happiness

As long as you chase happiness,

you are not ready to be happy, 

even if you owned everything.

As long as you lament a loss,

run after prizes in restless races,

you have not yet known peace.

But when you have moved beyond desire,

become a stranger to your goals and longings

and call no longer on happiness by name,

then you heart rises calmly

above the ebb and flow of action

and peace has reached your soul.

~ Hermann Hesse

translation by Ludwig Max Fischer 

 

so much

.

 

 

 

 

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.

With sadness there is something to rub against,

A wound to tend with lotion and cloth.

When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up,

Something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change.

 

But happiness floats.

It doesn’t need you to hold it down.

It doesn’t need anything.

Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,

And disappears when it wants to.

You are happy either way.

Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house

And now live over a quarry of noise and dust

Cannot make you unhappy.

Everything has a life of its own,

It too could wake up filled with possibilities

Of coffee cake and ripe peaches,

And love even the floor which needs to be swept,

The soiled linens and scratched records….

 

Since there is no place large enough 

To contain so much happiness,

You shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you

Into everything you touch. You are not responsible.

You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit

For the moon, but continues to hold it, and to share it,

And in that way, be known.






.

~ Naomi Shihab Nye

.

a life

That the stars are adamant

everyone understands—

but I won’t give up seeking joy on each blue wave

or peace below every gray stone.

If happiness never comes, what is a life?

A lily withers in the sand

and if its nature has failed? The tide

washes the beach at night.

What is the fly looking for on the spider’s web?

What does a dayfly make of its hours?

(Two wings creased over a hollow body.)

Black will never turn to white—

yet the perfume of our struggle lingers

as each morning fresh flowers

spring up from hell.

The day will come

when the earth is emptied, the skies collapse

and all goes still—

when nothing remains but the dayfly

folded in a leaf.

But no one knows it.

~  Edith Sodergran

translation by Averill Curdy

bluebird

 

 

 

 

 

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I'm not going
to let anybody see
you.
there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I pour whiskey on him and inhale
cigarette smoke
and the whores and the bartenders
and the grocery clerks
never know that
he's
in there.

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say,
stay down, do you want to mess
me up?
you want to screw up the
works?
you want to blow my book sales in
Europe?
there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too clever, I only let him out
at night sometimes
when everybody's asleep.
I say, I know that you're there,
so don't be
sad.
then I put him back,
but he's singing a little
in there, I haven't quite let him
die
and we sleep together like
that
with our
secret pact
and it's nice enough to
make a man
weep, but I don't
weep, do
you? 

 

 

 

~ Charles Bukowski

from The Last Night of the Earth Poems

 art by Ayat Fawzy

 

 

 

 

a gardner digs in another time

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 The gardener digs in another time, without past or future, beginning or end.

 A time that does not cleave the day with rush hours, lunch breaks, the last bus home.

 As you walk in the garden you pass into this time —

 the moment of entering can never be remembered.

 Around you the landscape lies transfigured.

 Here is the Amen beyond the prayer.

I have re-discovered my boredom here… 

where I can fight “what next” with nothing.

My garden is a memorial, each circular bed a dial and a true lover’s knot 

— planted with lavender, helichryssum and santolina.

to whom it may concern
in the dead stones of a planet
no longer remembered as earth
may he decipher this opaque hieroglyph
perform an archeology of soul
on these precious fragments
all that remains of our vanished days
here — at the sea’s edge
I have planted a stony garden
dragon tooth dolmen spring up
to defend the porch
steadfast warriors

 

 

 

 

~ Derek Jarman

from Modern Nature

with thanks to brianpickings

art by Emily Hughes

 

 

something unimportant

Happy as something unimportant

and free as a thing unimportant.

As something no one prizes

and which does not prize itself.

As something mocked by all

and which mocks at their mockery.

As laughter without serious reason. 

As a yell able to outyell itself.

Happy as no matter what,

as any no matter what.

Happy

as a dog's tail.

~ Anna Swir

from Talking to my body

translated by Czeslaw Milosz

without why

The Rose is without why

She blooms because she blooms

She does not care for herself

Asks not if she is seen.

***


The rose which here on earth is now perceived by me,
Has blossomed thus in God from all eternity.

~ Angelus Silesius

photo by albert koetsier

wordless and idea-less

Let your ears hear whatever they want to hear;
 let your eyes see whatever they want to see;
 let your mind think whatever it wants to think;
 let your lungs breathe in their own rhythm. 


Do not expect any special result,
 for in this wordless and idea-less state, 
where can there be past or future, 
and where any notion of purpose? 


Stop, look, and listen.

~ Alan Watts

a flowing force

Songs are thoughts, 

sung out with the breath when people are moved by great forces

 and ordinary speech no longer suffices. 

 

Man is moved just like the ice floe sailing here and there out in the current.

 His thoughts are driven by a flowing force when he feels joy, 

when he feels fear, when he feels sorrow. 

 

Thoughts can wash over him like a flood,

 making his breath come in gasps and his heart throb. 

 

Something like an abatement in the weather will keep him thawed up. 

And then it will happen that we, who think we are small, will feel still smaller.

 

 And we will fear to use words. 

When the words we want to use shoot up of themselves -

 we get a new song.

~ Orpingalik

 Inuit poet and shaman

every time

Let people realize clearly 
that every time they threaten someone
 or humiliate or unnecessarily
 hurt or dominate or reject
 another human being, 
they become forces for
 the creation of psychopathology, 
even if these be small forces.
 Let them recognize that every person
 who is kind, helpful, decent, 
psychologically democratic, 
affectionate, and warm,
 is a psychotheraputic force.

  ~ Abraham H. Maslow

those irrational fears

Most parents, when they see children not terrorized by the things that terrorize them, 

they work very hard until they've finally got you terrorized. 

They teach you those irrational fears. 

Well-meaning, but they do just the same. 

~  Abraham / Hicks

Two Look at Two

.

Love and forgetting might have carried them
A little further up the mountainside
With night so near, but not much further up.
They muct have halted soon in any case
With thoughts of the path back, how rough it was
With rock and washout, and unsafe in darkness;
When they were halted by a tumbled wall
With barbed-wire binding. They stood facing this,
Spending what onward impulse they still had
In one last look the way they must not go,
On up the failing path, where, if a stone
Or earthslide moved at night, it moved itself;
No footstep moved it. "This is all," they sighed,
"Good-night to woods." But not so; there was more.
A doe from round a spruce stood looking at them
Across the wall, as near the wall as they.
She saw them in their field, they her in hers.
The difficulty of seeing what stood still,
Like some up-ended boulder split in tow,
Was in her clouded eyes: they saw no fear there.
She sighed and passed unscared along the wall.
"This, then is all. What more is there to ask?"
But no, not yet. A snort to bid them wait.
A buck from round the spruce stood looking at them
Across the wall, as near the wall as they.
This was an antlered buck of lusty nostril,
Not the same doe come back into her place.
He viewed them quizzically with jerks of head,
As if to ask, "Why don't you make some motion?
Or give some sign of life? Because you can't.
I doubt if you're living as you look."
Thus till he had them almost feeling dared
To stretch a proffering hand-and a spell-breaking.
Then he too passed uncsared along the wall.
Two had seen two, whichever side you spoke from.
"This must be all." It was all. Still they stood,
A great wave from it going over them,
As if the earth in one unlooked-for favor
Had made them certain earth returned their love.

.

~ Robert Frost

.

toward me

Existence leans its mouth
toward me,
because my love
cares for
it.

 

 

 

 
~ Meister Eckhart

art by Coleen-Joy Page

love and compassion

.

.

We can reject everything else: religion, ideology, all received
wisdom. But we cannot escape the necessity of love and compassion....

This, then, is my true religion, my simple faith. In this sense, there is no need
for temple or church, for mosque or synagogue, no need for complicated
philosophy, doctrine or dogma. Our own heart, our own mind, is the temple.
The doctrine is compassion.

Love for others and respect for their rights and
dignity, no matter who or what they are: ultimately these are all we need.
So long as we practice these in our daily lives, then no matter if we are
learned or unlearned, whether we believe in Buddha or God, or follow some
other religion or none at all, as long as we have compassion for others and
conduct ourselves with restraint out of a sense of responsibility, there is
no doubt we will be happy.

~ Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama

.

 

 

 

deepest root of compassion

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bearing the unbearable is the deepest root of compassion in the world. 

When you bear what you think you cannot bear,

 who you think you are dies. 

 

You become compassion. 

You don't have compassion - you are compassion. 

 

True compassion goes beyond empathy 

to being with the experience of another.

 

 You become an instrument of compassion.

 

 

 

 

 

~ Ram Dass

 art by Susan Cohen Thompson