the skinny birds of non-existence

~ Robert Bly

during a storm

You too are a tree. During a storm of emotions, 

you should not stay at the level of the head or the heart,

 which are like the top of the tree.

 

 You have to leave the heart, the eye of the storm,

 and come back to the trunk of the tree. 

Your trunk is one centimeter below your navel.

 

 Focus there, paying attention only to the movement 

of your abdomen, and continue to breathe.

~ Thích Nhất Hạnh

 

 

 

 

 

still morning

It appears now that there is only one

age and it knows

nothing of age as the flying birds know

nothing of the air they are flying through

or of the day that bears them up

through themselves

and I am a child before there are words

arms are holding me up in a shadow

voices murmur in a shadow

as I watch one patch of sunlight moving

across the green carpet

in a building

gone long ago and all the voices

silent and each word they said in that time

silent now

while I go on seeing that patch of sunlight

~ W. S. Merwin

from Collected Poems (1996 - 2011)

art by emile claus

forgiveness

Forgiveness is the answer to a child’s dream of a miracle
 by which what is broken is made whole again, what is soiled is made clean.
 The dream explains why we need to be forgiven, and why we must forgive.
 In the presence of God, nothing stands between Him and us - we are forgiven.
 But we cannot feel His presence if anything is allowed
 to stand between ourselves and others.

~ Dag Hammarskjöld 

from Markings

translated by Leif Sjoberg and W.H. Auden.

Hammarskjöld was the second Secretary General of the United Nations, serving from 1953 until his death in a plane crash in 1961. He is the only person to be awarded a Nobel Peace Prize posthumously. Markings, a sort of diary of poetry and meditations, was found in his office after his death, along with a letter to Swedish Permanent Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs Leif Sjoberg, explaining that it may be published if Mr. Sjoberg felt it worth publishing.

from Martin Luther King Jr.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness;
 only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate;
 only love can do that. 

Have we not come to such an impasse in the modern world
 that we must love our enemies - or else? 
The chain reaction of evil - hate begetting hate,
 wars producing more wars - must be broken,
 or else we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation. 

I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love
 will have the final word in reality. This is why right,
 temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant. 

I have decided to stick with love.
 Hate is too great a burden to bear. 

Love is the only force capable of transforming
 an enemy into friend. 

We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive.
 He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid 
of the power to love. There is some good in the worst of us
 and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this,
 we are less prone to hate our enemies. 

~ Martin Luther King Jr.

my apologies

My apologies to chance for calling it necessity. 

 My apologies to necessity in case I'm mistaken. 

 Don't be angry, happiness, that I take you for my own. 

 May the dead forgive me that their memory's but a flicker. 

 My apologies to time for the quantity of world overlooked per second. 

 My apologies to an old love for treating a new one as the first. 

 Forgive me, far-off wars, for carrying my flowers home. 

 Forgive me, open wounds, for pricking my finger. 

 My apologies for the minuet record, to those calling out from the abyss. 

 My apologies to those in train stations for sleeping soundly at five in the morning. 

 Pardon me, hounded hope, for laughing sometimes. 

 Pardon me, deserts, for not rushing in with a spoonful of water. 

 And you, O hawk, the same bird for years in the same cage, 
staring, motionless, always at the same spot, 
 absolve me even if you happen to be stuffed. 

 My apologies to the tree felled for four table legs. 

 My apologies to large questions for small answers. 

 Truth, do not pay me too much attention. 

 Solemnity, be magnanimous toward me. 

 Bear with me, O mystery of being, for pulling threads from your veil. 

 Soul, don't blame me that I've got you so seldom. 

My apologies to everything that I can't be everywhere. 

 My apologies to all for not knowing how to be every man and woman. 

 I know that as long as I live nothing can excuse me, since I am my own obstacle. 

 Do not hold it against me, O speech, that I borrow weighty words, and then labor to make them light. 

~ Wislawa Szymborska

translated by Joanna Trzeciak

photo by agencja gazeta

on the value of not-knowing

All sorts of torturers, dictators, fanatics, and demagogues struggling for power
 by way of a few loudly shouted slogans also enjoy their jobs, 
and they too perform their duties with inventive fervor. Well, yes,
 but they “know.” They know, and whatever they know is enough for them
 once and for all. They don’t want to find out about anything else,
 since that might diminish their arguments’ force. And any knowledge
 that doesn’t lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain
 the temperature required for sustaining life. In the most extreme cases,
 cases well known from ancient and modern history, 
it even poses a lethal threat to society.

This is why I value that little phrase “I don’t know” so highly. 
It’s small, but it flies on mighty wings. It expands our lives to include 
the spaces within us as well as those outer expanses in which our tiny Earth 
hangs suspended. If Isaac Newton had never said to himself “I don’t know,” 
the apples in his little orchard might have dropped to the ground 
like hailstones and at best he would have stooped to pick them up 
and gobble them with gusto. Had my compatriot Marie Sklodowska-Curie
 never said to herself “I don’t know”, she probably would have wound up
 teaching chemistry at some private high school for young ladies from good families,
 and would have ended her days performing this otherwise perfectly respectable job.
 But she kept on saying “I don’t know,” and these words led her, 
not just once but twice, to Stockholm, where restless, questing spirits
 are occasionally rewarded with the Nobel Prize.

The world — whatever we might think when terrified by its vastness 
and our own impotence, or embittered by its indifference to individual suffering,
 of people, animals, and perhaps even plants, for why are we so sure
 that plants feel no pain; whatever we might think of its expanses
 pierced by the rays of stars surrounded by planets we’ve just begun
 to discover, planets already dead? still dead? we just don’t know;
 whatever we might think of this measureless theater to which we’ve got 
reserved tickets, but tickets whose lifespan is laughably short,
 bounded as it is by two arbitrary dates; whatever else
 we might think of this world — it is astonishing.

But “astonishing” is an epithet concealing a logical trap. We’re astonished, 
after all, by things that deviate from some well-known and universally 
acknowledged norm, from an obviousness we’ve grown accustomed to. 
Now the point is, there is no such obvious world. Our astonishment exists per se 
and isn’t based on comparison with something else.

Granted, in daily speech, where we don’t stop to consider every word, 
we all use phrases like “the ordinary world,” “ordinary life,” “the ordinary
 course of events” … But in the language of poetry, where every word is weighed,
 nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it.
 Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, 
not a single existence, not anyone’s existence in this world.

 ~  Wisława Szymborska

 art by Salvador Dalí from a rare edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

 

so much of Everything

Reality demands

we also state the following:

life goes on.

At Cannae and Borodino.

at Kosovo Polje and in Guernica.

There is a gas station 

in a small plaza in Jericho,

and freshly painted

benches near Bila Hora.

Letters travel

between Pearl Harbor and Hastings,

a furniture truck passes

before the eyes of the lion of Chaeronea,

and only an atmospheric front advances

toward the blossoming orchards near Verdun.

There is so much of Everything,

that Nothing is quite well concealed,

Music flows

from yachts at Actium

and on board couples dance in the sun.

So much keeps happening, 

that it must be happening everywhere.

Where not a stone is left standing,

there is an ice-cream truck

besieged by children.

Where Hiroshima had been,

Hiroshima is again

manufacturing products

for everyday use.

Not without its draws is this terrible world,

not without its draws

worth our waking.

In the fields of Maciejowice

the grass is green

and on the grass is - you know how grass is -

transparent dew,

Maybe there are no fields but battlefields,

those still remembered,

and those long forgotten,

birch groves and cedar groves,

snows and sands, iridescent swamps,

and ravines of dark defeat

where today, in sudden need,

you squat behind a bush.

What moral flows from this? Probably none.

But what really flows is quickly drying blood,

and as always, some rivers and clouds.

On the tragic mountain passes

the wind blows hats off heads

and we cannot help-

but laugh.

~ Wislawa Szymborska

from miracle fair

translated by Joanna Trzeciak

 

living in two worlds

~ Miriam Rose Ungunmerr-Bauman

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.