shrink us to our proper size

III

Yes, though hope is our duty,

let us live a while without it

to show ourselves we can.

Let us see that, without hope,

we still are well.  Let hopelessness

shrink us to our proper size.

Without it we are half as large

as yesterday, and the world

is twice as large.  My small

place grows immense as I walk

upon it without hope.

Our springtime rue anemones

as I walk among them, hoping 

not even to live, are beautiful

as Eden, and I their kinsman

am immortal in their moment.

~ Wendell Berry

to dance my dance

Waking up is unpleasant, you know. 

You are nice and comfortable in bed. 

It is irritating to be woken up. 

That's the reason the wise guru will not attempt
 to wake people up.

 I hope I'm going to be wise here 

and make no attempt whatsoever
 to wake you up if you are asleep.

 It is really none of my business, 
even though I say to you at times,

 "Wake up!"

 My business is to do my thing, 

to dance my dance. 

As the Arabs say,

 "The nature of rain is the same,

 but it makes thorns grow in the marshes
 and flowers in the gardens."

~ Anthony de Mello

.

do you have time

Oh do you have time

to linger

for just a little while

out of your busy

and very important day

for the goldfinches

that have gathered

in a field of thistles

for a musical battle,

to see who can sing

the highest note,

or the lowest,

or the most expressive of mirth,

or the most tender?

Their strong, blunt beaks

drink the air

as they strive

melodiously

not for your sake

and not for mine

and not for the sake of winning

but for sheer delight and gratitude—

believe us, they say,

it is a serious thing

just to be alive

on this fresh morning

in the broken world.

I beg of you,

do not walk by

without pausing

to attend to this

rather ridiculous performance.

It could mean something.

It could mean everything.

It could be what Rilke meant, when he wrote:

'You must change your life.'

~ Mary Oliver

the need to win

When the archer is shooting for nothing

He has all his skill.

If he shoots for a brass buckle

He is already nervous.

If he shoots for a prize of gold

He goes blind

Or see two targets -

He is out of his mind!

His skill has not changed.  But the prize

Divides him.  He cares.

He thinks more of winning

Than of shooting -

And the need to win 

Drains him of power.

~ Chuang Tzu

translation by Thomas Merton

sculpture by Antoine Bourdelle

detached from results

.

It is useless to try to make peace with ourselves by being pleased with everything we have done. 
In order to settle down in the quiet of our own being 
we must learn to be detached from the results of our own activity. 


We must withdraw ourselves, to some extent, 
from effects that are beyond our control 
and be content with the good will and the work 
that are the quiet expression of our interior life. 


We must be content to live without watching ourselves live, 
to work without expecting immediate reward, 
to love without instantaneous satisfaction, 
and to exist without any special recognition.

~ Thomas Merton

from  No Man is an Island

the present

The present is the wave that explodes over my head,
flinging the air with particles at the height of its breathless unroll;
it is the live water and light that bears from undisclosed sources
the freshest news, renewed and renewing,
world without end.

~ Annie Dillard

from the unknown

However smart we may be,

 however rich and clever or loving or charitable or spiritual or impeccable,

 it doesn't help us at all. 

The real power comes in to us from the beyond.

 Life enters us from behind, 

where we are sightless,

 and from below, 

where we do not understand. 

And unless we yield to the beyond, 

and take our power and might and honor and glory 

from the unseen, from the unknown,

 we shall continue empty.

~  D. H. Lawrence

sojourns in the parallel world

We live our lives of human passions,

cruelties, dreams, concepts,

crimes and the exercise of virtue

in and beside a world devoid

of our preoccupations, free

from apprehension--though affected,

certainly, by our actions. A world

parallel to our own though overlapping.

We call it "Nature"; only reluctantly

admitting ourselves to be "Nature" too.

Whenever we lose track of our own obsessions,

our self-concerns, because we drift for a minute,

an hour even, of pure (almost pure)

response to that insouciant life:

cloud, bird, fox, the flow of light, the dancing

pilgrimage of water, vast stillness

of spellbound ephemerae on a lit windowpane,

animal voices, mineral hum, wind

conversing with rain, ocean with rock, stuttering

of fire to coal--then something tethered

in us, hobbled like a donkey on its patch

of gnawed grass and thistles, breaks free.

No one discovers

just where we've been, when we're caught up again

into our own sphere (where we must

return, indeed, to evolve our destinies)

–but we have changed, a little.

~ Denise Levertov

from Sands of the Well

Grace Note

It is at last any morning

not answering to a name

I wake before there is light

hearing once more that same

music without repetition 

or beginning playing 

away into itself

in silence like a wave

a unison in its own

key that I seem

to have heard before I 

was listening but by the time

I hear it now it is gone

as when on a morning

alive with sunlight

almost at the year's end

a feathered breath a bird

flies in at the open window

then vanishes leaving me

believing what I do not see

~  W. S. Merwin

art by Van Gogh

suffering brings me so close to God

~ Jack Kornfield

Ram Dass

Trudy Goodman

Krishna Das and others 

that is home

For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers.
 I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves.
 And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons.
 Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great,
 solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles,
 their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle 
with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves
 according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. 
Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree.
 When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, 
one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk:
 in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, 
all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years
 and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. 
And every young farm boy knows that the hardest and noblest wood
 has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger
 the most indestructible, the strongest,
 the ideal trees grow.

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, 
whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth.
 They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred
 by particulars, the ancient law of life.

A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. 
The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, 
unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves
 in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form
 and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.

A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, 
I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me.
 I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. 
I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. 
Out of this trust I live.

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, 
then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! 
Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts… 
Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you,
 or home is nowhere at all.

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening.
 If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel,
 its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one’s suffering, 
though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother,
 for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, 
every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: 
Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours.
 They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. 
But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness
 and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy.
 Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. 
He wants to be nothing except what he is. 
That is home. That is happiness.





~ Hermann Hesse
with thanks to brainpickings 

door posts

~ Ram Dass

fasting

There’s hidden sweetness in the stomach’s emptiness.

We are lutes, no more, no less. If the soundbox

is stuffed full of anything, no music.

If the brain and belly are burning clean

with fasting, every moment a new song comes out of the fire.

The fog clears, and new energy makes you

run up the steps in front of you.

Be emptier and cry like reed instruments cry.

Emptier, write secrets with the reed pen.

When you’re full of food and drink, Satan sits

where your spirit should, an ugly metal statue

in place of the Kaaba. 


When you fast,

good habits gather like friends who want to help.

Fasting is Solomon’s ring. Don’t give it

to some illusion and lose your power,

but even if you have, if you've lost all will and control,

they come back when you fast, like soldiers appearing

out of the ground, pennants flying above them.

A table descends to your tents,

Jesus’ table.

Expect to see it, when you fast, this table

spread with other food, better than the broth of cabbages.

~ Rumi 

translated by Coleman Barks

to drift

He wanted to drift on the river not so much to see where it went 

as to be one with it, to go with it as virtually a part of it.  

He wished perhaps to live out a kind of parable.  

One cannot drift by intention - 

or at least, in intending to drift and in drifting, 

one must accept a severe limitation upon one's intentions.  

But in giving oneself to the currents, 

in thus subordination one's intentions, 

one becomes eligible for unintended goods, 

unwished -for gifts - 

and often these goods and gifts surpass 

those that one has intended or wished for.

 And so a drifter subscribes necessarily to a kind of faith 

that is identical both to the absolute trust of migrating birds 

and to the scripture that bids us to lose our lives in order to find them.  

Harlan stated it in 1932 with characteristic simplicity: 

"I believe that whatever we need is at hand."

~ Wendell Berry

from "Harlan Hubbard - Life and Work"

photo by Ansel Adams

when doing slows

When doing slows down, 

the thinking that is at its origin is exposed; 

when thinking dissolves, 

the feeling that is behind it is uncovered;

 when feeling subsides,

 the Being that is at its heart is revealed.

~ Rujpert Spira

a gracious lady came to us

A gracious lady came to us

and favored us by receiving

kindly our care of her

at the end of all her days.

She was a lady made graceful

beyond what we had known

by the welcome she gave to death,

her guest, whom she made unfearful

by her fearlessness, having no further

use for herself as we had known her.

~ Wendell Berry

kindness

Briefly

We walk this earth.

We have

But a short time.

We resemble grasses;

Green in the spring,

Brown in the summer heat,

Withering in the winter wind.

Those who understand this

Put aside their useless quarrels.

The cosmos is unfathomably vast.

The human mind is very small.

An act of kindness is never wasted;

It is the gateway to the deathless and unborn,

It is the exultation of the heart.

~  Jim Wilson

.

sowing

In the stilled place that once was a road going down

from the town to the river, and where the lives of marriages grew

a house, cistern and barn, flowers, the tilted stone of borders,

and the deeds of their lives ran to neglect, and honeysuckle

and then the fire overgrew it all, I walk heavy

with seed, spreading on the cleared hill the beginnings

of green, clover and grass to be pasture,  Between

history's death upon the place and the trees that would have come

I claim, and act, and am mingled in the fate of the world.

~ Wendell Berry

from Farming Poems

woodcut by Harlan Hubbard

perishable, it said

Perishable, it said on the plastic container,

and below, in different ink,

the date to be used by, the last teaspoon consumed.

I found myself looking:

now at the back of each hand,

now inside the knees,

now turning over each foot to look at the sole.

Then at the leaves of the young tomato plants,

then at the arguing jays.

Under the wooden table and lifted stones, looking.

Coffee cups, olives, cheeses,

hunger, sorrow, fears—

these too would certainly vanish, without knowing when.

How suddenly then

the strange happiness took me,

like a man with strong hands and strong mouth,

inside that hour with its perishing perfumes and clashings.

~ Jane Hirshfield

silent in the moonlight

Silent in the moonlight, no beginning or end.

Alone, and not alone.  A man and a woman lie

On open ground, under an antelope robe.

They sleep under animal skin, looking up

At the old, clear stars.  How many years?

The robe thrown over them, rough

Where they sleep.  Outside, the moon, the plains

Silent in the moonlight, no beginning or end.

~ Robert Bly

from Talking into the Ear of a Donkey

melted into the landscape

Last might when I cycled home from S., I poured out all my tenderness,
all the tenderness one cannot express for a man even when one loves him very,
very much, I poured it all out into the great, all-embracing spring night. I stood
on the little bridge and looked across the water; I melted into the landscape and
offered all my tenderness up to the sky and the stars and the water and to the
little bridge.  And that was the best moment of the day.

... And I felt this was the only way of transforming all the many deep and
tender feelings one carries for another into deeds: to entrust them to nature, to let
them stream out under the open spring sky, and to realize that there is no other
way of letting them go.




~ Etty Hillesum
from An Interrupted Life
story and art from Love and Gratitude
by Roderick Maclver



   

when one gave oneself to them

Near the end of the war, he was injured in an explosion which 

seriously impaired his vision. Told that his loss of sight would eventually

be total, he decided to return to more familiar surroundings in France to

continue his study of music and to prepare himself to leave the world of 

the sighted. "The sight of a pin," he wrote, "a hair, a leaf, a glass of

water - these filled me with tremendous excitement. The plants

 in the courtyards, the cobblestones, the lamp posts, the faces of strangers. I no

longer took them in and bound them up in me, they retained their values,

their identities. I went out to them, immersed myself in them and found

them more beautiful than I ever dreamed they could be. They tought,

they nourished when one gave oneself to them."

~ Robert Ellsberg

from a profile of John Howard Griffin

in The Catholic Worker

 found here in The Heron Dance Book of

Love and Gratitude

by Roderick Maclver

art by Mr. Maclver

walls

When they were building the walls,

How could I not have noticed?

But I never heard the builders,

Not a sound,

Imperceptibly they closed me off

From the outside world.

~ Constantine P. Cavafy

Cavafy articulates something that happens to all of us.  
Your complicity with other people’s images and expectations of you
 allows them to box you in completely.  It takes a long time to recognize
 how some key people on your life’s journey exercise so much control
 over your mind, behaviour, and actions.  Through the image they project
 onto you or through the expectations they have of you, they claim you. 

 Most of this is subtle and works in the domain of the implicit and unstated
 subtext; it is, of course, all the more powerful for not being direct and obvious.
  When you become conscious of these powerful builders and their work
 of housing you in, something within you refuses to comply; 
you begin to send back the building materials.
  
There is no planning permission here, thanks for the kindness! 
 Such projection and expectation is based on their fear and the need to control. 
 Expectation is resentment waiting to happen. 
 In contrast, friendship liberates you.

~ John O’Donohue
 from Eternal Echoes

rediscover yourself

.

.

The wildness of the invisible world is nameless.  It has no name. 
 A first step towards reawakening respect for your inner life may be to become aware 
of the private collage of dead names you have for your inner life.  

Often, the experiences of wilderness can return us to the nameless wildness within.  
Sometime, go away to a wild place on your own. 

 Leave your name 
and the grid of intentions and projects and images which mark you out as citizen Z.  
Leave it all, and let yourself just slip back into the rhythms of your intimate wildness. 
 You will be surprised at the lost terrains, wells, and mountains that you will rediscover,
 territories which have been buried under well-meant but dead names. 

 To go beyond confinement is to rediscover yourself.

.

John O’Donohue
from ‘Eternal Echoes’

.