Lewis Carroll

"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.

"Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat:

 "we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad."

"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.

"You must be," said the Cat, 

"or you wouldn't have come here."

(Alice's Adventures in Wonderland) 

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson

"Who are YOU?" said the Caterpillar.

This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, 

"I--I hardly know, sir, just at present-- 

at least I know who I WAS when I got up this morning, 

but I think I must have been changed several times since then."

(Alice's Adventures in Wonderland) 

drawings by Sir John Tenniel

Alice Liddell

" Well! I've often seen a cat without a grin," thought Alice; 

" but a grin without a cat! 

It's the most curious thing I ever saw in my life!"

(Alice's Adventures in Wonderland) 

Alice laughed. "There's no use trying," she said

 "one can't believe impossible things." 

"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen.

"When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. 

Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." 

(Through the Looking Glass) 

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 

"it means just what I choose it to mean -- 

neither more nor less." 

"The question is," said Alice, 

"whether you can make words mean so many different things." 

"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, 

"which is to be master - - 

that's all." 

(Through the Looking Glass) 

it is born

Here I came to the very edge 

where nothing at all needs saying,

everything is absorbed through weather and the sea,

and the moon swam back,

its rays all silvered,

and time and again the darkness would be broken

by the crash of a wave,

and every day on the balcony of the sea,

wings open, fire is born,

and everything is blue again like morning.

~ Pablo Neruda

from On the Blue Shores of Silence

something that waits and listens

There is something in every one of you that waits, listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself and if you cannot hear it, you will never find whatever it is for which you are searching and if you hear it and then do not follow it, it was better that you had never been born…

You are the only you that has ever lived; your idiom is the only idiom of its kind in all of existence and if you cannot hear the sound of the genuine in you, you will all of your life spend your days on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls…

There is in you something that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself and sometimes there is so much traffic going on in your minds, so many different kinds of signals, so many vast impulses floating through your organism that go back thousands of generations, long before you were even a thought in the mind of creation, and you are buffeted by these, and in the midst of all of this you have got to find out what your name is. Who are you? How does the sound of the genuine come through to you…

The sound of the genuine is flowing through you. Don’t be deceived and thrown off by all the noises that are a part even of your dreams, your ambitions, so that you don’t hear the sound of the genuine in you, because that is the only true guide that you will ever have, and if you don’t have that you don’t have a thing.

You may be famous. You may be whatever the other ideals are which are a part of this generation, but you know you don’t have the foggiest notion of who you are, where you are going, what you want. Cultivate the discipline of listening to the sound of the genuine in yourself

Now there is something in everybody that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in other people. And it is so easy to say that anybody who looks like him or her, anybody who acts as this person acts, can’t hear any sound of the genuine. I must wait and listen for the sound of the genuine in you. I must wait. For if I cannot hear it, then in my scheme of things, you are not even present. And everybody wants to feel that everybody else knows that she is there.

I have a blind friend who just became blind after she was a grown woman. I asked her: “What is the greatest disaster that your blindness has brought to you?” She said, “When I go places where there are people, I have a feeling that nobody knows that I’m here. I can’t see any recognition, I can’t see… and if nobody knows that I’m here, it’s hard for me to know where I am.”

There is something that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in your mother, in your father, in the people you can’t stand, and if you had the power you would wipe them out. But instinctively you know that if you wipe them out, you go with them. So you fight for your own life by finding some way to get along with them without killing them.

There is something in you that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in other people. And if you can’t hear it, then you are reduced by that much. If I were to ask you what is the thing that you desire most in life this afternoon, you would say a lot of things off the top of your head, most of which you wouldn’t believe but you would think that you were saying the things that I thought you ought to think that you should say.

But I think that if you were stripped to whatever there is in you that is literal and irreducible, and you tried to answer that question, the answer may be something like this: I want to feel that I am thoroughly and completely understood so that now and then I can take my guard down and look out around me and not feel that I will be destroyed with my defenses down. I want to feel completely vulnerable, completely naked, completely exposed and absolutely secure.

This is what you look for in your children when you have them, this is what you look for in your husband if you get one. That I can run the risk of radical exposure and know that the eye that beholds my vulnerability will not step on me. That I can feel secure in my awareness of the active presence of my own idiom in me.

So as I live my life then, this is what I am trying to fulfill. It doesn’t matter whether I become a doctor, lawyer, housewife. I’m secure because I hear the sound of the genuine in myself and having learned to listen to that, I can become quiet enough, still enough, to hear the sound of the genuine in you.

Now if I hear the sound of the genuine in me, and if you hear the sound of the genuine in you, it is possible for me to go down in me and come up in you. So that when I look at myself through your eyes having made that pilgrimage, I see in me what you see in me and the wall that separates and divides will disappear and we will become one because the sound of the genuine makes the same music.

~ Howard Thurman

from a1980 commencement address at Spelman College

 with thanks to Mystic Meandering

 

 

 

the heart is the sleeping beauty

The heart is the sleeping beauty

and love the only kiss it can't resist.

Even as eyes lay open wide,

there is a heart that sleeps inside,

and it's to there you must be hastening,

for all hearts dream,

they dream only of awakening.

~ Nicholas Klein

art by picasso

how did the rose

How

did the rose

ever open its heart

and give to this world all if its beauty?

It felt the encouragement of light against its being,

otherwise we all remain too

frightened.

~ Hafiz

up with the morning breeze

Wake up with the morning breeze

and ask for a change.

Open and fill yourself

with the wine that is your life.

Pass it around

Pass it to me first.

~ Rumi

over the endless oceans -

.

The sea wind sways over the endless oceans -

spreads its wings night and day

rises and sinks again

over the desolate swaying floor of the immortal ocean.

Now it is nearly morning

or it is nearly evening

and the ocean wind feels in its face - the land wind.

Clockbuoy toll morning and evening psalms,

the smoke of a coalboat

or the smoke of a tar-burning phoenician ship faces away at the

horizons.

The lonely jellyfish who has no history rocks around with

burning blue feet.

It's nearly evening now or morning.

~ Harry Martinson

from The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart

when we convene again

When we convene again
to understand the world,
the first speaker will again
point silently out of the window

at the hillside in its season,
sunlit, under the snow,
and we will nod silently,
and silently stand and go.



~ Wendell Berry

who yawns

It is God who yawns and sneezes

and coughs, and now laughs.

Look, it's God doing ablutions!

God deciding to fast, God going naked

from one New Year's Eve to the next.

Will you ever understand

how near God is

to you?

~ Lalla
from Naked Song
translations by Coleman Barks

lute music

Let us celebrate. The Earth will be going on a long time
Before it finally freezes;
Men will be on it; they will take names,
Give their deeds reasons.
We will be here only
As chemical constituents—
A small franchise indeed.

Right now we have lives,
Corpuscles, Ambitions, Caresses,
Like everybody had once—
Here at the year's end, at the feast
Of birth, let us bring to each other
The gifts brought once west through deserts—
The precious metal of our mingled hair,
The frankincense of enraptured arms and legs,
The myrrh of desperate, invincible kisses—

Let us celebrate the daily
Recurrent nativity of love,
The endless epiphany of our fluent selves,
While the earth rolls away under us
Into unknown snows and summers,
Into untraveled spaces of the stars.

—Kenneth Rexroth

 from The Phoenix and the Tortoise

 

 

in a mystery to be

in time of daffodils(who know

the goal of living is to grow)

forgetting why,remembering how

in time of lilacs who proclaim

the aim of walking is to dream

remembering so(forgetting seem)

in time of roses(who amaze

our now and here with paradise)

forgetting if,remembering yes

in time of all sweet things beyond

whatever mind may comprehend,

remember seek(forgetting find)

and in a mystery to be

(when time from time shall set us free)

forgetting me, remember me

~ e. e. Cummings

from Selected Poems

awaken to the mystery of being here

May you awaken to the mystery of being here and enter

the quiet immensity of your own presence.

May you have joy and peace in the temple of your senses.

May you receive great encouragement when new frontiers

beckon.

May you respond to the call of your gift and find the

courage to follow its path.

May the flame of anger free you from falsity.

May warmth of heart keep your presence aflame and may

anxiety never linger about you.

May your outer dignity mirror an inner dignity of soul.

May you take time to celebrate the quiet miracles that

seek no attention.

May you be consoled in the secret symmetry of your soul.

May you experience each day as a sacred gift woven

around the heart of wonder.

~ John O'Donohue

a gift

The gift of God is absolutely gratuitous.  It's not something you earn. It's something that's there. It's something you just have to accept. This is the gift that has been given. There's no place to go to get it. There's no place you can go to avoid it. It just is. It's part of our very existence. And so the purpose of all the great religions is to bring us into this relationship with reality that is so intimate that no words can possibly describe it.

~ Thomas Keating

simple seeing

~ Joan Tollifson

you bind yourself though you use no rope

What is the master [within you] who at this very moment is seeing and hearing?
 If you reply, as most do, that it is Mind or Nature or Buddha
 or one's Face before birth or one's Original Home or Koan or Being
 or Nothingness or Emptiness or Form-and-Color or the Known
 or the Unknown or Truth or Delusion, or say something
 or remain silent, or regard it as Enlightenment or Ignorance,
 you fall into error at once. What is more, if you are so foolhardy
 as to doubt the reality of this master, you bind yourself though you use no rope.

 However much you try to know it through logical reasoning or to name
 or call it, you are doomed to failure. And even though all of you becomes
 one mass of questioning as you turn inward and intently search
 the very core of your being, you will find nothing that can be termed
 Mind or Essence. Yet should someone call your name, something from 
within will hear and respond. Find out this instant who it is!

If you push forward with your last ounce of strength at the very point
 where the path of your thinking has been blocked, and then, 
completely stymied, leap with hands high in the air into the tremendous abyss
 of fire confronting you -- into the ever-burning flame of your own
 primordial nature -- all ego-consciousness, all delusive feelings
 and thoughts and perceptions will perish with your ego-root 
and the true source of your Self-nature will appear. You will feel resurrected,
 all sickness having completely vanished,
 and will experience genuine peace and joy.

~ Bassui
1327–1387

a Rinzai Zen Master born in modern-day Kanagawa Prefecture who had trained with Sōtō, Rinzai and Ch'an masters of his time. Bassui was unhappy with the state of Zen practice in Japan during his time, so he set out in life with the mission of revitalizing it. The problems he saw were really two sides of the same coin. That is, he saw both too much attachment by some monks and masters to ritual and dogma as well as too much attachment by some monks and masters to freedom and informality.