The flower invites the butterfly

.

.

The flower invites the butterfly with no-mind;

The butterfly visits the flower with no-mind.

The flower opens, the butterfly comes;

The butterfly comes, the flower opens.

I don’t know others,

Others don’t know me.

By not-knowing 

we follow nature’s course

.

~ Ryokan

.

Instant Glimpsable Only for an Instant

.

Moment. Moment. Moment.

- equal inside you, moment,

the velocitous mountains and cities rising and falling,

songs of children, iridescence even of beetles.

It is not you the locust can strip of all leaf.

Untouchable green at the center,

the wolf too lopes past you and through you as he eats.

Insult to mourn you, you who mourn no one, unable.

Without transformation,

yours the role of the chorus, to whom nothing happens.

The living step forward: choosing to enter, to lose.

I, who am made of you only,

speak these words against your unmasterable instruction -

A knife cannot cut itself open,

yet you ask me both to be you and to know you.

~ Jane Hirshfield

To my granddaughters

.

To my granddaughters who visited the Holocaust

Museum on the day of the burial of Yitzhak Rabin

Now you know the worst

we humans have to know

about ourselves, and I am sorry,

for I know that you will be afraid.

To those of our bodies given

without pity to be burned, I know

there is no answer

but loving one another,

even our enemies, and this is hard.

But remember:

when a man of war becomes a man of peace,

he gives a light, divine

though it is also human.

When a man of peace is killed

by a man of war, he gives a light.

You do not have to walk in darkness.

If you will have the courage for love,

you may walk in light. It will be

the light of those who have suffered

for peace. It will be

your light.

~ Wendell Berry

from: A Timbered Choir

I Am Completely Different

I am completely different.

Though I am wearing the same tie as yesterday,

am as poor as yesterday,

as good for nothing as yesterday,

today

I am completely different.

Though I am wearing the same clothes,

am as drunk as yesterday,

living as clumsily as yesterday, nevertheless

today

I am completely different.

Ah ...

I patiently close my eyes

on all the grins and smirks

on all the twisted smiles and horse laughs---

and glimpse then, inside me

one beautiful white butterfly

fluttering towards tomorrow.

~ Kuroda Saburo

so small

With strokes that ring clear and metallic, the hour
to touch me bends down on its way:
my senses are quivering. I feel I've the power-
and I seize on the pliable day.

Not a thing was complete till by me it was eyed,
every kind of becoming stood still.
Now my glances are ripe and there comes like a bride
to each of them just what it will.

There's nothing so small but I love it and choose
to paint it gold-groundly and great
and hold it most precious and know not whose
soul it may liberate...




~ Rainer Maria Rilke

There is a solitude of space

.

.

There is a solitude of space, 

A solitude of sea, 

A solitude of death, but these 

Society shall be, 

Compared with that profounder site, 

That polar privacy, 

A Soul admitted to Itself: 

Finite Infinity.

.

~  Emily Dickinson

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Just look

.

.

"Just look down the road and tell me if you can see either of them.”

.

“I see nobody on the road” said Alice.

.

“I only wish I had such eyes to see Nobody! And at such a distance too!”

.

~  Lewis Carroll, from:

 'Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There'

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reblogged from: http://saturnrising.tumblr.com/

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A hand

A hand is not four fingers and a thumb.

Nor is it palm and knuckles,

not ligaments or the fat's yellow pillow,

not tendons, star of the wristbone, meander of veins.

A hand is not the thick thatch of its lines

with their infinite dramas,

nor what it has written,

not on the page,

not on the ecstatic body.

Nor is the hand its meadows of holding, of shaping--

not sponge of rising yeast-bread,

not rotor pin's smoothness,

not ink.

The maple's green hands do not cup

the proliferant rain.

What empties itself falls into the place that is open.

A hand turned upward holds only a single, transparent question.

Unanswerable, humming like bees, it rises, swarms, departs.

~  Jane Hirshfield

Happy Birthday Omar

Hakim Omar Khayyam was born at sunrise on Wednesday May 18 in the year 1048 C.E. at Nishapur. As befitting a sage who mastered astronomy and reformed the calendar, it took a detailed analysis of the stellar and planetary positions described in the horoscope cast at his birth to arrive at this information. This analysis was only accomplished in the twentieth century. Prior to this time even the exact year of Omar’s birth remained in doubt. Details of the analysis as well as an astrological life sketch based on this horoscope are presented in “The Nectar of Grace: ‘Omar Khayyam’s Life and Works” by Swami Govinda Tirtha published in Kitabistan, Allahabad, India by the Government Central Press, Hyderabad-Dn. in 1941. This beautiful labor of love is by far the most comprehensive treatment of the life and works of Omar Khayyam that I have ever come across. This unique and valuable resource is little known in the United States and is difficult to locate.

.

Omar is primarily known in the West today for his poetry; usually Edward FitzGerald’s 1859 presentation (rather than translation) which introduced the Rubaiyat to the English speaking world. However, such was the not at all the case during his lifetime. Not until two centuries after Omar’s death did a few quatrains appear under his name. He was known in his own time as a sage, scholar, Hakim (wise man) who had mastered virtually all branches of knowledge of his time – astronomy, astrology, mathematics, medicine, physics, philosophy, religion, jurisprudence - am I leaving anything out? He was a pioneer of free expression, deplored hypocrisy, most certainly was not a drunkard or libertine, and is reported to have had a truly astounding memory!

I sent my soul into the invisible,

Some letter of that after life to spell.

And by and by my soul returned to me

And answered, I myself am heaven and hell.

Dreaming when Dawn's Left Hand was in the Sky

I heard a Voice within the Tavern cry,

"Awake, my Little ones, and fill the Cup

Before Life's Liquor in its Cup be dry."

~ verses from the Rubaiyat

Omar’s revision of the calendar in 1079 C.E. to yield the Jalaali calendar (named after Jalaal-ol-Din Malek -shaah-e Saljuqi, the ruler who commissioned the calendar revision and was Omar’s patron) is accurate to one day in 3770 years, which is superior to the Julian calendar, and was only approached by the Gregorian calendar which we use today. The Gregorian calendar is named after Pope Gregory XIII who introduced the latest changes in 1582 C.E., over 500 years after Omar’s work. The Jalaali calender is a very natural solar calendar based on the spring eqinox as the start of the new year (Norooz). If the exact time of the spring equinox event (Saal-Tahveel) occurs before midday Teheran time that day is 1 Farvardin (new year), otherwise the following day is 1 Farvardin and the preceding month of Esfand is extended by one day.

In mathematics, Omar developed means of solving cubic equations (he identified 13 distinct cases) using an ingenious selection of conic sections. He demonstrated cubic equations that have two solutions, but did not seem to realize that a cubic can have three solutions. He discoursed on the significance of Euclid’s controversial 5thpostulate (the parallel postulate), although he did not grasp that this postulate can be both true and not true – each assumption leading to a valid (i.e. fully consistent) geometry. Omar also seems to have been the first to develop the binomial theorem and determine the binomial coefficients for the case where the exponent is a positive integer.

After a long life filled with accomplishments, honors, and disappointments too, Omar died in Nishapur on Thursday March 23, 1122 C.E. (12 Moharram, 516 AH) at the age of 73. Some references give the year of Omar’s death as 1131 C.E.; however, I’m going to follow Tirtha on this one because I find a depth in his research generally unmatched by others. Omar never married and insofar as we know had no children.

~ Donn A. Allen

What is sorrow for?

.

What is sorrow for? It is a storehouse

Where we store wheat, barleey, corn and tears.

We step to the door on a round stone,

And the storehouse feeds all the birds of sorrow.

And I say to myself: Will you have

Sorrow at last? Go on, be cheerful in autumn,

Be stoic, yes, be tranquil, calm;

Or in the valley of sorrows spread your wings.

.

~ Robert Bly, from:  'Turkish Pears In August' (2007)

.

The Hermit at Dawn

Early in the morning the hermit wakes, hearing

The roots of the fir tree stir beneath his floor.

Someone is there. that strength buried

In earth carries up the summer world. When

A man loves a woman, he nourishes her.

Dancers strew the lawn with the light of their feet.

When a woman loves the earth, she nourishes it.

Earth nourishes what no one can see.

~  Robert Bly 
from Turkish Pears In August (2007)

.

If I'm a theologian

.

If I'm a theologian 

I am one to the extent I have learned to duck

when the small, haughty doctrines fly overhead,

dropping their loads of whitewash at random

 on the faces of those who look toward Heaven.
.

Look down, look down, and save your soul

by honester dirt, that receives with a lordly

indifference this off-fall of the air.

.

~  Wendell Berry

.

The piece is not actually silent

.

.

The piece is not actually silent 

[there will never be silence until death comes which never comes];

 it is full of sound,

 but sounds which I do not think of beforehand, 

which I hear for the first time the same time others hear. 

What we hear is determined by our own emptiness, 

our own receptivity; 

we receive to the extent we are empty to do so.

 If one is full, 

or in the course of its performance becomes full of an idea[...], then it is just that.

.

~ John Cage, responding to a detractor of 4'33", recalled by Christian Wolff

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reblogged from: http://crowwithnomouth-jesse.blogspot.com/

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a far green country

Frodo kissed Merry and Pippin, and last of all Sam, 
and went aboard; and the sails were drawn up, 
and the wind blew, and slowly the ship slipped down
 the long grey firth; and the light of the glass 
of Galadriel that Frodo bore glimmered and was lost.

 And the ship went out into the High Sea 
and passed on into the West, until at last on a night of rain 
Frodo smelled a sweet fragrance on the air and heard the sound
 of singing that came over the water. And then it seemed to him
 that as in his dream in the house of Bombadil, the grey rain-curtain
 turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, 
and he beheld white shores and beyond them
 a far green country under a swift sunrise.

But to Sam the evening deepened to darkness 
as he stood at the Haven; and as he looked
 at the grey sea he saw only a shadow
 on the waters that was soon lost in the West.

~  J.R.R. Tolkien 
from: 'The Lord of the Rings'

It is not skill

.

.

It is not skill, knowledge, intellect,
good luck or bad, but choosing
to feel the strange notes
of our wildness,
for there is not nothingness
despite the easy magic
of despair.

.
~  Terrance Keenan

.

question and answer

.

.

question and answer
beginning and end
post and comment
fits and starts
.
these all dissolve
beautifully into one
(a one with no parts)
when we let go
of our heads
and enter our hearts

.

~ Benjamin Dean

.

the grip of life

Say "death" and the whole room freezes--
even the couches stop moving,
even the lamps.
Like a squirrel suddenly aware it is being looked at.

Say the word continuously,
and things begin to go forward.
Your life takes on
the jerky texture of an old film strip.

Continue saying it, hold it moment after moment inside the mouth,
it becomes another syllable.
A shopping mall swirls around the corpse of a beetle.

Death is voracious, it swallows all the living.
Life is voracious, it swallows all the dead.
neither is ever satisfied, neither is ever filled,
each swallows and swallows the world.

The grip of life is as strong as the grip of death.

(but the vanished, the vanished beloved, o where?)



~ Jane Hirshfield

Unto our very selves we are abridged

.

.

Whether we write or speak or do but look 

We are ever unapparent. What we are 

Cannot be transfused into word or book. 

Our soul from us is infinitely far. 

However much we give our thoughts the will 

To be our soul and gesture it abroad, 

Our hearts are incommunicable still. 

In what we show ourselves we are ignored. 

The abyss from soul to soul cannot be bridged 

By any skill of thought or trick of seeming. 

Unto our very selves we are abridged 

When we would utter to our thought our being. 

We are our dreams of ourselves, souls by gleams, 

And each to each other dreams of others’ dreams.

.

~ Fernando Pessoa 

.

A Letter (to Ed McClanahan)

.

.

Dear Ed,

.

I dreamed that you and I were sent to Hell.

The place we went to was not fiery

or cold, was not Dante's Hell or Milton's,

but was, even so, as true a Hell as any.

It was a place unalterably public

in which crowds of people were rushing

in weary frenzy this way and that,

as when classes change in a university

or at quitting time in a city street,

except that this place was wider far

than we could see, and the crowd as large 

as the place.  In that crowd every one

was alone.  Every one was hurrying.

Nobody was sitting down.  Nobody

was standing around.  All were rushing

so uniformly frantic, that to average them

would have stood them still.  It was a place 

deeply disturbed.  We thought, you and I,

that we might get across and come out

on the other side, if we stayed together,

only if we stayed together.  The other side

would be a clear day in a place we would know.

We joined hands and hurried along,

snatching each other through small openings 

in the throng.  But the place was full

of dire distractions, dire satisfactions.

We were torn apart, and I found you 

breakfasting upon a huge fried egg.

I snatched you away: "Ed! Come on!"

And then, still susceptible, I met

a lady whose luster no hell could dim.

She took all my thought.  But then,

in the midst of my delight, my fear

returned: "Oh! Damn it all! Where's Ed?"

I fled, searching, and found you again.

We went on together.  How this ended

I do not know.  I woke before it could end.

But, old friend, I want to tell you

how fine it was, what a durable

nucleus of joy it gave my fright

to force that horrid way with you, how

heavenly, let us say, in spite of Hell.

.

P.S.

Do you want to know shy

you were distracted by an egg, and I

by a beautiful lady?  That's Hell.

.

~ Wendell Berry

.

The body is a single creature

God, how I hate names

of the body's chemicals and anatomy,

the frore and glum department

of its parts, each alone in the scattering

of the experts of Babel.

The body

is a single creature, whole

its life is one, never less that one, or more,

so is its world, and so

are two bodies in their love for one another

one.  In ignorance of this

we talk ourselves to death.

~  Wendell Berry

The abyss of no-meaning

.

.

The abyss of no-meaning-what

can prevail against it?  Love

for the water in its standing

fall through the hill's wrist

from the town down to the river.

There is no love but this,

and it extends from Heaven

to the land destroyed,

to the hurt man in his cage,

to the dead man in his grave.

.

~ Wendell Berry

.

Sorrows of the Moon

.

.

Tonight the moon dreams in a deeper languidness,
And, like a beauty on her cushions, lies at rest;
While drifting off to sleep, a tentative caress
Seeks, with a gentle hand, the contour of her breast;
.
As on a crest above her silken avalanche,
Dying, she yields herself to an unending swoon,
And sees a pallid vision everywhere she’d glance,
In the azure sky where blossoms have been strewn.
.
When sometime, in her weariness, upon her sphere
She might permit herself to sheda furtive tear,
A poet of great piety, a foe of sleep,
.
Catches in the hollow of his hand that tear,
An opal fragment, iridescent as a star;
Within his heart, far from the sun, it’s buried deep.
.
~  Charles Baudelaire 
.

This is what you shall do

.

.

This is what you shall do:
Love the earth and sun and the animals,
Despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks,
Stand up for the stupid and crazy,
Devote your income and labors to others,
Hate tyrants, argue not concerning God,
Have patience and indulgence toward the people,
Take off your hat to nothing known or unknown,
Or to any man or number of men,
Go freely with powerful uneducated persons,
And with the young and with the mothers of families,
Read these leaves in the open air,
Every season of every year of your life,
Reexamine all you have been told,
At school at church or in any book,
Dismiss whatever insults your own soul,
And your very flesh shall be a great poem,
And have the richest fluency not only in its words,
But in the silent lines of its lips and face,
And between the lashes of your eyes,
And in every motion and joint of your body.

.

~  Walt Whitman

.

the thorns

.

.

I was a child. I remember, I used to pick

once, wild roses.

They has so many thorns,

but I didn’t wanted to break them.

I thought they were - buds,

and they are going to bloom.

.

I met you, then. Oh, how many,

how many thorns you had!

but I didn’t wanted to undress you -

I thought they will bloom.

.

Today, everything passes

in front of my eyes and I smile.

I smile and I wander through valleys

Playful, in the blowing of the wind.

I was a child.

.

~   Lucian Blaga

.

my love is building a building

.

.

my love is building a building

around you,a frail slippery

house,a strong fragile house

(beginning at the singular beginning

.

of your smile)a skilful uncouth

prison,a precise clumsy

prison(building thatandthis into Thus,

Around the reckless magic of your mouth)

.

my love is building a magic,a discrete

tower of magic and(as i guess)

.

when Farmer Death(whom fairies hate)shall

.

crumble the mouth-flower fleet

He'll not my tower, 

                                                     laborious, casual

.

where the surrounded smile

                                                 hangs

.

                                                                            breathless

.

e. e. cummings
art by Sandy Eastoak,  http://www.sandyeastoak.com/
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