symbols

Traditionally, the value of the symbol is precisely in its apparent uselessness

 as a means of simple communication.  It is ordered toward communion,

 not to communication. Because it is not an efficient mode of communicating

 information, the symbol can achieve a higher purpose, beyond 

cause and effect. Instead of establishing a new contact by a meeting of minds

 in the sharing of news, the symbol tells nothing new:

 it revives our awareness of what we already know,

 and deepens our awareness. What is "new" in the symbol is the ever new

 discovery of a new depth and a new actuality in what is and always has been.

.The function of the symbol is to manifest a union that already exists

 but is not fully realized.  The symbol awakens awareness or restores it.  

Therefore it does not aim at communication but at communion. 

 Communion is the awareness of participation in an ontological reality: 

in the mystery of being, of human love, of redemptive mystery, 

of contemplative truth,

~ Thomas Merton 

from Merton's Palace of Nowhere 

by James Finley

the conversation

A woman moves close:

there is something she wants to say.

The currents take you one direction, her another.

All night you are aware of her presence,

aware of the conversation that did not happen.

Inside it are mountains, birds, a wide river,

a few sparse-leaved trees.

On the river, a wooden boat putters.

On its deck, a spider washes its face.

Years from now, the boat will reach a port by the sea,

and the generations of spider descendants upon it

will look out, from their nearsighted, eightfold eyes,

at something unanswered.

~ Jane Hirshfield

from Come, Thief

a history

Someone first thought it:

an ox gelded, tamed, harnessed to a plow.

Then someone realized the wooden yoke could hold two.

After that, mere power of multiplication.

Railroads, airplanes, factory ships canning salmon.

~ Jane Hirshfield

wind and water and stone

.

The water hollowed the stone,

the wind dispersed the water,

the stone stopped the wind.

Water and wind and stone.

The wind sculpted the stone,

the stone is a cup of water,

The water runs off and is wind.

Stone and wind and water.

The wind sings in its turnings,

the water murmurs as it goes,

the motionless stone is quiet.

Wind and water and stone.

One is the other and is neither:

among their empty names

they pass and disappear,

water and stone and wind. 

~ Octavio Paz

(Translated by Mark Strand, 

The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz, 1957-1987)

wooden

In the presence of supple

goodness, some people

grow less flexible,

experiencing a woodenness

they wouldn't have thought possible.

It is as strange and paradoxical

as the combined suffering

of Pinocchio and Geppetto

if Pinocchio had turned and said,

I can't be human after all.

~ Kay Ryan

from The Best of It

toward emptiness

In the desert,

Turn toward emptiness,

Fleeing the self.

Stand alone

Ask no one's help,

And your being will quiet,

Free from the bondage of things.

Those who cling to the world,

endeavor to free them;

Those who are free, praise.

Care for the sick,

But live alone,

Happy to drink from the waters of sorrow,

To kindle Love's fire

With the twigs of a simple life.

Thus you will live in the desert.

Mechtild of Magdeburg (1207?-1282? or 1297?)

translation by Jane Hirshfield

I come to you without me

I come to you without me, come to me without you.
Self is the thorn in the sole of the soul.
Merge with others,
If you stay in self, you are a grain, you are a drop,
If you merge with others, you are an ocean, you are a mine.

~ Rumi
art by Van Gogh

among the trees

When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.

I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.

Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, “Stay awhile.”
The light flows from their branches.

And they call again, “It’s simple”, they say,
“and you too have come into the world to do this,
to go easy, to be filled with light , and to shine.”





~ Mary Oliver

living it

First and foremost, you must listen to your own rhythm, and

 try to live in accordance with it. Be attentive to what emerges

 from deep down. Often, our actions are only imitations, 

fulfillment of an assumption of duty, or a reflection

 of what we believe a human being “should” be.

 

But the only certainty we may have about our life 

and our deeds can only spring from the very depth of our being.

I know that a new and kinder day will come,

 and I would so much like to live on, 

if only to express all the love I carry within me. 

 

And there is only one way of preparing the new age,

 by living it even now in our hearts.

 

We must be willing to act like a balm for all wounds.

~ Etty Hillesum

 

 

love frees

All day long a little burro labors, sometimes

with heavy loads on her back and sometimes just with worries

about things that bother only

burros.

And worries, as we know, can be more exhausting

than physical labor.

Once in a while a kind monk comes

to her stable and brings

a pear, but more

than that,

he looks into the burros eyes and touches her ears

and for a few seconds the burro is free

and even seems to laugh,

because love does

that.

Love frees.

~ Meister Eckhart

art by: Stephen Filarsky

sometimes

.

Water is sometimes sharp and sometimes strong,
sometimes acid and sometimes bitter,
sometimes sweet and sometimes thick or thin,
sometimes it is seen bringing hurt or pestilence,
sometime health-giving, sometimes poisonous.

It suffers change into as many natures as
are the different places through which it passes.

And as the mirror changes with the colour of its subject,
so it alters with the nature of the place,
becoming noisome, laxative, astringent, sulfurous, salty,
incarnadined, mournful, raging, angry, red, yellow,
green, black, blue, greasy, fat or slim.

Sometimes it starts a conflagration,
sometimes it extinguishes one;
is warm and is cold, carries away or sets down,
hollows out or builds up, tears or establishes,
fills or empties, raises itself or burrows down,
speeds or is still;

is the cause at times of life or death, or increase or privation,
nourishes at times and at others does the contrary;
at times has a tang, at times is without savor,
sometimes submerging the valleys with great floods.

In time and with water, everything changes.






~ Leonardo da Vinci
(art by Leonardo, The Last Supper, the face of John)

.

letters from God

I have said that the soul is not more than the body, 

And I have said that the body is not more than the soul, 

And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one’s self is,

And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own 

funeral drest in his shroud, 

And I or you pocketless of a dime may purchase the pick of the 

earth, 

And to glance with an eye or show a bean in its pod confounds the 

learning of all times, 

And there is no trade or employment but the young man following it 

may become a hero, 

And there is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the wheel’d 

universe, 

And I say to any man or woman, Let your soul stand cool and composed 

before a million universes. 

And I say to mankind, Be not curious about God, 

For I who am curious about each am not curious about God, 

(No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God and 

about death.) 

I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the 

least, 

Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself. 

Why should I wish to see God better than this day? 

I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment 

then, 

In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the 

glass, 

I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is sign’d 

by God’s name, 

And I leave them where they are, for I know that wheresoe’er I go, 

Others will punctually come for ever and ever.

~ Walt Whitman
photo by Edward Weston

last instruction

"Make of yourself a light" said the Buddha,

 before he died. I think of this 

every morning as the east begins to tear 

off its many clouds of darkness, 

to send up the first signal-a white fan 

streaked with pink and violet, even green. 

An old man, he lay down between two sala trees,

 and he might have said anything, 

knowing it was his final hour. The light burns upward,

 it thickens and settles over the fields. Around him,

 the villagers gathered and stretched forward to listen. 

Even before the sun itself hangs, disattached,

 in the blue air, I am touched everywhere

 by its ocean of yellow waves.

 No doubt he thought 

of everything that had happened in his difficult life. 

And then I feel the sun itself 

as it blazes over the hills, like a million flowers on fire- 

clearly I'm not needed, 

yet I feel myself turning into something 

of inexplicable value. Slowly, 

beneath the branches, he raised his head. 

He looked into the faces of that frightened crowd.

~  Mary Oliver

motion

If you are the amber mare

I am the road of blood

If you are the first snow

I am he who lights the hearth of dawn

If you are the tower of night

I am the spike burning in your mind

If you are the morning tide

I am the first bird's cry

If you are the basket of oranges

I am the knife of the sun

If you are the stone altar

I am the sacrilegious hand

If you are the sleeping land

I am the green cane

If you are the wind's leap

I am the buried fire

If you are the water's mouth

I am the mouth of moss

If you are the forest of the clouds

I am the axe that parts it

If you are the profaned city

I am the rain of consecration

If you are the yellow mountain

I am the red arms of lichen

If you are the rising sun

I am the road of blood

~ Octavio Paz

translated by Eliot Weinberger, 

from Collected Poems 1957-1987 

wander

"Everything around me is evaporating. My whole life, my memories, my imagination and its contents, my personality—it’s all evaporating. I continuously feel that I was someone else, that I felt something else, that I thought something else. What I’m attending here is a show with another set. And the show I’m attending is myself.

In the ordinary jumble of my literary drawer, I sometimes find texts I wrote ten, fifteen, or even more years ago. And many of them seem to me written by a stranger: I simply do not recognize myself in them. There was a person who wrote them, and it was I. I experienced them, but it was in another life, from which I just woke up, as if from someone else’s dream.

I often find texts of mine that I wrote when I was very young—when I was seventeen or twenty. And some have a power of expression that I do not remember having them. Certain sentences and passages I wrote when I had just taken a few steps away from adolescence seem produced by the self I am today, educated by years and things. I recognize I am the same as I was. And having felt I am today making a great progress from what I was, I wonder where this progress is if I was then the same as I am today.

Just a few days earlier I suffered horribly reading a short text I’d written earlier. I remember perfectly that my scruples—at least as far as language is concerned—are only a few years old. In a drawer I found a much older text in which those same scruples were strongly accentuated. I didn’t understand myself in the past in a positive way. How did I advance towards what I already was? How can the person who knows me today not know me yesterday? 

All this confuses me in a labyrinth where I am with myself and wander away from myself.

I wander with my thoughts and I’m sure that what I’m writing now I already wrote. I remember. And I ask the being that in me presumes to exist if there might not be in the Platonism of sensations another, more appropriate amamnesis, another memory of a former life that might only be of this life…

My God, my God, whose performance am I watching? How many people am I? What is this space between myself and myself?"

~ Fernando Pessoa
 from The Book of Disquiet