unlabeled

Like the small hole by the path-side something lives in,

in me are lives I do not know the names of,

nor the fates of,

nor the hungers of or what they eat.

They eat of me.

Of small and blemished apples in low fields of me

whose rocky streams and droughts I do not drink.

And in my streets—the narrow ones,

unlabeled on the self-map—

they follow stairs down music ears can’t follow,

and in my tongue borrowed by darkness,

in hours uncounted by the self-clock,

they speak in restless syllables of other losses, other loves.

There too have been the hard extinctions,

missing birds once feasted on and feasting.

There too must be machines

like loud ideas with tungsten bits that grind the day.

A few escape. A mercy.

They leave behind

small holes that something unweighed by the self-scale lives in.

~ Jane Hirshfield

Jane was born on this day in New York City (1953). She went to Princeton, where she was in the first graduating class to include women in 1973. She published her first poem not long after, then went off to northern California to study Buddhism for the next eight years, during which time she didn't write at all. She said: " I don't think poetry is based just on poetry; it is based on a thoroughly lived life. And so I couldn't just decide I was going to write no matter what; I first had to find out what it means to live.

comments from Writers Almanac

I sit on rocks and watch clouds

37

More than forty years I've lived as a hermit

out of touch with the world's rise and fall

a stove full of pine needles keeps me warm at night 

a bowl of wild plants fills me up at noon

I sit on rocks and watch clouds and let thoughts wander

I patch my robe in sunlight and cultivate silence

until someone asks why Bodhidharma came east

and I list all my possessions

38

Scorpion tails and wolf hearts overrun the world

everyone has a trick to get ahead

but how many smiles in a lifetime

how many moments of peace in a day

who knows a toppled cart means try another track

when trouble strikes there is no time for shame

this old monk isn't just talking

he's trying to remove your obstacles and chains

39

The crow and the hare race without rest 
living in the cliffs suddenly I'm old

my reflection looks thin when I walk beside a stream

my eyes have turned blue viewing mountains through pines

I gather red leaves to burn in my stove

I pick yellow flowers to put in a vase

toiling away for the wine of success

others get drunk and can't be revived

40

A thatched hut blue mountains green streams

visits by now are up to me

two or three peach trees and plum trees in bloom

green and yellow fields of vegetables and wheat

I sit all night in bed listening to rain

I open my paper window and doze off watching clouds

nothing is better than being free

but getting free isn't luck

~ Stonehouse

from The Zen Works of Stonehouse

by Red Pine
art by Huang Kung-wang

notes:

37. Stonehouse lived as a hermit for thirty-five years on Hsiamushan, but he also lived for three years with Kao-feng on Tienmushan's West Peak and six years with Chi-an on Langyashan near Chienyang. Although the practice was never as widespread in China as it was in India, monks were encouraged to restrict themselves to a noon meal, which they ate following their morning begging rounds. One of the most common koans asked by Zen masters is:"Why did Bodhidharma come east?" The student's answer is expected to express the essence of Zen rather than supply the Patriarch's presumed motivation.

38. One of the first measures enacted by the First Emperor when he unified China in 221 BC was to standardize the axle length of carts so that all tracks would be the same width. The Five Obstacles include desire, anger, tiredness, anxiety, and doubt. And the Ten Chains include shamelessness, insensitivity, envy, meanness, regret, laziness, over-activity, self-absorption, hate, and secretiveness.

39. According to Chinese mythology, the sun is the home of a crow, and the moon is the abode of a hare. The moon is yin and represents Earth, hence its symbol is an animal of the land; the sun is yang and represents Heaven, hence its totem is a creature of the air. Stonehouse's blue eyes could refer to the Zen eyes of Bodhidharma, the "blue-eyed barbarian," who brought Zen to China. But they could also refer to cataracts. Ironically, cataract surgery was introduced to the Chinese by Indian monks about the same time that Bodhidharma arrived, but the technique had been lost by Stonehouse's time. While Stonehouse used chrysanthemums for his altar, others infused them in their wine.

40. Etiquette requires paying a return visit to someone else who visits. Apparently Stonehouse no longer held up his side of such relationships. Perhaps he didn't like leaving his hut. As previously noted, windows were usually covered with oilpaper.


the author provides similar notes for each portion of the work.

a hat salesman and a capable ruler

A man of Sung did business

In silk ceremonial hats.

He traveled with a load of hats

To the wild men of the South.

The wild men had shaved heads,

Tattooed bodies.

What did they want

With silk

Ceremonial hats?

Yao had wisely governed

All China.

He had brought the entire world

To a state of rest.

After that, he went to visit

The four Perfect Ones

In the distant mountains

Of Ku Shih

When he came back

Across the border

Into his own city

His lost gaze

Saw no throne.

~ Chuang Tzu

translated by Thomas Merton

The Heart's Counting Knows Only One

In Sung China,

two monks, friends for sixty years

watched the geese pass.

Where are they going?

one tested the other, who couldn't say.

That moment's silence continues.

No one will study their friendship

in the koan-books of insight.

No one will remember their names.

I think of them sometimes,

standing, perplexed by sadness,

goose-down sewn into their quilted autumn robes.

Almost swallowed by the vastness of the mountains,

but not yet.

As the barely audible

geese are not yet swallowed;

as even we, my love, will not entirely be lost.

~ Jane Hirshfield
from Lives of the Heart

art by Stanley Roseman

a signal not a glitch

~ Johann Hari

 

to see this

I have come into this world to see this:
 the sword drop from men's hands
 even at the height of their arc of anger
 because we have finally realized there is just one flesh
 to wound and it is the Beloved's.

I have come into this world to see this: 
all creatures hold hands as we pass through
 this miraculous existence we share on the way
 to an even greater being of soul, 
a being of just ecstatic light, 
forever entwined and at play with Him.

I have come into this world to hear this:
 every song the earth has sung since it was conceived
 in the Divine's womb and began spinning from His wish,
 every song by wing and fin and hoof,
 every song by hill and field and tree
 and woman and child, every song
 of stream and rock, every song of tool and lyre and flute,
 every song of gold and emerald and fire,
 every song the heart should cry with magnificent dignity
 to know itself as God: for all other knowledge 
will leave us again in want and aching -
 only imbibing the glorious Sun will complete us. 

I have come into this world to experience this:
 men so true to love they would rather die
 before speaking an unkind word,
 men so true their lives are His covenant - the promise of hope.

I have come into this world to see this: 
the sword drop from men's hands 
even at the height of their arc of rage 
because we have finally realized there is just one flesh
 we can wound.

~ Hafiz

from Love Poems from God: 

Twelve Sacred voices from East and West

edited by Daniel Ladinsky

tripping over joy

What is the difference
Between your experience of Existence
And that of a saint?

The saint knows
That the spiritual path
Is a sublime chess game with God

And that the Beloved
Has just made such a Fantastic Move

That the saint is now continually
Tripping over Joy
And bursting out in Laughter
And saying, “I Surrender!”

Whereas, my dear,
I am afraid you still think
You have a thousand serious moves.

  ~ Hafez

from I Heard God Laughing: Poems of Hope and Joy

by Daniel Ladinsky

To Judgment: An Assay

.

You change a life

as eating an artichoke changes the taste 

of whatever is eaten after.

Yet you are not an artichoke, not a piano or cat -

not objectively present at all -

and what of you a cat possesses is essential but narrow:

to know if the distance between two things can be leapt.

The piano, that good servant,

has none of you in her at all, she lends herself

to what asks; this has been my ambition as well.

Yet a person who has you is like an iron spigot

whose water comes from far-off mountain springs.

Inexhaustible, your confident pronouncements flow,

coldly delicious.

For if judgment hurts the teeth, it doesn't mind,

not judgment.  Teeth pass,  Pain passes.

Judgment decrees what remains-

the serene judgments of evolution or the judgment

 of a boy-king entering Persia: "Burn it," he says,

and it burns.  And if a small tear swells the corner

of one eye, it is only the smoke, it is no more to him that a beetle

fleeing the flames of the village with her six-legged children.

The biologist Haldane - in one of his tenderer moments -

judged beetles especially loved by God,

"because He had made so many."  For judgment can be tender:

I have seen you carry a fate to its end as softly as a retriever

carries the quail. 


 Yet however much

I admire you at such moments, I cannot love you:

you are too much in me, weighing without pity your own worth.

When I have erased you from me entirely,

disrobed of your measuring adjectives,

stripped from my shoulders and hips each of your nouns,

when the world is horsefly, coal barge, and dawn the color of winter butter -

then perhaps I will love you,  Helpless to not.

As a newborn wolf is helpless: no choice but hunt the wolf milk,

find it sweet.

~  Jane Hirshfield,
from: 'After'

an instrument of comparison?

Is not the mind also an instrument of comparison?  You say this is better than that; you compare yourself with somebody who is more beautiful, who is more clever.  There is comparison when you say, 'I remember that particular river that I saw a year ago, and it was still more beautiful'.  Your compare yourself with somebody, compare yourself with an example, with the ultimate ideal.  Comparative judgment makes the mind dull; it does not sharpen the mind, it does not make the mind comprehensive, inclusive, because, when you are all the time comparing, what has happened?  You see the sunset, and you immediately compare that sunset with the previous sunset.  You see a mountain and you see how beautiful it is.  Then you say, 'I saw a still more beautiful mountain two years ago'.  When you are comparing, you are really not looking at the sunset which is there, but you are looking at it in order to compare it with something else.  So comparison prevents you from looking fully.  I look at you, you are nice, but I say, 'I know a much nicer person, a much better person, a more noble person, a more stupid person'.  When I do this, I am not looking at you.  Because my mind is occupied with something else, I am not looking at you at all.   In the same way, I am not looking at the sunset at all.  To really look at the sunset, there must be no comparison; to really look at you, I must not compare you with someone else.  It is only when I look at you without comparative judgment that I can understand you.  But when I compare you with somebody else, then I judge you and I say, 'Oh, he is a very stupid man'.  So stupidity arises when there is comparison.  I compare you with somebody else, and that very comparison brings about a lack of human dignity.  When I look at you without comparing, I am only concerned with you, not with someone else.  The very concern about you, not comparatively, brings about human dignity.

So as long as the mind is comparing, there is no love, and the mind is always judging, comparing, weighing, looking to find where the weakness is.  So where there is comparison, there is no love.  When the mother and father love their children, they do not compare them, they do not compare their child with another child; it is their child and they love their child.  But you want to compare yourself with something better, with something nobler, with something richer, so you create in yourself a lack of love.  You are always concerned with yourself in relationship to somebody else.   As the mind becomes more and more comparative, more and more possessive, more and more depending, it creates a pattern in which it gets caught, so it cannot look at anything anew, afresh.

And so it destroys that very thing, that very perfume of life, which is love.

J. Krishnamurti

from a conversation with students at Rajghat School

December 19, 1952

the weighing

The heart's reasons

seen clearly,

even the hardest

will carry

its whip-marks and sadness

and must be forgiven.

As the drought-starved 

eland forgives

the drought-starved lion

who finally takes her,

enters willingly then

the life she cannot refuse,

and is lion, is fed,

and does not remember the other.

So few grains of happiness

measured against all he dark

and still the scales balance.

The world asks of us

only the strength we have and we give it.

Then it asks more, and we give it.

~ Jane Hirshfield

from The October Palace

photo by eliot porter

beauty and art - transcending self

Beauty is the convenient and traditional name of something which art and nature share, and which gives a fairly clear sense to the idea of quality of experience and change of consciousness. I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious of my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel. And when I return to thinking of the other matter it seems less important. And of course this is something which we may also do deliberately: give attention to nature in order to clear our minds of selfish care.

art, affords us a pure delight in the independent existence of what is excellent. Both in its genesis and its enjoyment it is a thing totally opposed to selfish obsession. It invigorates our best faculties and, to use Platonic language, inspires love in the highest part of the soul. It is able to do this partly by virtue of something which it shares with nature: a perfection of form which invites unpossessive contemplation and resists absorption into the selfish dream life of the consciousness.

The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion. Goodness is connected with the attempt to see the unself, to see and to respond to the real world in the light of a virtuous consciousness. This is the non-metaphysical meaning of the idea of transcendence to which philosophers have so constantly resorted in their explanations of goodness. “Good is a transcendent reality” means that virtue is the attempt to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is. It is an empirical fact about human nature that this attempt cannot be entirely successful.

 

 

 

 

~ Iris Murdoch

from  The Sovereignty of Good

photo by Ida Kar

a mind that lets go

Do everything with a mind that lets go.

If you let go a little, you will have a little peace.

If you let go a lot, you will have a lot of peace.

If you let go completely, you will know complete peace and freedom.

Your struggles with the world will have come to an end.

~ Achaan Chah,  (1918-1992)

(Ajahn (sometimes spelled Achaan) Chah was born into a large and comfortable family in a rural village in Northeast Thailand. He ordained as a novice in early youth and on reaching the age of twenty took higher ordination as a monk. As a young monk he studied some basic Dhamma, Discipline and scriptures. Later he practiced meditation under the guidance of several of the local Meditation Masters in the Ascetic Forest Tradition. He wandered for a number of years in the style of an ascetic monk, sleeping in forests, caves and cremation grounds, and spent a short but enlightening period with Ajahn Mun, one of the most famous and respected Thai Meditation Masters of this century.)

 

the great sea

The great sea
Has sent me adrift,
It moves me as the weed in a great river,
Earth and the great weather move me,
Have carried me away,
And move my inward parts with joy.




~ Uvavnuk
Eskimo woman shaman,19th c.

art: Starry Night detail 

Van Gogh

 

 

behind states of mind

~ Rupert Spira

 

full surrender

The art of living is based on rhythm - on give and take, ebb and flow, light and dark, life and death. By acceptance of all aspects of life, good and bad, right and wrong, yours and mine, the static, defensive life, which is what most people are cursed with, is converted into a dance, ‘the dance of life,’ metamorphosis. One can dance to sorrow or to joy; one can even dance abstractly. But the point is that, by the mere act of dancing, the elements which compose it are transformed; the dance is an end in itself, just like life. The acceptance of the situation, any situation, brings about a flow, a rhythmic impulse towards self-expression. To relax is, of course, the first thing a dancer has to learn. It is also the first thing a patient has to learn when he confronts the analyst. It is the first thing any one has to learn in order to live. It is extremely difficult, because it means surrender, full surrender. 

~  Henry Miller

from The Wisdom of the Heart