a living flame

Love's valley is the next, and here desire

Will plunge the pilgrim into seas of fire,

Until his very being is en-flamed

And those whom fire rejects turn back ashamed.

The lover is a man who flares and burns,

Whose face is fevered, who in frenzy yearns,

Who knows no prudence, who will gladly send

A hundred worlds toward their blazing end,

Who knows of neither faith nor blasphemy,

Who has no time for doubt or certainty,

To whom both good and evil are the same,

And who is neither, but a living flame.

But you! Lukewarm in all you say or do,

Backsliding, weak - oh no, this is not you!

True lovers give up everything they own

To steal one moment with the Friend alone -

They make no vague, procrastinating vow,

But risk their livelihood and risk it now.

Until their hearts are burned, how can they flee

From their desire's incessant misery?

They are the falcon when it flies distressed

In circles, searching for its absent nest -

They are the fish cast up upon the land

That seeks the sea and shudders on the sand.

Love here is fire; its thick smoke clouds the head -

When love has come the intellect has fled;

It cannot tutor love, and all its care

Supplies no remedy for love's despair.

If you could seek the unseen you would find

Love's home, which is not reason or the mind,

And love's intoxication tumbles down

The world's designs for glory and renown -

If you could penetrate their passing show

And see the world's wild atoms, you would know

That reason's eyes will never glimpse one spark

Of shining love to mitigate the dark.

Love leads whoever starts along our Way;

The noblest bow to love and must obey -

But you, unwilling both to love and tread

The pilgrim's path, you might as well be dead!

The lover chafes, impatient to depart,

And longs to sacrifice his life and heart.

~ Farid Attar

translated by Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis

from The Conference of Birds

profound not-knowing

One of my favorite things to do is to sit with my elderly father who has Alzheimers. It's a beautiful thing just to sit a place of profound not-knowing with him, a place where I do not know what to say or do. I sit, without expectation, without trying to 'fix' him, or manipulate his experience in any way. I just listen, without trying to make things better in the moment, without playing the role of 'the one who knows'. As consciousness, I am simply available to him. I don't need to 'know' anything in this place, for we are each other. I simply cannot tell who is the one with memory loss. 

And here, I notice a deep and profound acceptance of any wave of frustration or sadness that appears in the ocean of experience. His pain, my pain, there is no difference at all. 

And this seems to me to be what true relationship is at its very core - meeting, really meeting in the moment, without hope, without a future, without expectation, without a story. Coming face to face with yourself. Nobody meeting nobody. 

I love what Nisargadatta Maharaj says: 

"With the dissolution of the personal 'I', 

personal suffering disappears." 

But crucially, he also adds: 

"What remains is the great sadness of compassion". 

Yes, the absence of 'I' is not cold detachment and neo-Advaita world-rejection, 

but intimacy of the most unspeakable kind. 

"Thanks, Dad, for keeping me grounded." 

~ Jeff Foster

from his newsletter: Life Without a Centre

art by picasso

unnameable

.

There is no where in you a paradise that is no place and there

You do not enter except without a story.

To enter there is to become unnameable.

Whoever is nowhere is nobody, and therefore cannot exist except as unborn:

No disguise will avail him anything

Such a one is neither lost nor found.

But he who has an address is lost.

They fall, they fall into apartments and are securely established!

They find themselves in streets. They are licensed

To proceed from place to place

They now know their own names

They can name several friends and know

Their own telephones must some time ring.

If all telephones ring at once, if all names are shouted at once and all cars crash at one crossing:

If all cities explode and fly away in dust

Yet identities refuse to be lost. There is a name and a number for everyone.

There is a definite place for bodies, there are pigeon holes for ashes:

Such security can business buy!

Who would dare to go nameless in so secure a universe?

Yet, to tell the truth, only the nameless are at home in it.

They bear with them in the center of nowhere the unborn flower of nothing:

This is the paradise tree. It must remain unseen until words end and arguments are silent.

~ Thomas Merton

from The Selected Poems of Thomas Merton

.

to breathe nothing but silence

.

Minds which are separated pretend to blend in one another's language.

The marriage of souls in concepts is mostly an illusion.

Thoughts which travel outward bring back reports from You from outward things, but a dialogue with You, uttered through the world, always ends by being a dialogue with my own reflection in the stream of time.  With You there is no dialogue, unless You choose a mountain, circle it with cloud and print Your words in fire upon the mind of Moses.

What was delivered to Moses on tablets of stone, as the fruit of lighting and thunder, 

is now more thoroughly born in our souls 

as quietly as the breath of our own being.

from Dialogues with Silence

To deliver oneself up, to hand oneself over, entrust oneself completely to the silence of a wide landscape of woods and hills, or sea, or desert; to sit still while the sun comes up over the land and fills its silences with light.  To pray and work in the morning and to labor in meditation in the evening when night falls upon that land and when the silence fills itself with darkness and with stars.  This is a true and special vocation.  There are few who are willing to belong completely to such silence, to let it soak into their bones, to breathe nothing but silence, to feed on silence, and to turn the very substance of their life into a living and vigilant silence.

Thomas Merton

from Thoughts in Solitude

sketch by the author

.

silence

.

The only silence we know is the silence when noise stops, the silence when thought stops - but that is not silence. Silence is something entirely different, like beauty, like love.  And this silence is not the product of a quiet mind, it is not the product of the brain cells which have understood the whole structure and say, 'for God's sake be quiet'; then the brain cells themselves produce the silence and that is not silence.  Nor is silence the outcome of attention in which the observer is observed; then there is no friction, but that is not silence.

You are waiting for me to describe what this silence is so that you can compare it, interpret it, carry it away and bury it.  It cannot be described.  What can be described is the known, and freedom from the known can come into being only when there is a dying every day to the known, to the hurts, the flatteries, to all the images you have made, to all your experiences - dying every day so that the brain cells themselves become fresh, young, innocent.  But that innocency, that freshness, that quality of tenderness and gentleness, does not produce love;  it is not the quality of beauty or silence.

That silence which is not the silence of the ending of noise is only a small beginning.  It is like going through a small hole to an enormous, wide, expansive ocean, to an immeasurable, timeless state.  But this you cannot understand verbally unless you have understood the whole structure of consciousness and the meaning of pleasure, sorrow and despair, and the brain cells themselves have become quiet.  Then perhaps you may come upon that mystery which nobody can reveal to you and nothing can destroy.  A living mind is a still mind, a living mind is a mind that has no center and therefore no space and time.  Such a mind is the limitless and that is the only truth, that is the only reality.

~ J. Krishnamurti

from Freedom from the Known

photo by Shreve Stockton