between what I see and what I say

for Roman Jakobson

1

Between what I see and what I say,

Between what I say and what I keep silent,

Between what I keep silent and what I dream,

Between what I dream and what I forget:

poetry.

It slips

between yes and no,

says

what I keep silent,

keeps silent

what I say,

dreams

what I forget.

It is not speech:

it is an act.

It is an act

of speech.

Poetry

speaks and listens:

it is real.

And as soon as I say

it is real,

it vanishes.

Is it then more real?

2

Tangible idea,

intangible

word:

poetry

comes and goes

between what is

and what is not.

It weaves

and unweaves reflections.

Poetry

scatters eyes on a page,

scatters words on our eyes.

Eyes speak,

words look,

looks think.

To hear

thoughts,

see

what we say,

touch

the body of an idea.

Eyes close,

the words open.

~ Octavio Paz (1914-1998),

from A Tree Within, (Poems 1976-1987)

opening

Opening the letter of the body's life

inside the words.  This body, your life, is a letter

to the king of the universe.

Go to a private place and open it and read to see if

the words are right.  If they

aren't, start another!  And don't think it's easy to open

the body and read the secret

message.  This is the most courageous work, not something

for children playing with knucklebones in the dirt.

Open to the title page.  Is what it says there the same as what you

have said it says?  If

you're carrying a heavy sack, empty out the stones!  Bring

only what should be given.

~ Rumi

from The Soul of Rumi

translation by Coleman Barks

self-imposed suffering

If we live in the moment, we are not in time. 

If you think, "I'm a retired person. I've retired from my role,"

 you are looking back at your life. It's retrospective; it's life in the rear-view mirror.

 If you're young, you might be thinking, "I have my whole life ahead of me. 

This is what I'll do later." That kind of thinking is called time-binding.

 It causes us to focus on the past or the future 

and to worry about what comes next.

Getting caught up in memories of the past or worrying about the future

 is a form of self-imposed suffering. Either retirement or youth 

can be seen as moving on, time for something different, something new.

 Aging is not a culmination. Youth isn't preparation for later.

 This isn't the end of the line or the beginning.

Now isn't a time to look back or plan ahead. 

It's time to just be present. The present is timeless. 

Being in the moment, just being here with what is,

 is ageless and eternal.

 

 

 

~ Ram Dass

 

 

 

 

 

 

earth's desire

To be seen

in her loveliness 

to be tasted

in her delicious

fruits

to be listened to

in her teaching

to be endured

in the severity

of her discipline

to be experienced

as the maternal

source

whence we come

the destiny

to which we

return.

~ Thomas Berry

The basic mood of the future might well be one of confidence in the continuing revelation that takes place in and through the Earth. If the dynamics of the Universe from the beginning shaped the course of the heavens, lighted the sun, and formed the Earth, if this same dynamism brought forth the continents and the seas and atmosphere, if it awakened life in the primordial cell and then brought into being the unnumbered variety of living beings, and finally brought us into being and guided us safely through the turbulent centuries, there is reason to believe that this same guiding process is precisely what has awakened in us our present understanding of ourselves and our relation to this stupendous process. Sensitized to such guidance from the very structure and functioning of the Universe, we can have confidence in the future that awaits the human venture.

"The New Story" The Dream of the Earth

impossible orchestra

~ Conductor Alondra de la Parra

brings together The Impossible Orchestra, formed by outstanding musicians from 14 different countries. The goal is to support Mexican women and children affected by COVID-19 through Fondo Semillas and Save the Children México.

 

 

 

when death comes

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox;

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

 

 

 

 

~ Mary Oliver

 

 

 

 

if strangers meet

if strangers meet

life begins-

not poor not rich

(only aware)

kind neither

nor cruel

(only complete)

i not not you

not possible;

only truthful

-truthfully,once

if strangers(who

deep our most are

selves)touch:

forever

.

(and so to dark)

~ e.e. cummings

intensely alive

.

.

When we look deeply into anything or anyone, 
the looking will always reveal a networking of causes and conditions,
 a fabric of inter-becoming that is vast and pervasive 
without any finite boundaries in either space or time. 

There is a transforming magic in deep seeing. 
There is a magic in love;
 magic in the sense that the moment is filled with
 a feeling of immense spaciousness and possibility. 
Things seem more intensely alive. 


The predictable world,
 filled with its opaque-making hopes and fears becomes transparent,
 revealing a world poised on that terrifying and awesomely alive point of impermanence, 
a universe dancing in that impossible place that transcends all paradox. 

To love someone is not to know a person totally.
 It is to constantly realize that they are infinitely vast and
 ultimately unknowable. 


So the voyage of discovery never comes to an end and 
the person is a focus of undying interest, 
continually revealing new facets of being. 



~ Tarchin Hearn 

.

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