again and again

Again and again, however we know the landscape of love

and the little churchyard there, with its sorrowing names,

and the frighteningly silent abyss into which the others

fall: again and again the two of us walk out together

under the ancient trees, lie down again and again

among the flowers, face to face with the sky.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke 

the couple

They turn the lights off, and its white globe glows

an instant and then dissolves, like a tablet

in a glass of darkness.  Then a rising.

The hotel walls shoot up into heaven's darkness.

Their movements have grown softer, and they sleep, 

but their most secret thoughts begin to meet

like two colors that meet and run together

on the wet paper in a schoolboy's painting.

It is dark and silent.  The city however has come nearer

tonight.  With its windows turned off. Houses have come.

They stand packed and waiting very near,

a mob of people with blank faces.

~ Tomas Transtromer

translated by robert bly

from The Half-Finished Heaven

art by picasso

the tangerine-eater

Oh what foresight!  This rabbit of the fruit-world!  Imagine: 
 thirty-seven little pits in a single specimen, ready to fall every-which-way
 and create offspring.  We had to correct that.  She could have populated
 the whole earth - this little headstrong Tangerine, wearing a dress
 too big for herself, as if she intended to keep on growing.
  In short: badly dressed; more concerned with reproduction 
than with style.  Show her the pomegranate, in her armor of Cordova leather: 
 she is bursting with future, holds herself back, condescends... 
And, letting us catch just a glimpse of her possible progeny, 
she smothers them in a dark-red cradle.  She thinks earth
 is too evasive to sign a pact of abundance.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

from Uncollected Poems,

four sketches

photo by bill thompson III

gratulerer med dagen Edvard

I was walking along a path with two friends – the sun was setting – 

suddenly the sky turned blood red – I paused, 

feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence – 

there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city – 

my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety – 

and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.

~ Edvard Munch 

from his diary Jan. 22, 1892

He paints, or rather regards, things in a way that is different from that of other artists. He sees only the essential, and that, naturally, is all he paints. For this reason Munch's pictures are as a rule "not complete", as people are so delighted to discover for themselves. Oh, yes, they are complete. His complete handiwork. Art is complete once the artist has really said everything that was on his mind, and this is precisely the advantage Munch has over painters of the other generation, that he really knows how to show us what he has felt, and what has gripped him, and to this he subordinates everything else.

~ Christian Krohg

a friend of Munch

Munch 1933

an ecstasy

There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, 

and beyond which life cannot rise. 

And such is the paradox of living, 

this ecstasy comes when one is most alive,

and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive. 

~ Jack London 

from The Call of the Wild

photo by Shreve Stockton

the ordinary and the wild

Unnameable Heart

The cricket who

kept me company three days

has fallen silent,

I don't know where.

There are so many

lives of which I know nothing.

Even my own. It moves now

through my fingers toward yours

and I know nothing

I can say that will name its heart.

A boat drifts far out

on the river below the mountains,

and below it

the fish, the great fish

that the one in the boat has come for,

swims in the shadows.

Perhaps the cricket is there, inside the fish.

Stranger things have happened.

I have looked everywhere else

for my lost companion.

From here, the shadow looks small,

but to the fish it is huge.

Range after range of mountains,

and still the old painters

found a place

where two could walk together, side by side.

~ Jane Hirshfield

gifts

The things we really need come to us only as gifts, 

and in order to receive them as gifts, 

we have to be open. 

In order to be open we have to renounce ourselves, 

in a sense we have to die to our image of ourselves, 

our autonomy, our fixation upon our self-willed destiny. 

We have to be able to relax the psychic 

and spiritual cramp which knots us in the painful, 

vulnerable, helpless “I” that is all we know of ourselves

~ Thomas Merton

sketch by catherine doherty

On this day in 1941 Thomas Merton arrived at the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani 

and on this day in 1968 he died in Thailand while participating in a conference of Benedictine and Trappist monks. In the 27 years between those two events he wrote a succession of books which have touched many lives.

the whole of love

We learned the whole of love,

The alphabet, the words,

A chapter, then the mighty book--

Then revelation closed.

But in each other's eyes

An ignorance beheld

Diviner than the childhood's,

And each to each a child.

Attempted to expound

What neither understood.

Alas, that wisdom is so large

And truth so manifold!

~ Emily Dickinson

breithlá sona, Emily

night

I

If I think of a horse wandering about sleeplessly

All night on this short grass covered with moonlight,

I feel a joy, as if I had thought

Of a pirate ship ploughing through dark flowers.

II

The box elders around us are full of joy,

Obeying what is beneath them.

The lilacs are sleeping, and the plants are sleeping;

Even the wood made into a casket is asleep.

III

The butterfly is carrying loam on his wings;

The toad is bearing tiny bits of granite in his skin.

The leaves at the crown of the tree are asleep

Like the dark bits of earth at its root.

IV

Alive, we are like a sleek black water beetle.

Skating across still water in any direction

We choose, and soon to be swallowed

Suddenly from beneath.








~ Robert Bly
photo by david edwards

one's not half two

one's not half two.  It's two are halves of one:

which halves reintegrating,shall occur

no death and any quantity;but than

all numerable mosts the actual more

minds ignorant of stern miraculous

this everytruth-beware of heartless them

(given the scalpel,they dissect a kiss;

or,sold the reason,they  undream a dream)

one is the song which friends and angels sing:

all murdering lies by mortals told make two.

Let liars wilt,repaying life they're loaned;

we(by a gift called dying born)must grow

deep in dark least ourselves remembering

love only rides his year.

                                    All lose, whole find

~ e.e.cummings

photo by Shreve Stockton

.

complete letting go

Perhaps you have never experienced that state of mind 

in which there is total abandonment of everything, 

a complete letting go. 

And you cannot abandon everything without deep passion, can you? 

You cannot abandon everything intellectually or emotionally. 

There is total abandonment, surely, only when there is intense passion. 

Don't be alarmed by that word because a man who is not passionate, 

who is not intense, 

can never understand or feel the quality of beauty. 

The mind that holds something in reserve,

the mind that has a vested interest, the mind that clings to position,

power, prestige, the mind that is respectable, which is a horror;

such a mind can never abandon itself.

J. Krishnamurti

from  The Book of Life

art by rodin

auguste rodin

"Farfallettina"

Shaking all over, she arrives near the lamp, and her dizziness grants her one last vague reprieve before she goes up in flames.  She has fallen into the green tablecloth, and upon that advantageous background she stretches out for a moment (for a unit of her own time which we have no way of measuring) the profusion of her inconceivable splendor.  She looks like a miniature lady who is having a heart attack on the way to the theater.  She will never arrive.  Besides, where is there a theater for such fragile spectators?.... Her wings, with their tiny golden threads, are moving like a double fan in front of no face; and between them is this thin body, a bilboquet onto which two eyes like emerald balls have fallen back....

It is in you, my dear, that God has exhausted himself.  He tosses you into the fire so that he can recover a bit of strength.  ( Like a little boy breaking into his piggy bank.)

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

taken from Four Sketches, Uncollected Poems

translation by Stephen Mitchell

going

No longer for ears...: sound

which, like a deeper ear,

hears us, who only seem 

to be hearing.  Reversal of spaces.

Projection of innermost worlds

into the Open... temple

before their birth, solution saturated with gods

that are almost insoluble...: Going!

Sum of all silence, which

acknowledges itself to itself,

thunderous turning-within

of what is struck dumb in itself,

duration pressed from time passing,

star re-liquefied...: Going!

You whom one never forgets,

who gave birth to herself in loss,

festival no longer grasped, wine on invisible lips,

storm in the pillar that upholds,

wanderer's plunge on the path,

our treason, to everything...: Going!

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

from Unpublished Poems

translation by Stephen Mitchell

art by Picasso

ten to fifteen years of the laborer's life

In the savage state, every family owns a shelter as good as the best, and sufficient for its coarser and simpler wants; though the birds of the air have their nests, and the foxes their holes, and the savages their wigwams, in modern civilized society not more than one half the families own a shelter.  In the large towns and cities, where civilization especially prevails, the number of those who own a shelter is a very small fraction of a whole.  The rest pay an annual tax for this outside garment of all, become indispensable summer and winter, which would buy a village of Indian wigwams, but now helps to keep them poor as long as they live.  I do not mean to insist here on the disadvantage of hiring compared with owning, but it is evident that the savage owns his shelter because it costs little, while the civilized man hires his commonly because he cannot afford to own it; nor can he, in the long run, any better afford to hire....An average house ... will take a man ten to fifteen years of the laborer's life.

~ Henry David Thoreau

from Walden, "Economy,"  1854

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

sketch by the author