the crucible of crisis

As unlikely as it may seem, the contemplative moment can be found at the very center of such ontological crises . . . during the Middle Passage in the holds of slave ships . . . auction blocks . . . and the . . . hush arbors [where slaves worshiped in secret]. Each event is experienced by individuals stunned into multiple realities by shock, journey, and displacement. . . . In the words of Howard Thurman, “when all hope for release in the world seems unrealistic and groundless, the heart turns to a way of escape beyond the present order.”  For captured Africans, there was no safety except in common cause and the development of internal and spiritual fortitude. . . .

The only sound that would carry Africans over the bitter waters was the moan. Moans flowed through each wracked body and drew each soul toward the center of contemplation. . . . One imagines the Spirit moaning as it hovered over the deep during the Genesis account of creation [Genesis 1:2]. Here, the moan stitches horror and survival instincts into a creation narrative. . . . On the slave ships, the moan became the language of stolen strangers, the sound of unspeakable fears, the precursor to joy yet unknown. The moan is the birthing sound, the first movement toward a creative response to oppression, the entry into the heart of contemplation through the crucible of crisis.

~ Barbara A. Holmes 

from Joy Unspeakable: Contemplative Practices of the Black Church

 

compassion and kinship

Fr. Gregory Boyle

Father Gregory Boyle, founder and executive director of Homeboy Industries, is an acknowledged expert on gangs, intervention and re-entry and today serves on the U.S. Attorney General's Defending Childhood Task Force. 
 

Born in Los Angeles, one of eight children, Fr. Greg worked in the family-owned dairy, loading milk trucks to earn his high school tuition. An enduring memory of that youthful time is when "...these weathered old truckers would come up to me, put their arms around me and point at my father in the distance, on the loading dock, and say, 'Your dad is a great man.'" Lessons from that first job apply at Homeboy Industries today where employees come to change for themselves and their children. Homeboy Industries traces its roots to "Jobs For A Future" (JFF), created in 1988 by Boyle at Dolores Mission. To address the escalating problems of gang-involved youth, he and the community developed an elementary school, day care program and sought legitimate employment for young people. Boyle serves on the National Gang Center Advisory Board (Bureau of Justice Assistance and the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention). He is also a member of the Advisory Board for the Loyola Law School Center for Juvenile Law and Policy and previously served on the California Commission on Juvenile Justice, Crime and Delinquency Prevention. The National Child Labor Committee recognized Fr. Greg with the first Nancy M. Daly Advocacy Award for Service to Children and Youth on January 30, 2012. Homeboy Industries, now located in the heart of downtown Los Angeles, is recognized as a national and international model for youth seeking to move beyond gangs and achieve a life of hope. 

homeboy-industries.org

many routes

Like those in the valley behind us, most people stand
 in sight of the spiritual mountains all their lives and never enter them,
 being content to listen to others who have been there 
and thus avoid the hardships. Some travel into the mountains 
accompanied by experienced guides who know the best and least
 dangerous routes by which they arrive at their destination.
 Still others, inexperienced and untrusting, attempt to make their own routes.
 Few of these are successful, but occasionally some, by sheer will
and luck and grace, do make it. Once there they become more aware 
than any of the others that there's no single or fixed number of routes. 
There are as many routes as there are individual souls.

- Robert M. Pirsig
from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

roses, late summer

What happens
to the leaves after
they turn red and golden and fall
away? What happens

to the singing birds
when they can't sing
any longer? What happens
to their quick wings?

Do you think there is any
personal heaven
for any of us?
Do you think anyone,

the other side of that darkness,
will call to us, meaning us?
Beyond the trees
the foxes keep teaching their children

to live in the valley.
so they never seem to vanish, they are always there
in the blossom of the light
that stands up every morning

in the dark sky.
And over one more set of hills,
along the sea,
the last roses have opened their factories of sweetness

and are giving it back to the world.
If I had another life
I would want to spend it all on some
unstinting happiness.

I would be a fox, or a tree
full of waving branches.
I wouldn't mind being a rose
in a field full of roses.

Fear has not yet occurred to them, nor ambition.
Reason they have not yet thought of.
Neither do they ask how long they must be roses, and then what.
Or any other foolish question.

~ Mary Oliver

 

break yourself apart

Be with those who help your being.

Don't sit with indifferent people, whose breath 

comes cold out of their mouths.

Not these visible forms, your work is deeper.

A chunk of dirt thrown in the air breaks to pieces.

If you don't try to fly, 

and so break yourself apart,

you will be broken open by death,

when it's too late for all you could become.

Leaves get yellow. The tree puts out fresh roots

and makes them green.

Why are you so content with a love that turns you yellow?

~ Rumi 

 translation Coleman Barks

the road home

An ant hurries along a threshing floor

with its wheat grain, moving between huge stacks

of wheat, not knowing the abundance 

all around.  It thinks its one grain

is all there is to love.

So we choose a tiny seed to be devoted to.

This body, one path, one teacher.

Look wider and farther.

The essence of every human being can see,

and what that essence-eye takes in,

the being becomes.  Saturn. Solomon!

The ocean pours through a jar,

and you might say it swims inside

the fish!  This mystery gives peace to

your longing and makes the road home home.

~ Rumi

translation by Coleman Barks

listen

For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farm boy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.

A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.

A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one’s suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.

~ Hermann Hesse

from Trees, Reflections and Poems

consenting to be deceived

By closing the eyes and slumbering and consenting to be deceived
 by shows, men establish and confirm their daily life of routine 
and habit everywhere, which still is built on purely illusory foundations ...

I have read in a Hindu book, that "there was a king's son,
 who, being expelled in infancy from his native city,
 was brought up by a forester, and, growing to maturity in that state, 
imagined himself to belong to the barbarous race with which he lived. 
 One of his father's ministers having discovered him,
 revealed to him what he was, and the misconception of his character 
was removed, and he knew himself to be a prince.  So soul,
" continues the Hindu philosopher, "from the circumstances in which it is placed,
 mistakes its own character, until the truth is revealed to it
 by some holy teacher, and then it knows itself to be Brahma."

I perceive that we inhabitants of New England live this mean life 
that we do because our vision does not penetrate the surface of things.

~ Henry David Thoreau

from Walden, "Where I lived, and what I lived for," 1854

All my body calls

All my body calls

for something in this sleeping

earth

we call the spirit.

But how

from lifted arms

where stars run through fingers

and the night is like sand

do I breathe a fragrance of its wisdom

do I call its name

or listen to the drops

that trickle down to earth

and hear

life being given

not only through the moving hands of the forest

but through the hand that reaches in

the dark unmoving regions of the chest

and uncovers slowly

the enormous

indistinct

shape of the ocean.

~  David Whyte 

a monk sips morning tea

A monk sips morning tea,

it's quiet,

the chrysanthemum's flowering.

~ Matsuo Basho

translated by Robert Hass 

Flowering Vetch

Each of the tragedies can be read

as the tale of a single ripening self,

every character part of one soul.

The comedies can be included in this as well.

Often the flaw is a flaw of self-knowledge;

sometimes greed.  For this reason

the comic glint of a school of herring leads to no plot line,

we cannot imagine a tragedy of donkeys or bees.

Before the ordinary realities, ordinary failures:

hunger, coldness, anger, longing, heat.

Yet one day, a thought as small as a vetch flower opens.

After, no longer minding the minor and almost wordless role,

playing the messenger given the letter

everyone knows will arrive too late or ruined by water.

To have stopped by the fig and eaten was not an error, then,

but the reason for going.

~  Jane Hirshfield

from After

Inter-us

.

You are me and I am you.
Isn't it obvious that we inter-are?
You cultivate the flower in yourself
so that I will be beautiful.
I transform the garbage in myself
so that you do not have to suffer.
I support you you support me.
I am here to bring you peace
you are here to bring me joy

 

 

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

unlived

.

No one lives his life.

Disguised since childhood,

haphazardly assembled

from voices and fears and little pleasures,

we come of age as masks.

Our true face never speaks.

Somewhere there must be storehouses

where all these lives are laid away

like suits of armor or old carriages

or clothes hanging limply on the walls.

Maybe all paths lead there,

to the repository of unlived things.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

from The Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

art by picasso

a fig in winter

Although from the beginning

I knew

the world is impermanent,

not a moment passes

when my sleeves are dry.

~ Ryokan

When you are delighted with anything, be delighted as with a thing which is not one of those which cannot be taken away, but as something of such a kind, as an earthen pot is, or a glass cup, that, when it has been broken, you may remember what it was and may not be troubled… What you love is nothing of your own: it has been given to you for the present, not that it should not be taken from you, nor has it been given to you for all time, but as a fig is given to you or a bunch of grapes at the appointed season of the year. But if you wish for these things in winter, you are a fool. So if you wish for your son or friend when it is not allowed to you, you must know that you are wishing for a fig in winter.

At the times when you are delighted with a thing, place before yourself the contrary appearances.


~ Epictetus
from The Discourses of Epictetus

with thanks to brainpickings

for the sake of others

The story goes that in certain Native American tribes, when a person became psychologically unstable, she or he was placed in the middle of a circle of tribal members – men and women, children and old people – and required to spin around and around until collapsing to the ground. The tribal member toward whom her body faced now became her special charge. She was obligated to care for that person, see to their needs, and be their companion and friend. The understanding was that caring for someone else is what stirs personal healing.

When we ache from the pain of loss or rejection, the pain of depression or loneliness, the pain of feeling unloved, from bodily pain or even the pain of impending death, the ache can feel agonizingly private to us. We feel alone in our pain: it encloses us in an isolation that feels terribly unfair. How is it possible then to offer care for others?

When Robert Kennedy lay dying from an assassin’s bullet, his blood spreading across a kitchen floor, he opened his eyes and asked, “Is everyone all right?” I like to believe that question eased his homecoming. At least it taught me this counter-intuitive calculus: when you are in need, give.

Giving in this way requires a shift in our hearts. In moving from self-concern to other-concern, we enter a deeper belonging.

The Native American ritual is charged by the healing power of belonging, not altruism, for altruistic behavior benefits another at one’s own expense. The circle of tribal members embraces the wounded person, who returns that embrace. Both are healed.

So to say “when you are in need, give,” is not an injunction to be virtuous or to sacrifice your need in favor of another’s. It is to step from the loneliness of separation into the seamlessness of Being where nothing and no one has ever been separate from anything else. Our absolute belonging is not an idea, nor do we need to make it happen, nor make ourselves worthy of it. It’s already and always so.

“Stepping into the seamlessness of Being” doesn’t require us to travel any distance – it may be more accurate to say it steps into us when we allow it to. A generous heart is first of all a receptive heart.

If I feel the need to be seen and loved for what I am, and if I sit in that need waiting for someone to respond with what I need, I might sit for a long time in disappointment. But if I stop waiting and simply give, as best I can, what I’ve been waiting for, my world turns inside out. The connection I longed for is revealed – maybe not in the way I wanted or expected, but in a more fundamental sense of belonging. I am now able to receive.

The way this happens is a kind of magic that is always available to us. The distressed woman falls to the ground. When she looks up she sees in front of her an old toothless grandmother. She takes her hand. What is it that passes between their hands?



~ Pir Elias Amidon, from Free Medicine