walls

When they were building the walls,

How could I not have noticed?

But I never heard the builders,

Not a sound,

Imperceptibly they closed me off

From the outside world.

~ Constantine P. Cavafy

Cavafy articulates something that happens to all of us.  
Your complicity with other people’s images and expectations of you
 allows them to box you in completely.  It takes a long time to recognize
 how some key people on your life’s journey exercise so much control
 over your mind, behaviour, and actions.  Through the image they project
 onto you or through the expectations they have of you, they claim you. 

 Most of this is subtle and works in the domain of the implicit and unstated
 subtext; it is, of course, all the more powerful for not being direct and obvious.
  When you become conscious of these powerful builders and their work
 of housing you in, something within you refuses to comply; 
you begin to send back the building materials.
  
There is no planning permission here, thanks for the kindness! 
 Such projection and expectation is based on their fear and the need to control. 
 Expectation is resentment waiting to happen. 
 In contrast, friendship liberates you.

~ John O’Donohue
 from Eternal Echoes

rediscover yourself

.

.

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’

.

identity with the suffering

The left hand is caught and the right hand pulls it out. 

The left hand turns to the right and says ‘thank you.’ 

It doesn’t work because they are both parts of the same body.

 Who are you thanking?

 You’re thanking yourself.

 So on that plane you realize it’s not her suffering,

 his suffering, or their suffering.

You go up one level, it’s our suffering. 

You go up another level, it’s my suffering. 

Then as it gets de-personalized, it’s the suffering. 

Out of the identity with the suffering comes compassion.

 It arises in relation to the suffering. 

It’s part and parcel of the whole package. 

There is nothing personal in this at all.

In that sense, you have become compassion

 instead of doing compassionate acts. 

Instead of being compassionate, 

you are compassion.

~ Ram Dass

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