my beauty in you

I see my beauty in you. I become
a mirror that cannot close its eyes

to your longing. My eyes wet with
yours in the early light. My mind

every moment giving birth, always
conceiving, always in the ninth

month, always the come-point. How

do I stand this? We become these

words we say, a wailing sound moving

out into the air. These thousands of

worlds that rise from nowhere, how

does your face contain them? I'm

a fly in your honey, then closer, a

moth caught in flame's allure, then

empty sky stretched out in homage.

 ~ Jelaluddin Rumi

.

because loved, a pure beast came to be

This is the non-existent animal.
Not knowing that, they loved it, loved its ways,
its neck, its posture, loved its quiet gaze
down to the light within it, loved it all.

True, it was not. But, because loved, a pure
beast came to be. A space was kept, conceded.
And in that space, left blank for it, secure,
it gently raised its head and hardly needed

to be. They fed it on no kind of corn,
but always only with the right to be.
And on the beast such power this could confer,

its brow put forth new growth. A single horn.
White, it sought out a virgin's company -
and was inside the mirror and in her.





~ Rainer Maria Rilke

from Sonnets to Orpheus II, 4

 

 

 

 

 

 

listen

listen

hiding in this cage

of visible matter

is the invisible

lifebird

pay attention

to her

she is singing

your song

~ Kabir

Sushil Rao translation

I am a boat

I am a boat

without wind.

You were the wind.

Was that the direction I wanted to go?

Who cares about directions

with a wind like that!

translation by Robert Bly

It’s the dream we carry in secret

that something miraculous will happen,

that it must happen –

that time will open

that the heart will open

that doors will open

that the mountains will open

that springs will gush –

that the dream will open,

that one morning we will glide into

some little harbour we didn't know was there.

translation by Robin Fulton

.

~ Olav H. Hauge

(18 August 1908 – 23 May 1994)

a Norwegian, Mr. Hauge worked as a gardener in his own orchard

the teapot

.

That morning I heard water being poured into a teapot.

The sound was an ordinary, daily, cluffy sound.

but all at once, I knew you loved me.

An unheard-of-thing, love audible in water falling.

~ Robert Bly

from Talking into the Ear of a Donkey

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