a poem for Giambattist Vico written by the Pacific

A rephrasing of Vico;

All cultures go through three stages, Culture moves from the

Sacred World to the Aristocratic Realm to the Democratic Place,

and back again.

1.

We were sitting there, badly blessed, and brooding

On aristocracies near the trouserless ocean.

We knew we were pure prose; the ocean stretched

Out, blown by wind, but we remained where we were.

The sand shifted; all of us walked on flat boards.

We were no one in particular, in our messy lives.

We tended to stay who we were. Our minds stay in this

Particular room with Nils and Judy and Tom.

If death is the mother of fashion, we don't mind.

I am myself; I am what is around me.

Pine cones fall and stick where they fall.

That is what it's like when we are born

Not from wind or spirit, but from things. 

2.

Spirit moves where it moves; that is what 

People are like who are born of the Spirit. 

For in high air there burns a furious spirit.

It rises out of ground like Milton's mind

That meets all furies high above the sea.

It wants to rise. "If music be the food of love,

Play on." So notes, inspired not by our toes

But by th'inspired intellect, take us

Out of the dark soul-house, upward through turns

And spiral stairs, fighting the darken'd air.

The Spirit carries us, and in our minds

We know if we are high or not. It is 

Something like this for those still in the Spirit.

3.

 The wind blows where it likes: that is what

Everyone is like who is born from the wind.

Oh now it's getting serious. We want to be those

Born from the wind that blows along the plains

And over the sea where no one has a home.

And that Upsetting Rabbi, didn't he say;

"Take nothing with you, no blanket, no bread.

When evening comes, sleep wherever you are.

And it the owners say no, shake out the dust

From your sandals; leave the dust on their doorstep."

Don't hope for what will never come. Give up hope,

Dear friends, the joists of life are laid on the winds.

~ Robert Bly

from Morning Poems

 

no way or path

There's a moment there in Arthur's banquet hall when all the knights are assembled around the Round Table.  Arthur would not let anyone start to eat until an adventure had occurred.  Well, in those days adventures were rather normal, so people didn't go hungry for long.

They were waiting for this day's adventure, and it did indeed occur.  The Holy Grail itself showed itself to the assembled knights - not in its full glory but covered with a great, radiant cloth.  Then it withdrew.  All were left ravished, sitting there in awe.

Finally, Gawain, Arthur's nephew, stood up and said,  "I propose a vow to this company, that we should all go in quest of that Grail to behold it unveiled."

Now we come to the part that interested me.  The text reads, 

"They thought it would be a disgrace to go forth in a group.  
Each entered the Forest Adventurous at that point which he himself had chosen, 
where it was darkest and there was no way or path."

You enter the forest at the darkest point, where there is no path.  Where there's a way or path, it is someone else's path;  each human being is a unique phenomenon. 

The idea is to find your own way.

~ Joseph Campbell

referring to:  La Queste del Saint Graal,

taken here from Pathways to Bliss

how it feels to be free

~ Nina Simone

 

it's probubly me

~ Gregory Porter

starry starry night

~ Vincent Van Gogh and Don McLean

one source of bad information

There's a boy in you about three

Years old who hasn't learned a thing for thirty

Thousand years.  Sometimes it's a girl.

This child had to make up its mind

How to save you from death.  He said things like:

"Stay home.  Avoid elevators.  Eat only elk."

You live with this child, but you don't know it.

You're in the office, yes, but live with this boy

At night.  He's uninformed, but he does want

To save your life.  And he has.  Because of this boy

You survived a lot.  He's got six big ideas.

Five don't work.  Right now he's repeating them to you.

~ Robert Bly

from Morning Poems


 

nothing's a gift

Nothing's a gift, it's all on loan.

I'm drowning in debts up to my ears.

I'll have to pay for myself

with my self,

give up my life for my life.

Here's how it's arranged:

The heart can be repossessed,

the liver, too,

and each single finger and toe.

Too late to tear up the terms,

my debts will be repaid,

and I'll be fleeced,

or, more precisely, flayed.

I move about the planet

in a crush of other debtors.

some are saddled with the burden

of paying off their wings.

Others must, willy-nilly,

account for every leaf.

Every tissue in us lies

on the debit side.

Not a tentacle or tendril

is for keeps.

The inventory, infinitely detailed,

implies we'll be left

not just empty-handed

but handless too.

I can't remember

where, when, and why

I let someone open

this account in my name.

We call the protest against this

the soul.

And it's the only item

not included on the list.

~ Wislawa Szymborska

translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh

the struggle for identity

The world rests in the night. Trees, mountains, fields, and faces

 are released from the prison of shape and the burden of exposure. 

Each thing creeps back into its own nature within the shelter of the dark. 

Darkness is the ancient womb. Nighttime is womb- time. 

Our souls come out to play. The darkness absolves everything; 

the struggle for identity and impression falls away. 

We rest in the night.

~ John O'Donohue

from Anam Cara

How long does it take to make the woods?

How long does it take to make the woods?
As long as it takes to make the world.
The woods is present as the world is, the presence
of all its past and of all its time to come.
It is always finished, it is always being made, the act
of its making forever greater than the act of its destruction.
It is a part of eternity for its end and beginning
belong to the end and beginning of all things,
the beginning lost in the end, the end in the beginning.

What is the way to the woods, how do you go there?
By climbing up through the six days’ field,
kept in all the body’s years, the body’s
sorrow, weariness, and joy. By passing through
the narrow gate on the far side of that field
where the pasture grass of the body’s life gives way
to the high, original standing of the trees.
By coming into the shadow, the shadow
of the grace of the strait way’s ending,
the shadow of the mercy of light.

Why must the gate be narrow?
Because you cannot pass beyond it burdened.
To come into the woods you must leave behind
the six days’ world, all of it, all of its plans and hopes.
You must come without weapon or tool, alone,
expecting nothing, remembering nothing,
into the ease of sight, the brotherhood of eye and leaf.





~ Wendell Berry
 from A Timbered Choir

feynman

Young Physics Prodigies (L to R) Stanisław Ulam, Richard Feynman, and John Von Neumann at Los Alamos During the Manhattan Project 1944

A poet once said, ‘The whole universe is in a glass of wine.’ We will probably never know in what sense he meant that, for poets do not write to be understood. But it is true that if we look at a glass of wine closely enough we see the entire universe. There are the things of physics: the twisting liquid which evaporates depending on the wind and weather, the reflections in the glass, and our imagination adds the atoms. The glass is a distillation of the Earth’s rocks, and in its composition we see the secrets of the universe’s age, and the evolution of stars. What strange arrays of chemicals are in the wine? How did they come to be? There are the ferments, the enzymes, the substrates, and the products. There in wine is found the great generalization: all life is fermentation. Nobody can discover the chemistry of wine without discovering, as did Louis Pasteur, the cause of much disease. How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it! If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts — physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on — remember that Nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let it give us one more final pleasure: drink it and forget it all!

~ Richard Feynman

from The Feynman Lectures on Physics,  Vol. 1, 1964

escape from himself

It appears that man has always escaped from himself, from what he is, from where he is going, from what all this is about – the universe, our daily life, the dying and the beginning. It is strange that we never realize that however much we may escape from ourselves, however much we may wander away consciously, deliberately or unconsciously, subtly, the conflict, the pleasure, the pain, the fear and so on are always there. 

They ultimately dominate. You may try to suppress them, you may try to put them away deliberately with an act of will but they surface again. And pleasure is one of the factors that predominate; it too has the same conflicts, the same pain, the same boredom. The weariness of pleasure and the fret is part of this turmoil of our life. You can’t escape it, my friend. 

You can’t escape from this deep unfathomed turmoil unless you really give thought to it, not only thought but see by careful attention, diligent watching, the whole movement of thought and the self. You may say all this is too tiresome, perhaps unnecessary. But if you do not pay attention to this, give heed, the future is not only going to be more destructive, more intolerable but without much significance. All this is not a dampening, depressing point of view, it is actually so. 

What you are now is what you will be in the coming days. You can’t avoid it. It is as definite as the sun rising and setting. This is the share of all men, of all humanity, unless we all change, each one of us, change to something that is not projected by thought.

~ J. Krishnamurti

pain and pleasure

Human beings try to avoid pain by setting up permanent zones of pleasure. 

The mind is always seeking to create permanent territories of pleasure to avoid pain. 

But these zones, what we might call 'zones of safety' don't last. 

They always fall apart, and because they are fleeting, 

then we scramble to find another zone of pleasure to help us forget our pain. 

This going round and round is what we mean by samsara. 

Hell is just resistance to life. It's counter-intuitive, but if we stop, 

become curious about the pain, learn to befriend it 

and work with it, actually learn how to be genuine friends 

of ourselves, then the pleasures of life become authentic pleasures 

as opposed to numbing agents, anesthetizing us from our genuine experience.

~ Pema Chodron, 

Dharma talk, Karma Dzong, Boulder, Colorado, 1999

 art by Edvard Munch

addiction to pattern - avoidance and repression

 

 You cannot learn the Self. You cannot learn consciousness. 

You cannot learn love. 

You cannot learn trust.

 But you can learn how you deny all of that. 

For this denial, there are techniques and strategies. 

There is either indulgence or repression, 

and with both there is an avoidance 

of simply experiencing 

the power and the immensity of the moment.

We are speaking of a certain kind of addiction; the addiction to a pattern.

With addiction there has to come a point 

when you see that the desire is out of your control. 

Maybe the addiction is physiological. 

Maybe it has been practiced for so long that it has its own groove.

 But what is in your control, absolutely,

 is the willingness to not move when the desire appears. 

The willingness neither to indulge nor repress 

but to not move in the fire of this impulse of thousands of years.

 Have you ever experienced this?

Then you know the beauty of this fire. 

You know that in this moment, 

there is actually a willingness to die. 

Because the addiction to mind or to habits can be so strong that

 there is the sense if you don't feed the addiction, 

you will die. 

Eventually, through the maturity of the soul,

 there is a willingness to say, "Okay, if I die I will die.

 But I am not going to follow this demon down this road again."

This, too, is the mind, but it is the mind in service to what was betrayed. 

 It feels like a descent into hell

 because with any addiction, the impulse is strong

 to get rid of the craving, to get rid of the fire.

 How? How? How? There are millions of ways how, 

but to not get rid of it, to not go numb with it,

 to let it burn - this is the fire. 

This is the Buddha and the temptations of Mara.

 This is Christ in the desert. 

Everyone has to experience this -

 Oh my god, I am dying. Okay, so I am dying.

 I surrender. I surrender - and there is peace,

 there is freedom. You recognize what has never left. 

You recognize what is always here. In that moment,

 there is a break in the habit pattern. 

The habit may reappear, but there is something bigger than it, 

so it does not have the same hold on you. 

Do you follow this?

Justification can arise, and a kind of thrill from the adrenaline

 and the power that comes with justification. 

There can be quick excuse making, such as,

 "Well, so-and-so did it," or, "It doesn't matter," or,

 "We're all one, it is all the Self," but this is all thought.

 It is all the sirens saying, "Come, come back, 

back into where you were all-powerful, 

where you were in control, where you were God, 

where you got to say what happens."

 

 Don't follow any of it. DON'T MOVE. 

And an exquisite experience is revealed that can never be taken from you.

There is suffering, yes, but it is conscious suffering.

 This is very different from attempting to delay suffering. 

This is very different from following, 

indulging, or discharging suffering.

 Then suffering is spread out over time,

 and the suffering of the misidentification continues.

This willingness takes enormous resolve.

 Resolve is a little different from vigilance. 

Resolve comes after vigilance has been betrayed, 

after re-identification has set in. It is the mind's resolve

 to recognize the hell that has once again been created 

and to be here, to burn here, and in that burning, 

there is naturally redemption. 

No one is needed to come and redeem you. 

Redemption happens naturally.

Right here, in this universe, patterns of war still appear,

 and war is what we are talking about, right? 

Even though you have tasted peace, 

even though this universe has tasted peace on earth,

 how is it that conflict still has its way?

 This is true of every mindstream, especially in humans.

 War is inbred, and it has gone unmet. 

 So meet that war within yourself consciously, awake,

 refusing to budge. In meeting war, you will find peace.

 If you have tasted it, then you know it is so. 

If you have not tasted it, it may seem impossible,

 but taste it anyway and see. Just take one moment

 in the midst of one attacking pattern and don't budge.

Beneath the behavior is the energy of an emotion, 

and that emotion is fueled by some thought 

of protection from being wounded or hurt or not being seen.

 In the willingness to experience that wounded or hurt

 or not being seen, to really be wounded, really be hurt, 

really not be seen, then it is no big deal. 

Then the wound is nothing, the hurt is nothing,

 and you realize that you will never be seen.

 You are the Self. You cannot be seen. 

You are not an object.




~ Gangaji,
(excerpt from the Meeting, Immovable Resolve, San Diego, CA, January 18, 2001)

.

silent friend of many distances

Silent friend of many distances, feel
how your breath enlarges all of space.
Let your presence ring out like a bell
into the night. What feeds upon your face

grows mighty from the nourishment thus offered.
Move through transformation, out and in.
What is the deepest loss that you have suffered?
If drinking is bitter, change yourself to wine.

In this immeasurable darkness, be the power
that rounds your sense in their magic ring,
the sense of their mysterious encounter.

And if the earthly no longer knows your name,
whisper to the silent earth: I’m flowing.
To the flashing water say: I am.





~ Rainer Maria Rilke
The Sonnets to Orpheus, II, 29
(Translation by Steven Mitchell)
art by Teresa Evangeline

young woman homeless

~ Terra Gardner

 in Toronto, Canada

Terra tells a very real story about life on the streets. She doesn't like shelters because she was beat up in one, so she sleeps on the streets or in parks. I hope Terra's story will stay in your heart and mind as it has with me. After this interview we took her to get some food. She is intelligent and funny, she just needs some extra love and compassion to change her life. The good news is the outreach nurse I was with is filled with that extra love and compassion and will do everything she can to find Terra some help. Please support all health and medical outreach services in your community.

 ***Terra Gardner was hit by a train and killed while still homeless