beauty and ugliness

When people see things as beautiful,

ugliness is created.

When people see things as good,

evil is created.

Being and non-being produce each other.

Difficult and easy complement each other.

Long and short define each other.

High and low oppose each other.

Fore and aft follow each other.

Therefore the Master

can act without doing anything

and teach without saying a word.

Things come her way and she does not stop them;

things leave and she lets them go.

She has without possessing,

and acts without any expectations.

When her work is done, she takes no credit.

That is why it will last forever.

~ Lao Tzu

from the Tao Te Ching

translation by j.h.mcdonald

what draws you?

There are two types on the path, those

who come against their will, the blindly religious,

and those who obey out of love.

The former have ulterior motives.

they want the midwife near because she gives them milk.

The others love the beauty of the nurse.

The former memorize the prooftexts of conformity

and repeat them. The latter disappear

into whatever draws them to God.

Both are drawn from the source.

Any motion is from the mover.

Any love from the beloved.

~ Rumi

from Rumi - The Book of Love

translations by Coleman Barks

 

sacrificed

Not until a person dissolves, can

he or she know what union is

There is a descent into emptiness.

A lie will not change to truth

with just talking about it.

***

Longing is the core of mystery

Longing itself brings the cure.

The only rule is, Suffer the pain.

Your desire must be disciplined,

and what you want to happen

in time, sacrificed.

~ Rumi

from The Soul of Rumi

translations by Coleman Barks

forget

Forget the suffering
You caused others.
Forget the suffering
Others caused you.

The waters run and run,
Springs sparkle and are done,
You walk the earth you are forgetting.

Sometimes you hear a distant refrain.
What does it mean, you ask, who is singing?
A childlike sun grows warm.
A grandson and a great-grandson are born.
You are led by the hand once again.

The names of the rivers remain with you.
How endless those rivers seem!
Your fields lie fallow,
The city towers are not as they were.
You stand at the threshold mute. 

By Czeslaw Milosz

version by Robert Hass

compassion and kinship

~ Fr. Gregory Boyle

when you're broken open

Dance, when you're broken open.

Dance, if you've torn the bandage off.

Dance in the middle of fighting.

Dance in your blood.

Dance, when you're perfectly free.

I have lived on the lip

of insanity, wanting to know reasons,

knocking on a door.  It opens.

I've been knocking from the inside!

Something opens our wings.  Something

makes boredom and hurt disappear.

Someone fills the cup in front of us.

We taste only sacredness.

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!

Some nights stay up till dawn,

as the moon sometimes does for the sun.

Be a full bucket pulled up the dark way

of a well, then lifted out into light.

~ Rumi

.

St. Francis and the sow

.

The bud

stands for all things,

even those things that don't flower,

for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;

though sometimes it is necessary

to reteach a thing its loveliness,

to put a hand on its brow

of the flower

and retell it in words and in touch

it is lovely

until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;

as St. Francis

put his hand on the creased forehead

of the sow, and told her in words and in touch

blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow

began remembering all down her thick length,

from the earthen snout all the way

through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of

the tail,

from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine

down through the great broken heart

to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering

from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking

and blowing beneath them:

the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

~ Galway Kinnell

epiphany

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race ... there is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun. 

I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God's eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all of the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed...

~ Thomas Merton

from Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

.

detachment

When I preach, I usually speak of detachment and

 say that a man should be empty of self and all things;

 and secondly, that he should be reconstructed in the simplicity
  beyond all words and beyond all understanding that God is;

 and thirdly, that he should consider the great longing

 which God has set up in the soul, such that by means of it 

man may wonderfully attain to God; and fourthly, 

of the purity of the divine nature.

~ Meister Eckhart

the woodcarver

Kling, the master carver, made a bell stand

Of precious wood. When it was finished,

All who saw it were astounded.  They said it must be

The work of spirits.

The Prince of Lu said to the master carver:

"What is your secret?"

Kling replied: " I am only a workman:

I have no secret. There is only this:

When I began to think about the work you commanded

I guarded my spirit, did not expend it

On trifles, that were not to the point.

I fasted in order to set

My heart at rest.

After three days fasting,

I had forgotten gain and success.

After five days

I had forgotten praise or criticism.

After seven days

I had forgotten my body

With all its limbs."

"By this time all thought of your Highness

And of the court had faded away.

All that might distract me from the work

Had vanished.

I was collected in the single thought

Of the bell stand."

"Then I went to the forest

To see the trees in their own natural state.

When the right tree appeared before my eyes,

The bell stand also appeared in it, clearly, beyond doubt.

All I had to do was to put forth my hand 

And begin."

"If I had not met this particular tree

There would have been 

No bell stand at all."

"What happened?

My own collected thought

Encountered the hidden potential in the wood;

From this live encounter came the work

Which you ascribe to the spirits."

~ Chuang Tzu

translation by Thomas Merton

from The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton

when it is one-sided

.

.

"I have found a thought, Govinda, which you'll again regard as a joke or foolishness, but which is my best thought. It says: The opposite of every truth is just as true! That's like this: any truth can only be expressed and put into words when it is one-sided. Everything is one-sided which can be thought with thoughts and said with words, it's all one-sided, all just one half, all lacks completeness, roundness, oneness. When the exalted Gotama spoke in his teachings of the world, he had to divide it into Sansara and Nirvana, into deception and truth, into suffering and salvation. It cannot be done differently, there is no other way for him who wants to teach. But the world itself, what exists around us and inside of us, is never one-sided. A person or an act is never entirely Sansara or entirely Nirvana, a person is never entirely holy or entirely sinful. It does really seem like this, because we are subject to deception, as if time was something real.

...

I have experienced on my body and on my soul that I needed sin very much, I needed lust, the desire for possessions, vanity, and needed the most shameful despair, in order to learn how to give up all resistance, in order to learn how to love the world, in order to stop comparing it to some world I wished, I imagined, some kind of perfection I had made up, but to leave it as it is and to love it and to enjoy being a part of it.

...

... love, oh Govinda, seems to me to be the most important thing of all. To thoroughly understand the world, to explain it, to despise it, may be the thing great thinkers do. But I'm only interested in being able to love the world, not to despise it, not to hate it and me, to be able to look upon it and me and all beings with love and admiration and great respect.

.

~ Herman Hesse

from  Siddhartha

.

nearer the roses

A nightingale flies nearer the roses.

A girl blushes. Pomegranates ripen.

Hallaj will be executed. A man walks

a mountain path, solitary and full of

prayer. Trust grows for nine months,

then a new being appears. Narcissus

at the edge, creekwater washing tree

roots: God is giving a general into-

ductory lecture. We hear and read it

everywhere, in the field, through the

branches. We'll never finish studying.

Neither of us has a penny, yet we're

walking the jewelers' bazaar seriously

considering making a purchase! Or

shall I say this with other metaphors?

A barn crowded with souls. Quietness

served around a table. Two people talk

along a road that's paved with words.

~ Rumi

.

attachment

.

Our self-centeredness,

our distinctive attachment to the feeling 

of an independent "I" works to inhibit

our compassion.

True compassion can only develop

and grow as such self-grasping is reduced

and eventually eliminated.

~ Dalai Lama 

from Tibetan Portrait - The Power of Compassion

photo by Phil Borges

the woman is Tamdin, 69 years old, she was imprisoned in 1987 but now has escaped, 
walking 35 days across the Himalayas to seek an audience with the Dalai Lama.

.

destroyer of illusion

Compassion is the destroyer of illusion, 

it isn’t helping ladies over the road or helping people get through life.  

 

Compassion doesn’t help the separate individual,

 it exposes the dream of separation and leaves freedom. 

 

 Unconditional love doesn’t recognize that there is

 a separate person who needs help… 

that is the freeing nature of the boundlessness

 that is palpable when we are together.

~ Tony Parsons

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