let the spirit move your lips and direct your tongue

You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts;

And when you can no longer dwell in the solitude of your heart

you live in your lips, and sound is a diversion and a pastime.

And in much of your talking, thinking is half murdered.

For thought is a bird of space, that in a cage of words

may indeed unfold its wings but cannot fly.

There are those among you who seek the talkative

through fear of being alone.

The silence of aloneness reveals to their eyes

their naked selves and they would escape.

And there are those who talk, and without knowledge

or forethought reveal a truth which they themselves do not understand.

And there are those who have the truth within them,

but they tell it not in words.

In the bosom of such as these

the spirit dwells in rhythmic silence.

~ Kahlil Gibran

from The Prophet

art by Andrea Dezsö

with thanks to The Marginalian 

by Maria Popova

have you considered

Have you considered the possibility
that everything you believe is wrong,
not merely off a bit, but totally wrong,
nothing like things as they really are?

If you've done this, you know how durably fragile
those phantoms we hold in our heads are,
those wisps of thought that people die and kill for,
betray lovers for, give up lifelong friendships for.

If you've not done this, you probably don't understand this poem,
or think it's not even a poem, but a bit of opaque nonsense,
occupying too much of your day's time,
so you probably should stop reading it here, now.

But if you've arrived at this line,
maybe, just maybe, you're open to that possibility,
the possibility of being absolutely completely wrong,
about everything that matters.

How different the world seems then:
everyone who was your enemy is your friend,
everything you hated, you now love,
and everything you love
slips through your fingers like sand.

 

 

 

 

~ Federico Moramarco

One Hundred and Eighty Degrees

from The City of Eden: Poems from a Life

allow the unfolding from within

Allow your judgments their own undisturbed development, 

which, like any unfolding, must come from within 

and can by nothing be forced or hastened. 

 

Everything is gestation and then birth. 

 

To allow each impression and each embryo of a feeling

 to complete itself in the dark, in the unsayable, the not-knowing,

 beyond the reach of one's own understanding, 

and humbly and patiently to await the dawning of a new clarity: 

that alone is the way of the artist -

in understanding as in creating.

 

...

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart

and try to love the questions themselves...

Do not now seek the answers, 

which cannot be given to you because you will not be able to live them.

And the point is, to live everything.

Live the questions now.

Perhaps you will then gradually,

without noticing it,

live along some distant day into the answer.

 

 

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

 from Letters to a Young Poet, April 23, 1903

its life is one

 

 

 

 


The body
is a single creature, whole,
its life is one, never less than one, or more,
so is its world, and so
are two bodies in their love for one another.
In ignorance of this
we talk ourselves to death.




~ Wendell Berry
Sabbaths, XIV

the larger circle of all creatures

We clasp the hands of those who go before us,
and the hands of those who come after us;
we enter the little circle of each other's arms,
and the larger circle of lovers
whose hands are joined in a dance,
and the larger circle of all creatures,
passing in and out of life,
who move also in a dance,
to a music so subtle and vast
that no one hears it except in fragments.



~ Wendell Berry

photo Jane Goodall with a 
chimpanzee at the Tchimpounga 
Chimpanzee Rehabilitation Centre, 
Congo (Brazzaville).

some backward perspective

 

Billy looked at the clock on the gas stove. 

He had an hour to kill before the saucer came. 

He went into the living room, swinging the bottle like a dinner bell, 

turned on the television. He came slightly unstuck in time, 

saw the late movie backwards, then forwards again. 

It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War

 and the gallant men who flew them. 

Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this:

American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses, 

took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, 

a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, 

sucked bullets and shell fragments 

from some of the planes and crewmen.

The bombers opened their bomb-bay doors, 

exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, 

gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, 

and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes.

The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own,

 which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck

 more fragments from the crewmen and planes.

When the bombers got back to their base,

 the steel cylinders were taken from the racks

 and shipped back to the United States of America, 

where factories were operating night and day, 

dismantling the cylinders, 

separating the dangerous contents into minerals.

Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work.

The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas.

 It was their business to put them into the ground, 

to hide them cleverly,

 so they would never hurt anybody ever again.

The American fliers turned in their uniforms, 

became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, 

Billy Pilgrim supposed. 

That wasn't in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. 

Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, 

without exception, conspired biologically 

to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve,

 he supposed.

~ Kurt Vonnegut

from Slaughterhouse Five

photo: Dresden after WWII bombing

with thanks to love is a place

poem of one world

 

This morning

the beautiful white heron

was floating along above the water

and then into the sky of this

the one world

we all belong to

where everything

sooner or later

is part of everything else

which thought made me feel

for a little while

quite beautiful myself.

~ Mary Oliver

from A Thousand Mornings: Poems

photo by  Ilan Horn

with thanks to Intrinsic Heart

at the core of delusion

  

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

~ Kurt Vonnegut 

from Mother Night

 

still I wonder: isn’t there a rock-solid unchanging

 “me” 

hidden somewhere underneath it all?

This unexamined self feels like an isolated, self-sufficient, permanent individual, 

essentially separate from others and all that surrounds it. Yet even a few moments

 of self-reflection suggests otherwise. My body is not the same as when I was eight

 or eighteen years old. If all humans are mortal, then my life will also end,

 exact time of departure unknown. Similarly, all my feelings of happiness and sadness

 come and go, arise and cease, changing gradually or suddenly,

 but always, inevitably, changing.

Looking closely, I also see that I’m not a self-contained, entirely independent individual.

 I need food, water, and air to survive. I speak and write a language generously passed on to me 

by others from long ago. I engage in everyday activities that were all part of my cultural training

 from childhood onward: brushing my teeth, exchanging greetings of “good morning”

 and saying “good night,” attending ceremonies, weddings, funerals.

Even at the most basic level of existence, I did not arise as a spontaneous,

 self-created human being. I was born and nurtured through the union and love 

of my parents, and they are also descendants of many ancestors before them.

 We are all “dependently related” beings, developing and aging in rapidly changing societies.

When we conduct our lives as though, all evidence to the contrary, we are separate,

 permanent, unitary selves, we find ourselves constantly living in fear of the large,

 looming shadow of change. Actions based on a mistaken sense of self, or “ego,”

 as an unchanging, isolated essence are filled with anxious struggle.

 We fight many futile battles against the way things actually are. How are they really?

 They are changing, connected, fluid. It’s as though we are standing waist-deep

 in the middle of a rushing river, our arms outstretched wide,

 straining to stop the flow.

This mistaken sense of self arises as a solidified set of beliefs about who we are

 and how the world is. When we proceed on that basis, all our life experiences are filtered

 through a rigorous, simplistic, for-and-against screening process:

 “Will this person or event enhance my permanent sense of self? 

Will this encounter threaten the ideas I’ve already accumulated?”

 

 Believing the inner voice of deception, we grasp and defend and ignore in service to an illusion,

 causing suffering for ourselves and others.

Letting go of the false sense of self feels liberating, like being released from a claustrophobic prison

 of mistaken view. What a relief to discover that we don’t have to pretend to be something 

we’re not! The initially surprising and challenging news of “no solid self” 

turns out to be a gentle invitation into a more spacious approach to living

 and being with others. Releasing fixation on permanence goes hand in hand

 with taking brave steps toward more communication and harmony in our lives,

 our actions, our relationships, and our work.

We might call this fluid inter-being an “open self,” one that is more sensitive

 to other living beings and nature. This open sense of self allows us to proceed from empathy

 and compassion for ourselves and for those suffering around us and elsewhere.

 With the dissolving of the seemingly solid walls of ego’s fragile tower, our experience is porous

 and permeable, less cut off and isolated. As we gradually release the old commitment

 to conquering the unconquerable, to denying the undeniable, we explore the many genuine

 and fresh possibilities in our ever-changing situation.

 

 

 

 

 

~  Gaylon Ferguson

with thanks to Lion's Roar

 

 

what makes them beautiful

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Look at the animals roaming the forest: God’s spirit dwells within them.

 Look at the birds flying across the sky: God’s spirit dwells within them.

 Look at the tiny insects crawling in the grass: God’s spirit dwells within them. . . .

 

 Look too at the great trees of the forest; look at the wild flowers and the grass in the fields;

 look even at your crops. God’s spirit is present within all plants as well.

 The presence of God’s spirit in all living things is what makes them beautiful; 

and if we look with God’s eyes, nothing on the earth is ugly. 

 

 

 

from The Letters of Pelagius: 

Celtic Soul Friend,

 edited by Robert Van de Weyer

 with thanks to Richard Rohr's Daily Meditations

 photo: Beluga Whales

 

 

nameless

 

In Love there are no days or nights,

For lovers it is all the same.

The musicians have gone, yet the Sufis listen;

In Love there is a beginning but no end.

Each has a name for his Beloved,

But for me my Beloved is nameless.

Sa’di, if you destroy an idol,

Then destroy the idol of the self.

~ Sa’di

from Islamic Mystical Poetry:

 Sufi Verse from the Early Mystics to Rumi

English version by Mahmood Jamal

with thanks to Poetry Chaikhana

all things arise, abide, and fall away

 

 

 

 

 

Sometimes the quiet of Hakujuan, which was one of its only virtues, 

was broken by the noise of guests, often they were give to complaint -

whining about conditions, gossiping about the temples and their struggles,

being angry in a world designed to cure anger.

 

She would listen, but as the years passed she found herself 

strangely dreaming sometimes.

 

The waves of feeling would roll past, and she could feel

life rising and falling like the deck of a ship - as though

her own body were rolling through the waves of time.

 

Arising, abiding, and falling away -

this is all the Blessed One taught.

This is all it is, she thought, this is it.

 

All things arise, abide, and fall away, and we suffer only because we 

hold on to what we are bound to lose,  Pain is a given, but suffering -

that we make.

 

This is all he taught, she reminded herself,

walking through the rooms of the nunnery as though

rowing a raft through the tide -

up, down, up again. 

 

...

And then she saw that arising arose, abided, and fell away -

and that abiding arose, abided, and fell away - 

and that falling away arose, abided, and fell away.

She saw that knowing this arose, abided, and fell away.

 

Then she knew there was nothing more than this, 

no ground, nothing to lean on stronger than the cane she held,

nothing to lean upon at all, and no one leaning, 

and she opened the clenched fist in her mind and let go

and fell into the midst of everything. 

 

 

 

~ Teijitsu

from the lonely one, found in

Women of the Way by Sallie Tisdale

 

 

 

 

you who want knowledge

 

You who want

knowledge,

seek the Oneness

within

There you

will find

the clear mirror

already waiting

~ Hadewijch

English version by Jane Hirshfield

with thanks to Poetry Chaikhana

no past or future

 

Have you not noticed

that love is silence?

It may be while holding the hand of another

or looking lovingly at a child,

or taking in the beauty of an evening.

Love has no past or future, and so it is

with this extraordinary state of silence.

~ J. Krishnamurti

rest in inaction

 

You have only to rest in inaction 

and things will transform themselves. 

Smash your form and body,

 spit out hearing and eyesight, 

forget you are a thing among other things, 

and you may join in great unity 

with the deep and boundless.

~ Chuang Tzu

with thanks to love is a place

photo: sleeping sperm whales

the illusion of self as a unity

 

Even the most spiritual and highly cultivated of men habitually

 sees the world and himself through the lenses of delusive formulas

 and artless simplifications — and most of all himself. 

For it appears to be an inborn and imperative need of all men

 to regard the self as a unit. However often and however grievously

 this illusion is shattered, it always mends again… 

And if ever the suspicion of their manifold being dawns upon men

 of unusual powers and of unusually delicate perceptions, 

so that, as all genius must, they break through the illusion 

of the unity of the personality and perceive that the self is made up

 of a bundle of selves, they have only to say so and at once

 the majority puts them under lock and key.

Every ego, so far from being a unity is in the highest degree

 a manifold world, a constellated heaven, a chaos of forms, 

of states and stages, of inheritances and potentialities.

 It appears to be a necessity as imperative as eating and breathing

 for everyone to be forced to regard this chaos as a unity 

and to speak of his ego as though it were a one-fold

 and clearly detached and fixed phenomenon.

 Even the best of us shares the delusion.

[These selves] form a unity and a supreme individuality; 

and it is in this higher unity alone, not in the several characters, 

that something of the true nature of the soul is revealed.

Love of one’s neighbor is not possible without love of oneself… 

Self-hate is really the same thing as sheer egoism, 

and in the long run breeds the same cruel isolation and despair.

~ Hermann Hesse

from Steppenwolf

with thanks to The Marginalian by Maria Popova