thoughts of a solitary farmhouse

 

 

 

 

 

And not to feel bad about dying.
Not to take it so personally -

it is only
the force we exert all our lives

to exclude death from our thoughts
that confronts us, when it does arrive,

as the horror of being excluded -
something like that, the Canadian wind

coming in off Lake Erie
rattling the windows, horizontal snow

appearing out of nowhere
across the black highway and fields
like billions of white bees.

 

 

 

 
- Franz Wright

from Ill Lit: Selected and New Poems

photo by Ed Varsson

with thanks to whiskey river 

the artificial structure

 

 

 

The mind tries to live by the artificial structure of the world, 

but the body will have none of it, holding to primeval forces.  

People try to be all mind...

this has gone so far that now... 

the earth itself is but an idea.  

As animal, man has suffered from this and degenerated... 

The only hope and consolation is the perception of beauty, 

the revelation today of that which was God.

 

 

 

 

~ Harlan Hubbard

from his journal, written in 1937 

Quoted here from "Harlan Hubbard - Live and Work"

by Wendell Berry

.

 

 

 

It needs forever to be in all its times and aspects and acts

 

 

Anna: There you are, Harlan.  I've called and called.  What are you doing?

Harlan: Looking.

Anna: At what?

Harlan: The river.

Anna: You've never seen enough, have you,  of that river you looked at all your life?

Harlan: It never does anything twice.   It needs forever to be in all its times and aspects and acts.  To know it in time is only to begin to know it.  To paint it, you must show it as less than it is.  That is why as a painter I never was at rest.  Now I look and do not paint.  This is the heaven of a painter - only to look, to see without limit.  It's as if a poet finally were free to say only the simplest things.

 

For a moment they are still again, both continuing to look, in  opposite directions, at the river.

 

 

 

 

~ Wendell Berry

excerpt from "Sonata at Payne Hollow"

.

the wild rose

 

 

 

Sometimes hidden from me

in daily custom and in trust,

so that I live by you unaware

as by the beating of my heart,

 

suddenly you flare in my sight,

a wild rose blooming at the edge

of thicket, grace and light

 

where yesterday was only a shade,

and once more I am blessed, choosing

again what I chose before.

 

 

 

 

Wendell Berry

 

 

 

 

three questions

 

 

~ Leo Tolstoy

 

 

 

These teachings are like a raft

 

 

 

 

 

These teachings are like a raft, 

to be abandoned once you have crossed the flood. 

 

Since you should abandon even good states of mind generated by these teachings,

 How much more so should you abandon bad states of mind! 

 

 

Conquer the angry man by love.

 Conquer the ill-natured man by goodness. 

Conquer the miser with generosity.

 Conquer the liar with truth.

 

 

 

 

 ~  The Dhammapada

 

 

 

 

a flowing event

A living body is not a fixed thing but a flowing event, 

like a flame or a whirlpool: the shape alone is stable, 

for the substance is a stream of energy going in at one end and out at the other.

We are particularly and temporarily identifiable wiggles in a stream 

that enters us in the form of light, heat, air, water, milk, bread, fruit, beer, 

beef Stroganoff, caviar, and pate de foie gras. 

It goes out as gas and excrement - 

and also as semen, babies, talk, politics, commerce, 

war, poetry, and music. And philosophy.

~ Alan Watts

a train of discontinuous fragments

.

In listening to my patients tell me thousands of stories, 

as they try to find some peace in the present, 

I have learned this beyond the shadow of a doubt. 

 Rather than behaving sanely, rather than being in touch with our present realities, 

we human beings - all of us, myself included - 

are too often simply run by losses and hardships long gone by,

 and by our stockpiled fears.  

 

Our collective history, our individual lives, our very minds, 

bear unmistakable testimony.


Instead of receding harmlessly into the past, the darkest,

 most frightening events from our childhood and adolescence gain power 

and authority as we grow older.  The memory of such events 

causes us to depart from ourselves, psychologically speaking,

 or to separate one part of our awareness from the others.  

 

What we conceive of as an unbroken thread of consciousness is, 

instead, quite often a train of discontinuous fragments.  

Our awareness is divided.  

And much more commonly that we know, 

even our personalities are fragmented - 

disorganized team efforts trying to cope with the past -

 rather than the sane, unified wholes 

we anticipate in ourselves and in other people...








~ Martha Stout
from The Myth of Sanity, Divided Consciousness and the Promise of Awareness
art by picasso

a multitude of others

From "the incessant workings of his mind and the physical activity
 displayed by the body... nothing of all that is from him, is him."
He, physically and mentally,  is the multitude of others.

On the mental plane, this "multitude of others" includes many beings
 who are his contemporaries: people he consorts with, with whom he chats,
 whose actions he watches. ... the individual absorbs a part of the various energies
 given off by those with whom he is in contact, and these incongruous energies, 
installing themselves in that which he considers his "I",
 form a swarming throng.

To a Westerner, Plato, Zeno, Jesus, Saint Paul, Calvin, Diderot,
 Jean Jacques Rousseau, Christopher Columbus, Marco Polo, 
Napoleon, and many others constitute a diversified crowd,...

 These names are only examples. The guests, whom X shelters
 in his particular guest-house, are not at all the same
 as those who live with Y.

"that which is compound", which is constituted by the combination of elements
 as a house is made up of stones, wood, etc., is only a collection, a group
 and in no way a real "ego".  Thus the individual is empty, 
everything is empty, because one can find nothing in it 
except the parts which constitute it.

 ~ Alexandra David-Neel and Lama Yongden

from The Secret oral teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects

art by Picasso

behind recognizable patterns

 

 

The Buddha described what we call “self” as a collection of aggregates -

 elements of mind and body - that function interdependently, 

creating the appearance of a woman or a man. 

 

We then identify with that image or appearance, taking it to be “I” or “mine,”

 imagining it to have some inherent self-existence.

 

 For example we get up in the morning, look in the mirror,

 recognize the reflection, and think, “Yes, that’s me again.” 

We then add all kinds of concepts to this sense of self:

 I’m a woman or a man, I’m a certain age,

 I’m a happy or unhappy person –

the list goes on and on.

When we examine our experience, though,

 we see that there is not some core being to whom experience refers;

 rather it is simply “empty phenomena rolling on.”

 It is “empty” in the sense that there is no one behind 

the arising and changing phenomena to whom they happen. 

 

A rainbow is a good example of this. 

We go out after a rainstorm and feel that moment of delight 

if a rainbow appears in the sky. Mostly, we simply enjoy the sight

 without investigating the real nature of what is happening.

 But when we look more deeply, it becomes clear that there is no “thing” 

called “rainbow” apart from the particular conditions of air and moisture and light. 

 

Our sense of self is like that rainbow - 

an appearance, arising from causes and conditions, 

that we cling to as ourselves, "my identity."

 

 

 

 

 

.- Joseph Goldstein

from  Tricycle

 

 

 

 

let go

Let go 

this 'everywhere' and this 'everything' in exchange for this 

'nowhere' and this 'nothing.' 

Never mind if you cannot fathom this nothing,

for I love it surely so much better. 

 

It is so worthwhile in 

itself that no thinking about it will do it justice. 

One can feel this nothing more easily than see it, 

for it is completely dark and hidden to 

those who have only just begun to look at it. 

 

Yet to speak more accurately, 

it is overwhelming spiritual light that blinds the soul that is experiencing it, 

rather than actual darkness or the absence of physical light. 

 

Who is it then, who is it then, who is calling it 'nothing'? 

Our outer self, to be sure, not our inner. 

Our inner self calls it 'All', 

for through it he is learning the secret of all things, 

physical and spiritual alike, 

without having to consider every single one separately 

on it's own.

 

 

 

~ The Cloud of Unknowing

.

capacity for solitude

In the 20th century, the idea of solitude formed the centre of Hannah Arendt’s thought.

 A German-Jewish émigré who fled Nazism and found refuge in the United States,

 Arendt spent much of her life studying the relationship between the

 individual and the polis. For her, freedom was tethered to both the private sphere – 

the vita contemplativa – and the public, political sphere – the vita activa.

 She understood that freedom entailed more than the human capacity to act

 spontaneously and creatively in public. It also entailed the capacity to think

 and to judge in private, where solitude empowers the individual to contemplate

 her actions and develop her conscience, to escape the cacophony of the crowd – 

to finally hear herself think.

In our hyper-connected world, a world in which we can communicate 

constantly and instantly over the internet, we rarely remember

 to carve out spaces for solitary contemplation. 

 

We check our email hundreds of times per day; 

we shoot off thousands of text messages per month; 

we obsessively thumb through Twitter, Facebook and Instagram,

 aching to connect at all hours with close and casual acquaintances alike. 

We search for friends of friends, ex-lovers, people we barely know,

 people we have no business knowing. 

We crave constant companionship.

But, Arendt reminds us, if we lose our capacity for solitude,

 our ability to be alone with ourselves, then we lose our very ability to think. 

We risk getting caught up in the crowd. We risk being ‘swept away’,

 as she put it, ‘by what everybody else does and believes in’ – 

no longer able, in the cage of thoughtless conformity, to distinguish 

‘right from wrong, beautiful from ugly’. Solitude is not only a state 

of mind essential to the development of an individual’s consciousness – 

and conscience – but also a practice that prepares one for participation

 in social and political life. Before we can keep company with others,

 we must learn to keep company with ourselves.

 

 

 

~ Hannah Arendt

from
Read more at Aeon HERE

 

 

gratitude

 

 

 

 

 

After a wedding ceremony in Singapore a few years

ago, the father of the bride took his new son-in-law aside to give

him some advice on how to keep the marriage long and happy.

 

"You probably love my daughter a lot," he said to the young man.

 

"Oh yes!" the young man sighed.

 

"And you probably think that she is the most wonderful person

in the world," the old man continued.

 

"She's soooo perfect in each and every way," the young man 

cooed.

 

"That's how it is when you get married," said the old man, "But

after a few years, you will begin to see the flaws in my daughter.

When you do begin to notice her faults, I want you to remember 

this. If she didn't have those faults to begin with, Son-in-law, she

would have married someone much better than you!"

 

So we should always be grateful for the faults in our partner

 because if they didn't have those faults from the start, they would

have been able to marry someone much better than us.

 

 

 

~ Ajahn Brahm

from Who Ordered This Truckload of Dung? 

art by Klimt

 

 

 

the garden

 

 

 

 

In relationships, you create an environment with your work on yourself, 

which you offer to another human being to use in the way they need to grow. 

You keep working. You become the soil—moist and soft and receptive—

so the person can grow the way they need to grow,

 because how do you know how they should grow?

After a while, you come to appreciate that what you can offer

 another human being is to work on yourself, to be a statement 

of what it is you have found in the way you live your life. 

 

One of the things you will find is the ability to appreciate what is, 

as it is, in equanimity, compassion, and love that isn’t conditional. 

You don’t love a person more because they are happier

 in the way you think they should be.

What you cultivate in yourself is the garden where they can grow,

 and you offer your consciousness and the spaciousness to hear it.

 

 

 

~ Ram Dass

 

 

 

what makes us miserable

It is startling that we desperately hold on to what makes us miserable. 

 Our own woundedness becomes a source of perverse pleasure and fixes our identity.  

We do not want to be cured, for that would mean moving into the unknown. 

 Often it seems we are destructively addicted to the negative.  

What we call the negative is usually the surface form of contradiction. 

 If we maintain our misery at this surface level, we hold off 

the initially threatening but ultimately redemptive and healing

 transfiguration that comes through engaging our inner contradiction. 

 We need to revalue what we consider to be negative.

  Rilke used to say that

 difficulty is one of the greatest friends of the soul.  

Our lives would be immeasurably enriched 

if we could but bring the same hospitality

 in meeting the negative as we bring to the joyful and pleasurable.

  In avoiding the negative, we only encourage it to recur... 

 

The negative threatens us so powerfully

 precisely because it is an invitation to an art of compassion

 and self-enlargement that our small thinking utterly resists. 

 

 Your vision is your home, and your home should have many mansions 

to shelter your wild divinity.  Such integration respects

 the multiplicity of selves within.  

~ John O'Donohue

from Anam Cara

photo by edmund teske