perhaps

How can we ever know the difference we make to the soul of the earth? Where the infinite stillness of the earth meets the passion of the human eye, invisible depths strain towards the mirror of the name.

In the word, the earth breaks silence. It has waited a long time for the word. Concealed beneath familiarity and silence, the earth holds back and it never occurs to us to wonder how the earth sees us. Is it not possible that a place could have huge affection for those who dwell there?

Perhaps your place loves having you there. It misses you when you are away and in its secret way rejoices when you return. Could it be possible that a landscape might have a deep friendship with you? That it could sense your presence and feel the care you extend towards it? Perhaps your favorite place feels proud of you.

We tend to think of death as a return to clay, a victory for nature. But maybe it is the converse: that when you die, your native place will fill with sorrow. It will miss your voice, your breath and the bright waves of your thought, how you walked through the light and brought news of other places.

Perhaps each day our lives undertake unknown tasks on behalf of the silent mind and vast soul of nature. During its millions of years of presence perhaps it was also waiting for us, for our eyes and our words. Each of us is a secret envoi of the earth.

~  John O'Donohue

from Beauty: Rediscovering the True Source of Compassion, 

Serenity and Hope

art by van gogh

separation is painful

When you have understood that all existence, in separation and limitation, is painful,

and when you are willing and able to live integrally, in oneness with all life, as pure being,

you have gone beyond all need of help.

You can help another by precept and example and, above all, by your being.

You cannot give what you do not have and you don't have what you are not.

You can only give what you are - and of that you can give limitlessly.

- Nisargadatta Maharaj

.

help

When another person makes you suffer, 

it is because he suffers deeply within himself, 

and his suffering is spilling over. 

He does not need punishment; he needs help. 

That’s the message he is sending.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

generosity of self

We should not force ourselves to change by hammering our lives into any predetermined shape. We do not need to operate according to the idea of a predetermined program or plan for our lives. Rather, we need to practice a new art of attention to our inner rhythm of our days and lives. This attention brings a new awareness of our own human and divine presence. A dramatic example of this kind of transfiguration is the one all parents know. You watch your children carefully, but one day they surprise you; you still recognize them, but your knowledge of them is insufficient. You have to start listening to them all over again.

It is far more creative to work with the idea of mindfulness rather than with the idea of will. Too often people try to change their lives by using the will as a kind of hammer to beat their life into proper shape. The intellect identifies the goal of the program, and the will accordingly forces the life into that shape. This way of approaching the sacredness of one’s own presence is externalistic and violent. It brings you falsely outside your own self and you can spend years lost in the wilderness of your own mechanical, spiritual programs. You can perish in a famine of your own making.

If you work with a different rhythm, you will come easily and naturally home to your self. Your soul knows the geography of your destiny. Your soul alone has a map of your future, therefore you can trust this indirect, oblique side of your self. If you do, it will take you where you need to go, but more importantly it will teach you a kindness of rhythm in your journey. There are no general principles for this art of being. Yet the signature of this unique journey is inscribed deeply in each soul. If you attend to your self and seek to come into your own presence, you will find exactly the right rhythm for your life. The senses are generous pathways which can bring you home.

~ John O’Donohue 

from Anam Cara 

art by Odilon Redon
 

water becomes one with water

When a wise man has withdrawn his mind from all things without, 

and when his spirit has peacefully left all inner sensations, 

let him rest in peace, free from the movement of will and desire. ... 

For it has been said: There is something beyond our mind, 

which abides in silence within our mind. 

It is the supreme mystery beyond thought. 

Let one's mind and subtle spirit rest upon that and nothing else. 

... When the mind is silent, 

beyond weakness and distraction, 

then it can enter into a world, 

which is far beyond the mind: the supreme Destination. ... 

Then one knows the joy of Eternity. ... 

Words cannot describe the joy of the soul 

whose impurities are washed away in the depths of contemplation, 

who is one with the Atman, his own Self. 

Only those who experience this joy know what it is. ... 

As water becomes one with water, 

fire with fire, 

and air with air, 

so the mind becomes one with the infinite Mind 

and thus attains Freedom. 

~ Maitreya Upanishad

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

 

 

 

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

 

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

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 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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