the present has abated its urgencies

For people who live in the country there is a charming freedom in such days. One is free of obligations to the ground.  There is no outside work that one ought to do, simply because, with the ground frozen deep and covered with snow, no such work is possible.  Growth has stopped; there is plenty of hay and grain in the barn; the present has abated its urgencies.  The mind may again turn freely to the past and look back on the way it has come.

This morning has been bearing down out of the future toward this bit of riverbank forever. And for perhaps as long, in a sense, my life has been approaching from the opposite direction. The approach of a man's life out of the past is history, and the approach of time out of the future is mystery. Their meeting is the present, and it is consciousness, the only time life is alive. The endless wonder of this meeting is what causes the mind, in its inward liberty of a frozen morning, to turn back and question and remember. The world is full of places. Why is it that I am here?

- Wendell Berry

from The Long-Legged House

photo by Harry Callahan

with thanks to whiskey river

a star on the horizon of my heart

Ever in my life have I sought thee with my songs. 

It was they who led me from door to door, 

and with them have I felt about me, 

searching and touching my world.

It was my songs that taught me all the lessons I ever learnt; 

they showed me secret paths, 

they brought before my sight many a star on the horizon of my heart.

They guided me all the day long to the mysteries of the country of pleasure and pain, 

and, at last, 

to what palace gate have they brought me in the evening at the end of my journey?

~ Rabindranath Tagore

art by van gogh

are animals thinking and feeling?

~ Carl Safina

the green cookstove

A lonely man once sat on a large flat stone.

When he lifted it, he saw a kitchen: a green

Enamel range with big claw feet, familiar.

Someone lives in that room, cooking and cackling.

"I saw her once," Virgil said. "She was Helen's

Younger sister."  Helen's betrayed husband

Sits by the window, peeling garlic cloves,

And throwing crusts to Plymouth Rocks.

We'll never understand this, Somewhere below

The flat stone of the skull, a carnivorous couple

Lives and plans future wars.  Are we innocent?

These wars don't happen by accident - they occur

Too regularly. How often do we lift the plate

At the bottom of our brain and throw some garlic

And grain down to the kitchen?  "Keep cooking,

My dears," "Something good will come of this."

~ Robert Bly

from Morning Poems

who one is

One never knows who one is. 

The others tell you who you are, 

don't they? 

And as you're told so a million times 

if you live a long life, in the end you don't know at all 

who you are. Everyone says something different. 

You yourself also say something 

different each new moment.

~  Thomas Bernhard

first step

The first step in love

is losing your head.

After the petty ego

you then give up your life

and bear the calamity.

With this behind you, proceed:

Polish the ego's rust

from the mirror

of your self

~ Fakhr al-Din Iraqi

from Love's Alchemy

translations by David and Sabrineh Fideler

glow

Not a single soul lacks

a pathway to you.

There's no stone,

no flower-

not a single piece of straw-

lacking your existence.

In every particle of the world,

the moon of your love

causes the heart

of each atom to glow.

~ Muhammad Shirin Maghribi  

from Love's Alchemy

Poems from the Sufi Tradition

translations by David and Sabrineh Fideler

a thousand years of joy - the film trailer

what difference

Some time when the river is ice ask me

mistakes I have made. Ask me whether

what I have done is my life. Others

have come in their slow way into

my thought, and some have tried to help

or to hurt: ask me what difference

their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say.

You and I can turn and look

at the silent river and wait. We know

the current is there, hidden; and there

are comings and goings from miles away

that hold the stillness exactly before us.

What the river says, that is what I say.

~ William Stafford
from Ask Me

what is happening

Instant to instant

we ask, what is happening?

The sound of shattering everywhere,

is it the world, fragmenting at last,

or our own hearts cracking,

the final break-up of ice?

~ Dorothy Walters

from Marrow of Flame

how much

~  Beth Cioffoletti
 louie louie blog

this moment this love

This moment this love comes to rest in me,

many beings in one being.

In one wheat grain a thousand sheaf stacks.

Inside the needle's eye, a turning night of stars.

Listen, if you can stand to.

Union with the friend

means not being who you have been,

being instead silence, a place,

a view where language is inside seeing.

From the wet source

someone cuts a reed to make a flute

The reed sips breath like wine,

sips more, practicing. Now drunk,

it starts the high clear notes.

There is a path from me to you

that I am constantly looking for,

so I try to keep clear and still

as water does with the moon.

We do not have to follow the pressure-flow of wanting.

We can be led by the guide.

Wishes may or may not come true

in this house of disappointment.

Let's push the door open together and leave.

My essence is like the essence of a red wine.

My body is a cup that grieves because it is inside time.

Glass after glass of wine go into my head.

Finally, my head goes into the wine.

~ Rumi

translation by Coleman Barks

from The Big Red Book

A clear midnight

This is thy hour O soul, thy free flight into the wordless,

Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,

Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best,

Night, sleep, death and the stars.

~ Walt Whitman

the wild earth

Even through these trivial crowded days,

I never lose sight of the wild earth on which I live,

of the ravishing perfection of its beauty.

I stand before infinity and look out over a virgin wilderness.

The potential for reproducing fragments

of this in a form worthy of it are endless.

~ Harlan Hubbard

from his journal, January 15, 1987

silent journal

Inaudible consonant inaudible vowel 

The word continues to fall 

in splendor around us 

Window half shadow window half moon 

back yard like a book of snow 

That holds nothing and that nothing holds 

Immaculate text 

not too prescient not too true

~ Charles Wright

from Xionia