births

 

 

 

 

 

We will never have any memory of dying.

We were so patient
about our being,
noting down
numbers, days,
years and months,
hair, and the mouths we kiss,
and that moment of dying
we let pass without a note—
we leave it to others as memory,
or we leave it simply to water,
to water, to air, to time.
Nor do we even keep
the memory of being born,
although to come into being was tumultuous and new;
and now you don’t remember a single detail
and haven’t kept even a trace
of your first light.

It’s well known that we are born.

It’s well known that in the room
or in the wood
or in the shelter in the fishermen’s quarter
or in the rustling canefields
there is a quite unusual silence,
a grave and wooden moment as
a woman prepares to give birth.

It’s well known that we were all born.

But of that abrupt translation
from not being to existing, to having hands,
to seeing, to having eyes,
to eating and weeping and overflowing
and loving and loving and suffering and suffering,
of that transition, that quivering
of an electric presence, raising up
one body more, like a living cup,
and of that woman left empty,
the mother who is left there in her blood
and her lacerated fullness,
and its end and its beginning, and disorder
tumbling the pulse, the floor, the covers
till everything comes together and adds
one knot more to the thread of life,
nothing, nothing remains in your memory
of the savage sea which summoned up a wave
and plucked a shrouded apple from the tree.

The only thing you remember is your life. 

~  Pablo Neruda

from Plenos Poderes (Fully Empowered)

 art by Jackie Traverse

 with thanks to whiskey river

 

 

 

no strangers

 

 

 

 


under cherry blossoms’ shade
even those whom we don’t know
are not strangers 

 

 

 

~ Issa Kobayashi 

 

 

 

relatedness

 

 

 

 

 

 In reality there is a single integral community of the Earth 

that includes all its component members 

whether human or other than human.

 

 In this community every being has its own role to fulfill, 

its own dignity, its inner spontaneity. Every being has its own voice. 

Every being declares itself to the entire universe. 

Every being enters into communion with other beings. 

 

This capacity for relatedness, for presence to other beings,

 for spontaneity in action, is a capacity possessed by every mode of being

 throughout the entire universe.

 

 

 

~ Thomas Berry

 photo by Edward Sheriff Curtis

 

 

desire the truth?

 

 

 

We are all convinced that we desire the truth above all.

Nothing strange about this. It is natural to man, an intelligent being, 

to desire the truth.

 

 (I still dare to speak of man as "an intelligent being"!)

But actually, what we desire is not "the truth" so much as "to be in the right."

To seek the pure truth for its own sake may be natural to us,

 but we are not able to act always in this respect according to our nature.

What we seek is not the pure truth, but the partial truth that justifies our prejudices,

 our limitations, our selfishness. This is not "the truth." 

It is only an argument strong enough to prove us "right."
And usually our desire to be right is correlative to our conviction

 that somebody else (perhaps everybody else) is wrong.

Why do we want to prove them wrong?

Because we need them to be wrong. For if they are wrong, 

and we are right, then our untruth becomes truth: 

our selfishness becomes justice and virtue: 

our cruelty and lust cannot be fairly condemned.

We can rest secure in the fiction we have determined to embrace as "truth."

What we desire is not the truth, but rather that our lie should be proved "right,"

 and our iniquity be vindicated as "just."

No wonder we hate. No wonder we are violent. 

No wonder we exhaust ourselves in preparing for war!

And in doing so, of course, we offer the enemy another reason to believe

 that he is right, that he must arm, that he must get ready to destroy us.

Our own lie provides the foundation of truth on which he erects his own lie,

 and the two lies together react to produce hatred, murder, disaster.

~ Thomas Merton, 

from Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

 with thanks to brainpickings

 

 

 

the swarming throng of "I"

 

 

 

 

 

 

The secret teachings lead the pupil further. 

They teach him to look, with the same serene indifference, 

at the incessant working of his mind and the physical activity 

displayed by the body. 

 

He ought to succeed in understanding, in noting that nothing

 of all that is from him, is him. 

He, physically and mentally,

 is a multitude of others.

This "multitude of others" includes the material elements—

the ground, one might say—which he owes to his heredity,

 his atavism, then those which he has ingested, which he has inhaled 

from before his birth, by the help of which his body was formed, 

and which, assimilated by him, have become, with the complex forces 

inherent in them, constituent parts of his being.

On the mental plane, this "multitude of others" includes many beings

 who are his contemporaries: people he consorts with, with whom he chats, 

whose actions he watches. 

 

Thus a continual inhibition is at work while the individual absorbs

 a part of the various energies given off by those with whom he is in contact, 

and these incongruous energies, installing themselves in that which

 he considers his "I", 

form there a swarming throng.

~ Alexandra David-Néel and Lama Yongten
frjom The Secret Oral Teachings

 in Tibetan Buddhist Sects

 

art from A detail from the Sea Journey: 

People Without Borders by Erub/Lifou 

Project, commissioned for APT9.

 

 with thanks to Love is a Place

 

 

 

 

painting tigers

 

 

 

 

brokenness and vulnerability

 

 

 

  brokenness and weakness 

also mysteriously pull us out of ourselves. 

We feel them both together.

Only vulnerability forces us beyond ourselves. 

Whenever we see true pain, most of us are drawn out

 of our own preoccupations and want to take away the pain. 

 

For example, when we rush toward a hurting child, 

 we want to take the suffering in our arms. 

That’s why so many saints wanted to get near suffering—

because as they said again and again, 

 it “saved” them from their smaller untrue self.(1)



I think grief puts us in touch with our vulnerabilities.

 I think the feeling of grief lets us know the power of wounds

 to shape our stories. I think it lets us know how capable we are

 of having our hearts broken and our feelings hurt. 

 

I think it lets us know the link that we each have because we’re human.

 Because we’re human, we hurt. Because we’re human, we have tears to cry.

 Because we’re human, our hearts are broken. Because we’re human,

 we understand that loss is a universal language. Everybody grieves.

 All of humanity grieves. All of us have setbacks, broken dreams.

 All of us have broken relationships or unrealized possibilities. 

All of us have bodies that just don’t do what they used to do.

 Though grief is personal, every person grieves.(2)

 

 

 

 

 ~ Richard Rohr(1) 

and Dr. Jacqui Lewis(2)

 

 

 

the world rolls right on

 

 

 

 

 

 

mountain sounds carry a chill wisdom
an upwelling spring whispers subtle tales
pine breezes stir the fire beneath my tea
bamboo shadows soak deep into my robe

I grind my ink: clouds scraping across the crags
copy out a verse: birds settling on branches
as the world rolls right on by
its every turn tracing out non-action

 

 

 

 

 

~ Shih Shu 

English version by James H. Sanford

from  The Clouds Should Know Me By Now: 

Buddhist Poet Monks of China

 Edited by Red Pine 

with thanks to Poetry Chaikhana

 

 

take a look - recognizing our biases

 

 

 

 



People can't see what they can’t see. 

Their biases get in the way, surrounding them like a high wall, 

trapping them in ignorance, deception, and illusion. 

No amount of reasoning and argument will get through to them,

 unless we first learn how to break down the walls of bias. . . .

Confirmation Bias: We judge new ideas based on the ease with which they fit in with and confirm the only standard we have: old ideas, old information, and trusted authorities. As a result, our framing story, belief system, or paradigm excludes whatever doesn’t fit.

Complexity Bias: Our brains prefer a simple falsehood to a complex truth.

Community Bias: It’s almost impossible to see what our community doesn’t, can’t, or won’t see.

Complementary Bias: If you are hostile to my ideas, I’ll be hostile to yours. If you are curious and respectful toward my ideas, I’ll respond in kind.

Competency Bias: We don’t know how much (or little) we know because we don’t know how much (or little) others know. In other words, incompetent people assume that most other people are about as incompetent as they are. As a result, they underestimate their [own] incompetence, and consider themselves at least of average competence.

Consciousness Bias: Some things simply can’t be seen from where I am right now. But if I keep growing, maturing, and developing, someday I will be able to see what is now inaccessible to me.

Comfort or Complacency Bias: I prefer not to have my comfort disturbed.

Conservative/Liberal Bias: I lean toward nurturing fairness and kindness, or towards strictly enforcing purity, loyalty, liberty, and authority, as an expression of my political identity.

Confidence Bias: I am attracted to confidence, even if it is false. I often prefer the bold lie to the hesitant truth.

Catastrophe or Normalcy Bias: I remember dramatic catastrophes but don’t notice gradual decline (or improvement).

Contact Bias: When I don’t have intense and sustained personal contact with “the other,” my prejudices and false assumptions go unchallenged.

Cash Bias: It’s hard for me to see something when my way of making a living requires me not to see it.

Conspiracy Bias: Under stress or shame, our brains are attracted to stories that relieve us, exonerate us, or portray us as innocent victims of malicious conspirators.

 

 

 

 

 

 ~ Brian McLaren

from  Why Don’t They Get It? Overcoming Bias in Others 

 with thanks to Beth Cioffoletti, quotes and musings

art by Caravaggio

 

 

 

 

look through it and you will see the world

 

 

 

If you look at zero you see nothing; but look through it and you will see the world.

 For zero brings into focus the great, organic sprawl of mathematics, 

and mathematics in turn the complex nature of things. 

 

From counting to calculating, from estimating the odds to knowing exactly

 when the tides in our affairs will crest, the shining tools of mathematics 

let us follow the tacking course everything takes through everything else –

 and all of their parts swing on the smallest of pivots, zero

With these mental devices we make visible the hidden laws 

controlling the objects around us in their cycles and swerves. 

Even the mind itself is mirrored in mathematics,

 its endless reflections now confusing,

 now clarifying insight.

 

The story begins some 5,000 years ago with the Sumerians, 

those lively people who settled in Mesopotamia (part of what is now Iraq). 

When you read, on one of their clay tablets, this exchange between father and son:

 “Where did you go?” “Nowhere.” “Then why are you late?”, 

you realize that 5,000 years are like an evening gone.

The Sumerians counted by 1s and 10s but also by 60s. 

This may seem bizarre until you recall that we do too, using 60 for minutes

 in an hour (and 6 × 60 = 360 for degrees in a circle). Worse, we also count by 12

 when it comes to months in a year, 7 for days in a week, 24 for hours in a day

 and 16 for ounces in a pound or a pint. Up until 1971 the British counted

 their pennies in heaps of 12 to a shilling but heaps of 20 shillings to a pound.

Tug on each of these different systems and you’ll unravel a history

 of customs and compromises, showing what you thought was quirky

 to be the most natural thing in the world. In the case of the Sumerians,

 a 60-base (sexagesimal) system most likely sprang from their dealings

 with another culture whose system of weights — 

and hence of monetary value — differed from their own.

 

Haven’t we all an ancient sense that for something to exist it must have a name?

 Many a child refuses to accept the argument that the numbers go on forever

 (just add one to any candidate for the last) because names run out.

 For them a googol — 1 with 100 zeroes after it — is a large and living friend,

 as is a googolplex (10 to the googol power, in an Archimedean spirit).

Names belong to things, but zero belongs to nothing. 

It counts the totality of what isn’t there. By this reasoning it must be everywhere

 with regard to this and that: with regard, for instance, to the number

 of humming-birds in that bowl with seven — or now six — apples.

 Then what does zero name? It looks like a smaller version of 

Gertrude Stein’s Oakland, having no there there.

While having a symbol for zero matters, having the notion matters more, 

and whether this came from the Babylonians directly or through the Greeks,

 what is hanging in the balance here in India is the character this notion will take:

 will it be the idea of the absence of any number —

 or the idea of a number for such absence?

 

~ Robert Kaplan

excerpts from The Nothing that Is:

A natural history of zero 

with thanks to brainpickings

 

 

 

How poems are made

Letting go
In order to hold one
I gradually understand
How poems are made.

There is a place the fear must go.

There is a place the choice must go.

There is a place the loss must go.

The leftover love.

The love that spills out

Of the too full cup

And runs and hides

Its too full self

In shame.

I gradually comprehend

How poems are made

To the upbeat flight of memories.

The flagged beats of the running 

Heart.

I understand how poems are made.

They are the tears

That season the smile.

The stiff-neck laughter

That crowds the throat.

The leftover love.

I know how poems are made.

There is a place the loss must go.

There is a place the gain must go.

The leftover love.

~ Alice Walker

one loss

One loss

folds itself inside another.

It is like the origami

held inside a plain sheet of paper

Not creased yet.

Not yet more heavy.

The hand stays steady.

~ Jane Hirshfield

from Come Thief

impermanence, respect and value every moment

Impermanence does not necessarily lead us to suffering. 
Without impermanence, life could not be. 
Without impermanence, your daughter could not grow
 into a beautiful young lady. Without impermanence, 
oppressive political regimes would never change. 
We think impermanence makes us suffer. 
The Buddha gave the example of a dog that was hit by a stone 
and got angry at the stone. It is not impermanence that makes us suffer.
 What makes us suffer is 
wanting things to be permanent
 when they are not.

We need to learn to appreciate the value of impermanence. 
If we are in good health and are aware of impermanence, 
we will take good care of ourselves. 
When we know that the person we love is impermanent, 
we will cherish our beloved all the more. 
Impermanence teaches us to respect and value every moment 
and all the precious things around us and inside of us.
 When we practice mindfulness of impermanence,
 we become fresher and more loving. 

Looking deeply can become a way of life. 
We can practice conscious breathing to help us be in touch
 with things and to look deeply at their impermanent nature.
 This practice will keep us from complaining that everything
 is impermanent and therefore not worth living for.

 Impermanence is what makes transformation possible. 
We should learn to say,
 “Long live impermanence”.
 Thanks to impermanence, 
we can change sufferings into joy.

~Thich Nhat Hanh 

from No Death No Fear 

FOUR QUARTETS T.S. Eliot LITTLE GIDDING (No. 4 of 'Four Quartets')

 

 

 

 

I

Midwinter spring is its own season
Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,
Suspended in time, between pole and tropic.
When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,
The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,
In windless cold that is the heart's heat,
Reflecting in a watery mirror
A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.
And glow more intense than blaze of branch, or brazier,
Stirs the dumb spirit: no wind, but pentecostal fire
In the dark time of the year. Between melting and freezing
The soul's sap quivers. There is no earth smell
Or smell of living thing. This is the spring time
But not in time's covenant. Now the hedgerow
Is blanched for an hour with transitory blossom
Of snow, a bloom more sudden
Than that of summer, neither budding nor fading,
Not in the scheme of generation.
Where is the summer, the unimaginable
Zero summer?

If you came this way,
Taking the route you would be likely to take
From the place you would be likely to come from,
If you came this way in may time, you would find the hedges
White again, in May, with voluptuary sweetness.
It would be the same at the end of the journey,
If you came at night like a broken king,
If you came by day not knowing what you came for,
It would be the same, when you leave the rough road
And turn behind the pig-sty to the dull facade
And the tombstone. And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all. Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfilment. There are other places
Which also are the world's end, some at the sea jaws,
Or over a dark lake, in a desert or a city—
But this is the nearest, in place and time,
Now and in England.

If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
Is England and nowhere. Never and always.



II

Ash on an old man's sleeve
Is all the ash the burnt roses leave.
Dust in the air suspended
Marks the place where a story ended.
Dust inbreathed was a house—
The walls, the wainscot and the mouse,
The death of hope and despair,
This is the death of air.

There are flood and drouth
Over the eyes and in the mouth,
Dead water and dead sand
Contending for the upper hand.
The parched eviscerate soil
Gapes at the vanity of toil,
Laughs without mirth.
This is the death of earth.

Water and fire succeed
The town, the pasture and the weed.
Water and fire deride
The sacrifice that we denied.
Water and fire shall rot
The marred foundations we forgot,
Of sanctuary and choir.
This is the death of water and fire.

In the uncertain hour before the morning
Near the ending of interminable night
At the recurrent end of the unending
After the dark dove with the flickering tongue
Had passed below the horizon of his homing
While the dead leaves still rattled on like tin
Over the asphalt where no other sound was
Between three districts whence the smoke arose
I met one walking, loitering and hurried
As if blown towards me like the metal leaves
Before the urban dawn wind unresisting.
And as I fixed upon the down-turned face
That pointed scrutiny with which we challenge
The first-met stranger in the waning dusk
I caught the sudden look of some dead master
Whom I had known, forgotten, half recalled
Both one and many; in the brown baked features
The eyes of a familiar compound ghost
Both intimate and unidentifiable.
So I assumed a double part, and cried
And heard another's voice cry: 'What! are you here?'
Although we were not. I was still the same,
Knowing myself yet being someone other—
And he a face still forming; yet the words sufficed
To compel the recognition they preceded.
And so, compliant to the common wind,
Too strange to each other for misunderstanding,
In concord at this intersection time
Of meeting nowhere, no before and after,
We trod the pavement in a dead patrol.
I said: 'The wonder that I feel is easy,
Yet ease is cause of wonder. Therefore speak:
I may not comprehend, may not remember.'
And he: 'I am not eager to rehearse
My thoughts and theory which you have forgotten.
These things have served their purpose: let them be.
So with your own, and pray they be forgiven
By others, as I pray you to forgive
Both bad and good. Last season's fruit is eaten
And the fullfed beast shall kick the empty pail.
For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.
But, as the passage now presents no hindrance
To the spirit unappeased and peregrine
Between two worlds become much like each other,
So I find words I never thought to speak
In streets I never thought I should revisit
When I left my body on a distant shore.
Since our concern was speech, and speech impelled us
To purify the dialect of the tribe
And urge the mind to aftersight and foresight,
Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age
To set a crown upon your lifetime's effort.
First, the cold friction of expiring sense
Without enchantment, offering no promise
But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit
As body and soul begin to fall asunder.
Second, the conscious impotence of rage
At human folly, and the laceration
Of laughter at what ceases to amuse.
And last, the rending pain of re-enactment
Of all that you have done, and been; the shame
Of motives late revealed, and the awareness
Of things ill done and done to others' harm
Which once you took for exercise of virtue.
Then fools' approval stings, and honour stains.
From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit
Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire
Where you must move in measure, like a dancer.'
The day was breaking. In the disfigured street
He left me, with a kind of valediction,
And faded on the blowing of the horn.



III

There are three conditions which often look alike
Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow:
Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment
From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference
Which resembles the others as death resembles life,
Being between two lives—unflowering, between
The live and the dead nettle. This is the use of memory:
For liberation—not less of love but expanding
Of love beyond desire, and so liberation
From the future as well as the past. Thus, love of a country
Begins as attachment to our own field of action
And comes to find that action of little importance
Though never indifferent. History may be servitude,
History may be freedom. See, now they vanish,
The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,
To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.

Sin is Behovely, but
All shall be well, and
All manner of thing shall be well.
If I think, again, of this place,
And of people, not wholly commendable,
Of no immediate kin or kindness,
But of some peculiar genius,
All touched by a common genius,
United in the strife which divided them;
If I think of a king at nightfall,
Of three men, and more, on the scaffold
And a few who died forgotten
In other places, here and abroad,
And of one who died blind and quiet
Why should we celebrate
These dead men more than the dying?
It is not to ring the bell backward
Nor is it an incantation
To summon the spectre of a Rose.
We cannot revive old factions
We cannot restore old policies
Or follow an antique drum.
These men, and those who opposed them
And those whom they opposed
Accept the constitution of silence
And are folded in a single party.
Whatever we inherit from the fortunate
We have taken from the defeated
What they had to leave us—a symbol:
A symbol perfected in death.
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
By the purification of the motive
In the ground of our beseeching.



IV

The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre—
To be redeemed from fire by fire.

Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.



V

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph. And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.
We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.
The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree
Are of equal duration. A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails
On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England.

With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this
Calling

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

 

 

 

 

practicing love

 

 

 

 

I don’t practice any particular prayer discipline.

 I have no specific technique I use to meditate. 

I know these methods work for many people. 

But for me, when I tried them, I just spent all my time 

rejecting my wandering thoughts, over and over.

 

 I’ve tried to practice these disciplines, but now I don’t worry about them anymore.

 Their only purpose anyway is to bring a person to union with God. 

Why should I fast or set aside particular prayer times or deny myself 

in some way when I’ve found the shortcut?

 

 If every moment I’m consciously practicing love, 

doing all things for God’s sake, then I don’t need to worry 

about these spiritual methods.

My thoughts are the biggest obstacles to this way of living my life. 

The little useless thoughts that drift through my head, making mischief,

 distracting me. I’ve learned to reject them as soon as I notice them.

 They have nothing to do with the reality at hand—

nor with my eternal salvation—

and once I stop paying attention to them, 

I can get back to communing with God.

I have abandoned all particular forms of devotion,

 all prayer techniques. My only prayer practice is attention.

 I carry on a habitual, silent, and secret conversation with God 

that fills me with overwhelming joy.

When we walk in the presence of God, the busiest moment of the day 

is no different from the quiet of a prayer altar. Even in the midst of noise

 and clutter, while people’s voices are coming at you from all directions,

 asking for your help with many different things, you can possess God

 with the same serenity as if you were on your knees in church.

I can’t always maintain my focus on God, of course.

 I’ll suddenly discover that I’ve barely given God a thought in a good long while.

 Usually what gets my attention is that I’ll notice how wretched I’m feeling—

and then I’ll realize I’ve forgotten God’s presence. But I don’t worry about it

 too much. I just turn back to God immediately.

 

 And having realized how miserable I am when I forget God, 

my trust in God is always that much greater.

The Divine Presence occupies the here and now.

 If you are not aware of this—become so!

 

 

 

 

 

 ~ Brother Lawrence

from Brother Lawrence: A Christian Zen Master

 with thanks to Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation