the speech of lovers

 

 

 

True silence is the speech of lovers. . . . 

True silence is a key to the immense and flaming heart of God.

 It is the beginning of a divine courtship that will end only in the immense,

 creative, fruitful, loving silence of final union with the Beloved.

Yes, such silence is holy, a prayer beyond all prayers. 

True silence leads to the final prayer of the constant presence of God,

 to the heights of contemplation, when the soul, finally at peace, 

lives by the will of whom she loves totally, utterly, and completely.

This silence, then, will break forth in a charity that overflows

 in the service of the neighbor without counting the cost. 

 

It will witness to Christ anywhere, always.

 Availability will become delightsome and easy,

 for in each person the soul will see the face of her Love.

 Hospitality will be deep and real, for a silent heart is a loving heart,

 and a loving heart is a hospice to the world. 

 

~ Catherine de Hueck Doherty

 

 a Russian-Canadian Catholic social worker 

and founder of the Madonna House Apostolate.

 A pioneer of social justice and a renowned national speaker,

 Doherty was also a prolific writer of hundreds of articles,

 best-selling author of dozens of books, and a dedicated wife and mother.

 In 1932, she gave up all her possessions, lived among the multitude of poor people

 in downtown Toronto and established Friendship House with its soup kitchen.

 She gave food to them when she had none for herself –

 

attachment

The soul that is attached to anything, 

however much good there may be in it, 

will not arrive at the liberty of divine union. 

 

For whether it be a strong wire rope 

or a slender and delicate thread that holds the bird, 

it matters not, if it really holds it fast; 

for, until the cord be broken, 

the bird cannot fly. 

 

 

 

 

~ Saint John of the Cross

.

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 there is homeless for he has no door and 

no identity with which to go out and to come in.

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 

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 Collected Poems of Thomas Merton

A person wakes from sleep

.

A person wakes from sleep
and does not know for a time
who she is, who he is.
This happens in a lifetime
once or twice.
It has happened to you, no doubt.
Some in that moment
panic,
some sigh with pleasure.
How each kind later envies the other,
who must so love their lives.

~   Jane Hirshfield

my doubt

I wake, doubt, beside you,

like a curtain half-open.

I dress doubting,

like a cup 

undecided if it has been dropped.

I eat doubting,

work doubting,

go out to a dubious cafe with skeptical friends.

I go to sleep doubting myself,

as a herd of goats

sleep in a suddenly gone-quiet truck.

I dream you, doubt,

nightly—

for what is the meaning of dreaming

if not that all we are while inside it

is transient, amorphous, in question?

Left hand and right hand,

doubt, you are in me,

throwing a basketball, guiding my knife and my fork.

Left knee and right knee,

we run for a bus,

for a meeting that surely will end before we arrive.

I would like

to grow content in you, doubt,

as a double-hung window

settles obedient into its hidden pulleys and ropes.

I doubt I can do so:

your own counterweight governs my nights and my days.

As the knob of hung lead holds steady

the open mouth of a window,

you hold me,

my kneeling before you resistant, stubborn,

offering these furious praises

I can't help but doubt you will ever be able to hear.

~ Jane Hirshfield

art by van gogh

surrender is the first step

.

[Since nature’s] beauties were such that even a fool

 could not force them into competition,

 this cured me once and for all of the pernicious tendency

 to compare and to prefer -an operation that does little good

 even when we are dealing with works of art

 and endless harm when we are dealing with nature.

 Total surrender is the first step towards the fruition of either.

 Shut your mouth; open your eyes and ears. 

Take in what is there and give no thought

 to what might have been there or what is somewhere else. 

That can come later, if it must come at all.

~ C. S. Lewis
 from Surprised by Joy

passing through

.

.

 

You are Life passing through your body, 

passing through your mind, 

passing through your soul. 

 

Once you find that out, 

not with logic, not with the intellect,

 but because you can feel that Life - 

you find out that you are,

 the force that makes the flowers open and close, 

that makes the hummingbird fly from flower to flower. 

 

You find out that you are in every tree, 

and you are in every animal, vegetable, and rock.

 

You are that force that moves the wind 

and breathes through your body. 

 

The whole universe is a living being that is moved by that force, 

and that is what you are. 

You are Life.

 

 

 

.

Don Miguel Ruiz

.

 

 

resting in gratitude

 

 

 

 

 

You have made me so rich, oh God, please let me share out Your beauty with open hands.

 My life has become an uninterrupted dialogue with You, oh God, one great dialogue.

 Sometimes when I stand in some corner of the camp, my feet planted on Your earth,

 my eyes raised toward Your heaven, tears sometimes run down my face,

 tears of deep emotion and gratitude. At night, too, when I lie in my bed and rest in You,

 oh God, tears of gratitude run down my face, and that is my prayer.

 

 I have been terribly tired for several days, but that too will pass. 

Things come and go in a deeper rhythm, and people must be taught to listen;

 it is the most important thing we have to learn in this life.

 

 I am not challenging You, oh God, my life is one great dialogue with You.

 I may never become the great artist I would really like to be, 

but I am already secure in You, God. Sometimes I try my hand

 at turning out small profundities and uncertain short stories, 

but I always end up with just one single word: God. 

And that says everything, and there is no need for anything more. 

And all my creative powers are translated into inner dialogues with You. 

The beat of my heart has grown deeper, more active, and yet more peaceful, 

and it is as if I were all the time storing up inner riches.

 

 

 

 

~ Etty Hillesum

from An Interrupted Life: The Diaries

translated by Arnold J. Pomerans

 

 

 

you can’t offer happiness until you have it for yourself

If you pour a handful of salt into a cup of water, the water becomes undrinkable.

 But if you pour the salt into a river, people can continue to draw the water to cook,

 wash, and drink. The river is immense, and it has the capacity to receive, embrace,

 and transform. When our hearts are small, our understanding and compassion are limited,

 and we suffer. We can’t accept or tolerate others and their shortcomings,

 and we demand that they change. But when our hearts expand, these same things

 don’t make us suffer anymore. We have a lot of understanding and compassion

 and can embrace others. We accept others as they are,

 and then they have a chance to transform.

When we feed and support our own happiness, we are nourishing our ability to love.

 That’s why to love means to learn the art of nourishing our happiness.

The essence of loving kindness is being able to offer happiness. 

You can be the sunshine for another person. You can’t offer happiness

 until you have it for yourself. So build a home inside by accepting yourself

 and learning to love and heal yourself. Learn how to practice mindfulness

 in such a way that you can create moments of happiness and joy

 for your own nourishment.

Then you have something to offer the other person.

If you have enough understanding and love, then every moment —

 whether it’s spent making breakfast, driving the car, watering the garden, 

or doing anything else in your day —

 can be a moment of joy.

In a deep relationship, there’s no longer a boundary between you and the other person.

 You are her and she is you. Your suffering is her suffering. Your understanding

 of your own suffering helps your loved one to suffer less.

 Suffering and happiness are no longer individual matters. 

What happens to your loved one happens to you.

 What happens to you happens to your loved one.

In true love, there’s no more separation or discrimination.

 His happiness is your happiness. Your suffering is his suffering.

 You can no longer say, “That’s your problem.”

When you love someone, you have to have trust and confidence.

Love without trust is not yet love. Of course, first you have to have trust,

 respect, and confidence in yourself. Trust that you have a good and compassionate nature.

 You are part of the universe; you are made of stars. When you look at your loved one,

 you see that he is also made of stars and carries eternity inside.

 Looking in this way, we naturally feel reverence. 

True love cannot be without trust and respect for oneself 

and for the other person.





~ Thich Nhat Hanh,
from his book How to Love 

chant of compassion,

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  In memory of our beloved teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh

 we are releasing our best recording of the Namo’valokiteshvaraya chant of compassion,

 which was recorded in the Still Water Meditation Hall, Upper Hamlet,

 Plum Village, France, in autumn 2020.

 

 

 

tender presence

.

May you know that absence is full of tender presence and

that nothing is forgotten.

May the absences in your life be full of eternal echo.

May you sense around you the secret Elsewhere which

holds the presences that have left your life.

May you be generous in your embrace of loss.

May the sore well of grief turn into a well of seamless

presence.

May your compassion reach out to the ones we never hear

from and may you have the courage to speak out for

the excluded ones.

May you become the gracious and passionate subject of

your own life.

May you not disrespect your mystery through brittle

words or false belonging.

May you be embraced by God in whom dawn and twilight

are one, and may your belonging inhabit its deepest

dreams within the shelter of the Great Belonging.

.

John O'Donohue
 from eternal echoes

.

the struggle is over

.

.

.

VI.                    Riding the Bull

Mounting the bull, slowly I return homeward.

The voice of my flute intones through the evening.

Measuring with hand-beats the pulsation harmony, I direct the endless rhythm.

Whoever hears this melody will join me.

.

 

Comment: 

 

 This struggle is over; gain and loss are assimilated. 

 I sing the song of the village woodsman, and play the tunes of the children. 

 Astride the bull, I observe the clouds above.  

Onward I go, no matter who may wish to call me back.

.

 

 

 

 

 ~ Kakuan

from 10 BULLS

Transcribed by. Nyogen Senzaki and Paul Reps 

 Illustrated by Tomikichiro Tokuriki

 

 

 

clear of the sticky web of the personal

.

May morning be astir with the harvest of night;

Your mind quickening to the eros of a new question,

Your eyes seduced by some unintended glimpse

That cut right through the surface to a source.

May this be a morning of innocent beginning,

When the gift within you slips clear

Of the sticky web of the personal

With its hurt and its hauntings,

And fixed fortress corners,

A morning when you become a pure vessel

For what wants to ascend from silence,

May your imagination know

The grace of perfect danger,

To reach beyond imitation,

And the wheel of repetition,

Deep into the call of all

The unfinished and unsolved

Until the veil of the unknown yields

And something original begins

To stir toward your senses

And grow stronger in your heart

In order to come to birth

In a clean line of form,

That claims from time

A rhythm not yet heard,

That calls space to

A different shape.

May it be its own force field

And dwell uniquely

Between the heart and the light

To surprise the hungry eye

By how deftly it fits

About its secret loss.

~ John O'Donohue

from To Bless the Space Between Us

better thoughts?

Starting here, what do you want to remember?
How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?
What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
sound from outside fills the air?

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect that you carry
wherever you go right now? Are you waiting
for time to show you some better thoughts?

When you turn around, starting here, lift this
new glimpse that you found; carry into evening
all that you want from this day. This interval you spent
reading or hearing this, keep it for life --

What can anyone give you greater than now,
starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?

~ William Stafford
from The Way It Is: New & Selected Poems

fantasies fade only in stillness

.

25

.

I chose high cliffs far from town

the sound of tall grass a half-open gate

where's an old pauper who isn't deferential

or a rich man who isn't vain

emergency loans don't come without strings

fantasies fade only in stillness

clouds too say mountains are better

returning at night they ease the solitude

.

27

.

Who enters this gate and studies this teaching

has to be thorough and push to the end

empty the body and reason remains

forget the mind and the world disappears

cloud-covered trees form a landscape of white

swallowing the sun the mountain turns red

the flag moves or is it the wind

it isn't the wind or the flag

.

28

.

A friend of seclusion arrives at my gate 

we greet and pardon our lack of decorum

a white mane gathered in back

a monk's robe worn untied

embers of leaves at the end of the night

howl of a gibbon announcing the dawn

sitting on cushion wrapped in quilts

words forgotten finally we meet

.

 

 

 .

~ Stonehouse

from The Zen Works of Stonehouse

Poems and Talks of a 14th Century Chinese Hermit

translated by Red Pine

.

while the music lasts

Men's curiosity searches past and future 

And clings to that dimension. 

But to apprehend 

The point of intersection of the timeless 

With time, is an occupation for the saint - No occupation either, 

but something given And taken,

 in a lifetime's death in love, 

Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender. 

For most of us, there is only the unattended

 Moment, the moment in and out of time, 

The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight, 

The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning 

 Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply 

That it is not heard at all, but you are the music 

While the music lasts.

~ T.S. Eliot

excerpt from The Dry Salvages

 

the secret signature

 

 

 

 

 

All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it -

 tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away 

just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest -

 if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself -

 you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say

 'Here at last is the thing I was made for.'

We cannot tell each other about it.

 It is the secret signature of each soul,

 the incommunicable and unappeasable want,

 the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work,

 and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds,

 when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. 

While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.

 

~ C. S. Lewis
from The Problem of Pain

 

 

 

we must be still and still moving into another intensity

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older

The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated

Of dead and living. Not the intense moment

Isolated, with no before and after,

But a lifetime burning in every moment

And not the lifetime of one man only

But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.

There is a time for the evening under starlight,

A time for the evening under lamplight

(The evening with the photograph album).

Love is most nearly itself

When here and now cease to matter.

Old men ought to be explorers

Here or there does not matter

We must be still and still moving

Into another intensity

For a further union, a deeper communion

Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,

The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters

Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

~ T. S. Eliot

excerpt from East Coker

Eliot regarded Four Quartets as his masterpiece, and it is the work that led to his being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. It consists of four long poems, each first published separately: Burnt Norton , East Coker , The Dry Salvages and Little Gidding . Each has five sections.

awareness which allows experience to unfold itself

The desire to be secure in things and in relationship only brings about conflict and sorrow,

 dependence and fear; the search for happiness in relationship without understanding

 the cause of conflict leads to misery. When thought lays emphasis on sensate value

 and is dominated by it there can be only strife and pain. Without self-knowledge

 relationship becomes a source of struggle and antagonism, a device for covering up

 inward insufficiency, inward poverty.

Does not craving for security in any form indicate inward insufficiency?

 Does not this inner poverty make us seek, accept and cling to formulations, hopes,

 dogmas, beliefs, possessions; is not our action then merely imitative and compulsive?

 So anchored to ideology, belief, our thinking becomes merely a process of enchainment.

Our thought is conditioned by the past; the I, the me and the mine,

 is the result of stored up experience, ever incomplete. The memory of the past

 is always absorbing the present; the self which is memory of pleasure and pain

 is ever gathering and discarding, ever forging anew the chains of its own conditioning.

 It is building and destroying but always within its own self-created prison.

 To the pleasant memory it clings and the unpleasant it discards. 

Thought must transcend this conditioning for the being of the Real.

Is evaluating right thinking? Choice is conditioned thinking; right thinking 

comes through understanding the chooser, the censor. As long as thought

 is anchored in belief, in ideology, it can only function within its own limitation;

 it can only feel-act within the boundaries of its own prejudices;

 it can only experience according to its own memories which give continuity

 to the self and its bondage. Conditioned thought prevents right thinking

 which is non-evaluation, non-identification.

There must be alert self-observation without choice; choice is evaluation

 and evaluation strengthens the self-identifying memory. If we wish to understand 

deeply there must be passive and choiceless awareness which allows experience

 to unfold itself and reveal its own significance. The mind that seeks security

 through the Real creates only illusion. The Real is not a refuge; 

it is not the reward for righteous action;

 it is not an end to be gained.

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

 from The Observer Is The Observed

 with thanks to No Mind's Land

desire to become

We all want to become something: 

a pacifist, a war hero, a millionaire, 

a virtuous man, or what you will. 

The very desire to become involves conflict, and that conflict produces war. 

There is peace only when there is no desire to become something, 

and that is the only true state because in that state alone

there is creation, there is reality. 

But that is completely foreign to the whole structure of society, 

which is the projection of yourself. You worship success. 

Your god is success, 

the giver of titles, degrees, 

position, and authority. 

There is a constant battle within yourself, 

the struggle to achieve what you want. 

You never have a peaceful moment, 

there is never peace in your heart because 

you are always striving to become something, to progress. 

Do not be misled by the word progress. 

Mechanical things progress, but thought can never progress 

except in terms of its own becoming.

J. Krishnamurti

from The Collected Works