the country of marriage

I.

I dream of you walking at night along the streams of the country of my birth, warm blooms and the nightsongs of birds opening around you as you walk. You are holding in your body the dark seed of my sleep.

II.

This comes after silence. Was it something I said that bound me to you, some mere promise or, worse, the fear of loneliness and death? A man lost in the woods in the dark, I stood still and said nothing. And then there rose in me, like the earth’s empowering brew rising in root and branch, the words of a dream of you I did not know I had dreamed. I was a wanderer who feels the solace of his native land under his feet again and moving in his blood. I went on, blind and faithful. Where I stepped my track was there to steady me. It was no abyss that lay before me, but only the level ground.

III.

Sometimes our life reminds me of a forest in which there is a graceful clearing and in that opening a house, an orchard and garden, comfortable shades, and flowers red and yellow in the sun, a pattern made in the light for the light to return to. The forest is mostly dark, its ways to be made anew day after day, the dark richer than the light and more blessed, provided we stay brave enough to keep on going in.

IV.

How many times have I come to you out of my head with joy, if ever a man was, for to approach you I have given up the light and all directions. I come to you lost, wholly trusting as a man who goes into the forest unarmed. It is as though I descend slowly earthward out of the air. I rest in peace in you, when I arrive at last.

V.

Our bond is no little economy based on the exchange of my love and work for yours, so much for so much of an expendable fund. We don’t know what its limits are–that puts us in the dark. We are more together than we know, how else could we keep on discovering we are more together than we thought? You are the known way leading always to the unknown, and you are the known place to which the unknown is always leading me back. More blessed in you than I know, I possess nothing worthy to give you, nothing not belittled by my saying that I possess it. Even an hour of love is a moral predicament, a blessing a man may be hard up to be worthy of. He can only accept it, as a plant accepts from all the bounty of the light enough to live, and then accepts the dark, passing unencumbered back to the earth, as I have fallen tine and again from the great strength of my desire, helpless, into your arms.

VI.

What I am learning to give you is my death to set you free of me, and me from myself into the dark and the new light. Like the water of a deep stream, love is always too much. We did not make it. Though we drink till we burst we cannot have it all, or want it all. In its abundance it survives our thirst. In the evening we come down to the shore to drink our fill, and sleep, while it flows through the regions of the dark. It does not hold us, except we keep returning to its rich waters thirsty. We enter, willing to die, into the commonwealth of its joy.

VII.

I give you what is unbounded, passing from dark to dark, containing darkness: a night of rain, an early morning. I give you the life I have let live for the love of you: a clump of orange-blooming weeds beside the road, the young orchard waiting in the snow, our own life that we have planted in the ground, as I have planted mine in you. I give you my love for all beautiful and honest women that you gather to yourself again and again, and satisfy–and this poem, no more mine than any man’s who has loved a woman.

~ Wendell Berry

from The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry

art by van gogh

the window

I am not -

open or closed -

what you expected, o heart.

Or would you 

without me have thought

to throw open

the flooding and roar,

to step through the lion's gold pelt?

Have thought that

the passionate glass is the body?

And this life, the one life you wanted?

Wanted, 

meaning neither lacked,

nor desired.

but something else.

Something closer

to how, when the two owl-lovers

begin their night singing

and all the black length of the woods

is held in those arms,

not one stone, not one leaf goes uncalling.

If I had been what you thought,

o heart,

how could the clear glass

flow as it does with mountains,

with jewel-colored, perishing fish?

Flashing and falling,

the black-bright rain of beings and things -

Some recognizable, yours, but others -

too fleeting or large - that cannot be spoken.

Though the one world touches the other

in every part, o heart,

in silence,

like new lovers taking their fill in the crowded dark.

~ Jane Hirshfield 

from The October Palace

art by picasso

forever Oneness

Forever Oneness,

who sings to us in silence,

who teaches us through each other.

Guide my steps with strength and wisdom.

May I see the lessons as I walk,

honor the Purpose of all things.

Help me touch with respect,

always speak from behind my eyes. 

Let me observe, not judge.

May I cause no harm,

and leave music and beauty after my visit.

When I return to forever

may the circle be closed

and the spiral be broader.

~  Bee Lake, 

(an aboriginal woman)

emerges from us

People have already had to rethink so many concepts of motion; 

and they will also gradually come to realize that what we call fate 

does not come into us from the outside, but emerges from us. 

It is only because so many people have not absorbed 

and transformed their fates while they were living in them 

that they have not realized what was emerging from them; 

it was so alien to them that, in their confusion and fear, 

they thought it must have entered them at the very moment 

they became aware of it, for they swore they had never before

 found anything like that inside them. 

Just as people for a long time had a wrong idea about the sun’s motion, 

they are even now wrong about the motion of what is to come. 

The future stands still, dear Mr. Kappus, 

but we move in infinite space.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

 from Letters to a Young Poet

translated by Stephen Mitchell

art by picasso

Carl Jung speaks about death

with thanks to it's all dhamma

through massive rock

It feels as though I make my own way

through massive rock

like a vein of ore

alone, encased.

I am so deep inside it

I can't see the path or any distance:

everything is close

and everything closing in on me

has turned to stone.

Since I still don't know enough about pain,

this terrible darkness makes me small,

If it's you, though—

press down hard on me, break in

that I may know the weight of your hand

and you, the fullness of my cry.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

from The Book of Poverty and Death III, 1

photo by eliot porter

a hidden wholeness

at the end of year

The particular mind of the ocean

Filling the coastline's longing

With such brief harvest

Of elegant, vanishing waves

Is like the mind of time

Opening us shapes of days.

As this year draws to its end,

We give thanks for the gifts it brought

And how they became inlaid within

Where neither time nor tide can touch them.

The days when the veil lifted

And the soul could see delight;

When a quiver caressed the heart

In the sheer exuberance of being here.

Surprises that came awake

In forgotten corners of old fields

Where expectation seemed to have quenched.

The slow, brooding times

When all was awkward

And the wave in the mind

Pierced every sore with salt.

The darkened days that stopped

The confidence of the dawn.

Days when beloved faces shone brighter

With light from beyond themselves;

And from the granite of some secret sorrow

A stream of buried tears loosened.

We bless this year for all we learned,

For all we loved and lost

And for the quiet way it brought us

Nearer to our invisible destination.

~ John O'Donohue

from To Bless the Space Between Us

art from original art studio

trying to reconcile

On the one hand I felt the call of God; on the other, I continued to follow the world. 

All the things of God gave me great pleasure, but I was held captive by those of the world. 

I might have been said to be trying to reconcile these two extremes, 

to bring contraries together: the spiritual life on the one hand and worldly satisfactions, 

pleasures, and pastimes on the other. 

~ Saint Teresa of Avila

so silent

There is a silent self within us whose presence is disturbing precisely because it is so silent: 

it can’t be spoken. It has to remain silent. 

To articulate it, to verbalize it, is to tamper with it, and in some ways to destroy it. 

Now let us frankly face the fact that our culture is one which is geared in many ways 

to help us evade any need to face this inner, silent self. 

We live in a state of constant semi-attention to the sound of voices, music, traffic, 

or the generalized noise of what goes on around us all the time. 

This keeps us immersed in a flood of racket and words, 

a diffuse medium in which our consciousness is half diluted: 

we are not quite ‘thinking,’ not entirely responding, but we are more or less there. 

We are not fully present and not entirely absent; 

not fully withdrawn, yet not completely available. 

It cannot be said that we are really participating in anything and we may, 

in fact, be half conscious of our alienation and resentment. 

Yet we derive a certain comfort from the vague sense that we are ‘part of’ something – 

although we are not quite able to define what that something is – 

and probably wouldn't want to define it even if we could. 

We just float along in the general noise. 

Resigned and indifferent, we share semi-consciously 

in the mindless mind of Muzak and radio commercials which passes for ‘reality.’

~ Thomas Merton

from Essential Writings

with thanks to running cause i cant fly

the kingdom

At times

the heart

stands back

and looks at the body,

looks at the mind,

as a lion

quietly looks

at the not-quite-itself,

not-quite-another,

moving of shadows and grass.

Wary, but with interest,

considers its kingdom.

Then seeing

all that will be,

heart once again enters -- 

enters hunger, enters sorrow,

enters finally losing it all.

To know, if nothing else,

what it once owned.

~ Jane Hirshfield

from The October Palace

the ninth elegy

Why, if this interval of being can be spent serenely

in the form of a laurel, slightly darker than all

other green, with tiny waves on the edges

of every leaf (like the smile of a breeze)–: why then

have to be human–and, escaping from fate,

keep longing for fate? . . .

Oh not because happiness exists,

that too-hasty profit snatched from approaching loss.

Not out of curiosity, not as practice for the heart, which

would exist in the laurel too. . . . .

But because truly being here is so much; because everything here

apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way

keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.

Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too,

just once. And never again. But to have been

this once, completely, even if only once:

to have been one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.

And so we keep pressing on, trying to achieve it,

trying to hold it firmly in our simple hands,

in our overcrowded gaze, in our speechless heart.

Trying to become it.–Whom can we give it to? We would

hold on to it all, forever . . . Ah, but what can we take along

into that other realm? Not the art of looking,

which is learned so slowly, and nothing that happened here. Nothing.

The sufferings, then. And above all, the heaviness,

and the long experience of love,– just what is wholly

unsayable. But later, among the stars,

what good is it – they are better as they are: unsayable.

For when the traveler returns from the mountain-slopes into the valley,

he brings, not a handful of earth, unsayable to others, but instead

some word he has gained, some pure word, the yellow and blue

gentian. Perhaps we are here in order to say: house,

bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window–

at most: column, tower. . . . But to say them, you must understand,

oh to say them more intensely than the Things themselves

ever dreamed of existing. Isn't the secret intent

of this taciturn earth, when it forces lovers together,

that inside their boundless emotion all things may shudder with joy?

Threshold: what it means for two lovers

to be wearing down, imperceptibly, the ancient threshold of their door–

they too, after the many who came before them

and before those to come. . . . ., lightly.

Here is the time for the sayable, here is its homeland.

Speak and bear witness. More than ever

the Things that we might experience are vanishing, for

what crowds them out and replaces them is an imageless act.

An act under a shell, which easily cracks open as soon as

the business inside outgrows it and seeks new limits.

Between the hammers our heart

endures, just as the tongue does

between the teeth and, despite that,

still is able to praise.

Praise this world to the angel, not the unsayable one,

you can’t impress him with glorious emotion; in the universe

where he feels more powerfully, you are a novice. So show him

something simple which, formed over generations,

lives as our own, near our hand and within our gaze.

Tell him of Things. He will stand astonished; as you stood

by the ropemaker in Rome or the potter along the Nile.

Show him how happy a Thing can be, how innocent and ours,

how even lamenting grief purely decides to take form,

serves as a Thing, or dies into a Thing–, and blissfully

escapes far beyond the violin.–And these Things,

which live by perishing, know you are praising them; transient,

they look to us for deliverance: us, the most transient of all.

They want us to change them, utterly, in our invisible heart,

within–oh endlessly–within us! Whoever we may be at last.

Earth, isn't this what you want: to arise within us,

invisible? Isn't it your dream

to be wholly invisible someday?–O Earth: invisible!

What, if not transformation, is your urgent command?

Earth, my dearest, I will. Oh believe me, you no longer

need your springtimes to win me over–one of them,

ah, even one, is already too much for my blood.

Unspeakably I have belonged to you, from the first.

You were always right, and your holiest inspiration

is our intimate companion, Death.

Look, I am living. On what? Neither childhood nor future

grows any smaller . . . . . Superabundant being

wells up in my heart.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

from Duino Elegies (1923)

Empedocles' Physics

In all its parts the deep foul valley trembled so

I thought the universe felt love, which some believe

Has many times returned the world to chaos; here below

And elsewhere in that moment, the ancient cliffsides tumbled.

The Inferno, Canto XII

'Aversion carves the self.'

- A Vedic teaching too, though here

it is Empedocles', who wrote

that Hate creates our fractal'd world,

which Love would have a single, formless sphere.

An example: enemy soldiers, late

in 1914, carolled each other across the fields.

Could not, next dawn, take up their former places.

Such is the chaos that affection yields.

When did we cut the long-compounded verbs

into their separate nouns,

the worm's life from the bird's?

Must it be loneliness crowns all things

that live?  Packed fat of the sea-lion,

fox blood splashing the brush like early sun-

why give them to our wars to be undone?

But what if in truth Love's perfect One were

Dante's sheered disorder, the known world tumbled?

If the longing and stumble of self were made of sin?

Choose Hate, to stay faceted then

in the many and season-strung minds, the battered salmonskin

peeling its sky's flung rind, the blossoming strife.

Choose the cell's dividing, life into life,

the too-bright stream.  Choose beauty loved-

how loved - within division's light.

~ Jane Hirshfield

from The October Palace

art by picasso

Wendell Berry - on work

This article is printed here courtesy of The Progressive , where it originally appeared as a letter to the editor in response to the article “Less Work, More Life.”

The Progressive, in the September issue, both in Matthew Rothschild’s “Editor’s Note” and in the article by John de Graaf (“Less Work, More Life”), offers “less work” and a 30-hour workweek as needs that are as indisputable as the need to eat.

"Though I would support the idea of a 30-hour workweek in some circumstances, I see nothing absolute or indisputable about it. It can be proposed as a universal need only after abandonment of any respect for vocation and the replacement of discourse by slogans.

It is true that the industrialization of virtually all forms of production and service has filled the world with “jobs” that are meaningless, demeaning, and boring—as well as inherently destructive. I don’t think there is a good argument for the existence of such work, and I wish for its elimination, but even its reduction calls for economic changes not yet defined, let alone advocated, by the “left” or the “right.” Neither side, so far as I know, has produced a reliable distinction between good work and bad work. To shorten the “official workweek” while consenting to the continuation of bad work is not much of a solution.

The old and honorable idea of “vocation” is simply that we each are called, by God, or by our gifts, or by our preference, to a kind of good work for which we are particularly fitted. Implicit in this idea is the evidently startling possibility that we might work willingly, and that there is no necessary contradiction between work and happiness or satisfaction.

Only in the absence of any viable idea of vocation or good work can one make the distinction implied in such phrases as “less work, more life” or “work-life balance,” as if one commutes daily from life here to work there.

But aren't we living even when we are most miserably and harmfully at work?

And isn't that exactly why we object (when we do object) to bad work?

And if you are called to music or farming or carpentry or healing, if you make your living by your calling, if you use your skills well and to a good purpose and therefore are happy or satisfied in your work, why should you necessarily do less of it?

More important, why should you think of your life as distinct from it?

And why should you not be affronted by some official decree that you should do less of it?

A useful discourse on the subject of work would raise a number of questions that Mr. de Graaf has neglected to ask:

What work are we talking about?

Did you choose your work, or are you doing it under compulsion as the way to earn money?

How much of your intelligence, your affection, your skill, and your pride is employed in your work?

Do you respect the product or the service that is the result of your work?

For whom do you work: a manager, a boss, or yourself?

What are the ecological and social costs of your work?

If such questions are not asked, then we have no way of seeing or proceeding beyond the assumptions of Mr. de Graaf and his work-life experts: that all work is bad work; that all workers are unhappily and even helplessly dependent on employers; that work and life are irreconcilable; and that the only solution to bad work is to shorten the workweek and thus divide the badness among more people.

I don’t think anybody can honorably object to the proposition, in theory, that it is better “to reduce hours rather than lay off workers.” But this raises the likelihood of reduced income and therefore of less “life.” As a remedy for this, Mr. de Graaf can offer only “unemployment benefits,” one of the industrial economy’s more fragile “safety nets.”

And what are people going to do with the “more life” that is understood to be the result of “less work”? Mr. de Graaf says that they “will exercise more, sleep more, garden more, spend more time with friends and family, and drive less.” This happy vision descends from the proposition, popular not so long ago, that in the spare time gained by the purchase of “labor-saving devices,” people would patronize libraries, museums, and symphony orchestras.

But what if the liberated workers drive more?

What if they recreate themselves with off-road vehicles, fast motorboats, fast food, computer games, television, electronic “communication,” and the various genres of pornography?

Well, that’ll be “life,” supposedly, and anything beats work.

Mr. de Graaf makes the further doubtful assumption that work is a static quantity, dependably available, and divisible into dependably sufficient portions. This supposes that one of the purposes of the industrial economy is to provide employment to workers. On the contrary, one of the purposes of this economy has always been to transform independent farmers, shopkeepers, and tradespeople into employees, and then to use the employees as cheaply as possible, and then to replace them as soon as possible with technological substitutes.

So there could be fewer working hours to divide, more workers among whom to divide them, and fewer unemployment benefits to take up the slack.

On the other hand, there is a lot of work needing to be done—ecosystem and watershed restoration, improved transportation networks, healthier and safer food production, soil conservation, etc.—that nobody yet is willing to pay for. Sooner or later, such work will have to be done.

We may end up working longer workdays in order not to “live,” but to survive."

Wendell Berry

Port Royal, Kentucky

Love Wins

with thanks to practicing resurrection

stable as the land

How necessary it is for monks to work in the fields, 

in the rain, in the sun, in the mud, in the clay, 

in the wind: these are our spiritual directors and our novice masters. 

They form our contemplation. 

They instill virtue into us. 

They make us as stable as the land we live in. 

You do not get that out of a typewriter.

~ Thomas Merton

from The Intimate Merton

art by van gogh