winter dreams and butterflys

Winter

Evening. A fire

in the grate and a fire

outside, where a robin

is burning. How they both

sing, offering a friendship

unacceptable to the hand

that is as vulnerable to the one

as it is treacherous to the other.

Ah, time, enemy of their music,

reducing fuel to feathers, feathers

to ash, it was, but a moment ago,

spring in this tinder: flames

in flower that are now embers

on song's hearth.

The leaves fall

from a dark tree, brimming

with shadow, fall on one who,

as Borges suggested,

is no more perhaps than the dream God

in his loneliness is dreaming.

~ R. S. Thomas

from  Mass for Hard Times

You have wakened not out of sleep, 

but into a prior dream, 

and that dream lies within another, and so on, 

to infinity, which is the number of grains of sand. 

The path that you are to take is endless, 

and you will die before you have truly awakened.

~ Jorge Luis Borges

Once Chuang Tzu dreamt  he was a butterfly, 

a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, 

happy with himself and doing as he pleased. 

 He didn't know he was Chuang Tzu. 

 Suddenly he woke up and there he was, 

solid and unmistakable Chuang Tzu. 

 But he didn't know if he was Chuang Tzu who had dreamt he was a butterfly, 

or a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Tzu.

~ Chuang Tzu

from The Complete Chuang Tzu

translated by Burton Watson

they bless me

I spend all my morning with the muses;  
- and they bless me also in my walks.

Compelled to contemplate a lasting malady,

 born with an ardent and lively temperament, 

susceptible to the diversions of society, 

I was obliged at an early date to isolate myself and live a life of solitude....

For me there can be no recreation in human society, refined conversation,

 mutual exchange of thoughts and feelings; only so far as necessity

 compels may I give myself to society,—

I must live like an exile. 

~ from the Ludwig van Beethoven journals

with thanks to Roderick Maclver

at heron dance

portrait by 

Joseph Karl Stieler

horses

In truth I am puzzled most in life

by nine horses.

I've been watching them for eleven weeks

in a pasture near Melrose.

Two are on one side of the fence and seven

on the other side.

They stare at one another from the same places

hours and hours each day.

This is another unanswerable question

to haunt us with the ordinary.

They have to be talking to one another

in a language without a voice.

Maybe they are speaking the wordless talk of lovers,

sullen, melancholy, jubilant.

Linguists say that language comes after music

and we sang nonsense syllables

before we invented a rational speech

to order our days.

We live far out in the country where I hear

creature voices night and day.

Like us they are talking about their lives

on this brief visit to earth.

In truth each day is a universe in which

we are tangled in the light of stars.

Stop a moment. Think about these horses

in their sweet-smelling silence.

~ Jim Harrison

from Songs of Unreason

with thanks to being poetry

blessing bow

Here at seventy-four, I am having an idea

what I do pretty-well, what not-so-well.

I dream. I keep a journal of my dreams,

and I put images from them in trance-poems.

I do not write or think about poetry

with a very clear intelligence. I love

certain lines and passages without getting

the whole picture, like rocks thrown against

my door without knowing who’s there.

I found this piece of paper on my bookshelf

dated Sept. 2, 1976. It records a three-part

dream from that night. I recall best

what it felt like there at the end, here

thirty-five years later. I am invited to

a dinner table with Gary Snyder, his family

and friends. We sit in the blessing-bow.

He begins, but I raise my head instead,

and open my eyes, feeling a great love

coming. The air is electrical, full of spirit.

He opens his eyes and sees me reaching

my hand toward him. He takes my hand,

still saying the blessing, which is about

filling with love for the ONE, as we are,

and amen to that. Now the dream

feels like an approach into this flawed

and difficult, hilarious, opening-out time

left before death encloses me in its whatever

it-will-be, a full prostration blessing-bow.

~ Coleman Barks

from the Georgia Review

photo by Robert Foah

paying attention to the melody

All right.  I know that each of us will die alone.

It doesn't matter how loud or soft the sitar plays.

Sooner or later the melody will say it all.

The prologue is so long!  At last the theme comes.

It says the soul will rise above all these notes.

It says the dust will be swept up from the floor.

It doesn't matter if we say our prayers or not.

We know the canoe is heading straight for the falls,

And no one will pick us up from the water this time.

One day the mice will carry our ragged impulses

All the way to Egypt, and at home the cows

Will graze on a thousand acres of thought.

Everyone goes on hoping for a good death.

The old rope hangs down from the hangman's nail.

The forty-nine robbers are climbing into their boots.

Robert, don't expect too much.  You've put yourself

Ahead of others for years, a hundred years.

It will take a long time for you to hear the melody.

~ Robert Bly

from Talking into the Ear of a Donkey

creator, preserver, and destroyer

statue from Tamil Nadu, Chola Dynasty, India

As a symbol, Shiva Nataraja is a brilliant invention. 

It combines in a single image Shiva's roles as creator, preserver, and destroyer 

of the universe and conveys the Indian conception of the never-ending cycle of time. 

Although it appeared in sculpture as early as the fifth century, its present, 

world-famous form evolved under the rule of the Cholas. 

Shiva's dance is set within a flaming halo. 

The god holds in his upper right hand the damaru (hand drum that made the first sounds of creation). 

His upper left hand holds agni (the fire that will destroy the universe). 

With his lower right hand, he makes abhayamudra (the gesture that allays fear). 

The dwarflike figure being trampled by his right foot represents 

apasmara purusha (illusion, which leads mankind astray). 

Shiva's front left hand, pointing to his raised left foot, 

signifies refuge for the troubled soul. 

The energy of his dance makes his hair fly to the sides.

~ description by the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Beneath its diversity and complexity, the underlying unity of Hinduism has correspondences with the inward dimension of the Christian faith.

~ Ursula King

only breath

~ Rumi

with Coleman Barks

after long busyness

I start out for a walk at last after weeks at the desk.

Moon gone, plowing underfoot, no stars, not a trace of light!

Suppose a horse were galloping toward me in this open field?

Every day I did not spend in solitude was wasted.

~ Robert Bly

photo by michael totten

creativity - authority - self-knowledge

There is no method for self-knowledge. 

Seeking a method invariably implies the desire to attain some result and that is what we all want. We follow authority - if not that of a person, then of a system, of an ideology - because we want a result that will be satisfactory, which will give us security. We really do not want to understand ourselves, our impulses and reactions, the whole process of our thinking, the conscious as well as the unconscious; we would rather pursue a system that assures us of a result. But the pursuit of a system is invariably the outcome of our desire for security, for certainty, and the result is obviously not the understanding of oneself. When we follow a method, we must have authorities - the teacher, the guru, the savior, the Master - who will guarantee us what we desire; and surely that is not the way to self-knowledge.

Authority prevents the understanding of oneself, does it not? Under the shelter of an authority, a guide, you may have temporarily a sense of security, a sense of well-being, but that is not the understanding of the total process of oneself. Authority in its very nature prevents the full awareness of oneself and therefore ultimately destroys freedom; in freedom alone can there be creativeness. 

There can be creativeness only through self-knowledge.

~ J. Krishnamurti

from The Book of Life

with thanks to j krishnamurti online

you can barely distinguish me

I have hymns you haven't heard.

There is an upward soaring

in which I bend close.

You can barely distinguish me

from the things that kneel before me.

They are like sheep, they are grazing.

I am the shepherd on the brow of the hill.

When evening draws them home

I follow after, the dark bridge thudding,

and the vapor rising from their backs

hides my own homecoming.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

from The Book of Monastic Life

translation by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy

art from the cave of chauvet-pont-d'arc

flight

The modern pagan, the child of technology or the “mass man,” does not even enjoy the anguish of dualism or the comfort of myth. His anxieties are no longer born of eternal aspiration, though they are certainly rooted in a consciousness of death. “Mass man” is something more than fallen. He lives not only below the level of grace, but below the level of nature—below his own humanity. No longer in contact with the created world or with himself, out of touch with the reality of nature, he lives in the world of collective obsessions, the world of systems and fictions with which modern man has surrounded himself. In such a world, man’s life is no longer even a seasonal cycle. It’s a linear flight into nothingness, a flight from reality and from God, without purpose and without objective, except to keep moving, to keep from having to face reality….

~ Thomas Merton

from Seasons of Celebration

art by picasso

the beauty

~ John O'Donohue

as we climb higher

As we climb higher, we say this.

It is not soul or mind, nor does it possess

imagination, conviction, speech or understanding.

It does not live nor is it life.  It is not a 

substance, nor is it eternity or time.

It is not wisdom.

It is neither one nor oneness, divinity nor goodness.

It falls neither within the predicate of nonbeing nor being.

It is beyond assertion and denial.  We make assertions and

denials of what is next to it, but never of it, for it is both beyond

every assertion, being the perfect and unique cause of all things,

and by virtue of its pre-eminently simple and absolute nature,

free of every limitation,

beyond every limitation;

it is also beyond every denial.

~ Pseudo-Dionysius

art from Sistine Chapel images

unsophisticated teachers say

Unsophisticated teachers say that God is pure

being.  He is as high above being as the highest

angel is above a gnat.  I would be speaking as incorrectly

in calling God a being as if I called the sun pale or black.

God is neither this or that.

~ Meister Eckhart

the parents poem

It’s a good idea to figure what to do with parents.

One man I knew, after caring for them for years,

Led them across a busy street—two lines of traffic.

He started a lost colony for his parents.

He bought them big boots and pith helmets.

He sent his parents into battle. He dressed

Them in Austrian uniforms and gave them

Maps of Russia. No one ever saw them again.

Another man built a furnace and put his parents

Into it. He got some tincture, and tried to tran-

Substantiate his parents. It took a long time

And used a lot of heat, but there wasn't much change.

A neighbor stored them in an empty cistern—the ladder

Is still sticking out. He took them to Kenya

And got his parents to take a walk with the elephants.

And they died all right . . . But by the end,

They knew for sure that they’d had children.

~ Robert Bly

art by gene kloss