who am i being?

~ Benjamin Zander

the great way is not difficult

The Great Way is not difficult 

for those who have no preferences. 

When love and hate are both absent 

everything becomes clear and undisguised.

Make the smallest distinction, however 

and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart.

If you wish to see the truth 

then hold no opinions for or against anything. 

To set up what you like against what you dislike 

is the disease of the mind. 

When the deep meaning of things is not understood 

the minds essential peace is disturbed to no avail. 

The Way is perfect like vast space 

where nothing is lacking and nothing is in excess. 

Indeed, it is due to our choosing to accept or reject 

that we do not see the true nature of things. 

Live neither in the entanglements of outer things, 

nor in inner feelings of emptiness.

Be serene in the oneness of things 

and such erroneous views will disappear by themselves.

When you try to stop activity to achieve passivity 

your very effort fills you with activity. 

As long as you remain in one extreme or the other 

you will never know Oneness.

~ Seng-T’san

a friend's umbrella

Ralph Waldo Emerson, toward the end

of his life, found the names

of familiar objects escaping him.

He wanted to say something about a window,

or a table, or a book on a table.

But the word wasn't there,

although other words could still suggest

the shape of what he meant.

Then someone, his wife perhaps,

would understand: "Yes, window! I'm sorry,

is there a draft?" He'd nod.

She'd rise. Once a friend dropped by

to visit, shook out his umbrella

in the hall, remarked upon the rain.

Later the word umbrella

vanished and became

the thing that strangers take away.

Paper, pen, table, book:

was it possible for a man to think

without them? To know

that he was thinking? We remember

that we forget, he'd written once,

before he started to forget.

Three times he was told

that Longfellow had died.

Without the past, the present

lay around him like the sea.

Or like a ship, becalmed,

upon the sea. He smiled

to think he was the captain then,

gazing off into whiteness,

waiting for the wind to rise. 

~ Lawrence Raab

from The History of Forgetting

found here: http://deathdeconstructed.blogspot.com/

the power of introverts

~ Susan Cain

all kinds of minds

~ Temple Grandin

happiness and bare consciousness

~ Matthieu Ricard

a hide

There's a skin or hide between ourselves and our inner being.  And in the West that skin is very thick.  Inside us there's a sea and that sea is your inner life, your spiritual life, and your sexual impulses - everything you've gotten from the memory stores of evolution.  Then there's the outside world made of buildings and automobiles.  And these two worlds can't rub against each other.  It's too painful.  Therefore you develop a hide exactly like a cow develops a hide.  You don't want her guts to rub against the barn.

~  Robert Bly

spoken to Lewis Hyde in an interview

taken here from Robert Bly - In This World

that lonesome valley

~ Pete Seeger and Joan Baez

the return of the rivers

All the rivers run into the sea;

yet the sea is not full;

unto the place from whence the rivers come,

thither they return again. 

It is raining today

in the mountains. 

It is a warm green rain

with love

in its pockets

for spring is here,

and does not dream

of death.

Birds happen music

like clocks ticking heaves

in a land

where children love spiders,

and let them sleep

in their hair. 

A slow rain sizzles

on the river

like a pan

full of frying flowers,

and with each drop

of rain

the ocean

begins again.

~ Richard Brautigan

moonlight sonata

Ludwig Van Beethoven actually intended for his pieces to be played a lot faster but no orchestra could manage it so they had to slow it down. Here is moonlight sonata 3rd movement played in the original intended tempo. Simply amazing.

~ Valentina Lisitsa

stanzas of the soul / the living flame of love

~ St. John of the Cross

sunflower

What sower walked over earth,

which hands sowed

our inward seeds of fire?

They went out from his fists like rainbow curves

to frozen earth, young loam, hot sand,

they will sleep there

greedily, and drink up our lives

and explode it into pieces

for the sake of a sunflower that you haven't seen

or a thistle head or a chrysanthemum.

Let the young rain of tears come.

Let the calm hands of grief come.

It's not all as evil as you think.

~ Rolf Jacobsen

translated by Robert Bly

from 'Flatirons'

V

It’s when we’re most engaged with other things

that the angel enters, a twist in temperature,

a lightness in the chest that we call wings.

Giddy with sacrament and the impure

gluttony of blood and air and skin,

we look with panoramic eyes to where

the earth curls under and the sky begins,

though we ourselves are of this light-shot air,

senses extending without obstacle,

reaching past by rooting down through rock—

obdurate kindness, heaven’s windowsill.

We are as useless as an open lock,

more insubstantial than a drinking song,

and marked by sandstone long after we’re gone. 

~ David Yezzi

from Flatirons

with thanks to http://fivebranchtree.blogspot.com//

the lamp once out

The lamp once out

Cool stars enter

The window frame.

~ Natsume Soseki

from Zen Haiku: Poems and Letters of Natsume Soseki, by Natsume Soseki 

 Translated by Soiku Shigematsu

music is in the piano only when it is being played

Jack Gilbert: 1925-2012 (Photo by Robert Toby)

We are not one with this world. We are not

the complexity our body is, nor the summer air

idling in the big maple without purpose.

We are a shape the wind makes in these leaves

as it passes through. We are not the wood

any more than the fire, but the heat which is a marriage

between the two. We are certainly not the lake

nor the fish in it, but the something that is

pleased by them. We are the stillness when

a mighty Mediterranean noon subtracts even the voices of

insects by the broken farmhouse. We are evident

when the orchestra plays, and yet are not part

of the strings or brass. Like the song that exists

only in the singing, and is not the singer.

God does not live among the church bells

but is briefly resident there. We are occasional

like that. A lifetime of easy happiness mixed

with pain and loss, trying always to name and hold

on to the enterprise under way in our chest.

Reality is not what we marry as a feeling. It is what

walks up the dirt path, through the excessive heat

and giant sky, the sea stretching away.

He continues past the nunnery to the old villa

where he will sit on the terrace with her, their sides

touching. In the quiet that is the music of that place,

which is the difference between silence and windlessness.

~  Jack Gilbert