steps out of the circle

The self steps out of the circle;
it stops wanting to be
the farmer, the wife, and the child.

It stops trying to please
by learning everyone's dialect;
it finds it can live, after all,
in a world of strangers.

It sends itself fewer flowers;
it stops preserving its tears in amber.

How splendidly arrogant it was
when it believed the gold-filled tomb
of language awaited its raids!
Now it frequents the junkyards
knowing all words are secondhand.

It has not chosen its poverty,
this new frugality.
It did not want to fall out of love
with itself. Young,
it celebrated itself
and richly sang itself,
seeing only itself
in the mirror of the world.

It cannot return. It assumes
its place in the universe of stars
that do not see it. Even the dead
no longer need it to be at peace.
Its function is to applaud.

~ Lisel Mueller

 from Alive Together: New and Selected Poems

 

for the asking

Augustine said his soul

was a house so cramped

God could barely squeeze in.

Knock down the mean partitions,

he prayed, so You may enter!

Raise the oppressive ceilings!

Augustine's soul 

 didn't become a mansion large enough

to welcome, along with God, the woman he'd loved,

except for his mother (though one, perhaps,

his son's mother, did remain to inhabit

a small dark room).  God, therefore,

would never have felt

fully at home as his guest.

Nevertheless,

it's clear desire

fulfilled itself in the asking, revealing prayer's

dynamic action, that scoops out channels

like water on stone, or builds like layers

of grainy sediment steadily

forming sandstone. The walls, with each thought,

each feeling, each word he set down,

expanded, unnoticed; the roof

rose, and a skylight opened.

~ Denise Levertov

from for lovers of god everywhere

by roger housden

 art by Yayoi Kusama

 

the fabric of things

I thought I’d lost you. But you said: I’m imbued

in the fabric of things, the way

that wax lost from batik shapes

the pattern where the dye won’t take.

I make the space around you,

and so allow you shape. And always

you’ll feel the traces of that wax

soaked far into the weave:

the air around your gestures,

the silence after you speak.

That’s me, the slight wind between

your hand and what you’re reaching for,

chair and paper, book or cup:

that close, where I am: between

where breath ends, air starts.

~ Mark Doty

art by: Dali

a standing ground

Flee fro the prees, and dwelle with sothfastnesse;

Suffyce unto thy thyng, though hit be smal...

~ Geoffrey Chaucer

from Good Counsel of Chaucer

However just and anxious I have been,

I will stop and step back

from the crowd of those who may agree

with what I say, and be apart.

There is no earthly promise of life or peace

but where the roots branch and weave

their patient silent passages in the dark;

uprooted, I have been furious without an aim.

I am not bound for any public place,

but for ground of my own

where I have planted vines and orchard trees,

and in the heat of the day climbed up

into the healing shadow of the woods.

Better than any argument is to rise at dawn

and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.

~ Wendell Berry

from Farming Poems

thorn witness

.

Apparent shapes and meanings change.

Creature hunts down creature. Bales

get unloaded and weighed to determine

price. None of any of this pertains

to the unseen fire we call the Beloved.

That presence has no form, and cannot

be understood or measured. Take

your hands away from your face. If

a wall of dust moves across the plain,

there's usually an army advancing

under it. When you look for the Friend,

the Friend is looking for you. Carried

by a strong current, you and the others

with you seem to be making decisions,

but you're not. I weave coarse wool.

I decide to talk less. By my actions

cause nothing. A thorn grows next to

the rose as its witness. I am that

thorn for whom simply to be is an act

of praise. Near the rose, no shame.

~ Rumi

translation by Coleman Barks, with Nevit Ergin 

from The Glance

a symbolic universe

There is no remedy against this reversal of the natural order. Man cannot escape from his own achievement. He cannot but adopt the conditions of his own life. No longer in a merely physical universe, man lives in a symbolic universe. Language, myth, art, and religion are parts of this universe. They are the varied threads which weave the symbolic net, the tangled web of human experience. All human progress in thought and experience refines and strengthens this net. No longer can man confront reality immediately; he cannot see it, as it were, face to face. Physical reality seems to recede in proportion as man's symbolic activity advances. Instead of dealing with the things themselves man is in a sense constantly conversing with himself.

He has so enveloped himself in linguistic forms, in artistic images, in mythical symbols or religious rites that he cannot see or know anything except by the interposition of this artificial medium. His situation is the same in the theoretical as in the practical sphere. Even here man does not live in a world of hard facts, or according to his immediate needs and desires. He lives rather in the midst of imaginary emotions, in hopes and fears, in illusions and disillusions, in his fantasies and dreams. 'What disturbs and alarms man,' said Epictetus, 'are not the things, but his opinions and fantasies about the things.

 ~  Ernst Cassirer 

from An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture

 

weave project

~ David Brooks

terror within

It has always been much easier (because it has always seemed much safer) to give a name to the evil without than to locate the terror within. 

And yet, the terror within is far truer and far more powerful than any of our labels: the labels change, the terror is constant. And this terror has something to do with that irreducible gap between the self one invents — the self one takes oneself as being, which is, however, and by definition, a provisional self — and the undiscoverable self which always has the power to blow the provisional self to bits. 

It is perfectly possible — indeed, it is far from uncommon — to go to bed one night, or wake up one morning, or simply walk through a door one has known all one’s life, and discover, between inhaling and exhaling, that the self one has sewn together with such effort is all dirty rags, is unusable, is gone: and out of what raw material will one build a self again? 

The lives of men — and, therefore, of nations — to an extent literally unimaginable, depend on how vividly this question lives in the mind. It is a question which can paralyze the mind, of course; but if the question does NOT live in the mind, then one is simply condemned to eternal youth, which is a synonym for corruption.

~ James Baldwin

from The Price of the Ticket

art by picasso

a mustard seed

Become as a child,

become deaf, become blind!

Your own substance

must become nothingness;

drive all substance, all nothingness far from you!

Leave space, leave time,

eschew also all physical representation.

Go without a way

the narrow footpath,

then you will succeed in finding the desert.

 ~ Anonymous

(excerpt from Granum Sinapis) - found here in for lovers of god everywhere 

by roger housden

...the writer suggests we have only to let go of all striving and effort and open ourselves to the deep waters of existence. Without technique, without trying to seek anything, being only awake and attentive to the moment, we may enter the desert, the luminous ground of silence.  

pour yourself out like a fountain

Want the change. Be inspired by the flame

where everything shines as it disappears.

The artist, when sketching, loves nothing so much

as the curve of the body as it turns away.

What locks itself in sameness has congealed.

Is it safer to be gray and numb?

What turns hard becomes rigid

and is easily shattered.

Pour yourself out like a fountain.

Flow into the knowledge that what you are seeking

finishes often at the start, and, with ending, begins.

Every happiness is the child of a separation

it did not think it could survive. And Daphne, becoming a laurel,

dares you to become the wind.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke
The Sonnets to Orpheus, Part Two, XII

this bleeding separation

In the school of mind you

learn a lot, and become

a true scholar for many to look up to.

In the school of Love, you become

a child to learn again.

*****

A pious one with a hundred beads on your rosary,

or a drunkard in a tavern,

any gift you bring the Beloved will be accepted

as long as you come in longing.

It is this most secret pain,

this bleeding separation,

which will guide you to your Heart of Hearts.

*****

If you do not give up the crowds

you won't find your way to Oneness.

If you do not drop your self

you won't find your true worth.

If you do not offer all you

have to the Beloved,

you will live this life free of that

pain which makes it worth living.

~ Abu-Said Abil-Kheir

English version by Vraje Abramian

from Nobody, Son of Nobody: 

Poems of Shaikh Abu-Saeed Abil-Kheir

no edges now

 

The clear bead at the center
changes everything.

There are
no edges to my loving now.

You've heard it said there's
a window that opens from one
mind to another, but if there's
no wall, there's no need for
fitting the window, or the latch.



~ Rumi

farewell letter

She wrote me a letter

after her death

and I remember

a kind of happy light

falling on the envelope

as I sat by the rose tree

on her old bench

at the back door,

so surprised by its arrival

wondering what she would say,

looking up before I could open it

and laughing to myself

in silent expectation.

Dear son, it is time

for me to leave you.

I am afraid that the words

you are used to hearing

are no longer mine to give,

they are gone and mingled

back in the world

where it is no longer

in my power

to be their first

original author

not their last loving bearer.

You can hear

motherly

words of affection now

only from your own mouth

and only

when you speak them

to those

who stand

motherless

before you.

As for me I must forsake

adulthood

and be bound gladly

to a new childhood.

You must understand

this apprenticeship

demands of me

an elemental innocence

from everything

I ever held in my hands. 

I know your generous soul

is well able to let me go

you will in the end

be happy to know

my God was true

and I find myself

after loving you all so long,

in the wide,

infinite mercy

of being mothered myself. 

P.S. All your intuitions are true.

~ David Whyte
photo by edward steichen

mother

if there are any heavens my mother will (all by
herself) have
one. It will not be a pansy heaven nor
a fragile heaven of lilies-of-the-valley but
it will be a heaven of blackred roses

my father will be (deep like a rose
tall like a rose)

standing near my

(swaying over her
silent)
with eyes which are really petals and see

nothing with the face of a poet really which
is a flower and not a face with
hands
which whisper
This is my beloved my

(suddenly in sunlight

he will bow,

and the whole garden will bow) 

 

 

 

 

~ e. e. cummings

 from  Like a perhaps hand: Poems. Gedichte

 

 

no shape

The river has no shape, but it takes on the boundaries which it carves out for itself,
so is the mind boundless, until it creates a prison for its own thoughts.



~ Samurai Warrior Wisdom