water and ice

There is no place to put the mind. 

A certain person once said, "No matter where I put my mind,

 my intentions are held in check in the place where my mind goes,

 and I lose to my opponent. Because of that, I place my mind 

just below my navel and do not let it wander. Then am I able to change

 according to the actions of my opponent." This is reasonable.

 But viewed from the highest standpoint of Buddhism, putting the mind 

just below the navel and not allowing it to wander is a low level

 of understanding, not a high one. It is at the level of discipline 

and training. It is at the level of seriousness. Or of Mencius' saying,

 "Seek after the lost mind." This is not the highest level either.

 It has the sense of seriousness. As for the "lost mind,"

 I have written about this elsewhere, and you can take a look at it there. 

If you consider putting your mind below your navel and not letting it wander, 

your mind will be taken by the mind that thinks of this plan.

You will have no ability to move ahead and will be exceptionally unfree.

 This leads to the next question, "If putting my mind below my navel

 leaves me unable to function and without freedom, it is of no use.

 In what part of my body, then, should I put my mind?" I answered,

 "If you put it in your right hand, it will be taken by the right hand

 and your body will lack its functioning. If you put your mind in the eye, 

it will be taken by the eye, and your body will lack its functioning.

 If you put your mind in your right foot, your mind will be taken by

 the right foot and your body will lack its functioning.

 "No matter where you put it, if you put the mind in on place,

 the rest of your body will lack its functioning."

 "Well, then, where does one put his mind." I answered,

 "If you don't put it anywhere, it will go to all parts of your body

 and extend throughout its entirety. In this way, when it enters your hand,

 it will realize the hand's function. When it enters your foot, it will realize

 the foot's function. When it enters your eye, 

it will realize the eye's function. 



Putting the mind in one place is called falling into onesidedness.

 One-sidedness is said to be bias in one place. Correctness is in moving

 about anywhere. The Correct Mind shows itself by extending the mind 

throughout the body. It not biased in any one place. When the mind is biased

 in one place and lacking in another, it is called a one-sided mind.

 One-sidedness is despicable. To be arrested by anything, no matter what, 

is falling into one-sidedness and is despised by those travelling the Way. 


The Right Mind is the mind that does not remain in one place. 

It is the mind that stretches throughout the entire body and self.

 The Confused Mind is the mind that, thinking something over,

 congeals in one place. When the Right Mind congeals and settles

 in one place, it becomes what is called the Confused Mind. 

When the Right Mind is lost, it is lacking in function here and there.

 For this reason, it is important not to lose it. In not remaining in one place,

 the Right Mind is like water. The Confused Mind is like ice, 

and ice is unable to wash hands or head. When ice is melted, it becomes water 

and flows everywhere, and it can wash the hands, the feet or anything else. 

If the mind congeals in one place and remains with one thing,

 it is like frozen water and is unable to be used freely: ice that can wash 

neither hands nor feet. When the mind is The Unfettered Mind –

 Writings of the Zen Master to the Sword Master melted and is used like water,

 extending throughout the body, it can be sent wherever one wants to send it.

 This is the Right Mind. 

~ Takuan Soho

from The Unfettered Mind:

 writings of the Zen Master to the Sword Master 
translated by William Scott Wilson

his peaceful death and his insight

 
excerpts from:

Henry David Thoreau

Henry Thoreau as Remembered by a Young Friend
Edward Emerson, (1917)

 


Thoreau was but forty-four years old when he died.
 Even his health could not throw off a chill got by long stooping
 in a wet snow storm counting the growth-rings on the stumps of some old trees.
 The family infection became active. He lived a year and a half 
after this exposure and made a trip to Minnesota in vain for health.

 For the last months he was confined to the house, he was affectionate,
 and utterly brave, and worked on his manuscript until the last days.
 When his neighbour, Reverend Mr. Reynolds, came in
 he found him so employed, and he looked up cheerfully and, 
with a twinkle in his eye, whispered -- his voice was gone --
 "you know it's respectable to leave an estate to one's friends "
His old acquaintance Staples, once his jailer,
 coming out, meeting Mr. Emerson coming in, reported that he
 "never saw a man dying with so much pleasure and peace." 

To his Calvinistic Aunt who felt obliged to ask,
 "Henry, have you made your peace with God?" -- 
"I did not know we had ever quarreled, Aunt," 
was the pleasant answer. 

His friend and companion, Edward Hoar, 
said to me, "With Thoreau's life something went out of Concord woods
 and fields and river that never will return. He so loved Nature,
 delighted in her every aspect and seemed to infuse himself into her." 
Yes, something went. But our woods and waters will always be different
 because of this man. Something of him abides and truly "for good"
 in his town. Here he was born, and within its borders he found 
a wealth of beauty and interest -- 
all that he asked -- 
and shared it with us all.

...

Thoreau writes: "Explore your own higher latitudes; nay,

 be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, 

opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.

 Every man is lord of a realm beside which the earthly empire of the Czar

 is but a petty state. I do not wish to be any more busy with my hands 

than is necessary. My head is hands and feet. I feel all my best faculties

 concentrated in it. My instinct tells me that my head is an organ for burrowing,

 as some creatures use their snout and fore-paws, and with it I would mine

 and burrow my way through these hills. I think that the richest vein 

is somewhere hereabouts: so by the divining rod and thin rising vapours

 I judge: and here I will begin to mine."

Again: "If my curve is large, why bend it to a smaller circle?"

Emerson wrote of Thoreau:

 "He who sees the horizon may securely say what he pleases

 of any twig or tree between him and it."


Thoreau, living by Walden wrote:
 "In a pleasant spring morning all men's sins are forgiven. 
Such a day is a truce to vice. While such a sun holds out to burn,
 the vilest sinner may return. Through our own recovered innocence
 we discern the innocence of our neighbors. You may have known
 your neighbour yesterday for a thief, a drunkard, or a sensualist, 
and merely pitied or despised him, and despaired of the world;
 but the sun shines bright and warm this spring morning, 
recreating the world, and you meet him at some serene work, 
and see how his exhausted and debauched veins expand with still joy
 and bless the new day, feel the spring influence with the innocence 
of infancy, and all his faults are forgotten. There is not only an atmosphere 
of goodwill about him, but even a savour of holiness groping for expression,
 blindly and ineffectually perhaps, like a new-born instinct, 
 and for a short hour the south hill-side echoes to no vulgar jest. 
You see some innocent fair shoots preparing to burst from his gnarled rind 
 and try another year's life, tender and fresh as the youngest plant. 
Even he has entered into the joy of his lord. 
Why the jailer does not leave open his prison doors, -- 
why the judge does not dismiss his case, --
 why the preacher does not dismiss his congregation.
 It is because they do not obey the hint that God gives them, 
nor accept the pardon that he freely offers to all."

  He loved the River: "It is my own highway, the only wild 
and unfenced part of the world hereabouts.
" But always he looked for something behind what he saw. 
At another time he writes: "Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.
 I drink at it, but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect
 how shallow it is. Its thin current glides away, but eternity remains.
 I would drink deeper; fish in the sky whose bottom
 is pebbly with stars."

...

 

  The news of Thoreau's death came to Louisa Alcott, 
then nursing in a military hospital. In the watches of the night, 
sitting by the cot of a dying soldier, her thoughts wandered back 
to the happy evenings when Thoreau might bring his flute with him 
to please the growing girls, when he visited the elders; that yellow flute, 
very melodious in its tone, which his brother John used to play. 
In these sad surroundings she wrote: --

Thoreau's Flute We sighing said, "Our Pan is dead --
His pipe hangs mute beside the river,
Around it friendly moonbeams quiver,
But music's airy voice is fled.
Spring comes to us in guise forlorn,
The blue-bird chants a requiem,
The willow-blossom waits for him,
The genius of the wood is gone"
Then from the flute, untouched by hands,
There came a low, harmonious breath:
For such as he there is no death.
His life the eternal life commands.
Above men's aims his nature rose.
The wisdom of a just content
Made one small spot a continent,
And turned to poetry life's prose
Haunting the hills, the stream, the wild,
Swallow and aster, lake and pine
To him seemed human or divine,
Fit mates for this large-hearted child.
Such homage Nature ne'er forgets;
And yearly on the coverlid
'Neath which her darling lieth hid
Will write his name in violets.
To him no vain regrets belong
Whose soul, that finer instrument,
Gave to the world no poor lament,
But wood-notes ever sweet and strong.
Oh lonely friend, He still will be
A potent presence, though unseen,
Steadfast, sagacious and serene.
Seek not for him: he is with Thee.

...

  The friendship and honour one for the other ran true to the end, 
in spite of temperamental barriers in communication.
 Emerson spoke his feeling about his friend at the burial: -- 

"The Country knows not yet, or in the least part how great a son it has lost. 
It seems an injury that he should leave, in the midst, his broken task, 
which none can finish, a kind of indignity to so noble a soul 
that he should depart out of Nature before yet he has been really shown
 to his peers for what he is. But he, at least, is content.
 His soul was made for the noblest society; he had in a short life
 exhausted the capabilities of this world: wherever there is knowledge,
 wherever there is virtue, wherever there is beauty,
 he will find a home."

the entire transcript found here:
https://archive.vcu.edu/english/engweb/transcendentalism/authors/thoreau/youngfriend.html

without identity

~ Joseph Goldstein

 

a community at peace with itself

The first discipline of non-violence is to honor every human
being as a unique soul-body, refusing to identify them by
race, gender, religion, or political party.

Yet just as much as right-wing movements, today's "progressive"
movement often promotes conflict and division by labeling
individual Persons by their group identity. Some of us who
talk about "diversity" actually stifle it, because real diversity
is not to promote tribalism or nationalism, but to recognize
the incomparable unique Personhood of individuals.

As it also says in the Declaration of Independence.

It is much easier to hate a category than a Person, whether
your animosity is toward Muslims or Christians, "black people",
or "white people", liberals or conservatives.

The beginning of world peace is to free each human soul-body
from racial, political, or religious abstractions. Our incidental
association with a group is not who we really are.

I do not identify my Self Eternal Being as a color, as rich
or poor, capitalist or socialist, Republican or Democrat,
Christian or Pagan or American. I am neither "good" nor
"evil." Those are just conceptual chains with which your mind
attempts to enthrall me. But I am not your concept of me:
you are.

If you want to superimpose a group identity on me, that is your
act of violence against the singularity of my Personhood. You
are free to label me, but I am also free... I refuse to identify with
your label...
I Am who I Am...



~ Fred LaMotte

 art by Picasso 
  with thanks to mystic meanderings

 We adopt the means of nonviolence because

 our end is a community at peace with itself.

 ~ Martin Luther King Jr.

no leaders, please

invent yourself and then reinvent yourself,

don't swim in the same slough.

invent yourself and then reinvent yourself and

stay out of the clutches of mediocrity.

invent yourself and then reinvent yourself,

change your tone and shape so often that they can never categorize you.

reinvigorate yourself and

accept what is

but only on the terms that you have invented

and reinvented.

be self-taught.

and reinvent your life because you must;

it is your life and

its history

and the present

belong only to

you.

~ Charles Bukowski

now

.

By making peace with the present moment....That present moment
 is the field on which the game of life happens. 
It cannot happen anywhere else. 

 Once you have made peace with the present moment, see what happens, 
what you can do or choose to do, or rather what life does through you. 

There are three words that convey the secret of the art of living,
 the secret of all success and happiness: 
One With Life.
 Being one with life is being one with now. 
You then realize that you don't live your life,
 but life lives you. Life is the dancer,
 and you are the dance.

~ Eckhart Tolle
from A New Earth

the exhibit

My uncle in East Germany
points to the unicorn in the painting
and explains it is now extinct.
We correct him, say such a creature
never existed. He does not argue,
but we know he does not believe us.
He is certain power and gentleness
must have gone hand in hand
once. A prisoner of war
even after the war was over,
my uncle needs to believe in something
that could not be captured except by love,
whose single luminous horn
redeemed the murderous forest
and, dipped into foul water,
would turn it pure. This world,
this terrible world we live in,
is not the only possible one,
his eighty-year-old eyes insist,
dry wells that fill so easily now.

 ~  Lisel Mueller

from Alive Together: New and Selected Poems

art: tapestry from the middle ages. Designed in Paris about 1500,
 are considered to be some of the greatest surviving masterpieces
 of medieval European art. They depict a lady flanked by a lion
 and a unicorn, surrounded by an enchanting world of animals, 
trees and flowers. One of the most intriguing aspects of these
 six large-scale artworks is the mystery of their origin and meaning.
 

with thanks to whiskey river

 

prayer

Whatever happens. Whatever

What is is is what

I want.  Only that.  But that.

~  Galway Kinnell

another night in the ruins

7

How many nights must it take

one such as me to learn

that we aren't, after all, made

from that bird that flies out of its ashes, 

that for us

as we go up in flames, our one work

is

to open ourselves, to be

the flames?

Galway Kinnell

 from Three Books

lines written in the days of growing darkness

Every year we have been

witness to it: how the

world descends

into a rich mash, in order that

it may resume.

And therefore

who would cry out 

to the petals on the ground

to stay,

knowing, as we must,

how the vivacity of what was is married 

to the vitality of what will be?

I don’t say

it’s easy, but

what else will do 

if the love one claims to have for the world

be true?

So let us go on 

though the sun be swinging east,

and the ponds be cold and black,

and the sweets of the year be doomed.

~ Mary Oliver

photo by Eliot Porter

more kind?

Once a man came to me and spoke for hours about
“His great visions of God” he felt he was having.

He asked me for confirmation, saying,
Are these wondrous dreams true?”

I replied, “How many goats do you have?”
He looked surprised and said,
“I am speaking of sublime visions
And you ask
About goats!”

And I spoke again saying,
“Yes, brother – how many do you have?”

“Well, Hafiz, I have sixty-two.”

“And how many wives?”

Again he looked surprised, then said,
“Four.”

“How many rose bushes in your garden,
How many children,
Are your parents still alive,
Do you feed the birds in winter?”

And to all he answered.

Then I said,
“You asked me if I thought your visions were true,
I would say that they were if they make you become
More human,

More kind to every creature and plant
That you know.

~ Hafiz

from The Gift: Poems by the Great Sufi Master

 

cummings and chopin

~ art by e.e. cummings

the skinny birds of non-existence

~ Robert Bly

during a storm

You too are a tree. During a storm of emotions, 

you should not stay at the level of the head or the heart,

 which are like the top of the tree.

 

 You have to leave the heart, the eye of the storm,

 and come back to the trunk of the tree. 

Your trunk is one centimeter below your navel.

 

 Focus there, paying attention only to the movement 

of your abdomen, and continue to breathe.

~ Thích Nhất Hạnh

 

 

 

 

 

still morning

It appears now that there is only one

age and it knows

nothing of age as the flying birds know

nothing of the air they are flying through

or of the day that bears them up

through themselves

and I am a child before there are words

arms are holding me up in a shadow

voices murmur in a shadow

as I watch one patch of sunlight moving

across the green carpet

in a building

gone long ago and all the voices

silent and each word they said in that time

silent now

while I go on seeing that patch of sunlight

~ W. S. Merwin

from Collected Poems (1996 - 2011)

art by emile claus

forgiveness

Forgiveness is the answer to a child’s dream of a miracle
 by which what is broken is made whole again, what is soiled is made clean.
 The dream explains why we need to be forgiven, and why we must forgive.
 In the presence of God, nothing stands between Him and us - we are forgiven.
 But we cannot feel His presence if anything is allowed
 to stand between ourselves and others.

~ Dag Hammarskjöld 

from Markings

translated by Leif Sjoberg and W.H. Auden.

Hammarskjöld was the second Secretary General of the United Nations, serving from 1953 until his death in a plane crash in 1961. He is the only person to be awarded a Nobel Peace Prize posthumously. Markings, a sort of diary of poetry and meditations, was found in his office after his death, along with a letter to Swedish Permanent Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs Leif Sjoberg, explaining that it may be published if Mr. Sjoberg felt it worth publishing.

from Martin Luther King Jr.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness;
 only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate;
 only love can do that. 

Have we not come to such an impasse in the modern world
 that we must love our enemies - or else? 
The chain reaction of evil - hate begetting hate,
 wars producing more wars - must be broken,
 or else we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation. 

I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love
 will have the final word in reality. This is why right,
 temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant. 

I have decided to stick with love.
 Hate is too great a burden to bear. 

Love is the only force capable of transforming
 an enemy into friend. 

We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive.
 He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid 
of the power to love. There is some good in the worst of us
 and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this,
 we are less prone to hate our enemies. 

~ Martin Luther King Jr.

my apologies

My apologies to chance for calling it necessity. 

 My apologies to necessity in case I'm mistaken. 

 Don't be angry, happiness, that I take you for my own. 

 May the dead forgive me that their memory's but a flicker. 

 My apologies to time for the quantity of world overlooked per second. 

 My apologies to an old love for treating a new one as the first. 

 Forgive me, far-off wars, for carrying my flowers home. 

 Forgive me, open wounds, for pricking my finger. 

 My apologies for the minuet record, to those calling out from the abyss. 

 My apologies to those in train stations for sleeping soundly at five in the morning. 

 Pardon me, hounded hope, for laughing sometimes. 

 Pardon me, deserts, for not rushing in with a spoonful of water. 

 And you, O hawk, the same bird for years in the same cage, 
staring, motionless, always at the same spot, 
 absolve me even if you happen to be stuffed. 

 My apologies to the tree felled for four table legs. 

 My apologies to large questions for small answers. 

 Truth, do not pay me too much attention. 

 Solemnity, be magnanimous toward me. 

 Bear with me, O mystery of being, for pulling threads from your veil. 

 Soul, don't blame me that I've got you so seldom. 

My apologies to everything that I can't be everywhere. 

 My apologies to all for not knowing how to be every man and woman. 

 I know that as long as I live nothing can excuse me, since I am my own obstacle. 

 Do not hold it against me, O speech, that I borrow weighty words, and then labor to make them light. 

~ Wislawa Szymborska

translated by Joanna Trzeciak

photo by agencja gazeta

on the value of not-knowing

All sorts of torturers, dictators, fanatics, and demagogues struggling for power
 by way of a few loudly shouted slogans also enjoy their jobs, 
and they too perform their duties with inventive fervor. Well, yes,
 but they “know.” They know, and whatever they know is enough for them
 once and for all. They don’t want to find out about anything else,
 since that might diminish their arguments’ force. And any knowledge
 that doesn’t lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain
 the temperature required for sustaining life. In the most extreme cases,
 cases well known from ancient and modern history, 
it even poses a lethal threat to society.

This is why I value that little phrase “I don’t know” so highly. 
It’s small, but it flies on mighty wings. It expands our lives to include 
the spaces within us as well as those outer expanses in which our tiny Earth 
hangs suspended. If Isaac Newton had never said to himself “I don’t know,” 
the apples in his little orchard might have dropped to the ground 
like hailstones and at best he would have stooped to pick them up 
and gobble them with gusto. Had my compatriot Marie Sklodowska-Curie
 never said to herself “I don’t know”, she probably would have wound up
 teaching chemistry at some private high school for young ladies from good families,
 and would have ended her days performing this otherwise perfectly respectable job.
 But she kept on saying “I don’t know,” and these words led her, 
not just once but twice, to Stockholm, where restless, questing spirits
 are occasionally rewarded with the Nobel Prize.

The world — whatever we might think when terrified by its vastness 
and our own impotence, or embittered by its indifference to individual suffering,
 of people, animals, and perhaps even plants, for why are we so sure
 that plants feel no pain; whatever we might think of its expanses
 pierced by the rays of stars surrounded by planets we’ve just begun
 to discover, planets already dead? still dead? we just don’t know;
 whatever we might think of this measureless theater to which we’ve got 
reserved tickets, but tickets whose lifespan is laughably short,
 bounded as it is by two arbitrary dates; whatever else
 we might think of this world — it is astonishing.

But “astonishing” is an epithet concealing a logical trap. We’re astonished, 
after all, by things that deviate from some well-known and universally 
acknowledged norm, from an obviousness we’ve grown accustomed to. 
Now the point is, there is no such obvious world. Our astonishment exists per se 
and isn’t based on comparison with something else.

Granted, in daily speech, where we don’t stop to consider every word, 
we all use phrases like “the ordinary world,” “ordinary life,” “the ordinary
 course of events” … But in the language of poetry, where every word is weighed,
 nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it.
 Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, 
not a single existence, not anyone’s existence in this world.

 ~  Wisława Szymborska

 art by Salvador Dalí from a rare edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

 

so much of Everything

Reality demands

we also state the following:

life goes on.

At Cannae and Borodino.

at Kosovo Polje and in Guernica.

There is a gas station 

in a small plaza in Jericho,

and freshly painted

benches near Bila Hora.

Letters travel

between Pearl Harbor and Hastings,

a furniture truck passes

before the eyes of the lion of Chaeronea,

and only an atmospheric front advances

toward the blossoming orchards near Verdun.

There is so much of Everything,

that Nothing is quite well concealed,

Music flows

from yachts at Actium

and on board couples dance in the sun.

So much keeps happening, 

that it must be happening everywhere.

Where not a stone is left standing,

there is an ice-cream truck

besieged by children.

Where Hiroshima had been,

Hiroshima is again

manufacturing products

for everyday use.

Not without its draws is this terrible world,

not without its draws

worth our waking.

In the fields of Maciejowice

the grass is green

and on the grass is - you know how grass is -

transparent dew,

Maybe there are no fields but battlefields,

those still remembered,

and those long forgotten,

birch groves and cedar groves,

snows and sands, iridescent swamps,

and ravines of dark defeat

where today, in sudden need,

you squat behind a bush.

What moral flows from this? Probably none.

But what really flows is quickly drying blood,

and as always, some rivers and clouds.

On the tragic mountain passes

the wind blows hats off heads

and we cannot help-

but laugh.

~ Wislawa Szymborska

from miracle fair

translated by Joanna Trzeciak

 

living in two worlds

~ Miriam Rose Ungunmerr-Bauman

water and ice

~ Joseph Goldstein