there is a kindness

There is a kindness that dwells deep down in things; it presides everywhere,
 often in the places we least expect. The world can be harsh and negative,
 but if we remain generous and patient, kindness inevitably reveals itself. 
Something deep in the human soul seems to depend on the presence of kindness;
 something instinctive in us expects it, and once we sense it we are able to trust
 and open ourselves. Here in Connemara, the mountains are terse and dark; 
left to themselves they would make for a brooding atmosphere. However,
 everywhere around and in between there are lakes. The surface of these lakes
 takes on the variations of the surrounding light to create 
subtle diffusion's of color. Thus their presence qualifies the whole landscape
 with a sense of warmth and imagination. If we did not feel that some ultimate kindness
 holds sway, we would feel like outsiders confronted on every side by a world 
toward which we could make no real bridges.


The word kindness has a gentle sound that seems to echo the presence
 of compassionate goodness. When someone is kind to you, you feel understood
 and seen. There is no judgment or harsh perception directed toward you.
 Kindness has gracious eyes; it is not small-minded or competitive;
 it wants nothing back for itself. Kindness strikes a resonance with the depths
 of your own heart; it also suggests that your vulnerability,
 though somehow exposed, is not taken advantage of; 
rather, it has become an occasion for dignity and empathy.
 Kindness casts a different light, an evening light that has the depth
 of color and patience to illuminate what is complex and rich in difference.

Despite all the darkness, human hope is based on the instinct 
that at the deepest level of reality some intimate kindness holds sway.
 This is the heart of blessing. To believe in blessing is to believe
 that our being here, our very presence in the world, is itself the first gift,
 the primal blessing. As Rilke says: Hier zu sein ist so viel 
— to be here is immense. Nowhere does the silence of the infinite
 lean so intensely as around the form of a newly born infant. 
Once we arrive, we enter into the inheritance of everything that has preceded us;
 we become heirs to the world. To be born is to be chosen. To be created 
and come to birth is to be blessed. Some primal kindness chose us
 and brought us through the forest of dreaming until we could emerge
 into the clearance of individuality, with a path of life
 opening before us through the world.

The beginning often holds the clue to everything that follows. 
Given the nature of our beginning, it is no wonder that our hearts are imbued
 with longing for beauty, meaning, order, creativity, compassion, and love, 
We approach the world with this roster of longings and expect 
that in some way the world will respond and confirm our desire. 
Our longing knows it cannot force the fulfillment of its desire; 
yet it does instinctively expect that primal benevolence to respond to it.
 This is the threshold where blessing comes alive.

~ John O'Donohue

from To Bless the Space Between Us

photo by Ami Vitale

by presence

.

The teacher teaches by presence. 

The language of presence is 

more powerful than all the verbalizations 

from all the languages from the world put together. 

It is the eloquence of existence. 

If you allow life to become your teacher, it teaches. 

But if you turn to books 

and want to know whether it be duality or non-duality, 

one god or many, one creator, or two, etc., 

if you turn to books and theories, 

if you want to dig into the past and base your perception on that, 

then the opportunity to live first hand would be missed.

~ Vimala Thakar

from Growing into Wholeness

ripening

.

The longer we are together
the larger death grows around us.
How many we know by now
who are dead! We, who were young,
now count the cost of having been.
And yet as we know the dead
we grow familiar with the world.
We, who were young and loved each other
ignorantly, now come to know
each other in love, married
by what we have done, as much
as by what we intend. Our hair
turns white with our ripening
as though to fly away in some
coming wind, bearing the seed
of what we know. It was bitter to learn
that we come to death as we come
to love, bitter to face
the just and solving welcome
that death prepares. But that is bitter
only to the ignorant, who pray
it will not happen. Having come
the bitter way to better prayer, we have
the sweetness of ripening. How sweet
to know you by the signs of this world!



~ Wendell Berry

you come fresh

You come fresh from the place where names are not needed.
In that place there's a blissful secret most of us can no
longer remember. We have forgotten. But soon you
will start to learn words. You will learn to say what you
feel and want, and with that saying you too will forget
what is so natural to you now. Or perhaps you will be
lucky, and a current of the bliss you came from will
continue to stream through your heart...remembering
the beauty of your origin.


.....each of us is unique, and each of us has to find
our own way. I suppose it's only natural that I
should want to give you some advice...


Know you are safe...
Everything is all right forever.
We are made out of light.
One day you may doubt it -
that's part of the drama...
Just remember - you are safe...


Walk in the open air.
Spend as much time as you can
in nature, in places that humans
have not built on and paved over.
The natural world will teach you,
heal you, and replenish your soul
with its beauty. It is, like you are now,
fresh from the generosity of the
Unnameable.


Be interested in everything.
Be a generalist.
Be curious and amazed by things.
Listen to others.
Welcome new ways of seeing, but
always think for yourself.


Follow your love.
Do what you love.
Love what you love.
I'm not talking simply
about love that's affection
or passion - but love that
continually moves to heal...

Little one, you are about to start
a great adventure.
Follow your love.
Be interested in everything.
Walk in the open air.
Know you are safe.




~ Elias Amidon
with thanks to Mystic Meandering
 art: 99 names of Allah

beauty of the living world

 

 

 

 

 

 

The yellow-throated warbler, the highest remotest voice

of this place, sings in the tops of the tallest sycamores,

but one day he came twice to the railing of my porch

where I sat at work above the river. He was too close

to see with binoculars. Only the naked eye could take him in,

a bird more beautiful than every picture of himself,

more beautiful than himself killed and preserved

by the most skilled taxidermist, more beautiful

than any human mind, so small and inexact,

could hope ever to remember. My mind became

beautiful by the sight of him. He had the beauty only

of himself alive in the only moment of his life.

He had upon him like the whole

beauty of the living world that never dies.

 

 

 

 

 

~ Wendell Berry

from Given Poems

(for Jonathan Williams)  

Photo by Dan Dehm

 

 

we arrive here

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We arrive here in this world having forgotten where we came from, 

though something of a memory seems to remain: a whisper, a distant shine

like that of a house window at night on the far side of the valley, perhaps

what some have called "the inner light," to guide us when finally we have been

jolted awake.  And so we don't come from nothing. But once here we 

don't know where we are. At first I learned the world as a book written,

completed the day before my birth, not to be changed by another penstroke.

And then I saw that some I know were departing from it, never to return,and new

 strangers were arriving. The newcomers, if they stayed, would learn

more or less of where they were. And then, in time, they too would depart, 

taking with them the sum of all they had learned, leaving behind them

maybe a few who would remember them, and then the rememberers too 

would go and be gone. I see in this the order of things, nothing to complain

about. I have been here long enough to watch the whole turn of the wheel.

I see that we are passing through this world like a river of water flowing

 through a river of earth. A far cry from a written book, the world - to

extend my desperate metaphor - is a book ceaselessly being written,

and not in a human language. This too has not been submitted to our

judgment, and it is not for us to regret. To give thanks seems truly to be

the right response, for as we come and go we learn something of love,

the gift and the giving of it, if we accept it, to give us standing hereafter.

 

That is the heart speaking in the heart's language, and out of a mystery 

so vast that order and chance may be reconciled within it. Because,

 for all we surely know, we come into our times and places as much at 

random as leaves falling,...

 

 

 

 

 

~ Wendell Berry

from How it Went - Thirteen more stories of

the Port William membership

 

 

   

all you have

It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. 

Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced. 

The bond that binds us is beyond choice. We are brothers. 

We are brothers in what we share. In pain, which each of us must suffer alone, 

in hunger, in poverty, in hope, we know our brotherhood. 

 

We know it, because we have had to learn it. 

We know that there is no help for us but from one another, that no hand

 will save us if we do not reach out our hand. And the hand that you reach

 out is empty, as mine is. You have nothing. You possess nothing. You own nothing. 

You are free. All you have is what you are, and what you give.

If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. 

Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. 

You will not know what it is to come home… Fulfillment… is a function of time. 

The search for pleasure is circular, repetitive, atemporal… It has an end. 

It comes to the end and has to start over. It is not a journey and return,

 but a closed cycle, a locked room, a cell… The thing about working with time, 

instead of against it, …is that it is not wasted. Even pain counts.



~  Ursula Le Guin
from The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

finding happiness in troubled times

 

 

 

 

Deeply moving and laugh-out-loud funny, His Holiness the Dalai Lama

 and Archbishop Desmond Tutu share science-backed wisdom

 of how to live with joy in troubled times.

 director Louie Psihoyos teams up with co-director Peggy Callahan on

 MISSION: JOY – FINDING HAPPINESS IN TROUBLED TIMES,

 a documentary with unprecedented access to the unlikely friendship

 of two international icons who transcend religion:

 His Holiness the Dalai Lama & Archbishop Tutu.

 

 In their final joint mission, these self-described mischievous brothers give a master class

 in how to create joy in a world that was never easy for them. They offer neuroscience-backed

 wisdom to help each of us live with more joy, despite circumstances.

 

 

 

nature of mind

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

~ Joseph Goldstein

 

 

 

let go of experience and its boundaries

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

~ Rupert Spira

 

the world of names

Once a rabbi met the prophet Elijah.
 The rabbi asked Elijah,
 “When will the messiah come?” 

Elijah said, “Go and ask him yourself when he’s coming.” 

The rabbi said, “Where is he?” 

Elijah said, “He’s sitting at the city gate, covered in bandages’ 

So the rabbi went and asked the messiah,
 “When will you come?” 

The messiah said, “Today.”

The rabbi came back and relayed this to Elijah:
 “The messiah is coming today!” 

Elijah responded with temperance, saying
 “the messiah meant today, if you listen to God’s voice.” 

The tradition practically begs us to realize, the messiah is here.
 The world to come is here. The unknown is as close as your breath. 
What this means is that, as Wendell Berry writes, 
“What we need is here”;
 yet we must be careful to not grasp in the presence of that knowing,
 lest we fall to irretrievably
 into the world of names. 

~ Joshua Boettiger, 

from Naming The Unnameable: 

Advice on living in two worlds

art by Marc Chagall, 

Elijah Touched by an Angel, from the Bible suite, 1958, 

The Jewish Museum, New York

the dean of western writers

Wallace Stegner was born on February 18, 1909 in Lake Mills, Iowa.

He was an American historian,novelist, short story writer, and environmentalist,

often called "The Dean of Western Writers". He won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1972.

"In fiction I think we should have no agenda but to tell the truth."

"'You don't go there to find something,' he once said about wilderness, 'you go there to disappear.'"

Wallace Stegner wrote about the need to preserve the West, and he also fought for it. He became involved with the conservation movement in the 1950's while fighting the construction of dam on the Green River at Dinosaur National Monument. In 1960 he wrote his famous Wilderness Letter on the importance of federal protection of wild places. This letter was used to introduce the bill that established the National Wilderness Preservation System in 1964. 

"Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste. And so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, brother to the other animals, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it. Without any remaining wilderness we are committed wholly, without chance for even momentary reflection and rest, to a headlong drive into our technological termite-life, the Brave New World of a completely man-controlled environment. We need wilderness preserved--as much of it as is still left, and as many kinds--because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed. The reminder and the reassurance that it is still there is good for our spiritual health even if we never once in ten years set foot in it. It is good for us when we are young, because of the incomparable sanity it can bring briefly, as vacation and rest, into our insane lives. It is important to us when we are old simply because it is there--important, that is, simply as an idea."

In 1964 Stegner started the Creative Writing Program at Stanford University, where he served on the faculty until 1971. He also taught at University of Utah, University of Wisconsin, and Harvard University. His students include: Wendell Berry, Larry McMurtry, Thomas McGuane, Ernest Gaines, John Daniel, Raymond Carver, Edward Abbey, and Poet Laureate of the United States, Robert Haas.

He wrote in The Sound of Mountain Water, "We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be…a part of the geography of hope,"

Mr. Stegner died at 84, on April 13, 1993 following an auto accident in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He left a legacy as writer, professor, and environmentalist that once moved Edward Abbey to pronounce him "the only living American writer worthy of the Nobel." Indeed, Stegner was one of the American West's preeminent historians and arguably the most important of its novelists.

commentary by

James Hepworth and

wilderness.net

can we judge ourselves less harshly

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Part of it is observing oneself more impersonally… 

 

When you go out into the woods and you look at trees, you see all these different trees. 

And some of them are bent, and some of them are straight, and some of them are evergreens,

 and some of them are whatever. And you look at the tree and you allow it. 

You see why it is the way it is. You sort of understand that it didn’t get enough light, 

and so it turned that way. And you don’t get all emotional about it.

 You just allow it. 

You appreciate the tree.

The minute you get near humans, you lose all that.

 And you are constantly saying, “You’re too this, or I’m too this.”

 That judging mind comes in. 

And so I practice turning people into trees.

 Which means appreciating them just the way they are.

When a tree is very small we protect it by surrounding it with a fence so that animals do not step on it.

 Later when the tree is bigger it no longer needs the fence.

 Then it can give shelter to many.

 

 

 

 

~ Ram Dass

 with thanks to The Marginalian

 

 

 

 

 

revelation

In the point of rest at the center of our being, 

we encounter a world where all things are at rest in the same way. 

Then a tree becomes a mystery, 

a cloud a revelation, 

each man a cosmos of whose riches we can only catch glimpses.

The life of simplicity is simple, but it opens to us
 a book in which we never get beyond the first syllable.

~ Dag Hammarskjöld

from Markings

the simplicity

.

If you hold to Nature, to the simplicity that is in her, 

to the small detail that scarcely one man sees, 

which can so unexpectedly grow into something great and boundless; 

if you have this love for insignificant things and seek, simply as one who serves, 

to win the confidence of what seems to be poor: 

then everything will become easier for you, 

more coherent and somehow more conciliatory,

 not perhaps in the understanding, which lags wondering behind, 

but in your innermost consciousness, 

wakefulness and knowing.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke 

from Letters to a Young Poet

preferring simplicity and freedom from desires

.

If you overly esteem talented individuals,

people will become overly competitive.

If you overvalue possessions,

people will begin to steal.

Do not display your treasures

or people will become envious.

The Master leads by

emptying people's minds,

filling their bellies,

weakening their ambitions,

and making them become strong.

Preferring simplicity and freedom from desires,

avoiding the pitfalls of knowledge and wrong action.

For those who practice not-doing,

everything will fall into place.

~ Tao Teh Ching

version by j.h. mcdonald

as we truly are

We are not poor. We are just without riches,

we who have no will, no world:

marked with the marks of the latest anxiety,

disfigured, stripped of leaves.

Around us swirls the dust of the cities, 

the garbage clings to us.

We are shunned as if contaminated,

thrown away like broken pots, like bones,

like last year's calendar.

And yet if our Earth needed to

she could weave us together like roses

and make of us a garland.

For each being is cleaner than washed stones

and endlessly yours, and like an animal

who knows already in its first blind moments

its need for one thing only -

to let ourselves be poor like that - as we truly are.

 

 

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

III.16, The Book of Poverty and Death

 

 

 

a friend’s umbrella

.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, toward the end
of his life, found the names
of familiar objects escaping him.
He wanted to say something about a window, 
or a table, or a book on a table.
.
But the word wasn't there,
although other words could still suggest
the shape of what he meant.
Then someone, his wife perhaps,
.
would understand: "Yes, window! I'm sorry,
is there a draft?" He'd nod.
She'd rise. Once a friend dropped by 
to visit, shook out his umbrella
in the hall, remarked upon the rain.
.
Later the word umbrella
vanished and became
the thing that strangers take away.
.
Paper, pen, table, book:
was it possible for a man to think
without them? To know 
that he was thinking? We remember
that we forget, he'd written once, 
before he started to forget.
.
Three times he was told
that Longfellow had died
.
Without the past, the present
lay around him like the sea.
Or like a ship, becalmed,
upon the sea. He smiled
.
to think he was the captain then,
gazing off into whiteness,
waiting for the wind to rise. 




~ Lawrence Raab

the intimate space

.

 

 

 

What birds plunge through is not the intimate space

in which you see all forms intensified.

(Out in the Open, you would be denied

your self, would disappear into that vastness.)

 

Space reaches from us and construes the world:

to know a tree, in its true element,

throw inner space around it, from that pure

abundance in you.  Surround it with restraint.

It has no limits.  Not till it is held

in your renouncing is it truly there.

 

 

 

 

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

from Uncollected Poems

.

 

 

 

next time

 

 

 

 

 

 Next time what I'd do is look at
the earth before saying anything. I'd stop
just before going into a house
and be an emperor for a minute
and listen better to the wind
or to the air being still.


When anyone talked to me, whether
blame or praise or just passing time,
I'd watch the face, how the mouth
had to work, and see any strain, any
sign of what lifted the voice.


And for all, I'd know more - the earth
bracing itself and soaring, the air
finding every leaf and feather over
forest and water, and for every person
the body glowing inside the clothes
like a light.






~ William Stafford

with thanks to being silently drawn

 

walking in the rain

When my master and I
were walking in the rain,
he would say,
"Do not walk so fast,
the rain is everywhere."

~  Shunryu Suzuki

silent

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A person made dazed

by the cup of love

forgets all other joys.

 

He speaks with remembrance

in his innermost soul-

and then falls silent

to outer disputes.

 

 

 

 

 

~ 'Ala'  al-Dawala Simnani 

 

 

epitaph

Having lived long in time,
he lives now in timelessness
without sorrow, made perfect
by our never finished love,
by our compassion and forgiveness,
and by his happiness in receiving
these gifts we give. Here in time
we are added to one another forever.




~ Wendell Berry
from The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry

 

 

this morning

 

 

 

 

 

 

. . . This morning, when I looked
at a lily, just beginning to open,
its long, slender pouch tipped
with soft, curling-back lips, and I could peek just
slightly in, and see the clasping
interior, the cache of pollen,
and smell the extreme sweetness, I thought they were
shyly saying Mary's body,
he came from the blossom of a woman, he was born
in the beauty of her lily.

 

 

 

~ Sharon Olds 

for a moment

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Across the highway a heron stands
in the flooded field. It stands
as if lost in thought, on one leg, careless,
as if the field belongs to herons.
The air is clear and quiet.
Snow melts on this second fair day.
Mother and daughter,
we sit in the parking lot
with doughnuts and coffee.
We are silent.
For a moment the wall between us
opens to the universe;
then closes.
And you go on saying
you do not want to repeat my life.

 

 

 

 

~ Ruth Stone