Sunday, October 23, 2011

a choice






"Give us a king."
 

Samuel told all the words of the Lord to the people who were asking him for a king, 
He said,
"This is what the king who will reign over you will do:

He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses,
and they will run in front of his chariots.
Some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties,
 and others to plow his ground and reap his harvest and still others to make weapons
 of war and equipment for his chariots. 

He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers.
He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves 
and give them to his attendants.

He will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it
 to his officials and attendants.
Your menservants and maidservants and the best of your cattle and donkeys
 he will take for his own use.

He will take a tenth of your flocks,
 and you yourselves will become his slaves.

When that day comes, you will cry out for relief 
from the king you have chosen,
and the Lord will not answer you in that day.

...


"No," they said, "We want a king over us.
Then we will be like all the other nations,
with a king to lead us and to go out before us
 and fight our battles."



~ 1 Samuel 8, 11-19
from the Holy Bible
new international version




Friday, October 21, 2011

no bell







When I heard the sound of the bell ringing,
there was no bell,
and there was no I -
there was only the ringing. 

Once you stop clinging and let things be,
you’ll be free, even of birth and death. 

You’ll transform everything…
And you’ll be at peace wherever you are. 

Even as fire finds peace
in its resting place without fuel,
when thoughts become silence
the soul finds peace in its own source. 

When the mind is silent,
then it can enter into a world
which is far beyond the mind:
the highest End. 

The mind should be kept in the heart
as long as it has not reached the highest End.
This is wisdom, and this is liberation. 





~ Upanishads 




Thursday, October 20, 2011

solitude









I was nearly killed here, one night in February.
My car shivered, and slewed sideways on the ice,
right across into the other lane. The slur of traffic
came at me with their lights.

My name, my girls, my job, all
slipped free and were left behind, smaller and smaller,
further and further away. I was a nobody:
a boy in a playground, suddenly surrounded.

The headlights of the oncoming cars
bore down on me as I wrestled the wheel through a slick
of terror, clear and slippery as egg-white.
The seconds grew and grew – making more room for me –
stretching huge as hospitals.

I almost felt that I could rest
and take a breath
before the crash.

Then something caught: some helpful sand
or a well-timed gust of wind. The car
snapped out of it, swinging back across the road.
A signpost shot up and cracked, with a sharp clang,
spinning away in the darkness.

And it was still. I sat back in my seat-belt
and watched someone tramp through the whirling snow
to see what was left of me.



~ Tomas Transtromer


Tranströmer is the recipient of the 2011 Nobel Prize for Literature. His other honors and awards include the Aftonbladets Literary Prize, the Bonnier Award for Poetry, the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the Oevralids Prize, the Petrach Prize in Germany, and the Swedish Award from International Poetry Forum.

He has read at many American universities, often with poet and friend Robert Bly. Tranströmer is a respected psychologist, and has worked at a juvenile prison, and with the disabled, convicts, and drug addicts. He lives with his wife Monica in Vasteras, west of Stockholm.

from  poets.org


Tuesday, October 18, 2011

two things






Two things of opposite natures seem to depend
On one another, as Logos depends
On Eros, day on night, the imagined

On the real. This is the origin of change.
Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace
And forth the particulars of rapture come.

Music falls on the silence like a sense
A passion that we feel, not understand.
Morning and afternoon are clasped together

And North and South are an intrinsic couple
And sun and rain a plural, like two lovers
That walk away together as one in the greenest body.





~ Wallace Stevens








the place of rest








Unto the deep the deep heart goes,
It lays its sadness nigh the breast:
Only the Mighty Mother knows
The wounds that quiver unconfessed.

It seeks a deeper silence still;
It folds itself around with peace,
Where thoughts alike of good or ill
In quietness unfostered cease.

It feels in the unwounding vast
For comfort for its hopes and fears:
The Mighty Mother bows at last;
She listens to her children's tears.

Where the last anguish deepens -- there
The fire of beauty smites through pain:
A glory moves amid despair,
The Mother takes her child again. 





~ A. E. (George William Russell)
with thanks to poetry chaikhana






Saturday, October 15, 2011

today





a radiance once seen only in time and space
 shares his blessing without boundary

today a named one 
brings a particular beauty to the nameless 

today the pain and strength of  longing
stretches beyond limits

today that sparkling love can't be seen with eyes,
we seek it everywhere





 ~  nead rellek
for Doug









Thursday, October 13, 2011

words' leaves







.
Truly now I've grown old
in the winter rains.
Even the words' leaves
of love
change in their falling




~ Ono no Komachi




care






.

Once upon a time, when Dongshan was ill, a monk asked him, 
"You are ill, teacher, but is there anyone who doesn't get ill?" 


Dongshan said, "There is." 
 

The monk said, "Does the one who doesn't get ill look after you?" 
 

Dongshan said, "No, I look after him." 
 

The monk said, "How is it when you look after him?" 

Dongshan said, "I see that there is no illness." 






~ Dongshan
from the Book of Serenity
Zen dialogue (Case 94)










Wednesday, October 12, 2011

poetry?




.
Now, what is poetry?
If you say it is simply a matter of words, I will say a good poet gets rid of words.
If you say it is simply a matter of meaning, I will say a good poet gets rid of meaning.
"But," you ask, "without words and without meaning, where is the poetry?"
To this I reply, "Get rid of words and get rid of meaning, and still there is poetry."



~ Yang Wan-li
translation by Jonathan Chaves




Tuesday, October 11, 2011

rain in May






.

The blackened iron
of the stove
is ticking into coolness
when the first drops 
start against the roof.
It is late: the night
has darkened into this
like a fruit--
a sudden pear-aroma fills the room.
Just before dawn 
it comes up harder again,
a white, steady drum of day-rain
caught in the moon's deep pail.
A battered tin-light
overspills ocean and sky,
hill opens to facing hill,
and I wake to a simple longing,
all I want of this ordinary hour,
this ordinary earth
that was long ago married to time:
to hear as a sand-crab hears the waves,
loud as a second heart;
to see as a green thing sees the sun,
with the undividing attention of blind love.






~ Jane Hirshfield




Monday, October 10, 2011

the ending earth-

.






stand with your lover on the ending earth-
and while a (huge by which huger than
huge) whoing sea leaps to greenly hurl snow, suppose we could not love, dear; imagine
ourselves like living neither nor dead these
(or many thousands hearts which don't and dream
or many million minds which sleep and move)
blind sand, at pitiless the mercy of
time time time time time
how fortunate are you and I, whose home
is timelessness: we who have wandered down
from fragrant mountains of eternal now
to frolic in such mysteries as birth
and death a day (or maybe even less)







~ e.e.cummings







contemplation







.

Contemplation cannot construct a new world by itself. 
Contemplation does not feed the hungry; it does not clothe the naked… 
and it does not return the sinner to peace, truth, and union with God. 
But without contemplation we cannot see what we do… 
Without contemplation we cannot understand the significance of the world in which we must act. 
Without contemplation we remain small, limited, divided, partial; 
we adhere to the insufficient, permanently united to our narrow group and its interests, 
losing sight of justice and charity, seized by the passions of the moments… 
Without contemplation, without the intimate, 
silent, secret pursuit of truth through love, 
our action loses itself in the world and becomes dangerous.





~ Thomas Merton
art by leonardo da vinci


Sunday, October 9, 2011

the silence



.
.



How many of your birthdays
I have by now been
glad of!  And all that time
I've been trying to tell you
how with you was born
my truest life and most 
desired, the better man
by your birth I am, however
fallen short. I'll never
get it right by half.
Between us, by now, what
is more telling than the silence
in which once more an old 
redbud simply blooms?
.







~ Wendell Berry
photo by Eliot Porter


Thursday, October 6, 2011

on creativity





.
When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer - say, traveling in a carriage, or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep; it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly.  Whence and how they come, I know not; nor can I force them...

When I proceed to write, the committing to paper is done quickly enough, for everything is, as I said before, already finished... But why my productions take from my hand that particular form and style that makes them Mozartish, and different from the works of other composers, is probably owing to the same cause which renders my nose so large or so aquiline, or, in short, make it Mozart's, and different from those other people. For I really do not study or aim at originality.


~ Mozart
translation by Edward Holmes

Mozart as a child, painted by Greuze



You will write if you will write without thinking of the result in terms of a result, but think of the writing in terms of discovery, which is to say that creation must take place between the pen and the paper, not before in a thought or afterwards in a recasting.  Yes, before in a thought , but not in careful thinking.  It will come if it is there and if you will let it come, and if you have anything you will get a sudden creative recognition... The great thing is not ever to think about form but let it come.  Does that sound strange from me?  They have accused me of thinking about nothing else.  Do you see the real joke?  It is the critics who have really thought about form always, and I have thought about - writing!


~ Gertrude Stein





The artist is a receptacle of emotions come from no matter where: from the sky, the earth, a piece of paper, a passing figure, a cobweb. This is why one must not discriminate between things.  There is no rank among them.  One must take one's good where one finds it...

When we invented cubism, we had no intention of inventing cubism, but simply of expressing what was in us. Nobody drew up a program of action, and through our friends the poets followed our efforts attentively, they never dictated to us.  The young painter of today often outline a program for themselves to follow and try to do their assignments correctly like well-behaved schoolboys.

The painter passes through states of fullness and emptying.  That is the whole secret of art.


~ Pablo Picasso
translated by Brewster Ghiselin





quotations taken here from Nine Gates - Entering the Mind of Poetry
by Jane Hirshfield




Wednesday, October 5, 2011

the ancient womb







The world rests in the night. 
Trees, mountains, fields, and faces are released from the prison of shape and the burden of exposure. 
Each thing creeps back into its own nature within the shelter of the dark. 
Darkness is the ancient womb. 
Nighttime is womb- time. Our souls come out to play. 
The darkness absolves everything; 
the struggle for identity and impression falls away. 
We rest in the night.






~ John O’Donohue 
from  Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom