nothing ahead

Lovers think they're looking for each other,

but there's only one search: wandering

this world is wandering that,

both inside one

transparent sky.  In here there is

no dogma and no heresy.

The miracle of Jesus is himself, not what he said

or did about the future.  Forget the future.

I'd worship someone who could do that.

On the way you may want to look back, or not.

But if you can say, There's nothing ahead,

there will be nothing there.

Stretch your arms

and take hold the cloth of your clothes

with both hands.  The cure for pain is in the pain.

Good and bad are mixed.  If you don't have both,

you don't belong with us.

When one of us gets lost,

is not here, he must be inside us.  There's no

place like that anywhere in the world.

~ Rumi

from The Book of Love

translations by Coleman Barks

where you love from

Look inside and find where a person loves from.

That's the reality, not what they say.

~ Hypocrities

the center of the circle

Forget about knowledge and wisdom,

and people will be a hundred times better off.

Throw away charity and righteousness,

and people will return to brotherly love.

Throw away profit and greed,

and there won't be any thieves.

These three are superficial and aren't enough

to keep us at the center of the circle, so we must also:

Embrace simplicity.

Put others first.

Desire little.



~ Lao-tzu
Tao Teh Ching
Mcdonald translation

we have ways within each other

They try to say what you are, spiritual or sexual? 

They wonder about Solomon and all his wives. 

In the body of the world, they say, there is a soul 

and you are that. 

But we have ways within each other 

that will never be said by anyone. 

~ Rumi

who knows what is going on

Who knows what is going on on the other side of each hour?

How many times the sunrise was

there, behind a mountain!

How many times the brilliant cloud piling up far off

was already a golden body full of thunder!

This rose was poison.

That sword gave life.

I was thinking of a flowery meadow

at the end of a road,

and found myself in the slough.

I was thinking of the greatness of what was human,

and found myself in the divine.

~ Juan Ramon Jimenez

English version by Robert Bly
with thanks to Poetry Chaikhana

the door

One day you’ll see: 

you’ve been knocking on a door 

without a house. 

You’ve been waiting, shivering, yelling 

words of daring and hope.

One day you’ll see:

there is no-one on the other side

except, as ever, the jubilant ocean

that won’t shatter ceramically like a dream

when you and I shatter.

But not yet. Now 

you wait outside, watching

the blue arches of mornings 

that will break but are now perfect.

Underneath on tip-toe 

pass the faces, speaking to you,

saying ‘you’, ‘you’, ‘you’, 

smiling, waving, arriving

in unfailing chronology.

One day you’ll doubt your movements, 

you will shudder

at the accuracy of your sudden age. 

You will ache for slow beauty 

to save you from your quick, quick life.

But not yet. Hope 

fills the yawn of time.

Blue surrounds you. Now let’s say

you see a door and knock, 

and wait for someone to hear. 

~ Kapka Kassabova

with thanks to Love is a Place

magnetism

The Self is like a powerful magnet within us. 

It draws us gradually to itself, though we imagine we are going to It of our own accord:

 when we are near enough, It puts an end to our activities, 

makes us still, and then swallows up our personal current,

 thus killing our wrong personality. 

It overwhelms the intellect and over floods the whole being. 

We think we are meditating upon It and developing towards It, 

whereas the truth is that we are iron filings and It is the Atman-magnet 

that is pulling us towards Itself. Thus the process of finding 

the Self is a form of Divine magnetism.

~ Ramana Maharshi

in succession, in division

We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. 

Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence;

 the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; 

the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist, 

and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing

 and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, 

the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. 

We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree;

 but the whole, of which these are the shining parts, is the soul. 

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

from the essay The Over-Soul

art by gene kloss

on friendship and love

Such a friendship has no model but itself, and can only be compared to itself. It was not one special consideration, nor two, nor three, nor four, nor a thousand; it was some mysterious quintessence of all this mixture which possessed itself of my will,  and led it to plunge and lose itself in his, which possessed itself of his whole will, and led it, with a similar hunger and a like impulse, to plunge and lose itself in mine.  I may truly say lose, for it left us with nothing that was our own, nothing that was either his or mine.

~ Montaigne

from Essays of Michel de Montaigne

In any true love - a mother's for her child, a husband's for his wife, a friend's for a friend - there is an excess energy that always wants to be in motion.  Moreover, it seems to move not simply from one person to another but through them toward something else.  ("All I know now / is the more he loved me the more I loved the world" - Spencer Reece.) That is why we can be so baffled and overwhelmed by such love (and I don't mean merely when we fall in love; in fact, I'm talking more of other, more durable relationships): it wants to be more than it is; it cries out inside of us to make it more than it is.

~ Christian Wiman

from My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer

we say

We say release, and radiance, and roses,

and echo upon everything that's known;

and yet, behind the world our names enclose is

the nameless: our true archetype and home.

The sun seems male, and earth is like a woman,

the field is humble, and the forest proud;

but over everything we say, inhuman,

moves the forever-undetermined god.

We grow up; but the world remains a child.

Star and flower, in silence, watch us go.

And sometimes we appear to be the final

exam they must succeed on. And they do.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

translation by Stephen Mitchell

photo by Carsten Meyerdierks

well of darkness

If each day falls

inside each night,

there exists a well

where clarity is imprisoned.

We need to sit on the rim

of the well of darkness

and fish for fallen light

with patience.

~ Pablo Neruda

from The Sea and the Bells

translated by William O'Daly

with thanks to Love is a Place

that crookedness is straightness itself

They asked al-Hallaj, "To which religious School do you belong?

he answered, "God's own."

He who limned 

a thousand worlds with paint-

you layabout! - do you expect

He'll use your color or mine?

Our paints and tints

are but opinions and fantasy,

He is colorless

and we must adopt His hue.

Look: a shadow lies crooked upon the ground because the very earth is laid rough; but no, 

that crookedness is straightness itself, for the perfection, the "straightness" of the eyebrow is in its 

sinuous curve.

Only because it is bent

is this piece of wood a bow.

Reality is a sphere: wherever you place your finger,

there is its dead center.

~ Fakhruddin Iraqi

from Divine Flashes

go deeper

Go deeper than love, for the soul has greater depths,

love is like the grass, but the heart is deep wild rock

molten, yet dense and permanent.

Go down to your deep old heart, and lose sight of yourself.

And lose sight of me, the me whom you turbulently loved.

Let us lose sight of ourselves, and break the mirrors.

For the fierce curve of our lives is moving again to the depths

out of sight, in the deep living heart.

But say, in the dark wild metal of your heart

is there a gem, which came into being between us?

is there a sapphire of mutual trust, a blue spark?

Is there a ruby of fused being, mine and yours, an inward glint?

If there is not, O then leave me, go away.

For I cannot be bullied back into the appearances of love,

any more than August can be bullied to look like March.

Love out of season, especially at the end of the season

is merely ridiculous.

If you insist on it, I insist on departure.

Have you no deep old heart of wild womanhood

self-forgetful, and gemmed with experience,

and swinging in a strange union of power

with the heart of the man you are supposed to have loved?

If you have not, go away.

If you can only sit with a mirror in your hand, an ageing woman

posing on and on as a lover,

in love with a self that now is shallow and withered,

your own self–that has passed like a last summer’s flower–

then go away–

I do not want a woman whom age cannot wither.

She is a made-up lie, a dyed immortelle

of infinite staleness.

~ D. H. Lawrence
from The Complete Poems of D.H. Lawrence

february 29

An extra day -

Like the painting's fifth cow,

who looks out directly,

straight toward you,

from inside her black and white spots

An extra day -

Accidental, surely:

the made calendar stumbling over the real

as a drunk trips over a threshold

too low to see.

An extra day -

With a second cup of black coffee.

A friendly but businesslike phone call.

A mailed-back package.

Some extra work, but not too much -

just one day's worth, exactly.

An extra day -

Not unlike the space

between a door and its frame

when one room is lit and another is not,

and one changes into the other

as a woman exchanges a scarf.

An extra day -

Extraordinarily like any other.

And still

there is some generosity to it,

like a letter re-readable after its writer has died.

~ Jane Hirshfield

from The Beauty

a person protests to fate

A person protests to fate:

"The things you have caused

me most to want

are those that furthest elude me."

Fate nods.

Fate is sympathetic.

To tie the shoes, button a shirt,

are triumphs

for only the very young,

the very old.

During the middle:

conjugating a river

mastering tango

training the cat to stay off the table

preserving a single moment longer than this one

continuing to wake whatever has happened the day before

and the penmanships love practices inside the body.

~ Jane Hirshfield

from The Beauty