we phantom figures

46

For in and out, above, about, below,

'Tis nothing but a Magic Shadow-show,

Play'd in a Box whose Candle is the Sun,

Round which we Phantom Figures come and go.

47

And if the Wine you drink, the Lip you press,
End in the Nothing all Things end in - Yes -
Then fancy while Thou art, Thou art but what
Thou shalt be - Nothing - Thou shalt not be less.

49

'Tis all a Chequer-board of Nights and Days
Where Destiny with Men for Pieces plays:
Hither and Thither moves, and mates, and slays,
And one by one back in the Closet lays.

51

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

52

And that inverted Bowl we call The Sky,
Whereunder crawling coop't we live and die,
Lift not thy hands to It for help - for It
Rolls impotently on as Thou or I.

2

Dreaming when Dawn's Left Hand was in the Sky
I heard a Voice within the Tavern cry,
"Awake, my Little ones, and fill the Cup
Before Life's Liquor in its Cup be dry."

7

Come , fill the Cup, and in the Fire of Spring
 The Winter Garment of Repentance fling:
The Bird of Time has but a little way
To fly - and Lo! the Bird is on the Wing.

20

Ah, my Beloved, fill the Cup that clears
To-day of past Regrets and future Fears -
To-morrow? - Why, To-morrow I may be
Myself with Yesterday's Sev'n Thousand Years.

32

There was a Door to which I found no Key:
There was a Veil past which I could not see:
Some little Talk awhile of Me and Thee
There seemed - and then no more of Thee and Me.

55

The Vine had struck a Fibre; which about
If clings my Being - let the Sufi flout;
Of my Base Metal may be filed a Key,
That shall unlock the Door he howls without

56

And this I know: whether the one True Light,
Kindle to Love, or Wrathconsume me quite,
One Glimpse of It within the Tavern caught
Better than in the Temple lost outright.

~ Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

First Edition, 1859

translation into English quatrains by Edward FitzGerald 

people like us

There are more like us. All over the world

There are confused people, who can't remember

The name of their dog when they wake up, and people

Who love God but can't remember where

He was when they went to sleep. It's

All right. The world cleanses itself this way.

A wrong number occurs to you in the middle

Of the night, you dial it, it rings just in time

To save the house. And the second-story man

Gets the wrong address, where the insomniac lives,

And he's lonely, and they talk, and the thief

Goes back to college. Even in graduate school,

You can wander into the wrong classroom,

And hear great poems lovingly spoken 

By the wrong professor. And you find your soul,

And greatness has a defender, and even in death you're safe.

~ Robert Bly

from Morning Poems

.

Our hearts irrigate this earth

.

How is it they live for eons in such harmony -

the billions of stars -

when most men can barely go a minute

without declaring war in their mind against someone they know.

There are wars where no one marches with a flag,

though that does not keep casualties

from mounting.

Our hearts irrigate this earth.

We are fields before

each other.

How can we live in harmony?

First we need to

know

we are all madly in love

with the same

God.

~ St. Thomas Aquinas

(Love Poems From God: Twelve Sacred Voices from the East and West 

by Daniel Ladinsky)

a somebody?

About a decade after he made his oft-quoted proclamation in Leaves of Grass — 

“Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, 

/ (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

 

 — Whitman considers the cohesion of those multitudes:

There is, in sanest hours, a consciousness, a thought that rises, 

independent, lifted out from all else, calm, like the stars, shining eternal.

 

This is the thought of identity — yours for you, whoever you are, 

as mine for me. Miracle of miracles, beyond statement, most spiritual

 and vaguest of earth’s dreams, yet hardest basic fact,

 and only entrance to all facts. 

 

In such devout hours,

 in the midst of the significant wonders of heaven and earth, 

(significant only because of the Me in the centre,)

 creeds, conventions, fall away and become of no account 

before this simple idea. Under the luminousness of real vision,

 it alone takes possession, takes value. Like the shadowy dwarf in the fable,

 once liberated and look’d upon, it expands over the whole earth,

 and spreads to the roof of heaven.

~ Walt Whitman

 from the essay Democratic Vistas
Illustration by Mimmo Paladino for a rare edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses

with thanks to Brain Pickings

looking for the face

~ Robert Lax

with thanks to louie, louie

a small green island

There is a small green island

where one white cow lives alone,

a meadow of an island.

 

The cow grazes till nightfall, full and fat,

but during the night she panics

and grows thin as a single hair.  "What shall I eat

tomorrow?  There's nothing left!"

 

By dawn, the grass has grown up again, waist-high.

The cow starts eating and by dark

the meadow is clipped short.

 

She's full of strength and energy, but she panics

in the dark as before, and grows 

abnormally thin overnight.

 

The cow does this over and over,

and this is all she does.

 

She never thinks, "This meadow has never failed

to grow back.  Why should I be afraid

every night that it won't?"

 

The cow is the bodily soul.

The island field is this world where

that grows lean with fear and fat with blessing,

 

lean and fat.  White cow,

don't make yourself miserable

with what's to come, or not to come.

 

 

 

~ Rumi

translation by Coleman Barks

 

 

 

nothing?

Once upon a time there was a man who had about twelve cows, and he loved his cows.  Every morning and evening he would praise them for the amount of  milk they were giving and praise them for their beauty.  One morning he noticed that the amount of milk had lessened.  Each day for a week he noticed the same thing.  So that night he decided to stay up and see what was going on.

About midnight, he happened to look up at the stars, and he saw one star that seemed to be getting larger.  It was - and the light got stronger as the star came closer and closer to earth.  It came straight down towards his cow pasture and stopped a few feet from him in the form of a great ball of light.  Inside the light there was a luminous woman.  As soon as her toes touched the ground, the light disappeared, and she stood there like an ordinary woman.

He said to her, "Are you the one who has been stealing milk from my cows?" "Yes," she said, "my sisters and I like the milk from your cows very much."  He said, "You are very beautiful, and I'm glad that you like my cows.  And so, this is what I want to say: If you marry me, we can live together, and I will never hit you and you won't have to take care of the cows all the time.  I'll take care of them part of the time myself.  Will you marry me?"  She said slowly, "Yes, I will.  But there's one condition.  I have brought this basket with me, and I want you to agree that you will never look into this basket.  You must never look into it, no matter how long we are married.  Do you agree to that?"  "Oh, I do,"  he said.

So they were married, and they lived together very well for six or seven months.  Then one day, while she was out herding the cows, he happened to notice that basket standing in a corner of the house.  He said to himself,  "Well, you know, she is my wife, so it could be considered to be my basket.  After all, this is my house, and the basket is in my house, and so it could be considered my basket!"  After he had said this, he opened the basket and then began to laugh.  "There's absolutely nothing in the basket!  Nothing! There's nothing in the basket!"  He kept saying these words and laughing so loud that his wife eventually heard the laughter.

She came into the house and she said to him, "Have you opened the basket?"  He began laughing again.  "I did!"  he said.  "I opened the basket!  There's nothing in it! There's nothing in the basket at all!  There's absolutely nothing in the basket! Nothing is in the basket!"

She said,"I have to leave now.  I have to go back."  He cried out. "Don't go!  Don't leave me!"  She said, "I have to go back now.  What I brought with me in the basket was spirit.  It's so like human beings to think that spirit is nothing."

And she was gone.

~  An African Story

from The Soul is Here for It's Own Joy - Sacred Poems from Many Cultures

edited by Robert Bly

african rock art from Chad

 

birds of passage

The

Classroom

Surely becomes disarrayed

When the teacher is out of sight

Because of our grand

Volcanic 

Spirits.

The 

Birds of passage

Arrive with a broken 

Wing,

Though

Are then lifted by God

So high and

"Low"

To experience the heart

Of everything.

The mind surely becomes disarrayed

When the Teacher is out

Of sight.

~ Hafiz

from The Gift

translations by Daniel Ladinisky

 

and love says

And love

Says,

"I will, I will take care of you,"

To everything that is

Near.

~ Hafiz

from The Gift

translation by Daniel Ladinsky

chickpea to cook

A chickpea leaps almost over the rim of the pot

where it's being boiled.

"Why are you doing this to me?"

The cook knocks him down with the ladle.

"Don't you try to jump out.

You think I'm torturing you.

I'm giving you flavor,

so you can mix with spices and rice

and be the lovely vitality of a human being.

Remember when you drank rain in the garden.

That was for this."

Grace first. Sexual pleasure,

then a boiling new life begins,

and the Friend has something good to eat.

Eventually the chickpea 

will say to the cook,

 "Boil me some more.

Hit me with the skimming spoon.

I can't do this be myself.

I'm like an elephant that dreams of gardens

back in Hindustan and doesn't pay attention

to his driver.  You're my cook, my driver,

my way into existence. I love cooking."

The cook says, "I was once like you,

fresh from the ground,  Then I boiled in time,

and boiled in the body, two fierce boilings.

My animal soul grew powerful.

I controlled it with practices,

and boiled some more, and boiled once beyond that,

and become your teacher."

~ Rumi

from The essential Rumi

translations by Coleman Barks and John Moyne

Macarius and the pony

.

.

People in a village

At the desert's edge

Had a daughter

Who was changed (they thought)

By magic arts

Into a pony.

At first they berated her

"Why do you have to be a horse?"

She could think of no reply.

So they led her out with a halter 

Into the hot waste land

Where there was a saint

Called Macarius

Living in a cell.

"Father" they said

"This young mare here

Is, or was, our daughter.

Enemies, wicked men,

Magicians, have made her

The animal you see.

Now by your prayers to God

Change her back

Into the girl she used to be."

"My prayers" said Macarius,

"Will change nothing,

For I see no mare.

Why do you call this good child

An animal?"

But he led her into his cell

With her parents:

There he spoke to God 

Anointing the girl with oil;

And when they saw with what love 

He placed his hand upon her head

They realized, at once.

She was no animal.

She had never changed.

She had been a girl from the beginning.

"Your own eyes

(said Macarius)

Are your enemies.

Your own crooked thoughts

(said the anchorite)

Change people around you

Into birds and animals.

Your own ill-will

(said the clear-eyed one)

Peoples the world with specters."

.

~ Thomas Merton

from  The Collected Poems

.

sweater

What is asked of one is not what is asked of another.

A sweater takes on the shape of its wearer,

a coffee cup sits to the left or the right of the workspace,

making its pale Saturn rings of now and before.

Lucky the one who rises to sit at a table,

day after day spilling coffee sweet with sugar, whitened with milk.

Lucky the one who writes in a book of spiral-bound mornings

a future in ink, who writes hand unshaking, warmed by thick wool.

Lucky still, the one who writes later, shaking.  Acrobatic at last, the 

sweater,

elastic as breath that enters what shape it is asked to. 

Patient the table;  unjudging, the ample, refillable cup.

Irrefusable, the shape the sweater is given,

stretched in the shoulders, sleeves lengthened by unmetaphysical

pullings on.

~ Jane Hirshfield

from Come, Thief 

the "I" experience

~ Alan Watts

simple acceptance

The everyday practice is simply to develop 

a complete acceptance and openness to all 

situations and emotions, and to all people,

 experiencing everything totally 

without mental reservations and blockages, 

so that one never withdraws

 or centralizes into oneself.

~ Trungpa Rinpoche

thank you

.

Meditation enables them to go

Deeper and deeper into consciousness,

From the world of words to the world of thoughts,

Then beyond thoughts to wisdom in the Self.

...

Sharp like a razor's edge, the sages say,

Is the path, difficult to traverse.

~ Katha Upanishad

This is the passage from which the title of Somerset Maugham's book The Razor's Edge was taken. His story traces the spiritual journey of an American fighter pilot traumatized by WWI. The book is apparently based on the life of Guy Hague who had spent time with Ramana Maharshi in Tamil Nadu, India, as did Maugham himself.

William Somerset Maugham was born on this day in 1874 in Paris. He was trained as a doctor and work on the front as a Red Cross volunteer during WWI. He became famous with his semi- autobiographical novel Of Human Bondage in 1915. Maugham's novels seem to make apparent the beauty of and intricacy of the fabric of life in-which we are all entwined.

Happy Birthday Mr. Maugham and thank you.