within the circles of our lives

Within the circles of our lives

we dance the circles of the years,

the circles of the seasons

within the circles of the years,

the cycles of the moon

within the circles of the seasons,

the circles of our reasons

within the cycles of the moon.

Again, again we come and go,

changed, changing.  Hands

join, unjoin in love and fear,

grief and joy.  The circles turn,

each giving into each, into all.

Only music keeps us here,

each by all the others held.

In the hold of hands and eyes

we turn in pairs, that joining 

joining each to all again.

And then we turn aside, alone,

out of the sunlight gone

into the darker circles of return.

~ Wendell Berry

photo by Ansel Adams

love - growth and evolution

Love is concerned with growth and evolution. 

It is — though as yet hardly acknowledged in that connection

 — a root-factor of ordinary human growth; 

for in so far as it is a hunger of the individual, 

the satisfaction of that hunger is necessary for individual growth

 — necessary (in its various forms) for physical, mental and spiritual nourishment,

 for health, mental energy, large affectional capacity, and so forth. 

And it is — though this too is not sufficiently acknowledged

 — a root-factor of the Evolution process. 

For in so far as it represents and gives rise to the union 

of two beings in a new form, it plainly represents a step in Evolution, 

and plainly suggests that the direction of that step 

will somehow depend upon the character and quality of the love concerned.
...
Love — even rude and rampant and outrageous love

 — does more for the moralizing of poor humanity 

than a hundred thousand Sunday schools.

 It cleans the little human soul from the clustered lies

 in which it has nested itself — from the petty conceits

 and deceits and cowardices and covert meannesses.
...
Self-consciousness is fatal to love. 

The self-conscious lover never ‘arrives.’

 … And so too the whole modern period of commercial civilization 

and Christianity has been fatal to love… They have bred the self-regarding

 consciousness in the highest degree; and so

 — though they may have had their uses 

and their parts to play in the history of mankind, 

they have been fatal to the communal spirit in society, 

and they have been fatal to the glad expression of the soul in private life.

Self-consciousness is fatal to love,

 which is the true expression of the soul.

 

 

~ Edward Carpenter

from Marriage in Free Society

 with thanks to brainpickings

 Carpenter was a poet and writer, he was a close friend of Rabindranath Tagore, and a friend of Walt Whitman.  He corresponded with many famous figures, such as Annie Besant, Isadora Duncan, Havelock Ellis, Roger Fry, Mahatma Gandhi, Keir Hardie, J. K. Kinney, Jack London, George Merrill, E. D. Morel, William Morris, Edward R. Pease, John Ruskin, and Olive Schreiner.

 

 Comments from Wikipedia

 

 

life in us

The life in us is like the water in the river. 
 It may rise this year higher than man has ever known it, 
and flood the parched uplands; even this may be the eventful year, 
which will drown out all our muskrats.  It was not always dry land 
where we dwell.  I see far inland the banks which the stream 
anciently washed,  before science began to record its freshets.

... Who does not feel his faith in a resurrection and immortality
 strengthened by hearing of this?  Who knows what beautiful
 and winged life, whose egg had been buried for ages 
under many concentric layers of woodenness
 in the dead dry life of society, deposited at first in the alburnum 
of the green and living tree, which has been gradually converted
 into the semblance of its well seasoned tomb - may unexpectedly
 come forth from amidst society's most trivial and handseled furniture,
 to enjoy its perfect summer life at last!

~ Henry David Thoreau

from Walden, "Conclusion," 1854

art by Roderick Maclver

so both and oneful

..
we are so both and oneful
night cannot be so sky
sky cannot be so sunful
i am through you so i


~ e.e.cummings





.

the hermit

Early in the morning the hermit wakes, hearing

The roots of the fir tree stir beneath his floor.

Someone is there.  That strength buried

In earth carries up the summer world.  When

A man loves a woman, he nourishes her.

Dancers strew the lawn with the light of their feet.

When a woman loves the earth, she nourishes it.

Earth nourishes what no one can see.

~ Robert Bly

from Talking into the Ear of a Donkey

death and deepening

When the body is in the grave, dead and buried, or when there is a death of ego and its perspectives during one's lifetime, then a deeper spirit or soul can come to be.  A deepening of historical being occurs by way of an under-the-worldly point of view.  The descent into the underworld of souls (psychai, animae) is a descent into a soul-perspective or depth-perspective concerning history.  One might say that the descent into hell is actually the ascent of soul.  It brings a sense of soul into ascendancy in life, and it gives the human ego a perspective from a soulful point of view.  The descent is itself a resurrection.

In-fero means  "to carry inward," "to gather in."  Therefore... the descensus may be read as referring, not to some actual physical place, but rather to a "journey to the interior."  The descensus is ad inferos.  It is a "carrying inward."  Hell is a descensus, and encountering it is a "deepening." 

Tradition imagines the descent into hell as a descent into "darkness," or into a "hole," or into a "pit," or into "invisibility" (Hades' name means "invisible"), then no matter how a person may feel about such experiences of being in the "dark," in a "hole," in the "pits," or "invisible" to others, that person is encouraged to search such deep moments for their disclosures and expressions of profound "soul."

~ David Leroy Miller

from Hells and Holy Ghosts: 

A Theopoetics of Christian Belief

a waking

I was walled inside a dream.

Its walls had no consistency,

no weight: its emptiness was its weight.

The walls were hours and the hours

sorrow, hoarded forever.

The time of those hours was not time.

I leapt through a breach: in this world

it was four o’clock. The room was my room

and my ghost was in each thing.

I wasn't there. I looked out the window:

not a soul under the electric light.

Vigilant streetlamps, dirty snow,

houses and cars asleep, the insomnia

of a lamp, the oak that talks to itself,

the wind and its knives, the illegible

writing of the constellations.

The things were buried deep in themselves

and my eyes of flesh saw them

weary of being, realities

stripped of their names. My two eyes

were souls grieving for the world.

On the empty street the presence

passed without passing, vanishing

into its forms, fixed in its changes,

and turned now into houses, oaks, snow, time.

Life and death flowed on, blurred together.

Uninhabited sight, the presence

looked at me with nobody’s eyes:

a bundle of reflections over the cliffs.

I looked inside: the room was my room

and I wasn't there. Being lacks nothing

—always full of itself, always the same—

even though we are not there … Outside,

the clarities, still uncertain:

dawn in the jumble of the rooftops.

The constellations were being erased.

~ Octavio Paz

translated by Eliot Weinberger,

 from  A Tree Within

art by sara fairfax

you find a flower

You find a flower half-buried in leaves,

And in your eye its very fate resides.

Loving beauty, you caress the bloom;

Soon enough, you’ll sweep petals from the floor.

Terrible to love the lovely so,

To count your own years, to say “I’m old,”

To see a flower half-buried in leaves

And come face to face with what you are.

~ 寒山 Han Shan

Han-shan's early life was privileged. He was well educated, traveled, served in the military, went to war, competed unsuccessfully for government jobs, and finally married, moved to the country and became a gentleman farmer. As the years passed, he became increasingly dissatisfied with his life and disappointed in the world of men. One day he packed up some books and began to wander. His wanderings led him to a remote place called Cold Mountain, in the Tien Tai range in southern China, where he built a hut, dug a pond and planted some vegetables. 

~ comments from Wikipedia

fallen in love

That day I saw beneath dark clouds

the passing light over the water

and I heard the voice of the world speak out,

I knew then, as I had before

life is no passing memory of what has been

nor the remaining pages in a great book

waiting to be read.

It is the opening of eyes long closed.

It is the vision of far off things

seen for the silence they hold.

It is the heart after years

of secret conversing

speaking out loud in the clear air.

It is Moses in the desert

fallen to his knees before the lit bush.

It is the man throwing away his shoes

as if to enter heaven

and finding himself astonished,

opened at last,

fallen in love with solid ground.

~ David Whyte

opening out

The opening out and out,
body yielding body:
the breaking
through which the new
comes, perching
above its shadow
on the piling up
darkened broken old
husks of itself:
bud opening to flower
opening to fruit opening
to the sweet marrow
of the seed -
taken
from what was, from
what could have been.
What is left
is what is.




~ Wendell Berry
art by Van Gogh

.

to leave even one's own first name behind

Of course, it is strange to inhabit the earth no longer,

to give up customs one barely had time to learn, 

not to see roses and other promising Things

in terms of a human future; no longer to be

what one was in infinitely anxious hands; to leave

even one's own first name behind, forgetting it

as easily as a child abandons a broken toy.

Strange to no longer desire one's desires.  Strange 

to see meanings that clung together once, floating away

in every direction.  And being dead is hard work

and full of retrieval before one can gradually feel

a trace of eternity. - Though the living are wrong to believe

in the too-sharp distinctions which they themselves have created.

Angels (they say) don't know whether it is the living 

they are moving among, or the dead.  The eternal torrent

whirls all ages along in it, through both realms

forever, and their voices are drowned out in its thunderous roar.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

from Duino Elegies, The first Elegy

translation by Stephen Mitchell

art by Matisse

love the difficult

What is required of us in that we love the difficult and learn to deal with it.

In the difficult are the friendly forces, the hands that work on us.

Right in the difficult we must have our joys, our happiness, our dreams:

there against the depth of this background, they stand out,

there for the first time we see how beautiful they are.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

there is this mystery

.

And yet, though we strain

against the deadening grip

of daily necessity,

I sense there is this mystery:

All life is being lived.

Who is living it, then?

Is it the things themselves,

or something waiting inside them,

like an unplayed melody in a flute?

Is it the winds blowing over the waters?

Is it the branches that signal to each other?

Is it flowers

interweaving their fragrances,

or streets, as they wind through time?

Is it the animals, warmly moving,

or the birds, that suddenly rise up?

Who lives it, then?  God, are you the one

who is living life?

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

from The Book of Pilgrimage, II,12

horses at midnight without a moon

Our heart wanders lost in the dark woods.

Our dream wrestles in the castle of doubt.

But there's music in us. Hope is pushed down

but the angel flies up again taking us with her.

The summer mornings begin inch by inch

while we sleep, and walk with us later

as long-legged beauty through

the dirty streets. It is no surprise

that danger and suffering surround us.

What astonishes is the singing.

We know the horses are there in the dark

meadow because we can smell them,

can hear them breathing.

Our spirit persists like a man struggling

through the frozen valley

who suddenly smells flowers

and realizes the snow is melting

out of sight on top of the mountain,

knows that spring has begun.

 ~ Jack Gilbert

from Refusing Heaven

you who let yourselves feel

You who let yourselves feel: enter the breathing

that is more than your own.

Let it brush your cheeks

as it divides and rejoins behind you.

Blessed ones, whole ones,

you where the heart begins:

You are the bow that shoots the arrows

and you are the target.

Fear not the pain. Let its weight fall back

into the earth;

for heavy are the mountains, heavy the seas.

The trees you planted in childhood have grown

too heavy. You cannot bring them along.

Give yourselves to the air, to what you cannot hold.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Sonnets to Orpheus, Part One, IV

translation by Joanna Macy