wonder and unity

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wonder is where it starts, and though wonder is also where it ends,

 this is no futile path. Whether admiring a patch of moss, a crystal,

 flower, or golden beetle, a sky full of clouds, a sea with the serene,

 vast sigh of its swells, or a butterfly wing with its arrangement of crystalline ribs,

 contours, and the vibrant bezel of its edges, the diverse scripts and ornamentations 

of its markings, and the infinite, sweet, delightfully inspired transitions

 and shadings of its colors — whenever I experience part of nature,

 whether with my eyes or another of the five senses, whenever I feel drawn in,

 enchanted, opening myself momentarily to its existence and epiphanies,

 that very moment allows me to forget the avaricious, blind world of human need,

 and rather than thinking or issuing orders, rather than acquiring or exploiting,

 fighting or organizing, all I do in that moment is “wonder,” like Goethe, 

and not only does this wonderment establish my brotherhood with him,

 other poets, and sages, it also makes me a brother to those wondrous things

 I behold and experience as the living world: butterflies and moths, beetles,

 clouds, rivers and mountains, because while wandering down the path of wonder,

 I briefly escape the world of separation and enter the world of unity.

Our universities fail to guide us down the easiest paths to wisdom… 

Rather than teaching a sense of awe, they teach the very opposite: 

counting and measuring over delight, sobriety over enchantment, 

a rigid hold on scattered individual parts over an affinity for the unified and whole. 

These are not schools of wisdom, after all, but schools of knowledge,

 though they take for granted that which they cannot teach — 

the capacity for experience, the capacity for being moved,

 the Goethean sense of wonderment.

 

 

 

 

 

~ Hermann Hesse

from  Butterflies: Reflections, Tales, and Verse

with thanks to the marginalian

 

a few words on the soul

 

 

 

 

 

 

We have a soul at times.

No one's got it nonstop,

for keeps.

 

Day after day,

year after year

may pass without it.

 

Sometimes 

it will settle for a while

only in childhood's fears and raptures.

Sometimes only in astonishment

that we are old.

 

It rarely lends a hand

in uphill tasks,

like moving furniture,

or lifting luggage,

or going miles in shoes that pinch.

 

It usually steps out

 whenever meat needs chopping

or forms have to be filled.

 

For every thousand conversations

it participates in one,

if even that,

since it prefers silence. 

 

Just when our body goes from ache to pain

it slips off duty.

 

It's picky:

it doesn't like seeing us in crowds,

our hustling for a dubious advantage

and creaky machinations make it sick.

 

Joy and sorrow

aren't two different feelings for it.

It attends us

only when the two are joined.

 

We can count on it

when we're sure of nothing

and curious about everything.

 

Among the material objects

it favors clocks with pendulums

and mirrors, which keep on working

even when no one is looking.

 

It won't say where it comes from

or when it's taking off again,

though it's clearly expecting such questions.

 

We need it

but apparently 

it needs us

for some reason too.

 

 

 

 

~ Wislawa Szymborska

from Monologue of a Dog 

 

 

 

 

the power of speech

 

 

 

 

 

Speech is such a powerful influence in our lives because we speak a lot.

Speech conditions our relationships, conditions our minds and hearts, and

to a great degree conditions consequences in the future.  

 

 The Buddha outlined a practice for staying mindful

 of how another person is addressing us, without getting caught up in our own reactivity, 

remaining compassionate for their welfare, with a mind of lovingkindness.

... there are five courses of speech that others may

use when they address you: their speech may be timely or

untimely, true or untrue, gentle or harsh, connected with

good or with harm, spoken with a mind of lovingkindness

or with inner hate....

 

you should train yourselves thus:

Our minds will remain unaffected, and we shall utter no

evil words; we shall abide compassionate for their welfare,

with a mind of lovingkindness...

 

One speaks at the right time, in accordance with facts,

speaks what is useful,,,

 

 

 

 

 

 ~ Buddha

 from Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening

by Joseph Goldstein

to catch a look at yourself

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I

I flinch from something that shuffles slantwise through sleet,
A fragment of what is to come.
A wall broken loose. Something without eyes. Hard.
A face of teeth!
A lone wall. Or is the house there
although I do not see it?
The Future: an army of empty houses
that grope their way ahead through sleet.

II

Two truths approach each other. One comes from within,
one comes from without--and where they meet you have the chance
to catch a look at yourself.
Noticing what is about to happen, you shout desperately: "Stop!
Anything, anything, as long as I don't have to know myself."
And there is a boat that wants to put in--tries to, right here--
it will try again thousands of times.
Out of the forest's dark comes a long boat hook
that's pushed through the open window
among the party guests who have danced themselves warm.

III

The apartment I've lived in most of my life is to be evacuated. It's already
emptied of everything. The anchor has let go--but despite the mournful
air it's still the lightest apartment in the city. Truth needs no furniture.
I've gone one round on life's circle and come back to the starting point: a
bare room. Scenes from my early life take shape on the walls like Egyptian
paintings inside a burial chamber. But they are fading. The light is too
strong. The windows have enlarged. The empty apartment is a big tele-
scope pointed at the sky. It's as quiet here as a Quaker meeting. Nothing
heard b ut the pigeons of the backyards, their cooings.

 

 

 

 

 

~ Tomas Transtromer

   Preludes

 art by Picasso

 

 

unlock the fullness of life

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life.

 It turns what we have into enough, and more. 

It turns denial into acceptance,

 chaos to order, confusion to clarity.

 

 It can turn a meal into a feast, 

a house into a home, 

a stranger into a friend. 

 

Gratitude makes sense of our past,

 brings peace for today and creates a vision for tomorrow.

 

 

 

 

 ~ Melody Beattie

with thanks to Heron Dance Art Journal

shoreline of the magnificent

 

 

 

 

 

The visible world is only the shoreline of the magnificent
ocean of the invisible. The invisible is not empty, but is
textured and tense with presences [energies]. These
presences cannot be named; they can only be sensed, not seen.

When you name a dimension of your experience, one of your
qualities or difficulties...you give it an identity. It then responds
to you according to the tone of its name...

The wildness of the invisible world is nameless. It has no name.
A first step towards reawakening respect for your inner life
may be to become aware of the private collage of dead names
you have for your inner life. 

 

Often the experiences of
wilderness can return us to the nameless wildness within.
Sometimes, go away to a wild place of your own. Leave
your name and the grid of intentions and projects and images
which mark you out as citizen Z. Leave it all and let yourself
just slip back into the rhythms of your intimate wildness.[rhythm]

 
You will be surprised at the lost terrains, wells, and mountains
that you will rediscover, territories which have been buried
under well-meant but dead names. To go beyond confinement
is to rediscover yourself.

 

 

 

 

John O'Donohue
from Eternal Echoes

with thanks to Mystic Meandering

 

 

 

 

an unexpected visitor, a joy, a depression, a meanness

.

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival,
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
Some momentary awareness come 

As an unexpected visitor,
Welcome and entertain them all,
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows
Who violently sweep your house
Empty of its furniture,
Still, treat each guest honorably 

They may be clearing you out
For some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the shame, the malice,
Meet them at the door laughing
And invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
Because each has been sent
As a guide from above.


.
~ Rumi

.

what matters

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

~ Rick Hanson

 

 

 

 

words

Being tired of people who come with words, but no speech,

I made my way to the snow-covered island.

 

The wild does not have words.

The pages free of handwriting stretched out on all sides!

I came upon the tracks of reindeer in the snow.

Speech but no words.

~ Tomas Transtromer

translation by Robert Bly

from The Half-Finished Heaven

allegro

I play Haydn after a black day

and feel a simple warmth in my hands.

The keys are willing. Soft hammers strike.

The resonance green, lively and calm.

The music says freedom exists

and someone doesn't pay the emperor tax.

I push down my hands in my Haydnpockets

and imitate a person looking on the world calmly.

I hoist the Haydnflag - it signifies:

"We don't give in. But want peace.'

The music is a glass-house on the slope

where the stones fly, the stones roll.

And the stones roll right through

but each pane stays whole.

~ Tomas Transtromer

from New Collected Poems

translated by Robin Fulton

making it right: a prophecy

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The duty of a musician is for us to take anything that

happens on stage and make it part of the music.

 

~ Herbie Hancock 

 

 

No wrong notes in jazz, said the musician

and the poet insisted, no wrong words,

No wrong leaf, said the tree,

and field said, no wrong grass.

No wrong time, promised the friend,

and the river said, no wrong rock.

And the heart said, no wrong love,

but the mind said, no, that's wrong.

And the wrong love replanted itself like grass

and grew wild in all the wrong places

like a gorgeous weed, like a tap-rooted song

until the whole field was beautifully wrong, wrong.

 

 

 

~ Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

from All the Honey

 

 

 

grace

"What is grace?" I asked God.
And He said,

"All that happens."

Then He added, when I looked perplexed,

"Could not lovers
say that every moment in their Beloved's arms
was grace?

Existence is my arms,
though I well understand how one can turn
away from
me,
until the heart has
wisdom."

 

~ Saint John of the Cross

in everything...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 I seek to reach the innermost part of myself...

One thing no longer existed for him, the wish to have teachers
and to listen to teachings.

He asked himself - "But what is this, what you have sought to
learn from teachings and from teachers, and what they, who
have taught you much, were still unable to teach you?" And
he found: "It was the self, the purpose and essence of which
I sought to learn. It was the self I wanted to free myself from,
which I sought to overcome. But I was not able to overcome
it, could only deceive it, could only flee from it, only hide from
it.

No thing in this world has kept my thoughts thus busy, as this
my very own self, this mystery of one being one and being
separated... And there is nothing I know less about... I know
nothing about myself! I searched Atman, I searched Brahman,
I was willing to dissect myself and pull off all of its layers, to
find the core of all peels in its unknown interior, the Atman, life
the divine part, the ultimate part. But I have lost myself in the
process. I do not want to kill and dissect myself any longer, to
find a secret behind the ruins.

I want to get to know myself, the secret of Siddhartha.

[The beauty of this world] was no longer the veil of Maya, was
no longer a pointless coincidental diversity of mere appearance,
despicable to the deeply thinking Brahman, who scorns diversity
who seeks unity, but the beauty was also in Siddhartha, the singular
and the divine lived hidden - the purpose and the essential
properties were not somewhere behind the things, they were in
them, in everything...



~  Hermann Hesse

from: Siddhartha

with thanks to Mystic Meandering

 

 

 

the self you leave behind

 

 

 

 

 

 

The self you leave behind
is only a skin you have outgrown.

 
Don't grieve for it.
Look to the wet, raw, unfinished
self, the one you are becoming.
The world, too, sheds its skin:
politicians, cataclysms, ordinary days.

 
It's easy to lose this tenderly
unfolding moment. Look for it
as if it were the first green blade
after a long winter. Listen for it
as if it were the first clear tone
in a place where dawn is heralded by bells.

And if all that fails,

wash your own dishes.
Rinse them.
Stand in your kitchen at your sink.
Let cold water run between your fingers.
Feel it.

 

 

 

 

 ~  Pat Schneider

 from  Olive Street Transfer

with thanks to Poetry Chaikhana

how healing comes

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Healing comes less like a falcon

            with mighty wings,

                        and more like an earthworm

            that slowly, slowly moves

beneath it all, tightening up,

            then stretching out, tightening up

                        and stretching out, a simple

            two-part rhythm. Some days,

that is all the body can do.

            Contract. Expand. Contract. Expand.

                        In the meantime, through this

            artless act, what is dense

becomes porous.

            In the meantime, what is stuck

                        and clotted gets moved around.

            What is dead passes through,

is processes by the grit inside.

            There are tunnels now in the soil of me,

                        thin channels of recovery-

            a blessed loosening,

a gradual renewal, It's unhurried, but

            I feel it, the air, the rain

                        the life coming in.

 

 

 

 

 

~ Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

    from All the Honey