stealing sugar from the castle

We are poor students who stay after school to study joy.

We are like those birds in the India mountains.

I am a widow whose child is her only joy.

The only thing I hold in my ant-like head

Is the builder's plan of the castle of sugar.

Just to steal one grain of sugar is a joy!

Like a bird, we fly out of darkness into the hall,

Which is lit with singing, then fly out again.

Being shut out of the warm hall is also a joy.

I am a laggard, a loafer, and an idiot. But I love

To read about those who caught one glimpse

Of the Face, and died twenty years later in joy.

I don't mind your saying I will die soon.

Even in the sound of the word soon, I hear

The word you which begins every sentence of joy.

"You're a thief!" the judge said. "Let's see

Your hands!" I showed my callused hands in court.

My sentence was a thousand years of joy.

~ Robert Bly

the going

Exultation is the going

Of an inland soul to sea,

Past the houses - past the headlands -

Into deep Eternity -

Bred as we, among the mountains,

Can the sailor understand

The divine intoxication 

Of the first league out from land?

~ Emily Dickinson 

from Emily Dickenson - Complete Poems

 

while I am Emily

Show me Eternity, and I will show you Memory -

Both in one package lain

And lifted back again -

Be Sue - while I am Emily -

Be next - what you have ever been - Infinity -

***

Parting is one of the exactions

of a Mortal Life.

It is bleak - like Dying

but occurs more times.

To escape the former,

some invite the last.

The Giant in the Human Heart

was never met outside.

~ Emily Dickinson

from New poems of Emily Dickinson

art by Fabrizio Cassetta

.

.

beneath all passing shows

The pilgrim sees no form but His and knows

That He subsists beneath all passing shows --

The pilgrim comes from Him whom he can see,

Lives in Him, with Him, and beyond all three.

Be lost in Unity's inclusive span,

Or you are human but not yet a man.

Whoever lives, the wicked and the blessed,

Contains a hidden sun within his breast --

Its light must dawn though dogged by long delay;

The clouds that veil it must be torn away --

Whoever reaches to his hidden sun

Surpasses good and bad and knows the One.

The good and bad are here while you are here;

Surpass yourself and they will disappear.

~ Farid ud-Din Attar (1120? - 1220?)

from The Conference of the Birds

English version by Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis

bright but hidden

Bright but hidden, the Self dwells in the heart.

Everything that moves, breathes, opens, and closes

Lives in the Self.  He is the source of love

And may be known through love but not through

thought.

He is the goal of life.  Attain this goal!

The shining Self dwells hidden in the heart.

Everything in the cosmos, great and small,

Lives in the Self.  He is the source of life,

Truth beyond the transience of this world.

He is the goal of life.  Attain this goal!

~ The Mundaka Upanishad

Modes of knowing

translation by Eknath Easwaran

hidden inside the seed

The Guest is inside you, and also inside me;
you know the sprout is hidden inside the seed.
We are all struggling; none of us has gone far.
Let your arrogance go, and look around inside.

The blue sky opens out farther and farther,
the daily sense of failure goes away,
the damage I have done to myself fades,
a million suns come forward with light,
when I sit firmly in that world.

I hear bells ringing that no-one has shaken,
inside “love” there is more joy than we know of,
rain pours down, although the sky is clear of clouds,
there are whole rivers of light.
The universe is shot through in all parts by a single sort of love.
how hard it is to feel that joy in all our four bodies!

Those who hope to be reasonable about it fail.
The arrogance of reason has separated us from that love.
With the word “reason” you already feel miles away.

How lucky Kabir is, that surrounded by all this joy
he sings inside his own little boat.
His poems amount to one soul meeting another.
These songs are about forgetting dying and loss.
They rise above both coming in and going out.

 ~ Kabir

 from Ecstatic Poems, by Kabir

(Dove that ventured outside)

.

Dove that ventured outside,     flying far from the dovecote:

housed and protected again,     one with the day, the night,

knows what serenity is,     for she has felt her wings

pass through all distance and fear     in the course of her wanderings.

The doves that remained at home,     never exposed to loss,

innocent and secure,     cannot know tenderness;

only the won-back heart      can ever be satisfied: free,

through all is has given up,     to rejoice in its mastery.

Being arches itself     over the vast abyss.

Ah the ball that we dared,     that we hurled into infinite space,

doesn't it fill our hands     differently with its return:

heavier by the weight     of where it has been.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

translation by Stephen Mitchell

from: The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

for the explainers

Spell the spiel of cause and effect,

Ride the long rail of fact after fact;

What curled the plume in the drake's tail

And put the white ring round his neck?

~ Wendell Berry

from The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry

far off though very near

Musk lies in the musk deer’s own nave,
But roam in the forest he does – it to seek;
Alike, God pervades heart to heart,
But men of the world this don’t conceive.

In man himself the Master dwells,
But man, deluded, knows not this,
So similar to the musk deer who
Again and again the grass sniffs.
...

God exists, profuse, in each place,
So don’t think He’s less here and more there,
Those who say He’s far – He is far,
Those who know Him near – He’s near.

I knew God to be far away,
But He is ubiquitous – here and there;
Thou didst know Him to be far off,
He’s far off though very near.

 ~ Kabir

fallen out on the road

The small ruby everyone wants has fallen out on the road.

Some say its East of us, others West of us.

Some say "among primitive earth rocks," others "in the deep waters." 

Kabir's instinct told him it was inside, and what it was worth,

And he wrapped it up carefully in his heart cloth.

~ Kabir

from More Than True - The Wisdom of Fairy Tales by Robert Bly

 

 

The dead do not want us dead

The dead do not want us dead;

such petty errors are left for the living.

Nor do they want our mourning.

No gift to them - not rage, not weeping.

Return one of them, any one of them, to the earth,

and look: such foolish skipping,

such telling of bad jokes, such feasting!

Even a cucumber, even a single anise seed: feasting.

~  Jane Hirshfield

coda

Perhaps to love is to learn

to walk through this world.

To learn to be silent

like the oak and the linden of the fable.

To learn to see.

Your glance scattered seeds.

It planted a tree.

I talk

because you shake its leaves.

~ Octavio Paz

the weight

Two horses were put together in the same paddock.

Night and day. In the night and in the day

wet from heat and the chill of the wind

on it. Muzzle to water, snorting, head swinging

and the taste of bay in the shadowed air.

The dignity of being. They slept that way,

knowing each other always.

Withers quivering for a moment,

fetlock and the proud rise at the base of the tail,

width of back. The volume of them, and each other's weight.

Fences were nothing compared to that.

People were nothing. They slept standing,

their throats curved against the other's rump.

They breathed against each other,

whinnied and stomped.

There are things they did that I do not know.

The privacy of them had a river in it.

Had our universe in it. And the way

its border looks back at us with its light.

This was finally their freedom.

The freedom an oak tree knows.

That is built at night by stars.

~ Linda Gregg

from Chosen by the Lion

her portrait by jack richard smith

failure to see

Rather the flying bird, leaving no trace

Than the going beast

Marking the earth with his track.

The bird flies by and forgets

(As is only right).  The beast

Where he no longer is

(And is therefore no use)

Marks that he was there before

(Which is also no use).

For to remember is to betray

Nature, since the nature of yesterday

Is not nature.

What has been, is nothing.

Remembering

Is failure to see.

Move on, bird, move on, teach me

To move on.

~ Fernando Pessoa

as translated by Thomas Merton

art by Marefumi Komura

I want a different thing

Egocentricity is the process of wanting something other than
what is. Egocentricity means there is an "I" who [feels]
separate from everything else and doesn't like it; one thing is
happening, but I want a different thing to be happening
[which causes suffering]. Egocentricity is that constant
concern with how I feel, what I think, what I'm doing, what
I want - looking at what is and seeing it as inadequate.
My identity is maintained by the struggle of wanting
something other than what is [causing suffering].

Instead of spending our time trying to avoid suffering,
we must find the willingness to go directly into it.
Whenever anything causes us to suffer, we can know
two things: suffering is the same as egocentricity, and
when it arises, that is our best opportunity to end suffering.
As we open to suffering, as we embrace it, as we accept it,
our relationship to it changes. It is no longer horrible,
something to escape from. Suffering becomes just
another opportunity [for awareness], another chance for
freedom [from egocentricity].

~ Cheri Huber

art by Van Gogh

Cheri Huber is a Zen teacher and the author of eighteen popular books. 

She founded A Center for the Practice of Zen Buddhist Meditation in Mountain View, California