretell.

She is a hollow, wrinkled husk,

Dark as a fire-gutted citadel. 

She has to turn her flock of talking loose

Or it will grow too crowded to relieve.

Flapping and screaming, words are flying all 

Around her. Then, returning home to roost,

They find a perch beneath her eyebrows' eaves,

And in that shadow wait for night to fall.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

art by picasso

non-violence

.

Non-violence is perhaps the most exacting of all forms of struggle, 

not only because it demands first of all that one be ready to suffer evil 

and even face the threat of death without retaliation, 

but because it excludes mere transient self-interest, 

even political, from its considerations.

 ~ Thomas Merton

shark's teeth

.

Everything contains some

silence.  Noise gets

its zest from the

small shark's-tooth-

shaped fragments

of rest angled

in it. An hour

of city holds maybe

a minute of these

remnants of a time

when silence reigned,

compact and dangerous

as a shark.  Sometimes

a bit of a tail

or fin can still

be sensed in parks.

~ Kay Ryan

from The Best of It

born at each moment into the everlasting newness

.

My gaze is clear as a sunflower.

My way is to walk the roads

Looking right and left

And sometimes looking behind me...

What I see at each moment

Is that which I never

Caught sight of before.

I have the knack of full awareness

The knack of essential astonishment

That an infant might experience

If at birth he were aware

That he was actually born!

I feel myself born at each moment

Into the everlasting newness

of the world.

I believe in the world

As I believe in a daisy

Because I see it.

But I do not think about it

Because to think is to not-understand.

The world was not made 

For us to think about it

(To think is to have sick vision)

But for us to look at it and assent.

I have no philosophy: I have senses ...

If I talk of nature, that is not because

I know what nature is

But because I love it, and love is for this only:

For he who loves never knows what he loves

Or why he loves, or what love is.

Loving is eternal innocence

And the only innocence is not-thinking.

~ Fernando Pessoa

from The Keeper of the Flocks

translated by Thomas Merton
art by van gogh

poetry of gratefulness

.

.

the book of Camp Branch

.

Camp Branch, my native stream,

forever unreturning flows

from the town down to Cane Run

which flows to the river.  It is 

my native descent, my native

walk, my native thought

that stays and goes, passing

ever downward toward the sea.

Its sound is a song that flings up

the light to the undersides of leaves.

Its song and light are a way

of walking, a way of thought

moved by sound and sight.

It flows as deep in its hollow

as it can go, far down as it has

worn its way. Passing down

over its plunder of rocks, it makes

an irregular music.  Here 

is what I want to know.  Here

is what I am trying to say.

O brave Ross Feld, here is

no "fortification against time."

Here the fort has fallen 

and the water passes its benediction

over the shards, singing!

How much delight I've known

in navigating down the flow

by stepping stones, by sounding

stones, by words too that are

stepping and sounding stones.

Going down stone by stone,

the song of the water changes,

changing the way I walk

which changes my thought

as I go.  Stone to stone

the stream flows.  Stone to stone

the walker goes.  The words

stand stone still until

the flow moves them, changing

the sound - a new word -

a new place to step or stand.

In the notch of Camp Branch

the footing changes, year

to year, sometimes

day to day, as the surges

of the stream move the rocks.

Every walk, as Archie Ammons

said, "is a new walk." And so

go slow.  Let the mind

step with the feet

as the stream steps

downward over the rocks,

nowhere anywhere

but where it is.

In the crease of its making

the steep stream gathers

the seeps that come silently

down from the wooded slants.

Only there at the rockbed

of the branch do the waters break

into light, into singing

of water flowing over rocks

which, in its motion, the water

moves.  And so, singing, the song

changes, moved by music

harsh and crude: splashes,

slubbers, chuckles, and warbles,

the hollow tones of a bell,

a sustained pour, the small

fall steady as a column.

Sometimes, gentled, if you

stand while it flows, it seems

to meditate upon itself

and the hill's long changing

under the sun and rain.

A changing song,

a changing walk,

a changing thought.

A sounding stone,

a stepping stone,

a word

that is a sounding and a stepping

stone.

A language that is a stream flowing

and is a man's thought as he 

walks and thinks beside the stream.

His thoughts will hold

if the words will hold, if each

is a stone that will bear weight,

placed by the flow

in the flow.  The language too

descends through time, subserving

false economy, heedless power,

blown with the gas of salesmanship,

rattled with the sale of needless war,

worn by the mere unhearing

babble of thoughtlessness,

and must return to its own 

downward flow by the flowing

water, the muttered syllables,

the measureless music, the stream

flowing and singing, the man

walking and thinking, balanced

on unsure footholds

in the flowing stream.

"Make sense," I told myself,

the song of the tumbling waters

in my ears.  The sense you make

may make its way along the stream,

but it will not be the stream's sense

you make, nor yet your own

quite, for the flux of language

will make its claim too

upon your walk, upon the stream.

The words fall at last

onto the page, the turning leaf

in the Book of Camp Branch

in time's stream.  As the eye,

as the mind, moves from

moving water to turning page,

what is lost?  What, worse,

is lost if the words falsify

the stream in your walk beside it?

To be carried or to resist

you must be a stone

in the way.  You must be

a stone rolled away.

The song changes by singing

into a different song.

It sings by falling.  The water

descending in its old groove

wears it new.  The words descending

to the page render the possible

into the actual, by wear,

for better or worse, renew

the wearied mind.  This is only

the lowly stream of Camp Branch,

but every stream is lowly.

Only low in the land does 

the water flow.  It goes

to seek the level that is lowest,

the silence that gathers

many songs, the darkness

made of many lights,

and then by the sun is raised

again into the air.

~ Wendell Berry

from Leavings

art by Norma Herring