the man who lost his key

A Sufi heard a cry: "I've lost my key;

If it's been found, please give it back to me -

My door's locked fast; I wish to God I knew

How I could get back in.  What can I do?"

The Sufi said: "And why should you complain?

You know where this door is; if you remain

Outside it - even if it is shut fast -

Someone no doubt will open it at last.

You make this fuss for nothing; how much more

Should I complain, who've lost both key and door!"

But if this Sufi presses on, he'll find

The closed or open door which haunts his mind.

Men cannot understand the sufis' state,

That deep Bewilderment which is their fate.

To those who ask: "What can I do?" reply:

"Bid all that you have done till now goodbye!"

Once in the Valley of Bewilderment

The pilgrim suffers endless discontent,

Crying: "How long must I endure delay,

Uncertainty? When shall I see the Way?

When shall I know? Oh, when?"  But knowledge here

Is turned again to indecisive fear;

Complaints become an grateful eulogy

And blasphemy is faith, faith blasphemy.

~Farid Attar

from The Conference of Birds

translation by Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis

dreams

.

~  Emil Nolde

born: 7 August 1867 Hans Emil Hansen Nolde at Burkal, North Schleswig

died: 13th  April 1956 Seebüll, North Friesland

one of the leading painters of expressionism

one of the great water-color artists in the 20th Century

Nolde is known for his expressive choice of colors

with thanks to Semsakrebsler

search for?

Don’t you see that it is your very search for happiness

 that makes you feel miserable? 

 

Try the other way: indifferent to pain and pleasure, 

neither seeking, nor refusing, 

give all your attention to the level on which

 ‘I am’ is timelessly present. 

Soon you will realize that peace and happiness are in your very nature 

and it is only seeking them through some particular channels that disturbs. 

Avoid the disturbance, that is all. 

 

To seek there is no need;

 you would not seek what you already have. 

You yourself are God, the Supreme Reality. 

To begin with, trust me, trust the teacher. 

It enables you to make the first step - 

and then your trust is justified by your own experience.

~ Nisargadatta Maharaj

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

.