a song for nobody

A yellow flower

(Light and spirit)

Sings by itself

For nobody.

A golden spirit

(Light and emptiness)

Sings without a word

By itself.

Let no one touch this gentle sun

In whose dark eye

Someone is awake.

(No light, no gold, no name, no color

And no thought:

O, wide awake!)

A golden heaven

Sings by itself

A song to nobody.

~ Thomas Merton

from Selected Poems of Thomas Merton

in blackwater woods

.

 

 

 

Look, the trees

are turning

their own bodies

into pillars

 

of light,

are giving off the rich

fragrance of cinnamon

and fulfillment,

 

the long tapers

of cattails

are bursting and floating away over

the blue shoulders

 

of the ponds,

and every pond,

no matter what its

name is, is

 

nameless now.

Every year

everything

I have ever learned

 

in my lifetime

leads back to this: the fires

and the black river of loss

whose other side

 

is salvation,

whose meaning

none of us will ever know.

To live in this world

 

you must be able

to do three things:

to love what is mortal;

to hold it

 

against your bones knowing

your own life depends on it;

and, when the time comes to let it go,

to let it go.

 

 

 

 

 

~ Mary Oliver

from  American Primitive

 photo by Eliot Porter

 

 

the waiting

The death of self of which the great writers speak is no violent act. 
It is merely the joining of the great rock heart of the earth in its roll.
 It is merely the slow cessation of the will's spirits and the intellect's chatter: 
it is waiting like a hollow bell with a stilled tongue. 

The waiting itself is the thing.

- Annie Dillard

from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

your crooked heart

 

 

 

 

 

 

As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.

And down by the brimming river
I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
'Love has no ending.

'I'll love you, dear, I'll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street,

'I'll love you till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky.

'The years shall run like rabbits,
For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
And the first love of the world.'

But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
'O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.

'In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.

'In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day.

'Into many a green valley
Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
And the diver's brilliant bow.

'O plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you've missed.

'The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.

'Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,
And Jill goes down on her back.

'O look, look in the mirror,
O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.

'O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.'

It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
And the deep river ran on.

As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.

And down by the brimming river
I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
'Love has no ending.

'I'll love you, dear, I'll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street,

'I'll love you till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky.

'The years shall run like rabbits,
For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
And the first love of the world.'

But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
'O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.

'In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.

'In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day.

'Into many a green valley
Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
And the diver's brilliant bow.

'O plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you've missed.

'The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.

'Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,
And Jill goes down on her back.

'O look, look in the mirror,
O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.

'O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.'

It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
And the deep river ran on.

 

 

 

 

 ~ W.H. Auden

from Another Time

 

 

 

 

the wisdom of insecurity

You cannot understand life and its mysteries as long as you try to grasp it. 

Indeed, you cannot grasp it just as you cannot walk off with a river in a bucket.

 If you try to capture running water in a bucket, it is clear that you do not understand

 it and that you will always be disappointed, 

for in the bucket the water does not run. 

To "have" running water 

you must let go of it and let it run.




-Alan Watts

Ars Poetica?

 

 

 

 

 

I have always aspired to a more spacious form
that would be free from the claims of poetry or prose
and would let us understand each other without exposing
the author or reader to sublime agonies.

In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent:
a thing is brought forth which we didn’t know we had in us,
so we blink our eyes, as if a tiger had sprung out
and stood in the light, lashing his tail.

....


And yet the world is different from what it seems to be
and we are other than how we see ourselves in our ravings.
People therefore preserve silent integrity,
thus earning the respect of their relatives and neighbors.

The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
and invisible guests come in and out at will.

....

~ Czeslaw Milosz
excerpt translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Lillian Vallee 

 with thanks to Love is a Place

 

five ways to lose

With the wood from a hundred-year-old tree

They make sacrificial vessels,

Covered with green and yellow designs.

The wood that was cut away

Lies unused in the ditch.

If we compare the sacrificial vessels with the wood in the ditch

We find them to differ in appearance:

One is more beautiful than the other

Yet they are equal in this: both have lost their original nature.

So if you compare the robber and the respectable citizen

You find that one is, indeed, more respectable than the other:

Yet they agree in this: they have both lost 

The original simplicity of man.

How did they lose it?  Here are the five ways:

Love of colors bewilders the eye

And it fails to see right.

Love of harmonies bewitches the ear

And it loses its true hearing.

Love of perfumes

Fills the head with dizziness.

Love of flavors

Ruins the taste.

Desires unsettle the heart

Until the original nature runs amok.

These five are enemies of true life.

Yet these are what "men of discernment" claim to live for.

They are not what I live for:

If this is life, then pigeons in a cage

Have found happiness!

~ Chuang Tzu

translation by Thomas Merton

not your true identity

 

 

 

 

 

The essence of all spirituality is presence,
a state of consciousness that transcends thinking.
There is a space behind and in between your thoughts and emotions.
When you become aware of that space,
you are present,
and you realize that your personal history,
which consists of thought,

is not your true identity and is not the essence of who you are.
What is that space, that inner spaciousness?
It is pure consciousness,
the transcendent "I AM" that becomes aware of itself.
The Buddha calls it sunyata,
emptiness.
It is the "kingdom of heaven" that Jesus pointed to,
which is within you
here and now.

~  Eckhart Tolle

 with thanks to louie, louie

 

 

 

metta

 

 

 

 

 

 Joseph Goldstein

 

 

 

 

what can I say

 

 

What can I say that I have not said before? 

So I'll say it again. 

The leaf has a song in it. 

Stone is the face of patience. 

Inside the river there is an unfinishable story 

and you are somewhere in it 

and it will never end until all ends. 

 

Take your busy heart to the art museum and the 

chamber of commerce 

but take it also to the forest. 

The song you heard singing in the leaf when you 

were a child 

is singing still. 

I am of years lived, so far, seventy-four, 

and the leaf is singing still. 

 

 

 

 

~ Mary Oliver

from Swan

 

 

 

lines written in the days of growing darkness

Every year we have been

witness to it: how the

world descends

into a rich mash, in order that

it may resume.

And therefore

who would cry out

to the petals on the ground

to stay,

knowing as we must,

how the vivacity of what was is married

to the vitality of what will be?

I don't say

it's easy, but

what else will do

if the love one claims to have for the world

be true?

So let us go on, cheerfully enough,

this and every crisping day,

though the sun be swinging east,

and the ponds be cold and black,

and the sweets of the year be doomed.

~ Mary Oliver

photo by Kathleen Connally

racialized consciousness

 

 

 

 

It started before I was born. It began before you were born, too, 

this turning wheel of racialized consciousness.

 Its tracks are evident across the face of time 

and the threads of human connection.

Let us propose this is not an intractable condition but a legacy of human thought,

 speech, and physical behaviors. Our racialized consciousness 

and the suffering and confusion associated with it need not continue. 

This moment in our social history compels us to invite ourselves 

into a path of discoveries, learning, and practices to transform our karma.

I ponder the wheel, an ancient invention of great practicality.

 Its shape appears throughout human history in art, culture, science, 

and spiritual traditions. It has provided a powerful image and metaphor

 for the spiritual journey of humanity. 

We must wake up.

In the Buddhist tradition, the wheel is a primary symbol 

of an eightfold path of healing and transformation leading to freedom. 

But the wheel also describes a repeating pattern of suffering called samsara,
a Sanskrit word referring to the experience of wandering, trapped through
endless cycles of suffering.

The diagram here is a map of the turning wheel of racial karma.
The Sanskrit word karma and Pali term kamma, which gave rise to
our modern-day word “karma,” literally mean action or doing.
Any kind of intentional action, whether mental, verbal, or physical,
is regarded as karma. Karma covers all that is included in the phrase
“thought, word, and deed.”

This diagram of karma shows how intention affects phenomena
in an interconnected cycle of manifestation, transmission, retribution,
and continuation. If you are an imaginative learner, you can visualize
how it relates to your lived experience.


Karma here means the living power of these three actions of thought,
word, and deed to shape the quality of our individual and collective experience.
In the Buddhist understanding, karma is not at all a fatalistic doctrine;
the Buddha transformed it from the older meaning of cause and effect
into a practical understanding of what it means to be
conscious of your own intention.

The wheel of karma is set in motion by intention.
This circle starts with what we intend and then manifests in our thinking,
our speech, and our behavior.

While practicing being more conscious of setting my own intentions in life,
I learned a scary thing: our brain is designed to use the least amount of energy
necessary to get things done. I’m not just talking about brushing our teeth
or driving a car or exercising. I’m talking about deeper things.
Unless we make a conscious choice not to live on automatic pilot,
most of us go through our days without thinking too deeply
about the motivations that drive our actions.

Most of us know that changing habits is challenging.
How much of what we do is habitual?
Studies by neurobiologists and psychologists researching habit formation
indicate that 40 to 95 percent of human behavior—how we think,
how we respond with emotions, what we say, and how we act—
falls into the habit category. So when it comes to deeply rooted thoughts
and behaviors, however good we think our intentions may be,
without insight about the need to change, the strong resolve to make it happen,
and the corresponding action, a good 50 percent of the time
we will default to habit.

The second station on this circle is manifestation.
Whatever we intend gets manifested, whether we intend it consciously or unconsciously.
Studies show that most of our behavior is unconscious. That’s scary to contemplate,
but we must. When it comes to our habits around race, we must acknowledge
and make what is unconscious conscious, so that we can set wise new intentions
as individuals and as a collective.

We must wake up.

The third station is transmission.
The manifestation of our unconscious intention gets transmitted outward
into the world through our actions and words, as well as inward through our thoughts
and emotions. What we manifest, we transmit. We communicate what’s on our minds
whether we want to or not. We communicate consciously and unconsciously,
verbally and nonverbally.

Also, very importantly, we communicate through vibration.
How did human beings communicate before language? We felt it.
Have you ever walked into a room, and when you opened the door you knew,
Boy, somebody was in here a minute ago, and they weren’t very happy?
We have this sensitivity, if we haven’t let it be educated out of us,
this sense of feeling what it is like to be in one another’s company.
Our mirror neurons fire, building empathy and understanding.
Neurologically and evolutionarily, we know we are capable of being together
because we are designed to be social creatures.

The next station in this circle is retribution.
Retribution doesn’t mean final judgment. Retribution means the here-and-now
consequences of a previous action, because karma means “action.”
Today’s adjective for someone who is aware of injustice is “woke”;
the quality of being awake to suffering is what defines the Buddha,
whose very name means “awakened.” If we aren’t awake,
our retribution won’t come in the form of enlightenment.

The last stage after retribution is continuation.
It’s a natural process. If you don’t intervene and don’t shift the wheel onto new pathways,
the wheel of karma simply rolls on. This is true of the modern evolution
of racialized consciousness. We see the same heartbreaking patterns repeating
again and again: lynching in the deaths of Black people at the hands of the state,
or slavery in the funneling of Black and Brown people into indentured labor
in the prison industrial complex.

Karma reveals how our consciousness continues to turn—creating, propagating,
cultivating, and systemizing racism worldwide. But every wheel has an axis
that sustains its momentum, its movement forward, and its accumulated power.
Like the characters in The Wizard of Oz, we are journeying with courage,
clarity, and heart into the center of the axis, the secret space from which
we can heal and transform the suffering of racialized consciousness.


 

----------- Exercise: Opening the Working Ground of Race ----------

This is a reflective exercise to understand how the energies of America’s racial karma are alive in your life story. Find a place where you may stop to reflect mindfully. You may speak, write, think, and meditate on these questions. If you write, keep your thoughts in a journal so you may read them again. What insights do you gain from going deeply into your storehouse of thoughts, feelings, and memories about race?

        What is the story of how your name came to be?
        When did you first notice differences in people’s looks?
        What stories about race and skin color did you hear growing up?
        What phrases do you use to describe racial differences?
        How is your body responding to this exercise?
        How is your body responding to these memories?
        What race seeds were planted as you look back over your life? Seeds meaning thoughts, words,                         actions, and events that remain with you, consciously and unconsciously.
        Which of these seeds were wholesome (leading away from racialized hate, greed, and delusion)?
        Which of these seeds were unwholesome (leading toward racialized hate, greed, and delusion)?
        Which seeds are most impactful in your life now?
        What is your priority in healing the racialized consciousness in yourself?

                            ~ Larry Ward                                

  Excerpted from America’s Racial Karma: An Invitation to Heal

quilt by Faith Ringgold

found here in Lions Roar

 

Larry’s introduction to Buddhist practice began in Calcutta, India in 1977 but it was not until 1991 when Larry met Thich That Hanh that this practice became the center of his life and service. He was ordained as a lay minister in Thay’s Plum Village Tradition in 1994 and a Dharma teacher in 2000. He has lived in spiritual community and has assisted Thich Nhat Hanh throughout the world. He has accompanied Thich Nhat Hanh on peace-making missions in China, France, Korea and Vietnam, as well as throughout the USA.

 

 

 

 

 

 

movement

 

 

 

 

 

 

V

Words move, music moves

Only in time; but that which is only living

Can only die. Words, after speech, reach

Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,

Can words or music reach

The stillness, as a Chinese jar still

Moves perpetually in its stillness.

Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,

Not that only, but the co-existence,

Or say that the end precedes the beginning,

And the end and the beginning were always there

Before the beginning and after the end.

And all is always now. Words strain,

Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,

Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,

Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,

Will not stay still. Shrieking voices

Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,

Always assail them. The Word in the desert

Is most attacked by voices of temptation,

The crying shadow in the funeral dance,

The loud lament of the disconsolate chimera.

The detail of the pattern is movement,

As in the figure of the ten stairs.

Desire itself is movement

Not in itself desirable;

Love is itself unmoving,

Only the cause and end of movement,

Timeless, and undesiring

Except in the aspect of time

Caught in the form of limitation

Between un-being and being.

Sudden in a shaft of sunlight

Even while the dust moves

There rises the hidden laughter

Of children in the foliage

Quick now, here, now, always—

Ridiculous the waste sad time

Stretching before and after.

T.S. Eliot

excerpt from Burnt Norton

(No 1 of the Four Quartets) 

you will become

 

 

 

 

You too will find your strength.

We who must live in this time

cannot imagine how strong you will become -

how strange, how surprising,

yet familiar as yesterday.

 

We will sense you

like a fragrance from a nearby garden

and watch you move through our days

like a shaft of sunlight in a sickroom.

 

We will not be herded into churches,

for you are not made by the crowd,

you who meet us in our solitude.

 

We are cradled close in you hands -

and lavishly flung forth.

 

 

 

 

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

from The Book of Pilgrimage, II,26

 

 

autumn refrain

The skreak and skritter of evening gone

And grackles gone and sorrows of the sun,

The sorrows of sun, too, gone . . . the moon and moon,

The yellow moon of words about the nightingale

In measureless measures, not a bird for me

But the name of a bird and the name of a nameless air

I have never–shall never hear. And yet beneath

The stillness of everything gone, and being still,

Being and sitting still, something resides,

Some skreaking and skrittering residuum,

And grates these evasions of the nightingale

Though I have never–shall never hear that bird.

And the stillness is in the key, all of it is,

The stillness is all in the key of that desolate sound.

~ Wallace Stevens