water and ice

~ Joseph Goldstein

 

like a creek

The way the soul is with the senses

and the mind, is like a creek.

When desire-weeds grow thick,

your intelligence cannot flow,

and soul-creatures stay hidden.

But sometimes a flooding comes

that runs so strong

it clears the clogged stream,

as though with God’s hand.

No longer weeping and frustrated,

your being grows as powerful

as your wantings were before.

Laughing and satisfied,

that masterful current

lets soul-creatures appear.

You look down,

and it’s lucid dreaming.

The gates made of light

swing open. 
You see in.

~ Rumi

from A Year with Rumi

translation by Coleman Barks

photo by ansel adams

not yet discouraged

By plucking her petals, you do not

gather the beauty of the flower.

Clouds come floating into my life,

no longer to carry rain or usher storm,

but to add colour to my sunset sky.

Death is not extinguishing the light;

it is only putting out the lamp

because the dawn has come.

Do not say, ‘It is morning,’

and dismiss it with a name of yesterday.

See it for the first time

as a newborn child that has no name.

Don’t limit a child to your own learning,

for he was born in another time.

Emancipation from the bondage of the soil

is no freedom for the tree.

Every child comes with the message

that God is not yet discouraged of man.

Every difficulty slurred over

will be a ghost to disturb your repose later on.

Everything comes to us that belongs to us

if we create the capacity to receive it.

Faith is the bird that feels the light

when the dawn is still dark.

From the solemn gloom of the temple

children run out to sit in the dust,

God watches them play and forgets the priest.

I have become my own version of an optimist.

If I can’t make it through one door,

I’ll go through another door - or I’ll make a door.

Something terrific will come

no matter how dark the present.

~ Rabindranath Tagore

the storm

.

We lay in our bed as in a tomb
awakened by thunder to the dark
in which our house was one with night,
and then light came as if the black
roof of the world had cracked open,
as if the night of all time had broken,
and out our window we glimpsed the world
birthwet and shining, as even
the sun at noon had never made it shine.

~ Wendell Berry

.

mindfulness

~ Joseph Goldstein

 

and for nothing was there a why and a wherefore

"The rain fell alike upon the just and upon the unjust, and for nothing was there a why and a wherefore."

~  from Of Human Bondage, 1915

Maugham then studied medicine for six years in London. He qualified in 1897 as doctor from St. Thomas' medical school, but abandoned medicine after the success of his first novels and plays.

"I have never pretended to be anything but a story teller. It has amused me to tell stories and I have told a great many. It is a misfortune for me that the telling of a story just for the sake of the story is not an activity that is in favor with the intelligentsia. I endeavor to bear my misfortunes with fortitude." 

from Creatures of Circumstance, 1947

With the outbreak of WW I, Maugham volunteered for the Red Cross, and was stationed in France for a period. There he met Gerald Haxton (1892-1944), an American, who became his companion. Disguising himself as a reporter, Maugham served as an espionage agent for British Secret Intelligence Service in Russia in 1916-17, but his stuttering and poor health hindered his career in this field.

In 1917 he married Syrie Barnardo Wellcome, an interior decorator; they were divored in 1927-8.

Syrie

Maugham named his daughter and only child, Elizabeth 'Liza' Mary Maugham, after the title character in his first novel  Liza of Lambeth.

Liza center

"He did not know how wide a country, arid and precipitous, must be crossed before the traveler through life comes to an acceptance of reality. It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched, for they are full of the truth-less ideals which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real they are bruised and wounded."

~ from Of Human Bondage, Ch. 29

Initially titled "The Artistic Temperament of Stephen Carey"

“The writer is more concerned to know than to judge,” 

declares the narrator of Maugham’s novel The Moon and Sixpence (1919)

Guy Hague and Ramana Maharshi

Meditation enables them to go

Deeper and deeper into consciousness,

From the world of words to the world of thoughts,

Then beyond thoughts to wisdom in the Self.

Sharp like a razor's edge, the sages say,

Is the path, difficult to traverse.

~ Katha Upanishad

This is the passage from which the title of Somerset Maugham's book The Razor's Edge was taken. His story traces the spiritual journey of an American fighter pilot traumatized by WWI. The book is apparently based on the life of Guy Hague who had spent time with Ramana Maharshi in Tamil Nadu, India, as did Maugham himself.

. 

Maugham's novels explore the beauty of and intricacy of the fabric of life in-which we are all entwined.

souvenir

I would like

to take something with me

but even one chair

is too awkward

too heavy

peeling paint

falls off in a suitcase

hinge sounds betray a theft

cheeses won't keep

the clothespin 

without its surroundings 

would be mediocre

the big thunder rolled elsewhere

the umbrella is for sale

but in a desert what you want is a soaking

the do not disturb sign is tattered

I have many times taken

some cafe's small packets of sugar

so that in Turkey

I might sweeten my coffee with China

and in Italy remember a Lithuanian pastry

but where is the coffee

hands left and right useless

Knees clattery

heart finally calm

as some hero at the end of a movie

squinting silently into the sun

you can't hold an umbrella there anyhow

and what would he hang from the clothespin

~ Jane Hirshfield

from The Beauty

When I come near the red peony flower

When I come near the red peony flower
I tremble as water does near thunder,
As the well does when the plates of earth move,
Or the tree when fifty birds leave at once.

The peony says that we have been given a gift,
And it is not the gift of this world.
Behind the leaves of the peony
There is a world still darker, that feeds many.

~ Robert Bly

real presence is the ideal

Real presence is the ideal of all true individuation.  When we yield to helplessness, 
we strengthen the hand of those who would destroy.  When we choose indifference, 
we betray our world.  Yet the world is not decided by action alone. 

 It is decided more by consciousness and spirit; they are the secret sources of all action
 and behavior.  The spirit of a time is an incredibly subtle, yet hugely powerful force. 
 And it is comprised of the mentality and spirit of all individuals together. 

 Therefore, the way you look at things is not simply a private matter.  
Your outlook actually and concretely affects what goes on.  When you give in
 to helplessness, you collude with despair and add to it.  When you take back
 your power and choose to see the possibilities for healing and transformation, 
your creativity awakens and flows...

~ John O'Donohue

from To Bless the Space Between Us
art: Herzeloyde – The Mother Archetype

singly

They come singly, the little streams,

Out of their solitude.  They bear

In their rough fall a spate of gleams

That glance and dance in morning air.

They come singly, and coming go

Ever downward toward the river

Into whose dark abiding flow

They come, now quieted, together.

In dark they mingle and are made

At one with light in highest flood

Embodied and inhabited,

The budded branch as red as blood.

~ Wendell Berry

from This Day - Collected & New Sabbath Poems

flow like the Tao

Who can free himself from achievement

And from fame, descend and be lost

Amid the masses of men?

He will flow like Tao, unseen,

He will go about like Life itself

With no name and no home.

Simple is he, without distinction.

To all appearances he is a fool.

His steps leave no trace.  He has no power.

He achieves nothing, has no reputation.

Since he judges no one

No one judges him.

Such is the perfect man:

His boat is empty.

~ Chuang Tzu

translation by Thomas Merton
from The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton

who?

 who sees exactly what is taking place in the world, 

and who really wants to find out if God, truth, 

is an actuality or merely a clever invention of the priest? 

After all, you and I are the result of the collective, are we not? 

And there must be individual human beings who have completely broken away from the collective, 

from society, who are free from conditioning, not in layers or in spots, but totally, 

for it is only such individuals who can find out what truth or God is 

-not the man of tradition, not the man who does japa, rings the bell, quotes the Gita,

 and goes to the temple every day. 

It is the irreligious people who do that. 

But the man who really wants to find out 

what this extraordinary movement of living is 

must not only understand the process of his own conditioning, 

but be able to go beyond it. 

Because, the mind can find out what is true 

only when it is free from all conditioning, 

not when it merely repeats certain words or quotes the sacred books. 

Such a mind is not free.

~ J. Krishnamurti

from  Collected Works

primal simplicity

.

Tao is always nameless.

Small as it is in its Primal Simplicity,

It is inferior to nothing in the world.

If only a ruler could cling to it,

Everything will render homage to him.

Heaven and Earth will be harmonized

And send down sweet dew

Peace and order will reign among the people

Without any command from above.

.

When once the Primal Simplicity diversified,

Different names appeared.

Are there not enough names now?

.

Is this not the time to stop?

To know when to stop is to preserve ourselves from danger.

The Tao is to the world what a great river or an ocean

is to the streams and brooks.

.

~ Lao Tzu

from the Tao Te Ching

translated by John C. H. Wu

.

the secret fish

As timely as a river

God's timeless life passes

Into this world. It passes

Through bodies, giving life,

And past them, giving death.

The secret fish leaps up

Into the light and is 

Again darkened. The sun

Comes from the dark, it lights

The always passing river,

Shines on the great-branches tree,

And goes. Longing and dark,

We are completely filled

With breath of love, in us

Forever incomplete.

~ Wendell Berry

from Sabbaths 2000

be ever kind

I saw a wise sage!  he did not heed

For caste or creed, for faith or worldly greed;

And free from truth and quest, from path and goal,

He sat at ease, from earth and heaven freed.

 

 

Some strung the pearls of thought by searching deep,

And told some tales about Him,–sold them cheap;

But none has caught a clue to secret realms,

They cast a horoscope and fall in sleep.

Dedicate yourself to the wise when you find

Forget fasting and praying, you need not mind

But listen to truth from what Umar Khayyæm says,

Drink wine, steal if you should but be ever kind. 

 

 

 

 ~ Omar Khayyam

(1048 - 1131)

from The Great‘UMAR KHAYYAM

 

He known for his agnostic and skeptic poetry 

 also lived in complicated times of cultural unrest

in which freedom of expression was repressed and 

access to education was limited.