beneath hurt and grief

Whoever finds love

beneath hurt and grief

disappears into emptiness

with a thousand new disguises

~ Rumi

version by Coleman Barks

burlap sack

A person is full of sorrow

the way a burlap sack is full of stones or sand.

We say, "Hand me the sack,"

but we get the weight.

Heavier if left out in the rain.

To think that the sand or stones are the self is an error.

To think that grief is the self is an error.

Self carries grief as a pack mule carries the side bags,

being careful between the trees to leave extra room.

The mule is not the load of ropes and nails and axes.

The self is not the miner nor builder nor driver.

What would it be to take the bride

and leave behind the heavy dowry?

To let the thin-ribbed mule browse in tall grasses,

its long ears waggling like the tails of two happy dogs?

~ Jane Hirshfield

a journey up a mountain

 

 

 

 

 

My observations are those of a beginner.

 As they are completely fresh in my mind and concern the first difficulties

 a beginner encounters, they may be more useful to beginners

 making their first ascents than treatises written by professionals.

 

 These are no doubt more methodical and complete,

 but are intelligible only after a little preliminary experience. 

The entire aim of these notes is to help the beginner

 acquire this preliminary experience a little faster. 

 

....

 

Keep your eye fixed on the way to the top,

 but don't forget to look right in front of you. 

 

The last step depends on the first. 

Don't think you're there just because you see the summit. 

 

Watch your footing, be sure of the next step,

 but don't let that distract you from the highest goal.

 

 The first step depends on the last.

 

 ....

 

When you take off on your own, leave some trace 

of your passage that will guide your return: 

one rock set on top of another, some grass pierced by a stick.

 

 But if you come to a place you cannot cross or that is dangerous,

 remember that the trace you have left might lead the people 

following you into trouble. So go back the way you came

 and destroy any traces you have left. 

 

This is addressed to anyone who wants to leave traces 

of his passage in this world. And even without wanting to, 

we always leave traces. 

 

Answer to your fellow men for the traces you leave behind.

 

 ....

 

If you slip or have a minor spill, don’t interrupt your momentum

 but even as you right yourself recover the rhythm of your walk.

 

Find your pace again the moment you get up.

 In your mind take careful note of the circumstances of your fall, 

but don’t let your body linger over what happened. 

 

The body constantly tries to draw attention to itself by its shiverings, 

its breathlessness, its palpitations, its shudders and sweats and cramps;

 but it reacts quickly to any scorn and indifference in its master. 

 

Once it senses that he is not taken in by its jeremiads, 

once it understands that it will inspire no pity for it that way,

 then it comes into line and obediently accomplishes its task.

 ~  René Daumal 

excerpts from Mount Analogue:
A Tale of Non-Euclidian and Symbolically Authentic Mountaineering Adventures

 

 

 

 

the journey of grieving

 

 

 

 

[Frankl] is speaking to me. He is speaking for me. . . . 

I read this, which is at the very heart of Frankl’s teaching:

 

 Everything can be taken from a man but one thing:

 the last of the human freedoms—

to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances,

 to choose one’s own way. Each moment is a choice. 

No matter how frustrating or boring or constraining 

or painful or oppressive our experience, 

we can always choose how we respond.

 And I finally begin to understand that I, too, have a choice. 

This realization will change my life.

~ Viktor E. Frankl, 

from Man’s Search for Meaning

 

 

The choice to accept myself as I am: human, imperfect.

 And the choice to be responsible for my own happiness.

 To forgive my flaws and reclaim my innocence. 

To stop asking why I deserved to survive. 

To function as well as I can, to commit myself to serve others,

 to do everything in my power to honor my parents,

 to see to it that they did not die in vain. To do my best,

 in my limited capacity, so future generations don’t experience what I did.

 

 To be useful, to be used up, to survive and to thrive

 so I can use every moment to make the world a better place.

 And to finally, finally stop running from the past.

 To do everything possible to redeem it, and then let it go.

 I can make the choice that all of us can make.

 I can’t ever change the past. But there is a life I can save: 

It is mine. The one I am living right now,

 this precious moment. . . .

And to the vast campus of death that consumed my parents

 and so very many others, to the classroom of horror

 that still had something sacred to teach me about how to live—

that I was victimized but I’m not a victim, that I was hurt but not broken,

 that the soul never dies, that meaning and purpose 

can come from deep in the heart of what hurts us the most—

 

I utter my final words. Goodbye, I say. And, Thank you. 

Thank you for life, and for the ability to finally accept the life that is.





~ Edith Eva Eger

from The Choice: Embrace the Possible

with thanks to Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation

 

 

 

 

a simple life

 

 

Simple life does not consist in the mere possession of a few things
 but in the freedom from possession and non-possession, 
in the indifference to things that comes with deep understanding.
 Merely to renounce things in order to reach greater happiness, 
greater joy that is promised, is to seek reward which limits thought
 and prevents it from flowering and discovering reality. 

To control thought-feeling for a greater reward, for a greater result,
 is to make it petty, ignorant and sorrowful. Simplicity of life
 comes with inner richness, with inward freedom from craving,
 with freedom from acquisitiveness, from addiction, from distraction.
 From this simple life there comes that necessary one-pointedness
 which is not the outcome of self-enclosing concentration 
but of extensional awareness and meditative understanding. 

Simple life is not the result of outward circumstances;
 contentment with little comes with the riches of inward understanding. 
If you depend on circumstances to make you satisfied with life
 then you will create misery and chaos, for then you are a plaything
 of environment, and it is only when circumstances are transcended 
through understanding that there is order and clarity. 

To be constantly aware of the process of acquisitiveness,
 of addiction, of distraction, brings freedom from them 
and so there is a true and simple life.

~ J. Krishnamurti

from The Collected Works Volume III Ojai 

8th Public Talk 2nd July, 1944

choosing drifting

a shantyboat community by the river's edge.  

After building their "shantyboat," out of mostly salvaged materials, 

Harlan and Anna set out on the river, 

drifting.

I had no theories to prove. 

I merely wanted to try living by my own hands, 

independent as far as possible from a system of division of labor 

in which the participant loses most of the pleasure 

of making and growing things for himself.  

I wanted to bring in my own fuel and smell its sweet smoke 

as it burned on the hearth I had made.  

I wanted to grow my own food, 

catch it in the river, or forage after it.  

In short, I wanted to do as much as I could for myself, 

because I had already realized from partial experience 

the inexpressible joy of so doing.

This is a windy day with a secret exhilaration about it. 

When I look at the rough water patched with cloud shadows, 

the boat pitching slightly in the wind waves -

 all this from a higher plane somewhere above these little affairs.  

Yet they are a part and lead into it. 

The pure delight of drifting.  

Each time, it was a thrill to shove out into the current, 

to feel the life and power of the river, 

whose beginning and end were so remote.  

We became a part of it, like the driftwood... 

The tension and excitement, the near ecstasy of drifting.  

We had to stop often and take it in small doses.

~ Harlan Hubbard

from Harlan Hubbard and the River - A Visionary Life

by Don Wallis

block prints by Harlan Hubbard

from 'Sonata at Payne Hollow'

 

Harlan and Anna Hubbard



And now, as both have known they would,
they turn toward one another, and thus they are
changed, revealing themselves now
as neither young nor old, but timeless
and clear, as each appears
within the long affection of the other. 

~ Wendell Berry

 

 

supple

Can you focus your life-breath until you become

supple as a newborn child?

 

While you cleanse your inner vision

will you be found without fault?

 

Can you love people and lead them

without forcing your will on them?

 

When Heaven gives and takes away

can you be content with the outcome?

 

When you understand all things

can you step back from your own understanding?

Giving birth and nourishing,

making without possessing,

expecting nothing in return.

To grow, yet not to control:

This is the mysterious virtue.

~ Lao Tzu

from Tao Te Ching

art: Aboriginal Australia Rainbow Serpent

Middle School Art

 

 

a dense cloud of thoughts

For those who allow their mind to wander here and there,

 everything will go wrong.

Just as the sun cannot be seen in a densely clouded sky,

 so one’s own Self cannot be seen in a mind-sky

 which is darkened by a dense cloud of thoughts.

All the benefit to be obtained by inner inquiry

 is only the destruction of the deceptive ‘I’-sense [the ego]. 

It would be too much to say that it is to attain Self,

 which always shines clear and ever-attained.

Firmly abiding as ‘I am I’, 

without any movement of the mind, 

is the attainment of Godhood.

When scrutinized, 

among all the many qualities necessary for those 

who wish to attain the imperishable Liberation, 

it is the attitude of a great liking to be in permanent solitude

 that must be well established in their mind.

According to the outlook of different people 

the same woman is considered to be wife, 

husband’s sister, daughter-in-law, wife of one’s brother-in-law,

 mother, and so on. 

 

Yet in truth she does not at all undergo any change in her form.

Unless one realizes oneself to be the unattached Self, 

which is like the space that remains not even in the least attached to anything,

 though it exists inside, outside and pervading everything,

 one cannot remain undeluded.

One who has destroyed the mind is the emperor

 who rides on the neck of the elephant of supreme Jnana (self-knowledge).

 Know for certain that the turmoil of the mind

 is the sole cause of the miserable bondage 

of the cruel and fierce birth [and death].

~ Ramana Maharshi

art by Colette Baumback

the busy edge dissolves

 

 

 

The object in meditation and all of our contemplative disciplines is silence. But… 

that silence is in order for you to perceive something other than yourself — 

what you’ve arranged as yourself to actually perceive this frontier

 between what you call your self and what you call other than your self, 

whether that’s a person or a landscape.

One of the greatest arts of poetry is actually to create silence through attentive speech — 

speech that says something in such a way that it appears as a third frontier

 between you and the world, and invites you into a deeper and more generous

 sense of your own identity and the identity of the world… 

 

Poetry is the verbal art-form by which we can actually create silence.

Silence is frightening, an intimation of the end, the graveyard of fixed identities.

 Real silence puts any present understanding to shame; orphans us from certainty;

 leads us beyond the well-known and accepted reality and confronts us 

with the unknown and previously unacceptable conversation 

about to break in upon our lives.

In silence, essence speaks to us of essence itself

 and asks for a kind of unilateral disarmament, 

our own essential nature slowly emerging

 as the defended periphery atomizes and falls apart.

 

 As the busy edge dissolves we begin to join the conversation 

through the portal of a present unknowing, robust vulnerability, 

revealing in the way we listen, a different ear, a more perceptive eye, 

an imagination refusing to come too early to a conclusion, 

and belonging to a different person 

than the one who first entered the quiet.

 

 

 

 

 

 

~ David Whyte

from  Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning

of Everyday Words

 photo by Aaron Burden

with thanks to BrainPickings

 

 

 

 

the silent self

There is a silent self within us whose presence is disturbing

 precisely because it is so silent: it can't be spoken.

 It has to remain silent. To articulate it, to verbalize it,

 is to tamper with it, and in some way to destroy it. 

Now let us frankly face the fact that our culture is one 

which is geared in many ways to help us evade any need to face this inner, silent self.

 We live in a state of constant semi attention to the sound of voices, music, traffic,

 or the generalized noise of what goes on around us all the time. 

This keeps us immersed in a flood of racket and words,

 a diffuse medium in which our consciousness is half diluted:

 we are not quite "thinking", not entirely responding, 

but we are more or less there. 

 

We are not fully present and not entirely absent, 

not fully withdrawn, yet not completely available. 

 

It cannot be said that we are really participating in anything

 and we may in fact, be half conscious of our alienation and resentment. 

Yet we derive a certain comfort from the vague sense that we are

 "part of something" -- 

although we are not quite able to define what that something is -- 

and probably wouldn't want to define it even if we could. 

 

We just float along in the general noise. 

Resigned and indifferent,

 we share semi-consciously in the mindless mind of Muzak 

and radio commercials which pass for "reality".

 

 

 

 

- Thomas Merton

from  Love & Living

art by Andy Mercer

 

 

 

the unwinding

So we sit down, we’re quiet for a while.
And gradually the unwinding happens –
of the mind, and the body, and the heart.
And then maybe we get a glimpse, or a taste, of freedom;
and if we do, then we give our attention to that.
We surrender to that presence.
Dropping out of our heads and surrendering to stillness,
one-pointed presence, effortless vastness.
We let it take us, completely.
That’s what surrender is.



~ Jon Bernie

from  Ordinary Freedom

 

 

 

with mindfulness' rope

 

 

 

 

 

Those who wish to keep the trainings

Must with perfect self-possession guard their minds.

Without this guard upon the mind,

The trainings cannot be preserved.

 

Wandering where it will, the elephant of mind,

Will bring us down to torment in the hell of Unrelenting Pain. 

No worldly beast, however wild and crazed, 

Could bring upon us such calamities.

 

If, with mindfulness' rope,

The elephant of mind is tethered all around,

Our fears will come to nothing,

Every virtue drop into our hands. 

 

 

 

 

~ Shantideva

from The Way of the Bodhisattva

 

 

 

 

equanimity

 

 

 

 

 

 

The things of the world cannot affect the soul;

 they lie inert outside it, and only internal beliefs disturb it.

Nothing happens that isn’t in accord with universal nature, 

and before long you won’t exist at all, just like [your heroes]…

 

 fix your gaze on the matter at hand and see it for what it is,

 and then, keeping in your mind 

your obligation to be a good person 

and the demands of your humanity, 

go right ahead and do it, in the way that seems to you

 to be most just. 

 

But do it with kindness and modesty

describe to yourself every impression that occurs to your mind, 

so that you can clearly see what the thing is like in its entirety, 

stripped to its essence, and tell yourself its proper name 

and the names of the elements of which it consists 

and into which it will be resolved.

 

 Nothing is more conducive to objectivity than the ability 

methodically and honestly to test everything that you come across in life, 

and always to look at things in such a way that you consider

 what kind of part each of them plays in what kind of universe,

 and what value it has for the universe as a whole.

If you carry out every present task by following right reason assiduously, 

resolutely, and with kindness; if rather than getting distracted by irrelevancies, 

you keep your guardian spirit unspoiled and steady, 

as though you had to surrender it at any moment; 

if you engage with the task not with expectations or evasions,

but satisfied if your current performance is in accord 

with nature and if what you say and express is spoken with true  honesty, 

you’ll be living the good life. And there’s no one who can stop you doing so!

 

 

 

 

~ Marcus Aurelius

excerpts from Meditations: The Annotated Edition by Robin Waterfield

art - Light distribution on soap bubble from Le monde physique

with thanks to brainpickings

 

 

 

song of the barren orange tree

Woodcutter.

Cut my shadow from me.

Free me from the torment

of seeing myself without fruit.

Why was I born among mirrors?

The day walks in circles around me,

and the night copies me

in all its stars.

I want to live without seeing myself.

And I will dream that ants

and thistleburrs are my 

leaves and my birds.

Woodcutter.

Cut my shadow from me.

Free me from the torment

of seeing myself without fruit.

~ Federico Garcia Lorca

translation by W.S. Merwin

Lorca and his family at their house in Granada.