the madman

.

You ask me how I became a madman.  It happened thus:  
One day, long before many gods were born,  I woke from a deep sleep
 and found all my masks were stolen, - the seven masks I have fashioned
 and worn in seven lives, - I ran maskless through the crowded streets shouting,
 "Thieves, thieves, and cursed thieves."

Men and women laughed at me and some ran to their houses in fear of me.

And when I reached the market place, a youth standing on a house-top cried,
 "He is a madman."  I looked up to behold him; the sun kissed my own naked face for the first time.  For the first time the sun kissed my own naked face and my soul was inflamed with love for the sun, and I wanted my masks no more.  And as if in a trance I cried, "Blessed, blessed are the thieves who stole my masks."

Thus I became a madman.

And I have found both freedom and safety in my madness;  
the freedom of loneliness and the safety from being understood,
 for those who understand us enslave something in us.

But let me not be too proud of my safety. 
 Even a Thief in jail is safe from another thief.

~ Kahlil Gibran

from The Madman his Parables and Poems

art Ludwig Kirchner

who am I

~ Jack Kornfield

 

still

.

I said I will find what is lowly

and put the roots of my identity

down there:

each day I'll wake up

and find the lowly nearby,

a handy focus and reminder,

a ready measure of my significance,

the voice by which I would be heard,

the wills, the kinds of selfishness

I could

freely adopt as my own:

but though I have looked everywhere,

I can find nothing

to give myself to:

everything is

magnificent with existence, is in

surfeit of glory:

nothing is diminished,

nothing has been diminished for me:

I said what is more lowly than the grass:

ah, underneath,

a ground-crust of dry-burnt moss:

I looked at it closely

and said this can be my habitat: but

nestling in I

found

below the brown exterior

green mechanisms beyond the intellect

awaiting resurrection in rain: so I got up

and ran saying there is nothing lowly in the universe:

I found a beggar:

he had stumps for legs: nobody was paying

him any attention: everybody went on by:

I nestled in and found his life:

there, love shook his body like a devastation:

I said

though I have looked everywhere

I can find nothing lowly

in the universe:

I whirled though transfigurations up and down,

transfigurations of size and shape and place:

.

at one sudden point came still,

stood in wonder:

moss, beggar, weed, tick, pine, self, magnificent

with being!

~ A. R. Ammons

.

emptiness

~ Jack Kornfield

 

a hundred roots silently drinking

I have many brothers in the South

who move, handsome in their vestments,

through cloister gardens.

The Madonnas they make are so human,

and I dream often of their Titians,

where God becomes an ardent flame.

But when I lean over the chasm of myself -

it seems

my God is dark

and like a web: a hundred roots

silently drinking.

This is the ferment I grow out of.

More I don't know, because my branches

rest in deep silence, stirred only by the wind.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

from The Book of Monastic Life, I,3

.

patience

~ Jack Kornfield

 

song in the year of catastrophe

I began to be followed by a voice saying:

"It can't last.  It can't last.

Harden yourself.  Harden yourself.

Be ready.  Be ready."

"Go look under the leaves,"

it said, "for what is living there

is dead in your tongue."

And it said, "Put your hands

into the earth.  Live close

to the ground. Learn the darkness.

Gather round you all

the things that you love, name

their names, prepare

to lose them,  It will be

as if all you know were turned

around within your body."

And I went and put my hands 

into the ground, and they took root

and grew into a season's harvest.

I looked behind the veil

of the leaves, and heard voices

that I knew had been dead

in my tongue years before my birth.

I learned the dark.

And still the voice stayed with me. 

Waking in the early mornings,

I could hear it, like a bird

bemused among the leaves,

a mockingbird idly singing

in the autumn of catastrophe:

"Be ready.   Be ready.

Harden yourself.  Harden yourself."

And I heard the sound 

of a great engine pounding

in the air, and a voice asking:

"Change or slavery?

Hardship or slavery?"

and the voices answering:

"Slavery!  Slavery!"

And I was afraid, loving 

what I know would be lost.

Then the voice following me said:

"you have not yet come close enough.

Come nearer the ground.  Learn

from the woodcock in the woods

whose feathering is a ritual

of the fallen leaves,

and from the nesting quail

whose speckling makes her hard to see

in the long grass.

Study the coat of the mole.

For the farmer shall wear

the greenery and the furrows

of his fields, and bear

the long standing of the woods."

And I asked: "you mean a death, then?"

"yes," the voice said.  "Die

into what the earth requires of you."

Then let go all holds, and sank

like a hopeless swimmer into the earth,

and at last came fully into the ease

and the joy of that place,

all my lost ones returning.

~ Wendell Berry

from Farming Poems

art by Roderick Maclver

still a mystery

How something is made flesh

no one can say. The buffalo soup

becomes a woman

who sings every day to her horses

or summons another to her private body

saying, come, touch, this is how

it begins, the path of a newly born

who, salvaged from other lives and worlds,

will grow to become a woman, a man,

with a heart that never rests,

and the gathered berries,

the wild grapes

enter the body,

human wine

which can love,

where nothing created is wasted;

the swallowed grain takes you through the dreams

of another night,

the deer meat becomes hands

strong enough to work.

But I love most

the white-haired creature

eating green leaves;

the sun shines there

swallowed, showing in her face

taking in all the light,

and in the end

when the shadow from the ground

enters the body and remains,

in the end, you might say,

This is myself,

still unknown, still a mystery.

–Linda Hogan

from Rounding the Human Corners

as we think, so we become

.

The thought manifests as the word,
The word manifests as the deed,
The deed develops into a habit,
And habit hardens in character,
.
So watch the thought and it's ways with care,
And let it spring from love,
Born out of concern for all beings...
.
As the shadow follows the body,
As we think so we become. 

~ Buddha, from the Dhammapada

. 

Sky: An Assay

A hawk flies though it, carrying

a still-twisting snake twice the length of its body.

Radiation, smoke, mosquitoes, the music of Mahler fly through it.

The sky makes room, adjusting its airy shoulders.

Sky doesn't age or remember,

carries neither grudges nor hope.

Every morning is new as the last one, uncreased

as the not quite imaginable first.

From the fate of thunderstorms, hailstorms, fog,

sky learns no lesson,

leaping through any window as soon as it's raised.

In speech, furious or tender,

it's still of passing sky the words are formed.

Whatever sky proposes is out in the open.

Clear even when not,

sky offers no model, no mirror - cloudy or bright -

to the ordinary heart: which is secretive,

rackety, domestic, harboring a wild uninterest in sky's disinterest.

And so we look right past sky, by it, through it,

to what also is moody and alters -

erosive mountains, eclipsable moons, stars distant but death-bound.

~ Jane Hirshfield

expioring the shadow

~ Jack Kornfield and Trudy Goodman

between the shadow and the soul

I do not love you as if you were the salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way 

than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.



~ Pablo Neruda 

 art by Odilon Redon, Golden Cell

hands and shadows

While the hand moves
the shadow must follow.
Since the shadow gains its substance
from the hand
it has none of itself.
That which derives existence
from something else
how can we say
it truly exists?
It has a name, yes,
but is not that existence
which subsists through God.




~ Fakhruddin 'Iraqi
from Divine Flashes

transforming darkness

~ Jack Kornfield

 

aloneness

But loneliness is entirely different from aloneness. That loneliness must be passed to be alone. Loneliness is not comparable with aloneness. The man who knows loneliness can never know that which is alone. Are you in that state of aloneness? Our minds are not integrated to be alone. The very process of the mind is separative. And that which separates knows loneliness.

But aloneness is not separative. It is something which is not the many, which is not influenced by the many, which is not the result of the many, which is not put together as the mind is; the mind is of the many. Mind is not an entity that is alone, being put together, brought together, manufactured through centuries. Mind can never be alone. Mind can never know aloneness. But being aware of the loneliness when going through it, there comes into being that aloneness. Then only can there be that which is immeasurable. Unfortunately most of us seek dependence. We want companions; we want friends; we want to live in a state of separation, in a state which brings about conflict. That which is alone can never be in a state of conflict. But mind can never perceive that, can never understand that; it can only know loneliness.

~ J. Krishnamurti

from the talk On Love and Loneliness (1952)

national geographic photo