by forgetting time

In our consciousness of time
we are doomed to the past.
The future we may dream of
but can know it only after
it has come and gone.
The present too we know
only as the past. When
we say, "This now is
present, the heat, the breeze,
the rippling water," it is past.
Before we knew it, before
we said "now." it was gone.


If the only time we live
is the present, and if the present
is immeasurably short (or
long), then by the measure
of the measurers we don't
exist at all, which seems
improbable, or we are
immortals, living always
in eternity, as from time to time
we hear, but rarely know.


You see the rainbow and the new-leafed
woods bright beneath, you see
the otters playing in the river
or the swallows flying, you see
a beloved face, mortal
and beloved, causing the heart
to sway in the rift between beats
where we live without counting,
where we have forgotten time
and have forgotten ourselves,
where eternity has seized us
as its own. This breaks
open the little circles
of the humanly known and believed,
of the world no longer existing,
letting us live where we are,
as in the deepest sleep also
we are entirely present,
entirely trusting, eternal.


Is it concentration of the mind,
our unresting counting
that leaves us standing
blind in our dust?
In time we are present only
by forgetting time.




~ Wendell Berry
art by James Eads

to steady the ladder

Some say that compassion, kindness and caring are our true nature.The instinct to help, to steady the ladder, to be there when we are needed,to do so without so much as a thought for ourselves may arise from deep within the seed of our being.

 In an article a few years ago one researcher discovered what turned out to be a predictable response from very young children.

Oops, the scientist dropped his clothespin.
Not to worry — a wobbly toddler raced to help, eagerly handing it back.
The simple experiment shows the capacity for altruism emerges
as early as 18 months of age.

Psychology researcher Felix Warneken of Germany’s 
Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology 
performed a series of ordinary tasks in front of toddlers,
such as hanging towels with clothespins or stacking books.

Sometimes he “struggled” with the tasks; sometimes he deliberately messed up.
Over and over, whether Warneken dropped clothespins or knocked over his books,
each of 24 toddlers offered help within seconds — but only if he appeared to need it.

Video shows how one overall-clad baby glanced between Warneken’s face
and the dropped clothespin before quickly crawling over,
grabbing the object, pushing up to his feet
and eagerly handing back the pin.

Warneken never asked for the help and didn’t even say “thank you,”
so as not to taint the research by training youngsters to expect praise


if they helped. After all, altruism means helping
with no expectation of anything in return
— the toddlers didn’t bother to offer help when he deliberately
pulled a book off the stack or threw a pin to the floor,

~ Felix Warneken

oh what is that beautiful thing that just happened?

At Blackwater Pond the tossed waters have settled
after a night of rain.


I dip my cupped hands. I drink
a long time. It tastes

like stone, leaves, fire. It falls cold
into my body, waking the bones. I hear them

deep inside me, whispering
oh what is that beautiful thing
that just happened?








~ Mary Oliver
photo by Eliot Porter

room for all this

Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. 
We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem,
 but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. 

They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again
 and fall apart again. It’s just like that. 

The healing comes from letting there be room for all this to happen;
 room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy. When we think 
something is going to bring us pleasure, we don’t know 
what’s really going to happen. When we think something is going
 to give us misery, we don’t know. 

Letting there be room for not knowing is the most important thing of all.
 We try to do what we think is going to help. But we don’t know. 
We never know if we’re going to fall flat or sit up tall.

 When there’s a big disappointment, we don’t know if that’s the end of the story.
 It may just be the beginning of a great adventure.

~ Pema Chodron

art by van gogh

what survives

Rexroth and son, 1955

A long lifetime

Peoples and places

And the crisis of mankind -

What survives is the crystal -

Infinitely small -

Infinitely large -

~ Kenneth Rexroth

photo from archives of american art

remembering rexroth

one of the leading poets of the San Francisco Renaissance, and he was considered a sort of father of the Beat movement, although he responded to this label by saying: "An entomologist is not a bug."  He said of San Francisco "It is the only city in the United States which was not settled overland by the westward-spreading puritan tradition, or by the Walter Scott, fake-cavalier tradition of the South. It had been settled, mostly, in spite of all the romances of the overland migration, by gamblers, prostitutes, rascals and fortune seekers who came across the Isthmus and around the Horn. They had their faults, but they were not influenced by Cotton Mather."

he loved California summer in the Sierra Nevada mountains, and almost every summer after that for the next 40 years. He said: "I have always felt I was most myself in the mountains. There I have done the bulk of what is called my creative work. At least it is in the mountains that I write most of my poetry. Life in the city in the winter seems too full of distractions and busy work. Who said poetry was emotion recollected in tranquility? I don't know about others, but I find most tranquility camped by a mountain lake at timber line.

Lying under the stars,

In the summer night,

Late while the autumn

Constellations climb the sky,

As the Cluster of Hercules

Falls down the west

I put the telescope by 

And watch Deneb

Move towards the zenith

My body is asleep. Only

My eyes and brain are awake.

The stars stand around me

Like gold eyes. I can no longer

Tell where I begin and leave off.

The faint breeze in the dark pines,

And the invisible grass,

The tipping earth, the swarming stars

Have an eye that sees itself.

The Earth will be going on a long time

Before it finally freezes;

Men will be on it; they will take names,

Give their deeds reasons.

We will be here only

As chemical constituents—

A small franchise indeed.

Right now we have lives,

Corpuscles, Ambitions, Caresses,

Like everybody had once—

Here at the year's end, at the feast

Of birth, let us bring to each other

The gifts brought once west through deserts—

The precious metal of our mingled hair,

The frankincense of enraptured arms and legs,

The myrrh of desperate, invincible kisses—

Let us celebrate the daily

Recurrent nativity of love,

The endless epiphany of our fluent selves,

While the earth rolls away under us

Into unknown snows and summers,

Into untraveled spaces of the stars.

~ Kenneth Rexroth
from Sacramental Acts

she who reconciles

She who reconciles the ill-matched threads
of her life, and weave them gratefully
into a single cloth -
it's she who drives the loudmouths from the hall
and clears it for a different celebration


where the one guest is you.
In the softness of evening
it's you she receives.

You are the partner of her loneliness,
the unspeaking center of her monologues.
With each disclosure you encompass more
and she stretches beyond what limits her,
to hold you.





~ Rainer Maria Rilke
from Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

I'm slipping

.

I'm slipping.  I'm slipping away

like sand

slipping through fingers.  All

my cells

are open, and all

so thirsty.  I ache and swell

in a hundred places, but mostly

in the middle of my heart.

I want to die.  Leave me alone.

I free I  am almost there -

where the great terror

can dismember me.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

from The Book of Hours

too many names

Mondays are meshed with Tuesdays
and the week with the whole year.
Time cannot be cut
with your weary scissors,
and all the names of the day
are washed out by the waters of night. 

No one can claim the name of Pedro,
nobody is Rosa or Maria,
all of us are dust or sand,
all of us are rain under rain.
They have spoken to me of Venezuelas,
of Chiles and of Paraguays;
I have no idea what they are saying.

I'm aware of the earth's skin
and I know that it doesn't have a name.


When I lived with the roots
I liked them more than the flowers,
and when I talked with a stone
it rang like a bell.


The spring is so long
that is lasts all winter:
time lost its shoes:
a year contains four centuries.


When I sleep all these nights,
what am I named or not named?
And when I wake up who am I
if I wasn't I when I slept?


This means that we have barely
disembarked into life,
that we've only just now been born,
let's not fill our mouths
with so many uncertain names,
with so many sad labels,
with so many pompous letters,
with so much yours and mine,
with so much signing of papers.


I intend to confuse things,
to unite them, make them new-born,
intermingle them, undress them,
until the light of the world
has the unity of the ocean,
a generous wholeness,
a fragrance alive and crackling.





~ Pablo Neruda
English version by Anthony Kerrigan

 image by Chris Behling

 

 

 

to heal the wound

I think most of us have been touched

 profoundly by our situation, the reality in which we live, 

and many of us need a kind of healing.

A number of people, including myself and many of my friends --
we need a little bit of time, of space, of privacy, of meditation,
in order to heal the wound that is very deep in ourselves. 

That does not mean that if sometimes I am absorbed in looking at a cloud
and not thinking about Vietnam, that does not mean that I don't care.
But I need the cloud to heal me and my deep wounds. Many of us are wounded,
and we understand and support each other in our need for healing.

We tend to imagine that the lifetime of a person is something like
using your pen in order to draw a line across a sheet of paper.
A person appears on this earth and lives and dies.
And we may think of the life of a person just like a line we trace
across a sheet of paper. But I think that is not true.

The life of a person is not confined to anything like a line

 you draw,o not go in one direction -
direction of the right side of a piece of paper, 

but you also go in other directions.
So the image of that line crossing the sheet of paper is not correct.
It goes in all directions. Not only four, or eight, or sixteen,

 but many, many.

So if we can see through to that reality, our notion of time will change.
That is why in meditation you can feel that you are not traveling in time
but we are, we are eternity. We are not caught by death, by change.
A few moments of being alive in that state of mind is a very good opportunity
for self purification. Not only will it affect our being,
but of course it affects our action -- our non-action.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

with thanks to louie, louie

and all shall be well

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;

At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.

Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well




~ T.S Eliot
from “Little Gidding,” Four Quartets

we travelers

We travelers, walking to the sun, can't see
Ahead, but looking back the very light
That blinded us shows us the way we came,
Along which blessings now appear, risen
As if from sightlessness to sight, and we,
By blessings brightly lit, keep going toward
That blessed light that yet to us is dark.



~ Wendell Berry

at the centre

When I am at the centre of my unrequited love

I cannot hold it as an object

It has no sharp edges to torture anyone

I breathe the fragrance of the longing

and the longing has no proprietor

"O my love" embraces the great wide sky

as the night picks through the constellations

lifting necklace after dripping necklace

for the delight of my true beloved

"O my love" cries out from every pore of snow

and the forest answers a from great height:

.

"O my love"

~ Leonard Cohen

.

I learned through my body and soul

I learned through my body and soul
 that it was necessary for me to sin,

that I needed lust,

that I had to strive for property,

and experience nausea and the depths of despair

in order to learn not to resist them,

in order to learn to love the world ...

Hermann Hesse, from 'Siddhartha'

 

dark eyes

My love and my yearning for home

ignited in the heat of this night

like the sweet fragrance of foreign flowers

fanning the flames of a fierce fervor.

My love and my yearning for home

and all my fortune and misfortune

now stand like silent stanzas of a song

in the dark mirror of your mythic gaze.

My love and my yearning for home

have turned away from the noise of this world

and in your dark eyes

have built a vast, secret throne.

~ Hermann Hesse

from The seasons of the Soul

translated by Ludwig Max Fischer