Saturday, April 25, 2020
Friday, April 24, 2020
beyond confinement
A name should never trap a thing. In the Jewish tradition, for instance, if you knew the name of a thing, you had a inkling of its secret and mystery. The name was a doorway of reverence. When you name a dimension of your experience, one of your qualities or difficulties, or some presence within you, you give it an identity. It then responds to you according to the tone of its name. We need to exercise great care and respect when we come to name something, We always need to find a name that is worthy and spacious.
When we name things in a small way, we cripple them. Often our way of naming things is driven by our addiction to what is obviously visible... The visible is only the shoreline of the magnificent ocean of the invisible. The invisible is not empty, but is textured and tense with presences. These presences cannot be named; they can only be sensed, not seen.
We have put wrong names on many of our most important experiences. We have often caricatured and shown disrespect to some of our most faithful desires. We have kept some of our most beautiful longings as prisoners in our hearts, falsely imprisoned simply because of mistaken identity.
The wildness of the invisible world is nameless. It has no name. A first step towards reawakening respect for your inner life may be to become aware of the private collage of dead names you have for your inner life. Often, the experiences of wilderness can return us to the nameless wildness within. Sometime, go away to a wild place on your own. Leave your name and the grid of intentions and projects and images which mark you out as citizen Z. Leave it all, and let yourself just slip back into the rhythms of your intimate wildness. You will be surprised at the lost terrains, wells, and mountains that you will rediscover, territories which have been buried under well-meant but dead names. To go beyond confinement is to rediscover yourself.
~ John O'Donohue
from Eternal Echoes
call me by my true names
Do not say that I'll depart tomorrow -
even today I am still arriving.
Look deeply: every second I am arriving
to be a bud on a Spring branch,
to be a tiny bird, with still-fragile wings,
learning to sing in my new nest,
to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower,
to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.
I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry,
to fear and to hope,
the rhythm of my heart is the birth and death
of all that are alive.
I am a mayfly metamorphosing
on the surface of the river.
And I am the bird which, when Spring comes,
arrives in time to eat the mayfly.
I am a frog swimming happily
in the clear water of a pond.
And I am the grass-snake
that silently feeds itself on the frog.
I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,
my legs as thin as bamboo sticks.
And I am the arms merchant,
selling deadly weapons to Uganda.
I am the twelve-year old girl,
refugee on a small boat,
who throws herself into the ocean
after being raped by a sea pirate.
And I am the pirate,
my heart not yet capable
of seeing and loving.
I am a member of the politburo,
with plenty of power in my hands.
And I am the man who has to pay his
"debt of blood" to my people
dying slowly in a forced labor camp.
My joy is like Spring, so warm
it makes flowers bloom all over the Earth.
My pain is like a river of tears,
so vast it fills the four oceans.
Please call me by my true names,
so I can hear all my cries and laughter at once,
so I can see that my joy and pain are one.
Please call me by my true names,
so I can wake up
and the door of my heart can be left open,
the door of compassion.
~ Thich Nhat Hanh
from Being Peace
my companion
You went away but remained in me
And thus became my peace and happiness.
In separation, separation left me
And I witnessed the Unknown.
You were the hidden secret of my longing,
Hidden deep within my conscience deeper than a dream.
You were my true friend in the day
And in darkness my companion.
~ Mansur al-Hallaj
translated by Mahmood Jamal
from Wikipedia
Al-Hallaj was born around 858 in Fars province of Persia to a cotton-carder (Hallaj means "cotton-carder" in Arabic). His grandfather was a Zoroastrian. His father lived a simple life, and this form of lifestyle greatly interested the young Al-Hallaj. As a youngster he memorized the Qur'an and would often retreat from worldly pursuits to join other mystics in study.
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Al-Hallaj later married and made a pilgrimage to Mecca, where he stayed for one year, facing the mosque, in fasting and total silence. After his stay at the city, he traveled extensively and wrote and taught along the way. He traveled as far as India and Central Asia gaining many followers, many of whom accompanied him on his second and third trips to Mecca. After this period of travel, he settled down in the Abbasid capital of Baghdad.
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During his early lifetime he was a disciple of Junayd Baghdadi and Amr al-Makki, but was later rejected by them both. Sahl al-Tustariwas also one of Al-Hallaj's early teachers.
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Among other Sufis, Al-Hallaj was an anomaly. Many Sufi masters felt that it was inappropriate to share mysticism with the masses, yet Al-Hallaj openly did so in his writings and through his teachings. He thus began to make enemies. This was exacerbated by occasions when he would fall into trances which he attributed to being in the presence of God.
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During one of these trances, he would utter Arabic: أنا الحق Anā l-Ḥaqq "I am The Truth," which was taken to mean that he was claiming to be God, since al-Ḥaqq "the Truth" is one of the Ninety Nine Names of Allah. In another controversial statement, al-Hallaj claimed "There is nothing wrapped in my turban but God," and similarly he would point to his cloak and say, ما في جبتي إلا الله Mā fī jubbatī illā l-Lāh "There is nothing in my cloak but God."
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These utterances led to a long trial, and his subsequent imprisonment for 11 years in a Baghdad prison. He was publicly crucified on March 26, 922.
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Thursday, April 23, 2020
a question the bundle had
.
When summer was nearly over,
The bundles would stand in the stubble
Whispering. One said: "For a while,
It looked like I might get away."
"I could have done it -
No one would have noticed.
But it was hard to know
If I should go singly, or with others."
Each of us resembles that
Bundle. For years we waited
For the right moment to escape.
Perhaps it was that moment in July
When the thunder came. But the next
Day it was too late. And we
Ended up in the thresher.
Were we right to wait?
~ Robert Bly
an early Vincent Van Gogh
are you prepared?
These Things whose essential life you want to express first ask you,
"Are you free? Are you prepared to devote all your love to me...?"
And if the Thing sees that you are otherwise occupied with even a particle
of your interest, it shuts itself off; it may perhaps give you some slight sign
of friendship, a word or a nod, but it will never give you its heart,
entrust you with its patient being, its sweet sidereal constancy,
which makes it so like the constellations in the sky.
In order for a Thing to speak to you, you must regard it for a certain time
as the only one that exists, as the one and only phenomenon which,
through your laborious and exclusive love, is now placed at the center of the universe,
and which, in that incomparable place, is on the day attended by angels.
"Are you free? Are you prepared to devote all your love to me...?"
And if the Thing sees that you are otherwise occupied with even a particle
of your interest, it shuts itself off; it may perhaps give you some slight sign
of friendship, a word or a nod, but it will never give you its heart,
entrust you with its patient being, its sweet sidereal constancy,
which makes it so like the constellations in the sky.
In order for a Thing to speak to you, you must regard it for a certain time
as the only one that exists, as the one and only phenomenon which,
through your laborious and exclusive love, is now placed at the center of the universe,
and which, in that incomparable place, is on the day attended by angels.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
from a letter to Baladine Klossowska
translated by Stephen Mitchell
a flow of aliveness
animated by a flow of aliveness
that resists crystallizing into a system of thought or belief -
although it does not hesitate to enjoy
thought and belief for the delight or communion they may reveal.
open, free-wheeling, inclusive
in view and practice, non-definitive, experimental, non-sectarian,
warm-hearted, and non-attached.
embraces the full range of human experience
while settling nowhere,
capable of a subtle openness and
... equally open to spontaneous delight and sensual extravagance. ...
grateful for beauty in all its forms of disclosure,
recognizing happiness and grief and all
emotions in between as free offerings of the Unnameable into Itself.
it negates conclusion-making while affirming the indefinable.
A kind of love-mysticism, it loves
the edginess and poignancy of human life
while seeing through its apparency to the stillness within.
Present without agenda, kind without being moralistic,
it reaches across the seeming divisions between
people and societies with the confidence of the light
that is common to us all.
~ Pir Elias Amidon
excerpts from Free Medicine
Wednesday, April 22, 2020
a default setting - cracks open possibility
In the wake of an earthquake, bombing, major storm, most people are altruistic, urgently engaged in caring for themselves and those around them, strangers and neighbors, as well as friends and loved ones.
These remarkable societies suggest that, just as many machines reset themselves to their original settings after a power outage, so human beings reset themselves to something altruistic, communitarian, resourceful, and imaginative after a disaster, that we revert to something we already know how to do. The possibility of paradise is already within us as a default setting.
Disaster demonstrates this, since among the factors determining whether you will live or die are the health of your immediate community and the justness of your society. We need ties to survive, but they along with purposefulness, immediacy, and agency also give us joy—the startling, sharp joy I found over and over again in accounts of disaster. These accounts of disaster demonstrate that the citizens any paradise requires—the people who are brave enough, resourceful enough, and generous enough—already exist. The possibility of paradise hovers on the cusp of coming into being, so much so that it takes powerful forces to keep such a paradise at bay. If Paradise nowadays most often arises in hell, that’s because the chaos of that hell suspends the ordinary rules and routines; it is not its hellishness but its disruptiveness that cracks open possibility.
The ideal societies we hear of are mostly far away or long ago or both, situated in some primordial society before the fall or a spiritual kingdom in a remote Himalayan fastness. The implication is that we here and now are far from capable of living such ideals. But what if paradise flashed up among us from time to time—at the worst of times? What if we glimpsed it in the jaws of hell? These flashes give us, as the long ago and far away do not, a glimpse of who else we ourselves may be and what else our society could become. This is a paradise of rising to the occasion that points out as well how the rest of the time most of us fall down from the heights of possibility, down into diminished selves and dismal societies. Many now do not even hope for a better society, but they recognize it when they run into it, and that discovery shines out even through the namelessness of their experience. Others recognize it, grasp it, and make something of it, and longterm social and political transformations, both good and bad, arise from the wreckage. The door to this era’s potential paradises is in hell.
The word emergency comes from emerge, to rise out of, the opposite of merge, which comes from mergere: to be within or under a liquid, immersed, submerged. An emergency is a separation from the familiar, a sudden emergence into a new atmosphere, one that often demands we ourselves rise to the occasion. Catastrophe comes from the Greek kata, or down, and streiphen, or turning over: it means an upset of what is expected and was originally used to mean a plot twist. To emerge into the unexpected is not always terrible, though these words have evolved to imply ill fortune. The word disaster comes from the Latin compound of dis-, or away, without, and astro, star or planet, literally without a star. It originally suggested misfortune due to astrologically generated trouble, as in the blues musician Albert King’s classic “Born Under a Bad Sign.”
In some of the disasters of the 20th century—the big northeastern blackouts in 1965 and 2003, the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake in the San Francisco Bay Area, 2005’s Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast—the loss of electrical power meant that the light pollution blotting out the night sky vanished. In these disaster-struck cities, people suddenly found themselves under the canopy of stars still visible in small and remote places. On the warm night of August 15, 2003, the Milky Way could be seen in New York City, a heavenly realm long lost to view until the blackout that hit the northeast late that afternoon. You can think of the current social order as something akin to this artificial light: another kind of power that fails in disaster. In its place appears a reversion to improvised, collaborative, cooperative and local society. However beautiful the stars of a suddenly visible night sky, few nowadays could find their way by them, but the constellations of solidarity, altruism and improvisation are within most of us and reappear at these times. People know what to do in a disaster. The loss of power, the disaster in the modern sense, is an affliction, but the reappearance of these old heavens is its opposite. This is the paradise entered through hell.
~ Rebecca Solnit
excerpts from A Paradise Built in Hell:
The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster
Saturday, April 18, 2020
for grief
When you lose someone you love,
Your life becomes strange,
The ground beneath you gets fragile,
Your thoughts make your eyes unsure;
And some dead echo drags your voice down
Where words have no confidence.
Your heart has grown heavy with loss;
And though this loss has wounded others too,
No one knows what has been taken from you
When the silence of absence deepens.
Flickers of guilt kindle regret
For all that was left unsaid or undone.
There are days when you wake up happy;
Again inside the fullness of life,
Until the moment breaks
And you are thrown back
Onto the black tide of loss.
Days when you have your heart back,
You are able to function well
Until in the middle of work or encounter,
Suddenly with no warning,
You are ambushed by grief.
It becomes hard to trust yourself.
All you can depend on now is that
Sorrow will remain faithful to itself.
More than you, it knows its way
And will find the right time
To pull and pull the rope of grief
Until that coiled hill of tears
Has reduced to its last drop.
Gradually, you will learn acquaintance
With the invisible form of your departed;
And, when the work of grief is done,
The wound of loss will heal
And you will have learned
To wean your eyes
From that gap in the air
And be able to enter the hearth
In your soul where your loved one
Has awaited your return
All the time.
Your life becomes strange,
The ground beneath you gets fragile,
Your thoughts make your eyes unsure;
And some dead echo drags your voice down
Where words have no confidence.
Your heart has grown heavy with loss;
And though this loss has wounded others too,
No one knows what has been taken from you
When the silence of absence deepens.
Flickers of guilt kindle regret
For all that was left unsaid or undone.
There are days when you wake up happy;
Again inside the fullness of life,
Until the moment breaks
And you are thrown back
Onto the black tide of loss.
Days when you have your heart back,
You are able to function well
Until in the middle of work or encounter,
Suddenly with no warning,
You are ambushed by grief.
It becomes hard to trust yourself.
All you can depend on now is that
Sorrow will remain faithful to itself.
More than you, it knows its way
And will find the right time
To pull and pull the rope of grief
Until that coiled hill of tears
Has reduced to its last drop.
Gradually, you will learn acquaintance
With the invisible form of your departed;
And, when the work of grief is done,
The wound of loss will heal
And you will have learned
To wean your eyes
From that gap in the air
And be able to enter the hearth
In your soul where your loved one
Has awaited your return
All the time.
~ John O’Donohue
from To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings
what you cannot hold
You who let yourselves feel: enter the breathing
that is more than your own.
Let it brush your cheeks
as it divides and rejoins beside you.
Blessed ones, whole ones,
you where the heart begins:
You are the bow that shoots the arrows
and you are the target.
Fear not the pain. Let its weight fall back
into the earth;
for heavy are the mountains, heavy the seas.
The trees you planted in childhood have grown
too heavy. You cannot bring them along.
Give yourselves to the air, to what you cannot hold.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
Sonnets to Orpheus, Part One, IV
translation by Macy and Barrows
Friday, April 17, 2020
not difficult
The Great Way is not difficult
for those who have no preferences.
*
*
When love and hate are both absent
everything becomes clear and undisguised.
*
*
Make the smallest distinction, however
and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart.
*
*
If you wish to see the truth
then hold no opinions for or against anything.
*
*
To set up what you like against what you dislike
is the disease of the mind.
*
*
When the deep meaning of things is not understood
the minds essential peace is disturbed to no avail.
The Way is perfect like vast space
where nothing is lacking and nothing is in excess.
*
*
Indeed, it is due to our choosing to accept or reject
that we do not see the true nature of things.
*
*
Live neither in the entanglements of outer things,
nor in inner feelings of emptiness.
*
*
Be serene in the oneness of things
and such erroneous views will disappear by themselves.
*
*
When you try to stop activity to achieve passivity
your very effort fills you with activity.
As long as you remain in one extreme or the other
you will never know Oneness.
~ Seng-T’san
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