the grace

The time of judging
Who is drunk or sober,
Who is right and who is wrong,
Who is closer to god, and who is farther away,
All that is over.

This caravan is led instead by a great delight,
The simple joy that sits with us now.

That is the grace.


~ Hafiz

a mighty kindness

Be helpless and dumbfounded,
unable to say yes or no.

Then a stretcher will come
from grace to gather us up.

We are too dull-eyed to see the beauty.
If we say "Yes we can," we'll be lying.

If we say "No, we don't see it,"
that "No" will behead us
and shut tight our window into spirit.

So let us not be sure of anything,
beside ourselves, and only that, so
miraculous beings come running to help.

Crazed, lying in a zero-circle, mute,
we will be saying finally,
with tremendous eloquence, "Lead us."

When we've totally surrendered to that beauty,
we'll become a mighty kindness.

~ Rumi

translation by Coleman Barks 
 art by Picasso

your hermitage is deep

If your hermitage is deep in the mountains

surely the moon, flowers, and maple trees

will become your friends.

Men of the world passing this way are few,

Dense grass conceals the door

All night in silence, a few wood-chips burn slowly,

As I read the poems of the ancients.

~ Ryokan

steady the heart

~ Trudy Goodman & Jack Kornfield

a manuscript of a divine letter

Do you know what you are?

You are a manuscript of a divine letter.
You are a mirror reflecting a noble face.
This universe is not outside of you. 

Look inside yourself;
everything that you want,
you are already that. 



~ Rumi
from  Hush, Don't Say Anything to God: Passionate Poems of Rumi
art by Misa Funai


 

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

.