hidden

The deep secrecy of my own being is often hidden from me 
by my own estimate of what I am. 

My idea of what I am is falsified by my admiration for what I do. 

And my illusions about myself are bred by contagion 
from the illusions of other men. 

We all seek to imitate one another’s imagined greatness.

If I do not know who I am, it is because 

I think I am the sort of person everyone around me wants to be. 

Perhaps I have never asked myself
 whether I really wanted to become 

what everybody else seems to want to become. 

Perhaps if I only realized that I do not admire
 what everyone seems to admire, 

I would really begin to live after all.

I would be liberated from the painful duty
 of saying what I really do not think 

and of acting in a way that betrays God’s truth
 and the integrity of my own soul.

~ Thomas Merton

 from No Man is an Island

art by Van Gogh

hidden beneath Van Gogh's Patch of Grass
a portrait is revealed

not enemies

We are not enemies

though parents told us so

We are not enemies 

though they taught us so as school

We are not enemies

just because the pulpit insists

We are not enemies

though strangers toss epithets

We are not enemies

though even love goes sour

We are not enemies

just because we can't contain our pain

We are not enemies

though we meet short of our sameness,

the best of each of us live in the other.

If we can forgive ourselves

we can forgive anyone.

~ Stephen Levine

from Breaking the Drought

 

to Paula in late spring

Let me imagine that we will come again

when we want to and it will be spring

we will be no older than we ever were

the worn griefs will have eased like the early cloud

through which the morning slowly comes to itself

and the ancient defenses against the dead

will be done with and left to the dead at last

the light will  be as it is now in the garden

that we have made here these years together

of our long evenings and astonishment

~ W.S. Merwin

art by Van Gogh

if only

Last year's

fragile, vanished snow

is falling now again -

if only seeing you

could be like this.

~ Izumi Shikibu

you need no change

.

Words indicate, but do not explain.
What I teach is the ancient and simple way of liberation through understanding. 

 

 Understand your own mind and its hold on you will snap. 

 The mind misunderstands, misunderstanding is its very nature. 

 Right understanding is the only remedy, whatever name you give it.

 It is the earliest and also the latest, for it deals with the mind as it is.

Nothing you do will change you, for you need no change. 

 You may change your mind or your body, but it is always something external

 to you that has changed, not yourself. Why bother at all to change?

 

 Realize once and for all that neither your body nor your mind, 

nor even your consciousness is yourself and stand alone in your true nature

 beyond consciousness and unconsciousness. No effort can take you there,

 only the clarity of understanding. Trace your misunderstandings and abandon them,

 that is all.

 

 There is nothing to seek and find,

 for there is nothing lost.

 Relax and watch the 'I am'. 

 Reality is just behind it.

 Keep quiet, keep silent; 

it will emerge,

 or, rather,

 it will take you in.

~ Nisargadatta Maharaj
.

 

 

present

As they were leaving the garden
one of the angels bent down to them and whispered

I am to give you this
as you are leaving the garden

I do not know what it is
or what it is for
what you will do with it

you will not be able to keep it
but you will not be able

to keep anything
yet they both reached at once

for the present
and when their hands met

they laughed 

~ W.S. Merwin

 from  Garden Time

art by Tiffany Gomez

your way of knowing

Your way of knowing is a private herb garden.

Enclose it with a hedge of meditation,

and self-discipline, and helpfulness to others.

Then everything you've done before

will be brought as a sacrifice

to the mother goddess.

And each day, as you eat the herbs,

the garden grows more bare and empty.

~ Lalla

translation by Coleman Barks

 from The Soul is here for its own Joy, Sacred Poems from Many Cultures

edited by Robert Bly

  

the sleepless ones

What if all the people
who could not sleep
at two or three or four
in the morning
left their houses
and went to the parks
what if hundreds, thousands,
millions
went in their solitude
like a stream
and each told their story
what if there were
old women
fearful if they slept
they would die
and young women
unable to conceive
and husbands
having affairs
and children
fearful of failing
and fathers
worried about paying bills
and men
having business troubles
and women unlucky in love
and those that were in physical
pain
and those who were guilty
what if they all left their houses
like a stream
and the moon
illuminated their way and
they came, each one
to tell their stories
would these be the more troubled
of humanity
or would these be
the more passionate of this world
or those who need to create to live
or would these be
the lonely
ones
and I ask you
if they all came to the parks
at night
and told their stories
would the sun on rising
be more radiant and

again I ask you
would they embrace

 

 

~ Lawrence Tirnauer

 a PhD from Pennsylvania State University

with a private practice in Washington DC

 

 

weight shifts

If we can imagine a wheel whose rim is the cycle of births and deaths,
 all of the 'stuff' of life, conditioned reality, and whose center is perfect flow,
 formless no-mind, the source, we’ve got one foot with most of our weight
 on the circumference of the wheel, and one foot tentatively on the center. 

That’s the beginning of awakening. And we come in, and we sit down and meditate,
 and suddenly there’s a moment when we feel the perfection of our being 
and our connection. Then our weight goes back on the outside of the wheel.
 Over and over and over, this happens.

Slowly, slowly the weight shifts. Then the weight shifts just enough
 so that there is a slight predominance on the center of the wheel,
 and we find that we naturally just want to sit down and be quiet, 
that we don’t have to say, 'I’ve got to meditate now,' 
or 'I’ve got to read a holy book,' or 'I’ve got to turn off the television set,'
 or 'I’ve got to do… anything.' It doesn’t become that kind of a discipline anymore.
 The balance has shifted.

And we keep allowing our lives to become more and more simple,
 more and more harmonious. And less and less are we grabbing
 at this and pushing that away...

~ Ram Dass 

man is but the place where I stand

.

I do not value any view of the universe

 into which man and the institutions of man 

enter very largely and absorb much of the attention.  

Man is but the place where I stand; 

and the prospect hence is infinite.

~ Henry David Thoreau

from his journal, 1852

art by roderick maclver

.

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

what isn't

~ Ram Dass

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.

.

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.

.

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.

.

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.

.

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."

.

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.

.

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