carmel point

The extraordinary patience of things!
This beautiful place defaced with a crop of suburban houses -
How beautiful when we first beheld it,
Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs;
No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing,
Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop rockheads -
Now the spoiler has come: does it care?
Not faintly, It has all time, It knows the people are a tide
That swells and in time will ebb, and all
Their works dissolve.  Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty
Lives in the very grain of the granite,
Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff. - As for us:
We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident 
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.






~ Robinson Jeffers
art by Gordon Mortensen

790

Nature — the Gentlest Mother is,

Impatient of no Child —

The feeblest — or the waywardest —

Her Admonition mild —

In Forest — and the Hill —

By Traveller — be heard —

Restraining Rampant Squirrel —

Or too impetuous Bird —

How fair Her Conversation —

A Summer Afternoon —

Her Household — Her Assembly —

And when the Sun go down —

Her Voice among the Aisles

Incite the timid prayer

Of the minutest Cricket —

The most unworthy Flower —

When all the Children sleep —

She turns as long away

As will suffice to light Her lamps —

Then bending from the Sky —

With infinite Affection —

And infiniter Care —

Her Golden finger on Her lip —

Wills Silence — Everywhere —

~ Emily Dickinson

with thanks to writers almanac

lost in the forest

Lost in the forest, I broke off a dark twig

and lifted its whisper to my thirsty lips:

myabe it was the voice of the rain crying, 

a cracked bell, or a torn heart.

Something from far off it seemed

deep and secret to me, hidden by the earth,

a shout muffled by huge autumns,

by the moist half-open darkness of the leaves.

Wakening from the dreaming forest there, the hazel-sprig

sang under my tongue, its drifting fragrance

climbed up though my conscious mind

as if suddenly the roots I had left behind

cried out to me, the land I had lost with my childhood -

and I stopped, wounded by the wandering scent.

~ Pablo Neruda

.

a thought

Some thoughts

throw off 

a backward heat

as walls might,

at night, in summer.

It could happen 

this moment -

Some movement.

One word's almost

imperceptible shiver.

And what was

long cold

in your left palm,

long cold in your right palm,

might find itself

malleable, warmer.

An apricot

could be planted

in such a corner.

~ Jane Hirshfield

from Come, Thief

not mine

All my life to pretend this world of theirs is mine

And to know such pretending is disgraceful.

But what can I do? Suppose I suddenly screamed

And started to prophesy. No one would hear me. 

Their screens and microphones are not for that. 

Others like me wander the streets

And talk to themselves. Sleep on benches in parks,

Or on pavements in alleys. For there aren't enough prisons

To lock up all the poor. I smile and keep quiet. 

They won't get me now. 

To feast with the chosen—that I do well.

~ Czeslaw Milosz 

translated by Robert Hass 

photo by Christine de Grancy

meaning

.

When I die, I will see the lining of the world. 

The other side, beyond bird, mountain, sunset. 

The true meaning, ready to be decoded. 

What never added up will add Up, 

What was incomprehensible will be comprehended. 

- And if there is no lining to the world? 

If a thrush on a branch is not a sign, 

But just a thrush on the branch? If night and day 

Make no sense following each other? 

And on this earth there is nothing except this earth? 

- Even if that is so, there will remain 

A word wakened by lips that perish, 

A tireless messenger who runs and runs 

Through interstellar fields, through the revolving galaxies, 

And calls out, protests, screams.

~ Czeslaw Milosz

snow-mountain

.

All my life perplexed by truth and falsity, right and wrong;

Now amusing myself in the moonlight,

Laughing at the wind,

Listening to the songs of birds --

So many years spent idly contemplating

The immense white layer on the mountains;

This winter, all of a sudden,

I see it for the first time as a snow-mountain.

~ Dogen

english version by Steven Heine

from The Zen Poetry of Dogen

with thanks to poetry chaikhana

art by Chen Jun

ladder

A man tips back his chair, all evening.

Years later, the ladder of small indentations

still marks the floor. Walking across it, then stopping.

Rarely are what is spoken and what is meant the same.

Mostly the mouth says one thing, the thighs and knees

say another, the floor hears a third.

Yet within us,

objects and longings are not different.

They twist on the stem of the heart, like ripening grapes.

~ Jane Hirshfield 
from Given Sugar, Given Salt

with thanks to nexus

children of a full life

.

with special thanks to it's all dhamma

why do I write

I write because to write a new sentence, let alone a new poem, is to cross the threshold into both a larger existence and a profound mystery. A thought was not there, then it is. An image, a story, an idea about what it is to be human, did not exist, then it does. With every new poem, an emotion new to the heart, to the world, speaks itself into being. Any new metaphor is a telescope, a canoe in rapids, an MRI machine. And like that MRI machine, sometimes its looking is accompanied by an awful banging. To write can be frightening as well as magnetic. You don't know what will happen when you throw open your windows and doors.

Why write? You might as well ask a fish, why swim, ask an apple tree, why make apples? The eye wants to look, the ear wants to hear, the heart wants to feel more than it thought it could bear...

The writer, when she or he cannot write, is a person outside the gates of her own being. Not long ago, I stood like that for months, disbarred from myself. Then, one sentence arrived; another. And I? I was a woman in love. For that also is what writing is. Every sentence that comes for a writer when actually writing—however imperfect, however inadequate—every sentence is a love poem to this world and to our good luck at being here, alive, in it.

~ Jane Hirshfield

Che Fece... Il Gran Refiuto

.

For some people the day comes

when they have to declare the great Yes

or the great No. It’s clear at once who has the Yes

ready within him; and saying it,

he goes from honor to honor, strong in his conviction.

He who refuses does not repent. Asked again,

he’d still say no. Yet that no—the right no—

drags him down all his life.

~ Constantine P. Cavafy

from C.P. Cavafy: Collected Poems

translated by Edmund Keeley and Phillip Sherrard

the falling

.

You turn towards meteor showers in August,

wishing yourself like that:

bright and burning wholly out.

When feeling finally comes it is

that falling, matter breaking away

from air, the sound

of crickets moving through the grass like fire—

and the strangely twisted metal

in the field that a child finds:

residue, crown.

Then there’s the story of the Chinese sage,

in anger and despair, who cut his body away in pieces,

flung them into the lake.

Each one, becoming finned and whole, swims off.

~ Jane Hirshfield

a lie

self-portrait - 1901

Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth

Everyone wants to understand painting. 

Why don’t they try to understand the song of the birds?

 Why do they love a night, a flower, 

everything which surrounds man, 

without attempting to understand them? 

 

Whereas where painting is concerned, they want to understand. 

Let them understand above all that the artist works from necessity; 

that he, too, is a minute element of the world

 to whom one should ascribe no more importance 

than so many things in nature which charm us 

but which we do not explain to ourselves.

 

 Those who attempt to explain a picture 

are on the wrong track most of the time.

~ Pablo Picasso

Boisgeloup, winter 1934

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

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