Friday, September 11, 2020
die to everything that you know
Thursday, September 10, 2020
in the deep woods
You find a flower half-buried in leaves,And in your eye its very fate resides.Loving beauty, you caress the bloom;Soon enough, you’ll sweep petals from the floor.
Terrible to love the lovely so,To count your own years, to say “I’m old,”To see a flower half-buried in leavesAnd come face to face with what you are.
In Basho's house
Tuesday, September 8, 2020
a moment outside the moment
between what I see and what I say
Monday, September 7, 2020
opening
Sunday, September 6, 2020
self-imposed suffering
If we live in the moment, we are not in time.
Getting caught up in memories of the past or worrying about the future
Now isn't a time to look back or plan ahead.
earth's desire
Saturday, September 5, 2020
impossible orchestra
~ Conductor Alondra de la Parra
brings together The Impossible Orchestra, formed by outstanding musicians from 14 different countries. The goal is to support Mexican women and children affected by COVID-19 through Fondo Semillas and Save the Children México.
when death comes
When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse
to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox;
when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,
and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,
and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,
and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.
When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.
Wednesday, September 2, 2020
intensely alive
.
the looking will always reveal a networking of causes and conditions,
a fabric of inter-becoming that is vast and pervasive
without any finite boundaries in either space or time.
There is a transforming magic in deep seeing.
There is a magic in love;
magic in the sense that the moment is filled with
a feeling of immense spaciousness and possibility.
Things seem more intensely alive.
The predictable world,
filled with its opaque-making hopes and fears becomes transparent,
revealing a world poised on that terrifying and awesomely alive point of impermanence,
a universe dancing in that impossible place that transcends all paradox.
To love someone is not to know a person totally.
It is to constantly realize that they are infinitely vast and
ultimately unknowable.
So the voyage of discovery never comes to an end and
the person is a focus of undying interest,
continually revealing new facets of being.
~ Tarchin Hearn
by forgetting time
In our consciousness of time
we are doomed to the past.
The future we may dream of
but can know it only after
it has come and gone.
The present too we know
only as the past. When
we say, "This now is
present, the heat, the breeze,
the rippling water," it is past.
Before we knew it, before
we said "now." it was gone.
If the only time we live
is the present, and if the present
is immeasurably short (or
long), then by the measure
of the measurers we don't
exist at all, which seems
improbable, or we are
immortals, living always
in eternity, as from time to time
we hear, but rarely know.
You see the rainbow and the new-leafed
woods bright beneath, you see
the otters playing in the river
or the swallows flying, you see
a beloved face, mortal
and beloved, causing the heart
to sway in the rift between beats
where we live without counting,
where we have forgotten time
and have forgotten ourselves,
where eternity has seized us
as its own. This breaks
open the little circles
of the humanly known and believed,
of the world no longer existing,
letting us live where we are,
as in the deepest sleep also
we are entirely present,
entirely trusting, eternal.
Is it concentration of the mind,
our unresting counting
that leaves us standing
blind in our dust?
In time we are present only
by forgetting time.
~ Wendell Berry
art by James Eads
Tuesday, September 1, 2020
to steady the ladder
Some say that compassion, kindness and caring are our true nature.The instinct to help, to steady the ladder, to be there when we are needed,to do so without so much as a thought for ourselves may arise from deep within the seed of our being.
In an article a few years ago one researcher discovered what turned out to be a predictable response from very young children.
Oops, the scientist dropped
his clothespin.
Not to worry — a wobbly toddler raced to help, eagerly handing it back.
The simple experiment shows the capacity for altruism emerges
as early as 18 months of age.
Psychology researcher Felix Warneken of Germany’s
Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology
performed a series of ordinary tasks in front of toddlers,
such as hanging towels with clothespins or stacking books.
Sometimes he “struggled” with the tasks; sometimes he deliberately messed up.
Over and over, whether Warneken dropped clothespins or knocked over his books,
each of 24 toddlers offered help within seconds — but only if he appeared to
need it.
Video shows how one overall-clad baby glanced between Warneken’s face
and the dropped clothespin before quickly crawling over,
grabbing the object, pushing up to his feet
and eagerly handing back the pin.
Warneken never asked for the help and didn’t even say “thank you,”
so as not to taint the research by training youngsters to expect praise
if they helped. After all, altruism means helping
with no expectation of anything in return
— the toddlers didn’t bother to offer help when he deliberately
pulled a book off the stack or threw a pin to the floor,
~ Felix Warneken
Monday, August 31, 2020
oh what is that beautiful thing that just happened?
At Blackwater Pond the tossed waters have settled
after a night of rain.
I dip my cupped hands. I drink
a long time. It tastes
like stone, leaves, fire. It falls cold
into my body, waking the bones. I hear them
deep inside me, whispering
oh what is that beautiful thing
that just happened?
~ Mary Oliver
photo by Eliot Porter
Sunday, August 30, 2020
room for all this
We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem,
but the truth is that things don’t really get solved.
They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again
and fall apart again. It’s just like that.
The healing comes from letting there be room for all this to happen;
room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy. When we think
something is going to bring us pleasure, we don’t know
what’s really going to happen. When we think something is going
to give us misery, we don’t know.
Letting there be room for not knowing is the most important thing of all.
We try to do what we think is going to help. But we don’t know.
We never know if we’re going to fall flat or sit up tall.
When there’s a big disappointment, we don’t know if that’s the end of the story.
It may just be the beginning of a great adventure.
Friday, August 28, 2020
what survives
remembering rexroth
from Sacramental Acts
Thursday, August 27, 2020
she who reconciles
She who reconciles the ill-matched threads
of her life, and weave them gratefully
into a single cloth -
it's she who drives the loudmouths from the hall
and clears it for a different celebration
where the one guest is you.
In the softness of evening
it's you she receives.
You are the partner of her loneliness,
the unspeaking center of her monologues.
With each disclosure you encompass more
and she stretches beyond what limits her,
to hold you.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
from Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God
Wednesday, August 26, 2020
I'm slipping
too many names
Mondays are meshed with Tuesdays
and the week with the whole year.
Time cannot be cut
with your weary scissors,
and all the names of the day
are washed out by the waters of night.
No one can claim the name of Pedro,
nobody is Rosa or Maria,
all of us are dust or sand,
all of us are rain under rain.
They have spoken to me of Venezuelas,
of Chiles and of Paraguays;
I have no idea what they are saying.
and I know that it doesn't have a name.
When I lived with the roots
I liked them more than the flowers,
and when I talked with a stone
it rang like a bell.
The spring is so long
that is lasts all winter:
time lost its shoes:
a year contains four centuries.
When I sleep all these nights,
what am I named or not named?
And when I wake up who am I
if I wasn't I when I slept?
This means that we have barely
disembarked into life,
that we've only just now been born,
let's not fill our mouths
with so many uncertain names,
with so many sad labels,
with so many pompous letters,
with so much yours and mine,
with so much signing of papers.
I intend to confuse things,
to unite them, make them new-born,
intermingle them, undress them,
until the light of the world
has the unity of the ocean,
a generous wholeness,
a fragrance alive and crackling.
~ Pablo Neruda
English version by Anthony Kerrigan
to heal the wound
A number of people, including myself and many of my friends --
we need a little bit of time, of space, of privacy, of meditation,
in order to heal the wound that is very deep in ourselves.
That does not mean that if sometimes I am absorbed in looking at a cloud
and not thinking about Vietnam, that does not mean that I don't care.
But I need the cloud to heal me and my deep wounds. Many of us are wounded,
and we understand and support each other in our need for healing.
We tend to imagine that the lifetime of a person is something like
using your pen in order to draw a line across a sheet of paper.
A person appears on this earth and lives and dies.
And we may think of the life of a person just like a line we trace
across a sheet of paper. But I think that is not true.
The life of a person is not confined to anything like a line
direction of the right side of a piece of paper,
So the image of that line crossing the sheet of paper is not correct.
It goes in all directions. Not only four, or eight, or sixteen,
So if we can see through to that reality, our notion of time will change.
That is why in meditation you can feel that you are not traveling in time
but we are, we are eternity. We are not caught by death, by change.
A few moments of being alive in that state of mind is a very good opportunity
for self purification. Not only will it affect our being,
but of course it affects our action -- our non-action.
~ Thich Nhat Hanh
Tuesday, August 25, 2020
and all shall be well
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
~ T.S Eliot
from “Little Gidding,” Four Quartets
we travelers
We travelers, walking to the sun, can't see
Ahead, but looking back the very light
That blinded us shows us the way we came,
Along which blessings now appear, risen
As if from sightlessness to sight, and we,
By blessings brightly lit, keep going toward
That blessed light that yet to us is dark.
~ Wendell Berry