see no stranger

 

 

 

 

See no stranger has become a practice that defines my relationships. . . .

 

 Seeing no stranger begins in wonder. 

It is to look upon the face of anyone and choose to say: 

You are a part of me I do not yet know. 

Wonder is the wellspring for love. 

 

Who we wonder about determines whose stories we hear 

and whose joy and pain we share. Those we grieve with,

 those we sit with and weep with, are ultimately those we organize

 with and advocate for. 

 

When a critical mass of people come together to wonder about one another,

 grieve with one another, and fight with and for one another, we begin to build

 the solidarity needed for collective liberation and transformation

—a solidarity rooted in love. . . .

Out in the world, I notice the unconscious biases that arise in me

 when I look at faces on the street or in the news. 

To practice seeing each of them as a sister or brother or family member, 

I say in my mind: You are a part of me I do not yet know. 

 

Through conscious repetition, I am practicing orienting to the world

 with wonder and preparing myself for the possibility of connection.

 (Sometimes I do this with animals and the earth, too!) 

 

It opens me up to pay attention to their story. When their story is painful, 

I make excuses to turn back—“It’s too overwhelming” or “It’s not my place”

—but I hold the compass and remember that all I need to do is be present

 to their pain and find a way to grieve with them. 

If I can sit with their pain, I begin to ask:

What do they need?

 

 

 

~  Valarie Kaur

 Australian aboriginal art

 

 

 

to spareness

.

You lean toward nonexistence,

but have not yet become it entirely.

For this reason, you can still be praised.

The tree unleafing enters your dominion.

An early snowfall shows you abide in all things.

Your two dimensions are line and inclination.

Therefore desire,

though is incinders each mote of its object, itself is spare.

The late paintings of Turner

prove your slender depths without limit.

The beauty too of shakuhachi and cello.

"Winter darkness. Rain. No crickets singing."

-You are there, pulling hard on the rope-end.

Remembering you, I remember also compassion.

I cannot explain this.

Nor how you live in a teabowl

or in a stone that has spent a long time in a river.

Nor the way you at times can signal your own contradiction,

meaning extra, but not by much-

"Brother, can you spare a dime," one thin man asks another.

Any room, however cluttered, gestures toward you,

declaring:

"Here lives this, not that."

In mathematics, the modest "<" sign gestures toward you.

Your season is surely November,

your fruit, persimmons ripening by coldness.

Your sound a crow cry, a bus idling at night by roadside.

Without apparent effect,

and so you remind of starlight on the colors of a cow's hide.

Your proposition, like you, is simple, of interest only to the human soul:

vast reach of all that is not, and still something is.

~ Jane Hirshfield

i am

i am a little church(no great cathedral)

far from the splendor and squalor of hurrying cities

-i do not worry if briefer days grow briefest,

i am not sorry when sun and rain make april

my life is the life of the reaper and the sower;

my prayers are prayers of earth's own clumsily striving

(finding and losing and laughing and crying)children

whose any sadness or joy is my grief or my gladness

around me surges a miracle of unceasing

birth and glory and death and resurrection:

over my sleeping self float flaming symbols

of hope,and i wake to a perfect patience of mountains

i am a little church(far from the frantic

world with its rapture and anguish)at peace with nature

-i do not worry if longer nights grow longest;

i am not sorry when silence becomes singing

winter by spring,i lift my diminutive spire to

merciful Him Whose only now is forever:

standing erect in the deathless truth of His presence

(welcoming humbly His light and proudly His darkness)

~ e.e.cummings

.from E. E. Commings:Selected Poems

 

adrift

.

Let my dreams while I'm wide-awake
loose. Let me be drowned, baptized,
in the light given me. Day comes around,
night, fall, winter, spring,
summer. Leaves over head, under foot.
Waves arrive, buffets from friends
offended, enemies. Let it all come:
this is my way, this is the canoe I'm in.



~ William Stafford

carry my dreams

 

small horses ride me

carry my dreams

of prairies and frontiers

where once

the first people roamed

claimed union with the earth

no right to own or possess

no sense of territory

all boundaries

placed by unseen ones

here I will give you thunder

shatter your hearts with rain

let snow soothe you

make your healing water

clear sweet

a sacred spring

where the thirsty

may drink

animals all

~ Bell Hooks (Gloria Jean Watkins)

 Appalachian Elegy #5

art by Harrison Begay

a blessing

 

~ The Blessing - Aotearoa - 

New Zealand Churches join to sing "The Blessing"

with thanks to Love is a place

before the mind gives us perception; name, form, comparison, is awareness

 

 As you realize yourself in manifestation,

 you keep on discovering that you are ever more 

than what you have imagined. 

Consciousness as such is the subtle counterpart of matter. 

Just as inertia and energy are attributes of matter, 

so does harmony manifest itself as consciousness.

 You may consider it in a way as a form of very subtle energy.

 Wherever matter organizes itself into a stable organism, 

consciousness appears spontaneously.

 With the destruction of the organism,

 consciousness disappears.

The mind produces thoughts ceaselessly, 

even when you do not look at them. 

When you know what is going on in your mind,

 you call it consciousness. 

This is your waking state - your consciousness shifts 

from sensation to sensation, from perception to perception, 

from idea to idea, in endless succession. 

Then comes awareness, 

the direct insight into the whole of consciousness,

 the totality of the mind. 

The mind is like a river,

 flowing ceaselessly in the bed of the body; 

you identify yourself for a moment 

with some particular ripple and call it "my thought". 

All you are conscious of is your mind;

 awareness is the cognizance of consciousness

 as a whole.

Consciousness comes and goes,

 awareness shines immutably. 

When there is a person, there is also consciousness.

 "I am", mind, consciousness denote the same state.

 If you say "I am aware", it only means 

"I am conscious of thinking about being aware".

 There is no "I am" in awareness. 

Witnessing is of the mind.

 The witness goes with the witnessed. 

In the state of non-duality,

 all separation ceases. 

It [the witness] is both [real and unreal]. 

The last remnant of illusion,

 the first touch of the real. To say: 

"I am only the witness"

 is both false and true: 

false because of the "I am", 

true because of the witness. 

It is better to say "there is witnessing". 

The moment you say "I am", 

the entire universe comes into being 

along with its creator. 

The witness is merely a point in awareness. 

It has no name and form. 

~ excerpts from Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj's

I AM THAT

art by Baje Whitethorn, Sr 

Navajo artist

How long does it take to make the woods?

How long does it take to make the woods?
As long as it takes to make the world.
The woods is present as the world is, the presence
of all its past and of all its time to come.
It is always finished, it is always being made, the act
of its making forever greater than the act of its destruction.
It is a part of eternity for its end and beginning
belong to the end and beginning of all things,
the beginning lost in the end, the end in the beginning.

What is the way to the woods, how do you go there?
By climbing up through the six days’ field,
kept in all the body’s years, the body’s
sorrow, weariness, and joy. By passing through
the narrow gate on the far side of that field
where the pasture grass of the body’s life gives way
to the high, original standing of the trees.
By coming into the shadow, the shadow
of the grace of the strait way’s ending,
the shadow of the mercy of light.

Why must the gate be narrow?
Because you cannot pass beyond it burdened.
To come into the woods you must leave behind
the six days’ world, all of it, all of its plans and hopes.
You must come without weapon or tool, alone,
expecting nothing, remembering nothing,
into the ease of sight, the brotherhood of eye and leaf.





~ Wendell Berry
 from A Timbered Choir

the clay jug

...

Inside this clay jug there are canyons and pine mountains,

and the maker of canyons and pine mountains!

All seven oceans are inside, and hundreds of millions of stars.

The acid that tests gold is there, and the one who judges jewels.

And the music from the stirings that no one touches, and the

source of all water.

...

It you want the truth, I will tell you the truth:

Friend, listen:  the God whom I love is inside.

...

~ Kabir

mother earth

 

The soul of a culture cannot evolve if the body is not reclaimed and honoured.

 In Navajo mythology, Changing Woman is the creatix. 

She is earth and sky, the Lady of the Plants, and of the Sea.

 She goes beyond the bearer aspect of the mother; 

she is the feminine creator.

Her cosmic cyclic movements-aging each Winter 

and becoming a young beautiful maiden each Spring

-make Her the essence of death and rebirth 

signature of the continual restoration and rejuvenation of Life. 

 This ability to move with the creative impulse 

without trying to force it is an aspect of the feminine. 

There is a quality of the feminine that allows 

things to happen in the natural cycle of things. 

~ from The Heroine's Journey

by Maureen Murdock

art: Navajo sand painting of Mother Earth

by Marie Akee

what you are given

.

You work with what you are given,

the red clay of grief,

the black clay of stubbornness going on after. 

Clay that tastes of care or carelessness,

clay that smells of the bottoms of rivers or dust.

Each thought is a life you have lived or failed to live, 

each word is a dish you have eaten or left on the table. 

There are honeys so bitter

no one would willingly choose to take them.

The clay takes them: honey of weariness, honey of vanity, 

honey of cruelty, fear.

This rebus—slip and stubbornness,

bottom of river, my own consumed life—

when will I learn to read it

plainly, slowly, uncolored by hope or desire? 

Not to understand it, only to see.

As water given sugar sweetens, given salt grows salty, 

we become our choices.

Each yes, each one continues,

this one a ladder, that one an anvil or cup.

The ladder leans into its darkness. 

The anvil leans into its silence. 

The cup sits empty.

How can I enter this question the clay has asked?

~ Jane Hirshfield

from Given Sugar, Given Salt
art by Vic Muniz

pain and healing

And a woman spoke, saying, Tell us of Pain.
And he said:

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.
Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, 
so must you know pain.
And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life, 
your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy;
And you would accept the seasons of your heart, 
even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass over your fields.
And you would watch with serenity through the winters of your grief.

Much of your pain is self-chosen,
It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self.
Therefore trust the physician, and drink his remedy in silence and tranquility:
For his hand, though heavy and hard, is guided by the tender hand of the Unseen,
And the cup he brings, though it burn your lips, 
has been fashioned of the clay which the Potter has moistened 
with His own sacred tears.

~ Kahlil Gibran

from The Prophet

 art by Sean Lewis

the nature of thoughts

 

Rupert Spira

silently if,out of not knowable

.

silently if,out of not knowable

night's utmost nothing,wanders a little guess

(only which is this world)more my life does

not leap than with the mystery your smile

sings or if(spiralling as luminous

they climb oblivion)voices who are dreams,

less into heaven certainly earth swims

than each my deeper death becomes your kiss

losing through you what seemed myself,i find

selves unimaginably mine;beyond

sorrow's own joys and hoping's very fears

yours is the light by which my spirit's born:

yours is the darkness of my soul's return

-you are my sun,my moon,and all my stars

~ e.e.cummings

the dark night of the soul (excerpt)

 

In the delicious night,

In privacy, where no one saw me,

Nor did I see one thing,

I had no light or guide

But the fire that burned inside my chest.

.

That fire showed me

The way more clearly that the blaze of noon

To where, waiting for me,

Was the One I knew so well,

In that place where no one ever is.

.

I stood still; I forgot who I was,

My face leaning against Him,

Everything stopped, abandoned me,

My being was gone, forgotten

Among the white lilies.

.

~ Saint John of the Cross