discontinuous fragments

We are a thoroughly shell-shocked species.

 Though we have not all suffered abuse as children, 

we have all endured experiences that we perceived as terrifying, 

and that utterly exhausted our tender attempts to comprehend and cope

....as a result of our histories, and of our inborn disposition to become dissociative

 when our minds need protection, moderately dissociative awareness

 is the normal mental status of all adult human beings. 

 What we conceive of as an unbroken thread of consciousness is,

 instead, quite often a train of discontinuous fragments. 

Our awareness is divided.

 And much more commonly than we know, 

even our personalities are fragmented-disorganized

 team efforts trying to cope with past-rather than the sane,

 unified wholes we anticipate in ourselves and in other people.

~ Martha Stout

from The Myth of Sanity

art by picasso

a basis of peace

~ Rupert Spira

 

a living flame

Love's valley is the next, and here desire

Will plunge the pilgrim into seas of fire,

Until his very being is en-flamed

And those whom fire rejects turn back ashamed.

The lover is a man who flares and burns,

Whose face is fevered, who in frenzy yearns,

Who knows no prudence, who will gladly send

A hundred worlds toward their blazing end,

Who knows of neither faith nor blasphemy,

Who has no time for doubt or certainty,

To whom both good and evil are the same,

And who is neither, but a living flame.

But you! Lukewarm in all you say or do,

Backsliding, weak - oh no, this is not you!

True lovers give up everything they own

To steal one moment with the Friend alone -

They make no vague, procrastinating vow,

But risk their livelihood and risk it now.

Until their hearts are burned, how can they flee

From their desire's incessant misery?

They are the falcon when it flies distressed

In circles, searching for its absent nest -

They are the fish cast up upon the land

That seeks the sea and shudders on the sand.

Love here is fire; its thick smoke clouds the head -

When love has come the intellect has fled;

It cannot tutor love, and all its care

Supplies no remedy for love's despair.

If you could seek the unseen you would find

Love's home, which is not reason or the mind,

And love's intoxication tumbles down

The world's designs for glory and renown -

If you could penetrate their passing show

And see the world's wild atoms, you would know

That reason's eyes will never glimpse one spark

Of shining love to mitigate the dark.

Love leads whoever starts along our Way;

The noblest bow to love and must obey -

But you, unwilling both to love and tread

The pilgrim's path, you might as well be dead!

The lover chafes, impatient to depart,

And longs to sacrifice his life and heart.

~ Farid Attar

translated by Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis

from The Conference of Birds

profound not-knowing

One of my favorite things to do is to sit with my elderly father who has Alzheimers. It's a beautiful thing just to sit a place of profound not-knowing with him, a place where I do not know what to say or do. I sit, without expectation, without trying to 'fix' him, or manipulate his experience in any way. I just listen, without trying to make things better in the moment, without playing the role of 'the one who knows'. As consciousness, I am simply available to him. I don't need to 'know' anything in this place, for we are each other. I simply cannot tell who is the one with memory loss. 

And here, I notice a deep and profound acceptance of any wave of frustration or sadness that appears in the ocean of experience. His pain, my pain, there is no difference at all. 

And this seems to me to be what true relationship is at its very core - meeting, really meeting in the moment, without hope, without a future, without expectation, without a story. Coming face to face with yourself. Nobody meeting nobody. 

I love what Nisargadatta Maharaj says: 

"With the dissolution of the personal 'I', 

personal suffering disappears." 

But crucially, he also adds: 

"What remains is the great sadness of compassion". 

Yes, the absence of 'I' is not cold detachment and neo-Advaita world-rejection, 

but intimacy of the most unspeakable kind. 

"Thanks, Dad, for keeping me grounded." 

~ Jeff Foster

from his newsletter: Life Without a Centre

art by picasso

unnameable

.

There is no where in you a paradise that is no place and there

You do not enter except without a story.

To enter there is to become unnameable.

Whoever is nowhere is nobody, and therefore cannot exist except as unborn:

No disguise will avail him anything

Such a one is neither lost nor found.

But he who has an address is lost.

They fall, they fall into apartments and are securely established!

They find themselves in streets. They are licensed

To proceed from place to place

They now know their own names

They can name several friends and know

Their own telephones must some time ring.

If all telephones ring at once, if all names are shouted at once and all cars crash at one crossing:

If all cities explode and fly away in dust

Yet identities refuse to be lost. There is a name and a number for everyone.

There is a definite place for bodies, there are pigeon holes for ashes:

Such security can business buy!

Who would dare to go nameless in so secure a universe?

Yet, to tell the truth, only the nameless are at home in it.

They bear with them in the center of nowhere the unborn flower of nothing:

This is the paradise tree. It must remain unseen until words end and arguments are silent.

~ Thomas Merton

from The Selected Poems of Thomas Merton

.

to breathe nothing but silence

.

Minds which are separated pretend to blend in one another's language.

The marriage of souls in concepts is mostly an illusion.

Thoughts which travel outward bring back reports from You from outward things, but a dialogue with You, uttered through the world, always ends by being a dialogue with my own reflection in the stream of time.  With You there is no dialogue, unless You choose a mountain, circle it with cloud and print Your words in fire upon the mind of Moses.

What was delivered to Moses on tablets of stone, as the fruit of lighting and thunder, 

is now more thoroughly born in our souls 

as quietly as the breath of our own being.

from Dialogues with Silence

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 the land and fills its silences with light.  To pray and work in the morning and to labor in meditation in the evening when night falls upon that land and when the silence fills itself with darkness and with stars.  This is a true and special vocation.  There are few who are willing to belong completely to such silence, to let it soak into their bones, to breathe nothing but silence, to feed on silence, and to turn the very substance of their life into a living and vigilant silence.

Thomas Merton

from Thoughts in Solitude

sketch by the author

.

silence

.

The only silence we know is the silence when noise stops, the silence when thought stops - but that is not silence. Silence is something entirely different, like beauty, like love.  And this silence is not the product of a quiet mind, it is not the product of the brain cells which have understood the whole structure and say, 'for God's sake be quiet'; then the brain cells themselves produce the silence and that is not silence.  Nor is silence the outcome of attention in which the observer is observed; then there is no friction, but that is not silence.

You are waiting for me to describe what this silence is so that you can compare it, interpret it, carry it away and bury it.  It cannot be described.  What can be described is the known, and freedom from the known can come into being only when there is a dying every day to the known, to the hurts, the flatteries, to all the images you have made, to all your experiences - dying every day so that the brain cells themselves become fresh, young, innocent.  But that innocency, that freshness, that quality of tenderness and gentleness, does not produce love;  it is not the quality of beauty or silence.

That silence which is not the silence of the ending of noise is only a small beginning.  It is like going through a small hole to an enormous, wide, expansive ocean, to an immeasurable, timeless state.  But this you cannot understand verbally unless you have understood the whole structure of consciousness and the meaning of pleasure, sorrow and despair, and the brain cells themselves have become quiet.  Then perhaps you may come upon that mystery which nobody can reveal to you and nothing can destroy.  A living mind is a still mind, a living mind is a mind that has no center and therefore no space and time.  Such a mind is the limitless and that is the only truth, that is the only reality.

~ J. Krishnamurti

from Freedom from the Known

photo by Shreve Stockton

silence II

Silence is not a lack of words. 

Silence is not a lack of music. 

Silence is not a lack of curses. 

Silence is not a lack of screams. 

Silence is not a lack of colors 

or voices or bodies or whistling wind. 

Silence is not a lack of anything. 

Silence is resting, nestling 

in every leaf of every tree, 

in every root and branch. 

Silence is the flower sprouting 

upon the branch. 

Silence is the mother singing 

to her newborn babe. 

Silence is the mother crying 

for her stillborn babe. 

Silence is the life of all 

these babes, whose breath 

is a breath of God. 

Silence is seeing and singing praises. 

Silence is the roar of ocean waves. 

Silence is the sandpiper dancing 

on the shore. 

Silence is the vastness of a whale. 

Silence is a blade of grass. 

Silence is sound 

And silence is silence. 

Silence is love, even 

the love that hides in hate. 

Silence is the pompous queen 

and the harlot and the pimp 

hugging his purse on a crowded street. 

Silence is the healer dreaming 

the plant, the drummer drumming 

the dream. It is the lover's 

exhausted fall into sleep. 

It is the call of morning birds. 

Silence is God's beat tapping all hearts. 

Silence is the star kissing a flower. 

Silence is a word, a hope, a candle 

lighting the window of home. 

Silence is everything --the renewing sleep 

of Earth, the purifying dream of Water, 

the purifying rage of Fire, the soaring 

and spiraling flight of Air. It is all 

things dissolved into no-thing--Silence 

is with you always.....the Presence 

of I AM 

~ Elaine Maria Upton

a state of magical simplicity

To practice Zen means to realize one's existence 

moment after moment,

 rather than letting life unravel in regret of the past 

and daydreaming of the future.

To "rest in the present"

 is a state of magical simplicity, 

although attainment of this state is not as simple as it sounds.

~  Peter Matthiessen
 from 'Nine-Headed Dragon River'

saunter reverently

I don't like either the word [hike] or the thing.

People ought to saunter in the mountains - not 'hike!' 
 

Do you know the origin of that word saunter?

 It's a beautiful word. Away back in the middle ages 

people used to go on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, 

and when people in the villages through which they passed 

asked where they were going they would reply,
 

 'A la sainte terre', 'To the Holy Land.'
 

 And so they became known as sainte-terre-ers or saunterers. 

Now these mountains are our Holy Land,
 

and we ought to saunter through them reverently,

 not 'hike' through them.

― John Muir 

the wind

The day we die

the wind comes down

to take away

our footprints.

The wind makes dust

to cover up

the markings we left

while walking.

For otherwise 

the thing would seem

as if we were

still living.

Therefore the wind

is he who comes

to blow away

our footprints.

~ Southern Bushmen

from A Book of Luminous Things

edited by Czeslaw Milosz 

 

sufficient

Strong and content I travel the open road.

The earth, that is sufficient,

I do not want the constellations any nearer,

I know they are very well where they are,

I know they suffice for those who belong to them.

You road I enter upon and look around, I believe you are not all that is here,

I believe that much unseen is also here.

All seems beautiful to me,

I can repeat over to men and women You have done such good to me I would do the same to you,

I will recruit for myself and you as I go,

I will scatter myself among men and women as I go,

I will toss a new gladness and roughness among them,

Whoever denies me it shall not trouble me,

Whoever accepts me he or she shall be blessed and shall bless me.

Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons,

It is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.

Here is the test of wisdom,

Wisdom is not finally tested in schools,

Wisdom cannot be pass’d from one having it to another not having it,

Wisdom is of the soul, is not susceptible of proof, is its own proof,

Applies to all stages and objects and qualities and is content,

Is the certainty of the reality and immortality of things, and the excellence of things;

Something there is in the float of the sight of things that provokes it out of the soul.

Now I re-examine philosophies and religions,

They may prove well in lecture-rooms, yet not prove at all under the spacious clouds and along the landscape and flowing currents.

Here is realization,

Here is a man tallied—he realizes here what he has in him,

The past, the future, majesty, love—if they are vacant of you, you are vacant of them.

Only the kernel of every object nourishes;

Where is he who tears off the husks for you and me?

Where is he that undoes stratagems and envelopes for you and me?

The efflux of the soul is happiness, here is happiness,

I think it pervades the open air, waiting at all times,

Now it flows unto us, we are rightly charged.

Here rises the fluid and attaching character,

The fluid and attaching character is the freshness and sweetness of man and woman,

(The herbs of the morning sprout no fresher and sweeter every day out of the roots of themselves, than it sprouts fresh and sweet continually out of itself.)

Toward the fluid and attaching character exudes the sweat of the love of young and old,

From it falls distill’d the charm that mocks beauty and attainments,

Toward it heaves the shuddering longing ache of contact.

~ Walt Whitman
excerpts from Song of the Open Road 


 

half life

We walk through half our life

as if it were a fever dream

barely touching the ground

our eyes half open

our heart half closed.

Not half knowing who we are

we watch the ghost of us drift

from room to room

through friends and lovers

never quite as real as advertised.

Not saying half we mean

or meaning half we say

we dream ourselves

from birth to birth

seeking some true self.

Until the fever breaks

and the heart can not abide

a moment longer

as the rest of us awakens,

summoned from the dream,

not half caring for anything but love.

- Stephen Levine

from Breaking the Drought

kinship

~ Homeboy Industries

perishable

The nimble ovenbird, the dignity of pears,

The simplicity of oars, the imperishable

Engines inside slim fir seeds, all of these

Make clear how much we want the impermanent

To be permanent.  We want the hermit wren

To keep her eggs even during the storm.

But that's impossible. We are perishable;

Friends, we are salty, impermanent kingdoms.

~ Robert Bly

from Talking into the Ear of a Donkey