dispair and humility

Despair is the absolute extreme of self-love ... 

It is reached when one deliberately turns his back on all help

 from anyone else in order to taste the rotten luxury of knowing himself to be lost. 

In every man there is hidden some root of despair

 because in every man there is pride that vegetates and springs weeds

 and rank flowers of self-pity as soon as our own resources fail us. . . . 

But a man who is truly humble cannot despair, 

because in the humble man there is no longer any such thing

 as self-pity.

Humility, therefore, is absolutely necessary 

if man is to avoid acting like a baby all his life. 

To grow up means, in fact, to become humble,

 to throw away the illusion that I am at the center

 of everything and that other people only exist 

to provide me with comfort and pleasure…





~ Thomas Merton
from Seeds of Contemplation
with thanks to louie, louie
art by van gogh

our essential nature -

~ Rupert Spira

I see my beauty in you

~ Rumi

version by Coleman Barks

be helpless and completely poor

Being humble is right for you now.
Don't thrash around showing your strength.

You're naked in the bee-house!
It doesn't matter how powerful
your arms and legs are.

To God, that is more of a lie
than your weakness is.

In his doorway your prestige
and your physical energy are just dust
on your face. Be helpless
and completely poor.

And don't try to meet his eye!
That's like signing a paper
that honors yourself.

If you can take care of things, do so!
But when you're living at home with God,
you neither sew the world together
with desires nor tear it apart
with disappointments.

In that place existence itself
is illusion. All that is, is one.

~ Hakim Sanai

English version by Coleman Barks
shoes by Van Gogh

 with thanks to Poetry Chaikhana

the blind old man

I don't know why so much sweetness hovers around us.

Nor why the wind blows the curtains in the afternoons,

Nor why the earth mutters so much about its children.

We'll never know why the snow falls through the night,

Nor how the heron stretches her long legs,

Nor why we feel so abandoned in the morning.

We have never understood how birds manage to fly,

Nor who the genius is who makes up dreams,

Nor how heaven and earth can appear in a poem.

We don't know why the rain falls so long.

The ditchdigger turns up one shovel after another.

The herons go on stitching the heavens together.

We've never heard about the day we were conceived

Nor the doctor who helped us to be born,

Nor that blind old man who decides when we will die.

It's hard to understand why the sun rises,

And why our children are mostly fond of us,

And why the wind blows the curtains in the afternoon.

~  Robert Bly

 from Talking Into the Ear of a Donkey