these temple bones

 

5

If one day it happens

you find yourself with someone you love

in a café at one end

of the Pont Mirabeau, at the zinc bar

where wine takes the shapes of upward opening glasses,

and if you commit then, as we did, the error

of thinking,

one day all this will only be memory,

learn to reach deeper

into the sorrows

to come—to touch

the almost imaginary bones

under the face, to hear under the laughter

the wind crying across the black stones. Kiss

the mouth

that tells you, here,

here is the world. This mouth. This laughter. These temple bones.

The still undanced cadence of vanishing.

~ Galway Kinnell 

excerpt from 

Little Sleep's-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight

in each a different part of the mystery becomes luminous

In your clay body, 

things are coming to expression and to light
 that were never known before,

 presences that never came to light or shape
 in any other individual.  

To paraphrase Heidegger, who said,
 "Man is a shepherd of being," 

 we could say,  "Man is a shepherd of clay." 
 You represent an unknown world

 that begs you to bring it to voice.  

Often the joy you feel 

does not belong to your individual biography 
but to the clay out of which you are formed. 

 At other times, 
you will find sorrow moving through you, 

like a dark mist over a landscape.
  This sorrow is dark enough to paralyze you.

  It is a mistake to interfere 
with this movement of feeling.  

It is more appropriate to recognize
 that this emotion belongs more to your clay

 than to your mind.

  
It is wise to let this weather of feeling pass; 

 it is on its way elsewhere.  
We so easily forget that our clay

 has a memory that preceded our minds, 
a life of its own 

before it took its present form.   

Regardless of how modern we seem, 

we still remain ancient, 
sister and brothers of the one clay. 

 In each of us 

a different part of the mystery
 becomes luminous.  

To truly be and become yourself, 
you need the ancient radiance of others.

~ John O'Donohue

from Anam Cara

art AI generated

I have come into this word to see this:

 

I have come into this world to see this:

the sword drop from men’s hands even at the height

of their arc of anger

because we have finally realized there is just one flesh to wound

and it is His – the Christ’s, our

Beloved’s.

I have come into this world to see this: all creatures hold hands as

we pass through this miraculous existence we share on the way

to even a greater being of soul,

a being of just ecstatic light, forever entwined and at play

with Him.

I have come into this world to hear this:

every song the earth has sung since it was conceived in

the Divine’s womb and began spinning from

His wish,

every song by wing and fin and hoof,

every song by hill and field and tree and woman and child,

every song of stream and rock,

every song of tool and lyre and flute,

every song of gold and emerald

and fire,

every song the heart should cry with magnificent dignity

to know itself as

God:

for all other knowledge will leave us again in want and aching –

only imbibing the glorious Sun

will complete us.

I have come into this world to experience this:

men so true to love

they would rather die before speaking

an unkind

word,

men so true their lives are His covenant –

the promise of

hope.

I have come into this world to see this:

the sword drop from men’s hands

even at the height of

their arc of

rage

because we have finally realized

there is just one flesh

we can wound.

~ Hafiz

from Love Poems From God 

by Daniel Ladinsky

with thanks to poetseers.org

the abyss between us

 

We don’t walk down the same street as the person walking beside us. 

All we can do is tell the other person what we see. 

We can point at things and try to name them. 

If we do this well, 

our friend can look at the world in a new way.

 We can meet.

...

I had a big beautiful cake in my head called 

“Feeling the Pain of Others” 

and I sliced it this way and that because 

I thought that emotion is the bridge between people, 

sentiment crosses space, sympathy is a gas, 

exhaled by one, inhaled by the other. Empathy! 

It’s just like melting. 

We can merge, you know. 

We can connect. 

We can cry at the same movie. 

You and I.

...

There is a real gap between me and the next person, 

there is a space between every human being. 

And it is not a frightening space. 

The empty air which exists between people

 might be crossed by emotion, but it might not. 

You need something else, or you need something first… 

Now, I think the word we need is “translation.”

...

These days I am obsessed by light, it is so hard to commodify.

 I am not talking about a beautiful dawn, or holidays in the sun,

 or the light that makes a photograph look good. 

I am talking about brightness itself, the air lit up.

 The gleam on the surfaces of my typing hands. 

I love the gift of its arrival.

 The light you see is always eight and a half minutes old. 

Always and again. 

And you think it is shared by everyone 

but it is not shared, exactly — 

our eyes are hit by our own, 

personal photons.

~ Anne Enright

excerpts from The Wren, the Wren

with thanks to the Marginalian

photo by Don Danko

we who never let each other sleep

I know the truth -- give up all other truths!

No need for people anywhere on earth to struggle.

Look -- it is evening, look, it is nearly night:

what do you speak of, poets, lovers, generals?

The wind is level now, the earth is wet with dew,

the storm of stars in the sky will turn to quiet.

And soon all of us will sleep under the earth, we

who never let each other sleep above it.

~ Marina Tsvetaeva

English version by Elaine Feinstein

with thanks to Poetry Chaikhana

it all moves

 

 

 

 

 

 

At night outside it all moves or
almost moves–trees, grass,
touches of wind. The room you have
in the world is ready to change.
Clouds parade by, and stars in their
configurations. Birds from far
touch the fabric around them–you can
feel their wings move. Somewhere under
the earth it waits, that emanation
of all things. It breathes. It pulls you
slowly out through doors or windows
and you spread in the thin halo of night mist.

 

 

 

 

~ William Stafford 

so close

I do not love you as if you were the salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.

I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,

in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms

but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;

thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,

risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.

I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;

so I love you because I know no other way

than this: where I does not exist, nor you,

so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,

so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

~ Pablo Neruda

.

caught up in the idea

 

We are a wave appearing on the surface of the ocean.

 The body of a wave does not last very long – 

perhaps only ten to twenty seconds.

 

The wave is subject to beginning and ending,

 to going up and coming down. 

The wave may be caught in the idea that 

‘I am here now and I won’t be here later.’

 And the wave may feel afraid or even angry.

 But the wave also has her ocean body. 

She has come from the ocean, 

and she will go back to the ocean.

 She has both her wave body and her ocean body.

 She is not only a wave; she is also the ocean. 

The wave does not need to look

 for a separate ocean body, 

because she is in this very moment 

both her wave body and her ocean body.

 As soon as the wave can go back to herself

 and touch her true nature,

 which is water,

 then all fear and

 anxiety disappear.

 ~ Thich Nhat Hanh

kindness in Navajo teachings

 

~ Traditional Navajo Teachings

may my heart always be open

may my heart always be open to little

birds who are the secrets of living

whatever they sing is better than to know

and if men should not hear them men are old

may my mind stroll about hungry

and fearless and thirsty and supple

and even if it's sunday may i be wrong

for whenever men are right they are not young

and may myself do nothing usefully

and love yourself so more than truly

there's never been quite such a fool who could fail

pulling all the sky over him with one smile

e.e.cummings

.

you know yourself only through the senses and the mind

 

 You know yourself only through the senses and the mind. 

You take yourself to be what they suggest;

 having no direct knowledge of yourself,

 you have mere ideas; all mediocre, 

second-hand, by hearsay.

Whatever you think you are you take it to be true; 

the habit of imagining yourself perceivable and

describable is very strong with you.

I see as you see, hear as you hear, taste as you taste,

 eat as you eat. 

I also feel thirst and hunger.

 When starved or sick,

 my body and mind go weak.

 All this I perceive quite clearly, but somehow I am not in it, 

I feel myself as if floating over it, aloof and detached.

 Even not aloof and detached. 

There is aloofness and detachment as there is thirst and

hunger; there is also the awareness of it all 

and a sense of Immense distance, 

as if the body and the mind and all that happens to them

 were somewhere far out on the horizon. 

I am like a cinema screen -- clear and empty -- 

the pictures pass over it and disappear, 

leaving it as clear and empty as before. 

In no way is the screen affected by the pictures, 

nor are the pictures affected by the screen. 

The screen intercepts and reflects the pictures,

 it does not shape them.

 It has nothing to do with the rolls of films.

 These are as they are, lumps of destiny (prarabdha),

 but not my destiny; the destinies of the people on the screen.

~ from I AM THAT

Dialogues of Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

happiness is the very nature of the Self

 

Happiness is the very nature of the Self:

happiness and the Self are not different.

There is no happiness in any object of the world.

We imagine through our ignorance that we

derive happiness from objects. 

When the mind goes out seeking,

it expereinces misery.

In truth, when its desires are fulfilled,

it returns to its own place and enjoys

the happiness that is the Self.

~ Sri Ramana Maharshi

aboriginal art

surrendering, lose myself in your loosened hair

 

 

Someday, emerging at last from the violent insight,

let me sing out jubilation and praise to assenting angels.

Let not even one of the clearly-struck hammers of my heart

fail to sound because of a slack, a doubtful,

or a broken string. 

 Let my joyfully streaming face

make me more radiant; let my hidden weeping arise

and blossom.  

How dear you will be to me then, you nights 

of anguish. 

 Why didn't I kneel more deeply to accept you,

inconsolable sisters, and, surrendering, lose myself

in your loosened hair. 

 How we squander our hours of pain.

How we gaze beyond them into the bitter duration

to see if they have an end.

  Though they are really

our winter-enduring foliage,

 our dark evergreen,

one season in our inner year -,

 not only a season

in time -,

 but are place and settlement, 

foundation and soil and home.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

from Duino Elegies, The Tenth Elegy

translation by stephen mitchell

art by van gogh

in the heart of every creature

.

.

.

Hidden in the heart of every creature

Exists the Self, subtler that the subtlest,

Greater than the greatest…

.

The Self cannot be known through study,

…nor through the intellect,

nor through discourses about it.

.

~  Katha Upanishad

.

the lost trapper

 

Each time the soprano and the tenor

Kneel and sing to each other,

Somewhere else on stage the baritone

Is about to die.

The Alaskan trapper finds

Blood on his arm, his radio

Dead, and new snow

Falling on the branches.

I don't know why the grasshopper

Doesn't try to wiggle

Out from the bird's claw,

But he doesn't move.

Just forget the idea that

Someone will come and save

You whenever cedars begin

Making that low sound.

~ Robert Bly 

from Talking into the Ear of a Donkey