a story about Alexander the great

When Alexander, that unconquered lord,

Who subjugated empires with his sword,

Required a lengthy message to be sent

He dressed up as the messenger and went.

"The king gives such an order," he would say,

And none of those who hurried to obey

Once guessed this messenger's identity -

They had no knowledge of such majesty,

And even if he said:  "I am your lord,"

The claim was thought preposterous and ignored.

Deluded natures cannot recognize

The royal way that stands before their eyes.

~ Farid Attar

from The Conference of Birds

translation by Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis

a dimension called love

So when you ask what love is, you may be too frightened to see the answer. It may mean complete upheaval; it may break up the family; you may discover that you do not love your wife or husband or children—do you?—you may have to shatter the house you have built, you may never go back to the temple. 

But if you still want to find out, you will see that fear is not love, dependence is not love, jealousy is not love, possessiveness and domination are not love, responsibility and duty are not love, self-pity is not love, the agony of not being loved is not love, love is not the opposite of hate any more than humility is the opposite of vanity. 

So if you eliminate all these, not by forcing them but by washing them away as the rain washes the dust of many days from a leaf, then perhaps you will come upon this strange flower, which man always hungers after. 

If you have not got love—not just in little drops but in abundance—if you are not filled with it, the world will go to disaster. You know intellectually that the unity of mankind is essential and that love is the only way, but who is going to teach you how to love? 

Will any authority, any method, any system, tell you how to love? If anyone tells you, it is not love. Can you say, “I will practice love. I will sit down day after day and think about it. I will practice being kind and gentle and force myself to pay attention to others”? 

Do you mean that you can discipline yourself to love, exercise the will to love? When you exercise discipline and will to love, love goes out the window. By practicing some method or system of loving you may become extraordinarily clever or more kindly or get into a state of nonviolence, but that has nothing whatsoever to do with love. 

In this torn desert world there is no love because pleasure and desire play the greatest roles, yet without love your daily life has no meaning. And you cannot have love if there is no beauty. Beauty is not something you see—not a beautiful tree, a beautiful picture, a beautiful building, or a beautiful woman. There is beauty only when your heart and mind know what love is. 

Without love and that sense of beauty there is no virtue, and you know very well that, do what you will—improve society, feed the poor—you will only be creating more mischief, for without love there is only ugliness and poverty in your own heart and mind. 

But when there is love and beauty, whatever you do is right, whatever you do is in order. If you know how to love, then you can do what you like because it will solve all other problems.

So we reach the point: Can the mind come upon love without discipline, without thought, without enforcement, without any book, any teacher or leader—come upon it as one comes upon a lovely sunset? It seems to me that one thing is absolutely necessary and that is passion without motive—passion that is not the result of some commitment or attachment, passion that is not lust. A man who does not know what passion is will never know love because love can only come into being when there is total self-abandonment. 

A mind that is seeking is not a passionate mind and to come upon love without seeking it is the only way to find it—to come upon it unknowingly and not as the result of any effort or experience. Such a love, you will find, is not of time; such a love is both personal and impersonal, is both the one and the many. 

Like a flower that has a perfume, you can smell it or pass it by. That flower is for everybody and for the one who takes the trouble to breath it deeply and to look at it with delight. Whether one is very near in the garden or very far away, it is the same to the flower because it is full of that perfume and, therefore, it is sharing with everybody. 

Love is something that is new, fresh, alive. It has no yesterday and no tomorrow. It is beyond the turmoil of thought. It is only the innocent mind which knows what love is, and the innocent mind can live in the world, which is not innocent. 

To find this extraordinary thing which man has sought endlessly through sacrifice, through worship, through relationship, through sex, through every form of pleasure and pain, is only possible when thought comes to understand itself and comes naturally to an end. Then love has no opposite, then love has no conflict. 

You may ask, “If I find such love, what happens to my wife, my children, my family? They must have security.” When you put such a question you have never been outside the field of thought, the field of consciousness. When once you have been outside that field you will never ask such a question because then you will know what love is in which there is no thought and therefore, no time. You may read this mesmerized and enchanted, but actually to go beyond thought and time—which means going beyond sorrow—is to be aware that there is a different dimension called love. 

But you don’t know how to come upon this extraordinary fount, so what do you do? If you don’t know what to do, you do nothing, don’t you? Absolutely nothing. Then inwardly you are completely silent. Do you understand what that means? It means you are not seeking, not wanting, not pursuing; there is no center at all. Then there is love.

~ J. Krishnamurti 

from Freedom from the Known

planting trees

In the mating of trees,

the pollen grain entering invisible

the domed room of the winds, survives

the ghost of the old forest

that was here when we came. The ground

invites it, and it will not be gone.

I become the familiar of that ghost

and its ally, carrying in a bucket

twenty trees smaller than weeds,

and I plant them along the way

of the departure of the ancient host.

I return to the ground its original music.

It will rise out of the horizon

of the grass, and over the heads

of weeds, and it will rise over

the horizon of men’s heads. As I age

in the world it will rise and spread,

and be for this place horizon

and orison, the voice of its winds.

I have made myself a dream to dream

of its rising, that has gentled my nights.

Let me desire and wish well the life

these trees may live when I

no longer rise in the mornings

to be pleased by the green of them

shining, and their shadows on the ground,

and the sound of the wind in them.

~ Wendell Berry

from The Country of Marriage

at last to the dark

We come at last to the dark

and enter in.  We are given bodies

newly made out of their absence

from one another in the light

of the ordinary day.  We come

to the space between ourselves,

the narrow doorway, and pass through

into the land of the wholly loved.

~ Wendell Berry

 from Sabbaths 2002,
Given

waiting for the barbarians

What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?

The barbarians are due here today.

Why isn't anything going on in the senate?

Why are the senators sitting there without legislating?

Because the barbarians are coming today.

What's the point of senators making laws now?

Once the barbarians are here, they'll do the legislating.

Why did our emperor get up so early,

and why is he sitting enthroned at the city's main gate,

in state, wearing the crown?

Because the barbarians are coming today

and the emperor's waiting to receive their leader.

He's even got a scroll to give him,

loaded with titles, with imposing names.

Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today

wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?

Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,

rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?

Why are they carrying elegant canes

beautifully worked in silver and gold?

Because the barbarians are coming today

and things like that dazzle the barbarians

Why don't our distinguished orators turn up as usual

to make their speeches, say what they have to say?

Because the barbarians are coming today

and they're bored by rhetoric and public speaking.

Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion?

(How serious people's faces have become.)

Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,

everyone going home lost in thought?

Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven't come.

And some of our men just in from the border say

there are no barbarians any longer.

Now what's going to happen to us without barbarians?

Those people were a kind of solution.

~ Constantine Cavafy

translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard

Cavafy understood the word "barbarian" in its original Greek meaning, as applied to all those who are outside and have, instead of human speech, incoherent gibberish.  His intuition allowed him to capture a centuries-old opposition between the inside and the outside.

~ comment by Czeslaw Milosz

foundations

I built on the sand

And it tumbled down.

I built on a rock

And it tumbled down.

Now when I build, I shall begin

With the smoke from the chimney.

~ Leopold Staff

translated by Czeslaw Milosz

from A Book of Luminous Things

the day we die

The day we die

the wind comes down

to take away

our footprints.

The wind makes dust

to cover up

the marks we left

while walking.

For otherwise 

the thing would seem

as if we were

still living.

Therefore the wind

is he who comes

to blow away

our footprints.

~ Southern Bushmen

from A Book of Luminous Things

edited by Czeslaw Milosz

utterance

Sitting over words

very late I have heard a kind of whispered sighing

not far

like a night wind in pines or like the sea in the dark

the echo of everything that has ever

been spoken 

still spinning its one syllable

between the earth and silence

~ W. S. Merwin

a colorful show

The world is but a show, glittering and empty. It is, and yet it is not.

 It is there as long as I want to see it and take part in it. 

When I cease caring, it dissolves. It has no cause and serves no purpose. 

It just happens when we are absent-minded. 

It appears exactly as it looks, but there is no depth in it, nor meaning. 

Only the onlooker is real, call him Self or Atma. 

To the Self, the world is but a colorful show, 

which he enjoys as long as it lasts and forgets when it is over. 

Whatever happens on the stage makes him shudder in terror or roll with laughter, 

yet all the time he is aware that it is but a show. 

Without desire or fear, he enjoys it, as it happens.

~ Nisargadatta Maharaj

amen

~ Robert Bly and friends

another spring

White birds over the grey river.

Scarlet flowers on the green hills.

I watch the Spring go by and wonder

If I shall ever return home.

~ Tu Fu

(713 - 770)

translated by Kenneth Rexroth

in heaven it is always autumn

"In Heaven It Is Always Autumn"

John Donne

In heaven it is always autumn. The leaves are always near

to falling there but never fall, and pairs of souls out walking

heaven's paths no longer feel the weight of years upon them.

Safe in heaven's calm, they take each other's arm,

the light shining through them, all joy and terror gone.

But we are far from heaven here, in a garden ragged and unkept

as Eden would be with the walls knocked down,

the paths littered

with the unswept leaves of many years, bright keepsakes

for children of the Fall. The light is gold, the sun pulling

the long shadow soul out of each thing, disclosing an outcome.

The last roses of the year nod their frail heads,

like listeners listening to all that's said, to ask,

What brought us here? What seed? What rain? What light?

What forced us upward through dark earth? What made us bloom?

What wind shall take us soon, sweeping the garden bare?

Their voiceless voices hang there, as ours might,

if we were roses, too. Their beds are blanketed with leaves,

tended by an absent gardener whose life is elsewhere.

It is the last of many last days. Is it enough?

To rest in this moment? To turn our faces to the sun?

To watch the lineaments of a world passing?

To feel the metal of a black iron chair, cool and eternal,

press against our skin? To apprehend a chill as clouds

pass overhead, turning us to shivering shade and shadow?

And then to be restored, small miracle, the sun

shining brightly

as before? We go on, you leading the way, a figure

leaning on a cane that leaves its mark on the earth.

My friend, you have led me farther than I have ever been.

To a garden in autumn. To a heaven of impermanence

where the final falling off is slow, a slow and radiant happening.

The light is gold. And while we're here, I think it must

be heaven.

~ Elizabeth Spires 

from Now the Green Blade Rises

with thanks to writers almanac

photo by eliot porter

paint

What we see is the paint.

Yet somehow the mind

knows the wall,

as the living know death.

~ Jane Hirshfield

from Come, Thief

through the lyre's strings

A god can do it. But will you tell me how

a man can penetrate through the lyre's strings?

Our mind is split.  And at the shadowed crossing

of heart-roads, there is a temple for Apollo.

Song, as you have taught it, is not desire,

not wooing any grace that can be achieved;

song is reality.  Simple, for a god.

But when can we be real? When does he pour

the earth, the stars, into us? Young man,

it is not your loving, even if your mouth

was forced wide open by your own voice - learn

to forget that passionate music.  It will end.

True singing is a different breath, about

nothing.  A gust inside the god.  A wind.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

from The Sonnets to Orpheus, I,3

translated by Stephen Mitchell

gift

A day so happy.

Fog lifted early, I worked in the garden.

Hummingbirds were stopping over honeysuckle flowers.

There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess.

I knew no one worth envying him.

Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.

To think that once I was the same man did not embarrass me.

In my body I felt no pain.

When straightening up, I saw the blue sea and sails. 

~ Czeslaw Milosz 

with thanks to  the mark on the wall

.