mindfulness - taking care of anger

 

 

 

 

 

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

 

 

 

the culture of the day

The cities only care for what is theirs

and uproot all that's in their path.

They crush the creatures like hollow sticks

and burn up nations like kindling.

Their people serve the culture of the day,

losing all balance and moderation,

calling their aimlessness progress,

driving recklessly where they once drove slow,

and with all that metal and glass

making such a racket.

It's as if they were under a spell:

they can no longer be themselves.

Money keeps growing, takes all their strength,

and empties them like a scouring wind,

while they wait for wine and poisonous passions

to spur them to fruitless occupations.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

III,31, The Book of Poverty and Death
translation by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows
photo by robert frank

eyes are blind

“‘People where you live,”

 the little prince said,

 “grow five thousand roses in one garden… 

yet they don’t find what they’re looking for…”

“They don’t find it,” I answered.

“And yet what they’re looking for could be found 

in a single rose, or a little water…”

“Of course,” I answered.

And the little prince added,

 “But eyes are blind. You have to look with the heart.’”

~  Antoine de Saint-Exupery

from The Little Prince

born in Lyon in 1900. He was rather a poor student, and he failed his entrance exam to the naval academy, but he joined the French army in 1921, and that's where he flew his first plane. He left the military five years later and began flying airmail routes into the Sahara Desert, eventually becoming the director of a remote airfield in Rio de Oro. Living conditions were Spartan, but he said, "I have never loved my house more than when I lived in the desert." He wrote his first novel, Southern Mail (1929), in the Sahara and never lost his love for the desert.

In 1929, he moved to South America to fly the mail through the Andes, and he later returned to carry the post between Casablanca and Port-étienne. He worked as a test pilot and a journalist throughout the 1930s, and survived several plane crashes. He also got married in 1931, to Consuelo Gómez Carrillo. She wrote of him in her memoir, "He wasn't like other people, but like a child or an angel who has fallen down from the sky."

He rejoined the French army upon the outbreak of World War II, but when the Nazis invaded France in 1940, he fled to the United States, hoping to serve the U.S. forces as a fighter pilot. He was turned down because of his age, and, homesick and discouraged, he began his best-known book, The Little Prince (1943). The following year, he returned to North Africa to fly a warplane for France. He took off on a mission on July 31, 1944, and was never heard from again.

when we are weak

 

 

 

When we are weak, we are

strong.  When our eyes close

on the world, then somewhere

within us the bush

burns.  When we are poor

and aware of the inadequacy

of our table, it is to that 

uninvited the guest comes.

 

 

 

 

~ R. S. Thomas

art by Picasso

when they sleep

 

 

All people are children when they sleep.

there's no war in them then.
They open their hands and breathe
in that quiet rhythm heaven has given them.
They pucker their lips like small children
and open their hands halfway,
soldiers and statesmen, servants and masters.
The stars stand guard
and a haze veils the sky,
a few hours when no one will do anybody harm.
If only we could speak to one another then
when our hearts are half-open flowers.
Words like golden bees
would drift in.

 
-- God, teach me the language of sleep.

 

 

 

 

~ Rolf Jacobsen

from Night Music - Selected Poems

translation by Robert Hedin 

photo - children of the boat people

with thanks to Poetry Chaikhana

ask anything

"Ask anything,"

My Lord said to me.

And my mind and heart thought deeply 

for a second,

then replied with just one word,

"When?"

God's arms then opened up and I entered Myself.

I entered Myself when I entered

Christ.

And having learned compassion I

allowed my soul

to stay.

~ Saint Thomas Aquinas

 from for lovers of god everywhere -

Poems of the Christian Mystics 

the half-finished heaven

Cowardice breaks off on its path.

Anguish breaks off on its path.

The vulture breaks off in its flight.

The eager light runs into the open,

even the ghosts take a drink.

And our paintings see the air,

red beasts of the ice-age studios.

Everything starts to look around.

We go out in the sun by hundreds.

Every person is a half-open door

leading to a room for everyone.

The endless field under us.

Water glitters between the trees.

The lake is a window into the earth.

~ Tomas Transtromer

from Half-Finished Heaven

translated by robert bly

art by rolf harris

happiness writes white

I am a piece of chalk

scrawling words on an empty blackboard.

I am a banner of smoke

that crosses the blue air and doesn't dissolve.

I don't believe that only sorrow

and misery can be written.

Happiness, too, can be precise:

Doctor, there's a keen throbbing

on the left side of my chest

where my ribs are wrenched by joy.

Wings flutter in my shoulders

and blood courses through my body

like waves cresting on a choppy sea.

Look: the eyes blur with tears

and the tears clear.

My head is like skylight.

My heart is like dawn.

~ Edward Hirsch

from Special Orders

thanks to knopf  poetry

broken

In my loneliness

I break and burn

twigs for the snapping fire -

hoping the smoke at least won't leave.

~ Izumi Shikibu

from The Ink Dark Moon

translation by Jane Hirshfield and Mariko Aratani

for what binds us

There are names for what binds us:

strong forces, weak forces.

Look around, you can see them:

the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,

nails rusting into the places they join,

joints dovetailed on their own weight.

The way things stay so solidly

wherever they've been set down --

and gravity, scientists say, is weak.

And see how the flesh grows back

across a wound, with a great vehemence,

more strong

than the simple, untested surface before.

There's a name for it on horses, 

when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,

as all flesh

is proud of its wounds, wears them

as honors given out after battle,

small triumphs pinned to the chest --

And when two people have loved each other 

see how it is like a

scar between their bodies,

stronger, darker, and proud;

how the black cord makes of them a single fabric

that nothing can tear or mend.

~ Jane Hirshfield

(Of Gravity & Angels)

exhausted

When the rhythm of the heart becomes hectic,

Time takes on the strain until it breaks;

Then all the unattended stress falls in

On the mind like an endless, increasing weight,

The light in the mind becomes dim.

Things you could take in your stride before

Now become laborsome events of will.

Weariness invades your spirit.

Gravity begins falling inside you,

Dragging down every bone.

The tide you never valued has gone out.

And you are marooned on unsure ground.

Something within you has closed down;

And you cannot push yourself back to life.

You have been forced to enter empty time.

The desire that drove you has relinquished.

There is nothing else to do now but rest

And patiently learn to receive the self

You have forsaken for the race of days.

At first your thinking will darken

And sadness take over like listless weather.

The flow of unwept tears will frighten you.

You have traveled too fast over false ground;

Now your soul has come to take you back.

Take refuge in your senses, open up

To all the small miracles you rushed through.

Become inclined to watch the way of rain

When it falls slow and free.

Imitate the habit of twilight,

Taking time to open the well of color

That fostered the brightness of day.

Draw alongside the silence of stone

Until its calmness can claim you.

Be excessively gentle with yourself.

Stay clear of those vexed in spirit.

Learn to linger around someone of ease

Who feels they have all the time in the world.

Gradually, you will return to yourself,

Having learned a new respect for your heart

And the joy that dwells far within slow time.

~ John O'Donohue

from To Bless the Space Between Us

art by van gogh

indescribable vastness

Indescribable vastness,

streaming from all sides,

streaming from no sides,

an ocean full and overflowing

with a luminous nothing.

...

where no word has ever gone, but

out of which the Word emerges.

And so this Silence washes

into the shores of perception,

making it stretch to receive

in metaphors of light,

union, calm,

spaciousness.

...

You are the vastness 

into which you gaze.

"Deep calls unto deep in the 

roar of your waters" (Ps 42:7)

~ Martin Laird
from for lovers of god everywhere

NASA photo of star cluster NGC 602


 

immersion

There is anger abroad in the world, a numb thunder,

because of God's silence. But how naive,

to keep wanting words we could speak ourselves,

English, Urdu, Tagalog, the French of Tours,

the French of Haiti...

Yes, that was one way omnipotence chose

to address us - Hebrew, Aramaic, or whatever the patriarchs

chose in their turn to call what they heard. Moses

demanded the word, spoken and written. But perfect freedom

assured other ways of speech. God is surely

patiently trying to immerse us in a different language,

events of grace, horrifying scrolls of history

and the unearned retrieval of blessings lost for ever,

the poor grass returning after drought, timid, persistent.

God's abstention is only from human dialects. The holy voice

utters its woe and glory in myriad musics, in signs and portents.

Our own words are for us to speak, a way to ask and to answer.

~ Denise Levertov

from for lovers of god everywhere
Poems of the Christian Mystics
art by Hillal Hussain

 

 

 

funny

What’s it like to be a human
the bird asked

I myself don’t know
it’s being held prisoner by your skin
while reaching infinity

being a captive of your scrap of time
while touching eternity

being hopelessly uncertain
and helplessly hopeful

being a needle of frost
and a handful of heat

breathing in the air
and choking wordlessly

it’s being on fire
with a nest made of ashes

eating bread
while filling up on hunger

it’s dying without love
it’s loving through death

That’s funny said the bird
and flew effortlessly up into the air

—Anna Kamienska 

from Astonishments 

translated by Grazyna Drabik and David Curzon

with thanks to love is a place

before sorrow

 

 

Before sorrow, anger,

longing, or fear have arisen,

you are in the center.

 

When these emotions appear

and you know how to see through them,

you are in harmony.

 

That center is the root of the universe;

that harmony is the Tao,

which reaches out to all things.

 

 

 

 

~ Stephen Mitchell

 from The Second Book of the Tao