the public bath

 

Imagine the phenomenal world as a furnace

heating water for the public bath.

Some people carry baskets of dung

to keep the furnace going,  Call them

materialists, energetic, fire-stoking citizens.

One of those brags how he's collected

and carried twenty dung baskets today,

while his friend has brought six!

They think the counting up at nightfall

is where truth lies. They love the smoke smell

of dried dung, and how it blazes up like gold!

If you give them musk or any fragrance

of soul intelligence, they find it unpleasant

and turn away. Others sit in the hot bathwater

and get clean. They use the world differently.

They love the feel of purity, and they have

dust marks on their foreheads from bowing down.

They are separated by a wall from those

who feed the fires, busy in the boiler room

belittling each other. Sometimes, though,

one of those leaves the furnace,

takes off the burnt smelling rags,

and sits in the cleansing water.

The mystery is how the obsessions

of the furnace stokers keep the bathwater

of the others simmering perfectly.

They seem opposed, but they're necessary

to each other's work: the proud piling up

of fire worship, the humble disrobing

and emptying out of purification.

As the sun dries wet dung to make it

ready to heat water, so dazzling

sparks fly from the burning filth.

~ Rumi

from The Book of Love

translations by Coleman Barks

angels grumble

 

Every time a man upon the path

Does not keep his

Word.

Some angels grumble

And have to remove a few of

The bets

They had placed upon

His heart

To win.

~ Hafiz

from The Subject Tonight is Love

translations by Daniel Ladinsky

the kind of friend you are

.

This is the kind of Friend

You are -

Without making me realize

My soul's anguished history,

You slip into my house at night,

And while I am sleeping,

You silently carry off

All my suffering and sordid past 

In Your beautiful 

Hands.

.

~ Hafiz

from The Subject Tonight is Love

translation by Daniel Ladinsky

the false dissolves when it is discovered

 

Contemplate life as infinite, undivided, ever present, ever active,

 until you realise yourself as one with it.

 It is not even very difficult, for you will be returning

 only to your own natural condition.

Once you realise that all comes from within, 

that the world in which you live has not been projected onto you but by you,

 your fear comes to an end. 

Without this realisation you identify yourself with the externals,

 like the body, mind, society, nation, humanity, even God or the Absolute.

 But these are all escapes from fear. 

It is only when you fully accept your responsibility

 for the little world in which you live and watch the process of its creation,

 preservation and destruction, that you may be free from your imaginary bondage.

 You are in bondage by inadvertence. Attention liberates. 

You are taking so many things for granted. Begin to question. 

The most obvious things are the most doubtful.

 Askyourself such questions as:

  'Am I really so-and-so?’

 ‘Who am I, anyhow?

  the false dissolves when it is discovered. 

All hangs on the idea 'I am'.

 Examine it very thoroughly. It lies at the root of every trouble.

 

It is a sort of skin that separates you from the reality.

 The real is both within and without the skin, but the skin itself is not real.

 This 'I am' idea was not born with you. 

~ Nisargadatta Maharaj

from I am That

with thanks to love is a place

ready-made knowledge

 

The role of the teacher is to create the conditions for invention

 rather than provide ready-made knowledge.

 ~ Papert

Ready-made knowledge can only be memorized;

 knowledge is not truly our own until we are capable of reproducing

 the given content in a form of our own making. 

Memorizing is but a negative condition; true,

 organic assimilation is impossible without 

inner transformation of what we learn.

All rules for study are summed up in this one: 

learn only in order to create.

~ Schelling

from On University Studies 

with thanks to love is a place

(Seymour Papert, an MIT professor, believed that teachers

 should create conditions for invention rather than provide ready-made knowledge.

 He argued that students should be allowed to learn through

 exploration and discovery, rather than being told what to think.

 Papert's ideas have been influential

 in the development of constructivist learning theory, 

which emphasizes the importance of active learning

 and the construction of knowledge by the learner.)

~ AI generated

express in action what you are

 

Once you realize that the road is the goal and that you are always on the road,

not to reach a goal, but to enjoy its beauty and its wisdom,

life ceases to be a task and becomes natural and simple,

in itself an ecstasy.

After all, what do you really want?

Not perfection; you are already perfect.

What you seek is to express in action what you are.

For this you have a body and a mind.

Take them in hand and make them serve you.

~ Nisargadatta Maharaj

excerpts from I am That

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