beyond our senses

 

Many claim to have found God in the mountains. 

I don’t know what God is, but I admit to having sought her there too.

 Whatever my search, I have found that the pursuit of scientific inquiry —

 its own, necessarily limited kind of truth-seeking — 

can be as much an act of devotion as it is scholarly meditation.

 For to pay attention to the world, to seek its stories, 

to run your fingers along some crack of rock or furrow of tree bark,

 to admire a raptor in flight, to look, closely, at the construction

 of a previously unencountered wildflower —

 to wonder and to seek answers to how these things 

might have come to be in the world — 

are themselves acts of devotion,

 ways of knowing, 

ways of longing for communion.

The world around us is not what we see. 

It holds a life-giving, gift-giving,

 invisible order everywhere and always. 

It is an order of musical and exultant beauty. 

It has a mysterious and radiant splendor. 

Everywhere we look, if we would look,

 the natural world is making beauty, 

without fanfare, and the work is so plain,

 intelligent, playful, and devoted, 

that there is only one word for it: 

cosmic.

There is something numinous and joyful in these encounters, 

a way in which the boundary between the world we sense

 and the world that is beyond our senses becomes, 

for the briefest of moments, thin —

 almost transparent.

Up too early again.

 Listening to the patter of rain dripping from the tree limbs

 onto the tent and the hush of the creek in the darkness.

 Breathing in the scent of earth and rain. 

I can’t believe we are here, 

surrounded by these old trees and mountains, 

with days ahead of us. I’m a little boy all over again, 

incredulous that this place actually exists, 

and I am here in it. 

I want to get up and wander 

down to the creek and feel its black,

 wet, cold aliveness on my skin.

~ Richard J. Nevle and Steven Nightingale

excerpts from The Paradise Notebooks:

 90 Miles across the Sierra Nevada

with thanks to 

The Marginalian by Maria Popova

art by Chiura Obata

making it our own

 

The question is asked, if life’s journey be endless where is its goal? 

The answer is, it is everywhere. 

We are in a palace which has no end, 

but which we have reached. 

By exploring it and extending 

our relationship with it

 we are ever making it more

 and more our own. 

The infant is born in the same universe where lives the adult of ripe mind.

 But its position is not like a schoolboy who has yet to learn his alphabet,

 finding himself in a college class. 

The infant has its own joy of life

 because the world is not a mere road, but a home,

of which it will have more and more as it grows up in wisdom. 

With our road the gain is at the end, 

but with this world of ours the gain is at every step;

 for it is the road and the home in one; 

it leads us on yet gives us shelter.

~ Rabindranath Tagore

 from The Essential Tagore

photo: termite mounds in Australia

by Brian W. Schaller

well done or

For a man regards some deeds as well done and some as evil,

and our Lord does not regard them so,

for everything which exists in nature is of God’s creation,

so that everything which is done has the property of being God’s doing

~ Julian of Norwich

art: Sendan Kendatsuba, banishing evil

from the Nara national museum or Japan

in a handful of God

 

Poetry reveals that there is no empty space.

When your truth forsakes its shyness,

When your fears surrender to your strengths,

You will begin to experience

That all existence

Is a teeming sea of infinite life.

In a handful of ocean water

You could not count all the finely tuned

Musicians

Who are acting stoned

For very intelligent and sane reasons

And of course are becoming extremely sweet

And wild!

In a handful of the sky and earth,

In a handful of God,

We cannot count

All the ecstatic lovers who are dancing there

Behind the mysterious veil.

True art reveals there is no void

Or darkness.

There is no loneliness to the clear-eyed mystic

In this luminous, brimming

Playful world.

~ Hafiz

from The Subject Tonight is Love:

 60 Wild and Sweet Poems of Hafiz 

translated by Daniel Ladinsky

photo: Artists from Tjanpi Desert Weavers let their sisters fly,

 Papulankutja, Western Australia, 2015. 

Photograph: Annieka Skinner

our separatedness and our grief

 

 

What gets you is the knowledge, and it sometimes can fall on you in a clap,

that the dead are gone absolutely from this world. As has been said around here

over and over again, you are not going to see them here anymore, ever.

Whatever was done or said before is done or said for good. Any questions

you think of that you ought to've asked while you had a chance are never

going to be answered. The dead know, and you don't.

 

And yet their absence puts them with you in a way they never were before.

You even maybe know them better than you did before. They stay with you,

and in a way you go with them. They don't live on in your heart, but your

 heart knows them. As your heart gets bigger on the inside, the world gets

bigger on the outside. If the dead had been alive only in this world, you

would forget them, looks like, as soon as they die. But you remember them, 

because they always were living in the other, bigger world while they lived 

in this little one, and this one and the other one are the same. You

can't see this with your eyes looking straight ahead. It's with your side vision, 

so to speak, that you see it. The longer I live, and the better acquainted

I am among the dead, the better I see it. I am telling what I know.

It's our separatedness and our grief that break the world in two.

~ Wendell Berry

from Stand by Me

art by Luke Marston

Coast Salish Artist

what is loved

 

I said to God,

"What are you?"

"I am what is loved.  I am not what should be loved.

for how cruel that would then

be for my

bride."

~ Saint John of the Cross

how heaven pulls earth into its arms

 

Doctor, you say that there are no haloes

around the streetlights in Paris

and what I see is an aberration

caused by old age, an affliction.

I tell you it has taken me all my life

to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,

to soften and blur and finally banish

the edges you regret I don't see,

to learn that the line I called the horizon

does not exist and sky and water,

so long apart, are the same state of being.

Fifty-four years before I could see

Rouen cathedral is built

of parallel shafts of sun,

and now you want to restore

my youthful errors: fixed

notions of top and bottom,

the illusion of three-dimensional space,

wisteria separate

from the bridge it covers.

What can I say to convince you

the Houses of Parliament dissolve

night after night to become

the fluid dream of the Thames?

I will not return to a universe

of objects that don't know each other,

as if islands were not the lost children

of one great continent. The world

is flux, and light becomes what it touches,

becomes water, lilies on water,

above and below water,

becomes lilac and mauve and yellow

and white and cerulean lamps,

small fists passing sunlight

so quickly to one another

that it would take long, streaming hair

inside my brush to catch it.

To paint the speed of light!

Our weighted shapes, these verticals,

burn to mix with air

and changes our bones, skin, clothes

to gases. Doctor,

if only you could see

how heaven pulls earth into its arms

and how infinitely the heart expands

to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

~ Lisel Mueller

from Second Language

Monet Refuses the Operation

with thanks to Poetry Chaikhana

art by Monet

The Way doesn't rise or fall

.

 

19

The Way doesn't rise or fall

those who are blind look for an advantage

sages and wise men escape from this world

where counterfeit truth prevails

rein in your senses don't indulge them

be ever mindful and nothing else

lose your body beneath a patched robe

and say good-bye to a thousand rebirths

 

 

21

A life lasts one hundred years

but which of us gets them all

precarious as a teetering thatched hut

or a leaking boat in a storm

mediocre monks are pathetic

would-be masters are sadder still

the world's empty ways aren't what they were

some days I shut my old gate tight

 

 

22

Green mist red clouds a trail through bamboo

and a hut where quiet lasts

just let go and worries end

stop to think and the mind reappears

an unpolished mirror holds millions of shapes

a bell doesn't ring until it is rung

our original nature is the real buddha

nothing solid or empty nothing old or new

 

 

23

A monk in the wild sits quiet and relaxed 

he survives all year on what karma brings

bamboo and yellow flowers occupy his thoughts

white clouds and streams simplify his life

he doesn't mistake a rock for a tiger on a hill

or the image of a bow for a snake in a bowl

in the woods he knows nothing of the world's affairs

at sunset he watches the crows return

 

 

 

~ Stonehouse

from "The Zen Works of Stonehouse"

Book One: Mountain Poems

translated by Red Pine

.

.

wild elegance

Beauty invites us towards profound elegance of soul.
 It reminds us that we are heirs to elegance and nobility of spirit 
and encourages us to awaken the divinity within us.  
We are no longer trapped in mental frames of self-reduction or self-denunciation.

Instead, we feel the desire to celebrate, to give ourselves over 
to the dance of joy and delight.   The overwhelming beauty 
which is God pervades the texture of our soul, transforming all smallness, 
limitation and self-division.  The mystics speak of the excitement of such unity. 
 This is how Marguerite Porete describes it: 

 'Such a Soul, says Love swims in the sea of joy, that is in the sea of delights,
 flowing and running out of the Divinity.  And so she feels no joy,
 for she is joy itself.  She swims and flows in Joy...
 for she dwells in Joy and Joy dwells in her.'   

When we acknowledge the wild beauty of God, we begin to glimpse
 the potential holiness of our neglected wildness.  As humans,
 citizens and believers, we have become domesticated beyond belief.  
We have fallen out of rhythm with our natural wildness.  
What we now call 'being wild' is often misshapen, destructive and violent.
  The natural wildness as the fluency of the soul at one with beauty is foreign to us.  

The call of the wild is a call to the elemental levels of the soul,
 the places of intuition, kinship, swiftness, fluency and the consolation 
of the lonesome that is not lonely.  Our fear of our own wildness 
derives in part from our fear of the formless; but the wild is not the formless
 - it holds immense refinement and, indeed, clarity. 
 The wild has a profound simplicity that carries none of the false burdens 
of brokenness or self-conflict; it flows naturally as one,
 elegant and seamless.  

~ John O'Donohue

from The Invisible Embrace, Beauty

our eyes are turned backward

With all its eyes the natural world looks out

into the Open.  Only our eyes are turned

backward, and surround plant, animal, child

like traps, as they emerge into their freedom.

We know what is really out there only from 

the animal's gaze;  for we take the very young

child and force it around, so that it sees

objects - not the Open, which is so

deep in animals' faces.  Free from death.

We, only, can see death; the free animal

has its decline in back of it, forever,

and God in front, and when it moves, it moves

already in eternity, like a fountain.

Never, not for a single day, do we have

before us that pure space into which flowers

endlessly open.  Always there is World

and never Nowhere without the No: that pure

unseparated element which one breathes

without desire and endlessly knows.  A child

may wander there for hours, through the timeless

stillness, may get lost in it and be 

shaken back.  Or someone dies and is it.

For, nearing death, one doesn't see death; but stares

beyond, perhaps with an animal's vast gaze.

Lovers, if the beloved were not there

blocking the view, are close to it, and marvel...

As if by some mistake, it opens for them

behind each other... But neither can move past

the other, and it changes back to World.

Forever turned toward objects, we see in them

the mere reflection of the realm of freedom,

which we have dimmed.  Or when some animal

mutely, serenely, looks us through and through.

That is what fate means: to be opposite,

to be opposite and nothing else, forever.

If the animal moving toward us so securely
in a different direction had our kind of 
consciousness -, it would wrench us around and drag us
along its path.  But it feels its life as boundless,
unfathomable, and without regard
to its own condition: pure, like its outward gaze.
And where we see the future, it sees all time
and itself within all time, forever healed.

Yet in the alert, warm animal there lies
the pain and burden of an enormous sadness.
For it too feels the presence of what often 
overwhelms us: a memory, as if 
the element we keep pressing toward was once
more intimate, more true, and our communion
infinitely tender.  Here all is distance;
there it was breath.  After that first home,
the second seems ambiguous and drafty.

Oh bliss of the tiny creature which remains
forever inside the womb that was its shelter;
joy of the gnat which, still within, leaps up
even at its marriage: for everything is womb.
And look at the half-assurance of the bird,
which knows both inner and outer, from its source,
as if it were the soul of an Etruscan,
flown out of a dead man received inside a space,
but with his reclining image as the lid.
And how bewildered is any womb-born creature
that has to fly.  As if terrified and fleeing
from itself, it zigzags through the air, the way 
a crack runs through a teacup.  So the bat
quivers across the porcelain of evening.

And we: spectators, always, everywhere,
turned toward the world of objects, never outward.
It fills us.  We arrange it.  It breaks down.
We rearrange it, then break down ourselves.
Who has twisted us around like this , so that 
no matter what we do, we are in the posture
of someone going away?  Just as, upon
the farthest hill, which shows him his whole valley
one last time, he turns, stops, lingers -,
so we live here, forever taking leave.




~ Rainer Maria Rilke

The Eighth Elegy 
from Duino Elegies
photo by shreve stockton

every cell

.Every creature has a religion. Every

foot is a shrine where

a secret candle

burns.

.

Every cell in us worships

God.

.

Every arrow in the bow of desire

has rushed out in hope

of nearing

Him.

.

~ St. Thomas Aquinas

.

the inner landscape of beauty

 

~ John O'Donohue

ten thousand flowers

 

Ten thousand flowers in spring, the moon in autumn,

a cool breeze in summer, snow in winter.

If your mind isn’t clouded by unnecessary things,

this is the best season of your life.

~ Wu Men Hui-k’ai

from The Enlightened Heart:

 An Anthology of Sacred Poetry

 by Stephen Mitchell

the first peace

 

The first peace, which is the most important, 

is that which comes within the souls of people 

when they realize their relationship, their oneness

 with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize 

at the center of the universe dwells the Great Spirit, 

and that its center is really everywhere, 

it is within each of us.

This grand show is eternal.

 It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once; 

a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, 

eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on seas and continents

 and islands, each in its turn, 

as the round earth rolls.

~ John Muir

self or non-self

 

 

 

 

 

  The biological identity of most organisms can’t be pried apart from the life

 of their microbial symbiotes. The word 'ecology’ has its roots in the Greek word oikos, meaning 'house’,

 'household’, or 'dwelling place’. Our bodies, like those of all other organisms, are dwelling places.

Life is nested biomes all the way down.

We can’t be defined on anatomical grounds because our bodies are shared with microbes,

 and consist of more microbial cells than our own - cows can’t eat grass,

 for example, but their microbial populations can, and cows’ bodies have evolved

 to house the microbes that sustain them.

Neither can we be defined developmentally, as the organism that proceeds from the fertilization

 of an animal egg, because we depend, like all mammals, on our symbiotic partners

 to direct parts of our development programs.

Nor is it possible to define us genetically, as bodies made up of cells that share an identical genome

 —many symbiotic microbial partners are inherited from our mothers alongside our own DNA,

 and at points in our evolution art history, microbial associates have permanently

 insinuated themselves into the cells of their hosts: our mitochondria have their own genome,

 as do plants’ chloroplasts, and at least 8 per cent of the human genome originated in viruses

 (we can even swap cells with other humans when we grow into 'chimeras’,

 formed when mothers and fetuses exchange cells or genetic material in utero).

Nor can our immune systems be taken as a measure of individuality, 

although our immune cells are often thought of as answering this question for us

 by distinguishing self from 'non-self’.

Immune systems are as concerned with managing our relationships with our resident microbes

 as fighting off external attackers, and appear to have evolved to enable colonization

 by microbes rather than prevent it. 

 

~ Merlin Sheldrake
from Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, 

Change Our Minds, And Shape Our Futures

 with thanks to love is a place