Friday, May 4, 2018

possibilities






I prefer the absurdity of writing poems
to the absurdity of not writing poems.
I prefer, where love's concerned, nonspecific anniversaries
that can be celebrated every day.
I prefer moralists
who promise me nothing.
I prefer cunning kindness to the over-trustful kind.
I prefer the earth in civvies.
I prefer conquered to conquering countries.
I prefer having some reservations.
I prefer the hell of chaos to the hell of order.
I prefer Grimms' fairy tales to the newspapers' front pages.
I prefer leaves without flowers to flowers without leaves.
I prefer dogs with uncropped tails.
I prefer light eyes, since mine are dark.
I prefer desk drawers.
I prefer many things that I haven't mentioned here
to many things I've also left unsaid.
I prefer zeroes on the loose
to those lined up behind a cipher.
I prefer the time of insects to the time of stars.
I prefer to knock on wood.
I prefer not to ask how much longer and when.
I prefer keeping in mind even the possibility
that existence has its own reason for being.


–Wislawa Szymborska
excerpt from Nothing Twice, 1997
Translated by S. Baranczak & C. Cavanagh
 
 
 

Sunday, April 29, 2018

pain and healing








And a woman spoke, saying, Tell us of Pain.
And he said:

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.
Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, 

so must you know pain.
And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life, 

your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy;
And you would accept the seasons of your heart, 

even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass over your fields.
And you would watch with serenity through the winters of your grief.

Much of your pain is self-chosen,
It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self.
Therefore trust the physician, and drink his remedy in silence and tranquility:
For his hand, though heavy and hard, is guided by the tender hand of the Unseen,
And the cup he brings, though it burn your lips, 

has been fashioned of the clay which the Potter has moistened 
with His own sacred tears.

~ Kahlil Gibran
from The Prophet
 art by Sean Lewis

Thursday, April 26, 2018

to heal






Sakyamuni (Buddha) himself refused to answer speculative questions, 
and he would not permit abstract philosophical discussion.  

His doctrine was not a doctrine but a way of being in the world.  
His religion was not a set of beliefs and convictions or of rites and sacraments,
 but an opening to love.  

His philosophy was not a world view but a significant silence,
 in which the fracture implied by conceptual knowledge 
was allowed to heal and reality appeared again in its mysterious
 "suchness."


~ Thomas Merton
from Zen and the Birds of Appetite

 

Wednesday, April 25, 2018

no better love






No better love than love with no object,
no more satisfying work than work with no purpose.

If you could give up tricks and cleverness,
that would be the cleverest trick!




~ Rumi
from The Essential Rumi
translations by Coleman Barks with John Moyne


Monday, April 16, 2018

see yourself in the cruelest







Practice until you see yourself in the cruelest person on Earth,
 in the child starving, in the political prisoner. 
Continue until you recognize yourself in everyone in the supermarket,
 on the street corner, in a concentration camp, on a leaf, in a dewdrop. 
Meditate until you see yourself in a speck of dust in a distant galaxy. 
See and listen with the whole of your being. If you are fully present, 
the rain of Dharma will water the deepest seeds in your consciousness, 
and tomorrow, while you are washing the dishes or looking at the blue sky, 
that seed will spring forth, and love and understanding
 will appear as a beautiful flower.


~  Thich Nhat Hanh
with thanks to louie, louie 


Saturday, April 14, 2018

vanishing





We are vanishing from the earth, yet I cannot think we are useless
or else Usen would not have created us. He created all tribes of 
men and certainly had a righteous purpose in creating each.


~ Geronimo

 

Sunday, April 8, 2018

vocation to solitude









 To deliver oneself up, to hand oneself over, entrust oneself completely to the silence of a wide landscape of woods and hills, or sea, or desert; to sit still while the sun comes up over that land and fills its silences with light. To pray and work in the morning and to labor and rest in the afternoon, and to sit still again in meditation in the evening when night falls up on that land and when the silence fills itself with darkness and with stars… to belong completely to such silence, to let it soak into the bones, to breathe nothing but silence, to feed on silence, and to turn the very substance of life into a living and vigilant silence.

~ Thomas Merton 
from Thoughts in Solitude
  art by Odilon Redon, " Silence"
with thanks to Parabola

 

the finger pointing?






“What is essential is invisible to the eye" 
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry



The various languages placed side by side show that with words it is never a question of truth, never a question of adequate expression; otherwise, there would not be so many languages. The “thing in itself” (which is precisely what the pure truth, apart from any of its consequences, would be) is likewise something quite incomprehensible to the creator of language and something not in the least worth striving for. This creator only designates the relations of things to men, and for expressing these relations he lays hold of the boldest metaphors… It is this way with all of us concerning language; we believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things — metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities… A word becomes a concept insofar as it simultaneously has to fit countless more or less similar cases — which means, purely and simply, cases which are never equal and thus altogether unequal. Every concept arises from the equation of unequal things. Just as it is certain that one leaf is never totally the same as another, so it is certain that the concept “leaf” is formed by arbitrarily discarding these individual differences and by forgetting the distinguishing aspects. This awakens the idea that, in addition to the leaves, there exists in nature the “leaf”: the original model according to which all the leaves were perhaps woven, sketched, measured, colored, curled, and painted — but by incompetent hands, so that no specimen has turned out to be a correct, trustworthy, and faithful likeness of the original model… We obtain the concept, as we do the form, by overlooking what is individual and actual; whereas nature is acquainted with no forms and no concepts, and likewise with no species, but only with an X which remains inaccessible and undefinable for us.




~ Friedrich Nietzsche
from  Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche
art from  original watercolors for The Little Prince
 

Wednesday, April 4, 2018

For Martin Luther King






On hearing if Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination Thomas Merton wrote this poem:
April 4 1968 


On a rainy night
On a rainy night in April
When everybody ---
Said the minister

On a balcony
Of a hotel in Tennessee
"We come at once
Upstairs

On a night
On a rainy night in April
When the shot was fired
Said the minister

"I've come at once upstairs
and found him lying
On the balcony ... after... the tornado...he came at once upstairs

On a --- ---
he was our hope
and we found a tornado
said the minister.

And a well dreamed white ---
said the minister
Propped a telescopic storm

and he never
(the well-deemed minister of death)
ran
ran away

And on the balcony
Said the minister
found
even lovely dying.... after... the tornado
... after the tornado
... after... the tornado
... after... the tornado



~ Thomas Merton
with thanks to louie,louie


Merton's letter to Coretta Scott King

 

Friday, March 30, 2018

in my end is my beginning







In the Beginning of Beginnings was Void of Void, the
Nameless.
And in the Nameless was the One, without body, without
form.
This One - this Being in whom all find power to exist -
Is the Living.
From the Living, comes the Formless, the Undivided.
From the act of this Formless, come the Existents, each
according
To its inner principle.  This is Form. Here body embraces and
cherishes spirit.
The two work together as one, blending and manifesting their
Characters.  And this is Nature.
But he who obeys Nature returns through Form and Formless
to the Living,
And in the Living
Joins the unbegun Beginning.
The joining is Sameness.  The sameness is Void.  The Void is
infinite.
The bird opens its beak and sings its note
And then the beak comes together again in Silence.
So Nature and the Living meet together in Void.
Like the closing of the bird's beak
After its song.
Heaven and earth come together in the Unbegun,
And all is foolishness, all is unknown, all is like
The lights of an idiot, all is without mind!
To obey is to close the beak and fall into Unbeginning.



~ Chuang Tzu
translation by Thomas Merton
from The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton
art by picasso




into the unknown






There is a certain innocence about beginning, 
with its excitement and promise of something new.
 But this will emerge only through undertaking some voyage into the unknown. 
And no one can foretell what the unknown might yield. 
There are journeys we have begun that have brought us great inner riches and refinement; 
but we had to travel through dark valleys of difficulty and suffering.
 Had we known at the beginning what the journey would demand of us,
 we might never have set out. 
Yet the rewards and gifts became vital to who we are. 
Through the innocence of beginning we are often seduced into growth.

… When the heart is ready for a fresh beginning, 
unforeseen things can emerge. And in a sense, 
this is exactly what a beginning does. 
 
It is an opening for surprises.
 Surrounding the intention and the act of beginning,
 there are always exciting possibilities. … 
beginnings have their own mind, 
and they invite and unveil new gifts and arrivals in one’s life.
 
Beginnings are new horizons that want to be seen; … 
What is the new horizon in you that wants to be seen?





~ John O’Donohue
from To Bless the Space Between Us




Monday, March 26, 2018

give up all questions except one






.

Give up all questions except one: 
'Who am I?' 
After all, the only fact you are sure of is that you are. 
The 'I am' is certain. 
The 'I am this' is not. 
Struggle to find out what you are in reality. 

To know what you are, you must first investigate and know what you are not. 
Discover all that you are not--
body, 
feelings, 
thoughts, 
time, space, 
this or that
--nothing, 
concrete or abstract, 
which you perceive can be you. 

The very act of perceiving shows that you are not what you perceive. 
The clearer you understand that on the level of mind you can be described in negative terms only, 
the quicker will you come to the end of your search and realize that you are the limitless being.




~ Nisargadatta Maharaj


Monday, March 19, 2018

freedom







Freedom is not following a river.
Freedom is following a river
...though, if you want to. 

It is deciding now by what happens now.
It is knowing that luck makes a difference.
No leader is free; no follower is free
 ...the rest of us can often be free.
Most of the world are living by
creeds too odd, chancy, and habit-forming
...to be worth arguing about by reason. 

If you are oppressed, wake up about
four in the morning: most places,
you can usually be free some of the time
..if you wake up before other people.


~ William Stafford
 from The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems

Tuesday, March 6, 2018

one body








My right hand has written all the poems that I have composed. 
My left hand has not written a single poem. 
But my right hand does not think, “Left Hand, you are good for nothing.” 
My right hand does not have a superiority complex. 
That is why it is very happy. 
My left hand does not have any complex at all. 
In my two hands there is the kind of wisdom 
called the wisdom of nondiscrimination.
One day I was hammering a nail and my right hand was not very accurate 
and instead of pounding on the nail it pounded on my finger.
 It put the hammer down and took care of the left hand 
in a very tender way, as if it were taking care of itself. 
It did not say, “Left Hand, you have to remember that
 I have taken good care of you and you have to pay me back in the future.” 
There was no such thinking. And my left hand did not say, 
“Right Hand, you have done me a lot of harm—
give me that hammer, I want justice.” 
My two hands know that they are members of one body; 
they are in each other.
 
 
~ Thich Nhat Hanh
from his address to Congress entitled
Leading with Courage and Compassion,
Sept. 10th 2003
with thanks to Love is a Place
 
 
 
 

Saturday, March 3, 2018

the way it is








There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.
 
 
 
~ William Stafford