things keep sorting themselves

Does the butterfat know it is butterfat,

milk know it’s milk?

No.

Something just goes and something remains.

Like a boardinghouse table:

men on one side, women on the other.

Nobody planned it.

Plaid shirts next to one another,

talking in accents from the Midwest.

Nobody plans to be a ghost.

Later on, the young people sit in the kitchen.

Soon enough, they’ll be the ones

to stumble Excuse me and quickly withdraw.

But they don’t know that.

No one can ever know that.

~ Jane Hirshfield

from Poetry (September 2012)

finding a box of family letters

The dead say little in their letters

they haven't said before.

We find no secrets, and yet

how different every sentence sounds

heard across the years.

My father breaks my heart

simply by being so young and handsome.

He's half my age, with jet-black hair.

Look at him in his navy uniform

grinning beside his dive-bomber.

Come back, Dad! I want to shout.

He says he misses all of us

(though I haven't yet been born).

He writes from places I never knew he saw,

and everyone he mentions now is dead.

There is a large, long photograph

curled like a diploma—a banquet sixty years ago.

My parents sit uncomfortably

among tables of dark-suited strangers.

The mildewed paper reeks of regret.

I wonder what song the band was playing,

just out of frame, as the photographer

arranged your smiles. A waltz? A foxtrot?

Get out there on the floor and dance!

You don't have forever.

What does it cost to send a postcard

to the underworld? I'll buy

a penny stamp from World War II

and mail it downtown at the old post office

just as the courthouse clock strikes twelve.

Surely the ghost of some postal worker

still makes his nightly rounds, his routine

too tedious for him to notice when it ended.

He works so slowly he moves back in time

carrying our dead letters to their lost addresses.

It's silly to get sentimental.

The dead have moved on. So should we.

But isn't it equally simpleminded to miss

the special expertise of the departed

in clarifying our long-term plans?

They never let us forget that the line

between them and us is only temporary.

Get out there and dance! the letters shout

adding, Love always. Can't wait to get home!

And soon we will be. See you there.

~ Dana Gioia

with thanks to writers almanac

photo from living solutions

an ancient voice

...behind this outer facade, another life is going on in you. 
The mind and heart are wanderers who are always tempted by new horizons.   
Your life belongs in a visible, outer consistency; your inner life is nomadic.
  Hegel says, "just this unrest that is the Self."  
Your longing frequently takes you on inner voyages that no one would ever guess. 
 Longing is the deepest and most ancient voice in the human soul. 
 It is the secret source of all presence, and the driving force of all creativity
 and imagination: longing keeps the door open and calls towards us the gifts
 and blessings which our lives dream.

...longing is a quality of desire which distance or duration evokes. 
 In other words, your longing reaches out into the distance to unite you
 with whatever or whomsoever your heart desires.  Longing awakens
 when there is a feeling that someone or something is away from you.  
It is interesting that the word "desire" comes from the Latin "desiderare,"
 which originally meant "to cease to see."  This suggested a sense of absence
 and the desire to seek and find the absent one. Deep down, 
we desire to come back into the intimate unity of belonging.

~ John O'Donohue

from Eternal Echoes

the unfinished work

 

~ Abraham Lincoln, Andrea Scheidler

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met here on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of it, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But in a larger sense, we can not dedicate we can not consecrate we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but can never forget what they did here.

It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they have, thus far, so nobly carried on. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom; and that this government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

 

 

 

an irresistible momentum

What am I in the eyes of most people — 

a nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person — 

somebody who has no position in society and will never have; 

in short, the lowest of the low.

 

All right, then — 

even if that were absolutely true, 

then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, 

such a nobody, has in his heart. 

That is my ambition, based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, 

based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. 

Though I am often in the depths of misery, 

there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. 

I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, 

in the dirtiest corners. 

And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum.

~ Vincent Van Gogh

leaning forward

 

 

 

 

If drawn as a cartoon figure,

you would be leaning always forward, feet blurred

with the multiple lines that convey both momentum and hurry.

 

Your god is surely Hermes:

messenger, inventor,

who likes to watch the traveler passing the crossroads

in any direction.

Your nemesis? The calm existence of things as they are.

 

When I speak as here,

in the second person, you are quietly present.

You are present in presents as well, which are given to.

 

Being means and not end, you are mostly modest,

obedient as railroad track to what comes or does not.

 

Yet your work requires

both transience and transformation:

night changes to day, snow to rain, the shoulder of the living pig to meat.

 

When attached to verbs, you sometimes change them

to adjectives, adverbs, nouns,

a trick I imagine

would bring enormous pleasure,

were you capable of pleasure, You are not.

 

You live below the ground of humor, hubris, grievance, grief.

Whatever has been given you,

you carry, indifferent as a planet to your own fate.

 

Yet it is you,

polite retainer of time and place, who bring us to ours,

who do not leave the house of the body

from the moment of birth until your low-voiced murmur, "dust to dust."

 

And so we say, "today," "tomorrow."

But from yesterday, like us, you have vanished.

 

 

 

 

 

~ Jane Hirshfield

from After

art by Salvador Dali

 

 

 

embodying the light

 

A good traveler has no fixed plans
and is not intent upon arriving.
A good artist lets his intuition
lead him wherever it wants.
A good scientist has freed himself of concepts
and keeps his mind open to what is.

Thus the Master is available to all people
and doesn’t reject anyone.
He is ready to use all situations
and doesn’t waste anything.
this is called embodying the light.

What is a good man but a bad man’s teacher?
What is a bad man but a good man’s job?
If you don’t understand this, you will get lost,
however intelligent you are.
It is the great secret.




~   Lao Tzu
translated by Stephen Mitchell

the struggle

 

 

 

 

 

We tend to think of Sisyphus as a tragic hero, 

condemned by the gods to shoulder his rock 

sweatily up the mountain, and again up the mountain, forever. 

 

The truth is that Sisyphus is in love with the rock. 

He cherishes every roughness and every ounce of it.

 He talks to it, sings to it. It has become the Mysterious Other. 

He evens dreams of it as he sleepwalks upward. 

 

Life is unimaginable without it, looming always above him

 like a huge gray moon. He doesn’t realize that at any moment 

he is permitted to step aside, let the rock hurtle to the bottom, 

and go home. 

 

Tragedy is the inertial force of the mind.




~  Stephen Mitchell

art by Van Gogh

no desire for security

Surely, the mind has abandoned itself and its moorings only when

 there is no desire for security. A mind that is seeking security

can never know what love is. Self-abandonment is not the state

 of the devotee before his idol or his mental image. Self-abandonment

 can come about only when you do not cultivate it,

 and when there is self-knowing.

When the mind has understood the significance of knowledge,

 only then is there self-knowing, and self-knowing implies self-abandonment. 

You have ceased to rest on any experience as a center from which to observe,

 to judge, to weigh; therefore, the mind has already plunged into the movement

 of self-abandonment. In that abandonment there is sensitivity. 

But the mind which is enclosed in its habits of eating, of thinking,

 in its habit of never looking at anything - such a mind obviously cannot

 be sensitive, cannot be loving. 

In the very abandonment of its own limitations, the mind becomes sensitive

 and therefore innocent. And only the innocent mind knows what love is

 not the calculating mind, not the mind that has divided love

 into the carnal and the spiritual. In that state there is passion and, 

without passion, reality will not come near you. It is only the enfeebled mind

 that invites reality; it is only the dull, grasping mind that pursues truth, 

God. But the mind that knows passion in love

 to such a mind the nameless comes.

~ J. Krishnamurti

from Collected Works, Vol. XI,251

with thanks to J. Krishnamurti Online

illustration by glen wexler 

no longer any shore

I do not cease swimming in the seas of love,

rising with the wave, then descending;

now the wave sustains me, and then I sink beneath it;

love bears me away where there is no longer any shore.

~ Al Hallaj

from Diwan al-Hallaj

tribute to John O'Donohue

leadership

 

The best leaders are those the people hardly know exist.

The next best is a leader who is loved and praised.

Next comes the one who is feared.

The worst one is the leader that is despised.

If you don't trust the people,

they will become untrustworthy.

The best leaders value their words, and use them sparingly.

When she has accomplished her task,

the people say, "Amazing:

we did it, all by ourselves!"

 

 

~ Lao Tzu

from the Tao Te Ching

the back of the world

.

Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? 

It is that we have only known the back of the world. 

We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal.

That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. 

That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. 

Cannot you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? 

If we could only get round in front—

~ G. K. Chesterton, 1908

from The Man Who Was Thursday

the spirit within the earth

.

It is lovely indeed, it is lovely indeed.

I, I am the spirit within the earth.

The feet of the earth are my feet;

The legs of the earth are my legs.

The strength of the earth is my strength;

The thoughts of the earth are my thoughts;

The voice of the earth is my voice.

The feather of the earth is my feather;

All that belongs to the earth belongs to me;

All that surrounds the earth surrounds me.

I, I am the sacred works of the earth.

It is lovely indeed, it is lovely indeed.

~ Navajo origin legend

Song of the Earth Spirit

art by van gogh

when I detect a beauty

.

 

When I detect a beauty in any of the recesses of nature, 

I am reminded by the serene and retired spirit in which it requires to be contemplated, 

of the inexpressible privacy of life - how silent and unambitious it is.  

The beauty there in mosses will have to be considered from the holiest, quietest nook.

 

My truest, serenest moments are too still for emotion; they have woolen feet.  

In all our lives we live under the hill, and if we are not gone we live there still. 

....

To be calm, to be serene!  

There is the calmness of the lake when there is not a breath of wind;

there is the calmness of a stagnant ditch.  So is it with us.  

Sometimes we are clarified and calmed healthily, as we never were before in our lives, 

not by an opiate, but by some unconscious obedience to the all-just laws, 

so that we become like a still lake of purest crystal 

and without an effort our depths are revealed to ourselves.  

 

I awoke into a music which no one by me heard.

Whom shall I thank for it?  I feel my Maker blessing me.

To the sane man the world is a musical instrument.

The very touch affords an exquisite pleasure.

 

~ Henry David Thoreau

taken from a journal entry, June 22,1851