addicted to the external

It is strange to be here. The mystery never leaves you alone. Behind your image, below your words, above your thoughts, the silence of another world waits. A world lives within you. No one else can bring you news of this inner world. Through our voices, we bring out sound from the mountain beneath our soul. These sounds are words. There are so many talking all the time, loudly, quietly, in rooms, on streets, on TV, on radio, in the paper, in books. The noise of words keeps what we call the world there for us. We take each others’ sounds and make patterns and predictions, benedictions, and blasphemies. Each day, our tribe of language holds what we call the ‘world’ together. Yet the uttering of the world reveals how each of us relentlessly creates. Everyone is an artist. Each person brings out sound out of silence and coaxes the invisible to become visible.

Humans are new here. Above us, the galaxies dance out toward infinity. Under our feet is the ancient earth. We are beautifully molded from this clay. Yet the smallest stone is millions of years older than us. In your thoughts, the silent universe seeks echo.

An unknown world aspires towards reflection. Words are the oblique mirrors which hold your thought. You gaze into these word mirrors and catch glimpses of meaning, belonging shelter. Behind their bright surfaces is the dark and the silence. Words are like the god Janus, they face inwards and outwards at once.

If we become addicted to the external our interiority will haunt us. We will become hungry with a hunger no image, person or deed can still. To be wholesome, we must remain truthful to our vulnerable complexity. In order to keep our balance, we need to hold the interior and exterior, visible and invisible, known and unknown, temporal and eternal, ancient and new together. No one else can undertake this task for you. You are the one and only threshold of your inner world. This wholesomeness is holiness. To be holy is natural; to befriend the worlds that come to balance in you.

Behind the facade of image and distraction, each person is an artist in this primal and inescapable sense. Each one of us is doomed and privileged to be an inner artist who carries and shapes a unique world.

Human presence is a creative and turbulent sacrament, a visible sign of invisible grace.

~ John O'Donohue

from Anam Cara

it’s enough

 

 

 

 

Now you too must learn to be satisfied with the many years

 you’ve already depended on your body. You should feel that it’s enough.

You can compare it to household utensils that you’ve had for a long time—

your cups, saucers, plates and so on. When you first had them 

they were clean and shining, but now after using them for so long,

 they’re starting to wear out. Some are already broken, some have disappeared, 

and those that are left are deteriorating: they have no stable form,

 and it’s their nature to be like that. Your body is the same way. 

It has been continually changing right from the day you were born, 

through childhood and youth, until now it has reached old age. 

Allow the mind to let go of its attachments. The time is ripe.

Even if your house is flooded or burnt to the ground, 

whatever the danger that threatens it,

 let it concern only the house. 

If there’s a flood, don’t let it flood your mind. 

If there’s a fire, don’t let it burn your heart.

 Let it be merely the house, that which is external to you, 

that is flooded and burned. Allow the mind to let go of its attachments.

 The time is ripe.

It is the same with your wealth, your possessions, and your family—

they are all yours only in name; they don’t really belong to you, 

they belong to nature.

It’s like the water of a river. It naturally flows down the gradient; 

it never flows against it, and that is its nature. If a person were to go

 and stand on a river bank and, seeing the water flowing swiftly 

down its course, foolishly want it to flow back up the gradient, 

he would suffer. Whatever he was doing, his wrong thinking 

would allow him no peace of mind. He would be unhappy

 because of his wrong view, thinking against the stream.

Find your real home

 

 

~  Ajahn Chah
excerpt from:
 First published on January 1, 1994 by permission of the Abbot, 

Wat Pah Nanachat, Thailand

found in Lions Roar

 

 

 

 

 

being afflicted

 

Being afflicted with bodily pain is like being struck by an arrow,

adding mental pain (aversion, displeasure, depression, or self-pity)

to physical pain is like being hit by a second arrow.

The wise person stops with the first arrow.

Simply by calling the pain by its true name, one can keep it from extending

beyond the physical, and thereby stop it from inflicting deep

and penetrating wounds upon the spirit.

Whatever feelings there may be—past, present, or future—

all feeling is not mine, not I, not my self.

~ The Buddha

of crime and punishment

 

 

Then one of the judges of the city stood forth and said,

 Speak to us of Crime and Punishment. 

 

 And he answered, saying: It is when your spirit goes wandering upon the wind, 

 That you, alone and unguarded, commit a wrong unto others and therefore unto yourself.

 

 And for that wrong committed must you knock and wait a while 

unheeded at the gate of the blessed. Like the ocean is your god-self;

 It remains for ever undefiled. And like the ether it lifts but the winged.

 

 Even like the sun is your god-self; It knows not the ways of the mole

 nor seeks it the holes of the serpent. But your god-self dwells not alone in your being. 

 

 Much in you is still man, and much in you is not yet man, 

But a shapeless pigmy that walks asleep in the mist searching for its own awakening.

 And of the man in you would I now speak. For it is he and not your god-self 

nor the pygmy in the mist, that knows crime and the punishment of crime.


Oftentimes have I heard you speak
of one who commits a wrong as though
he were not one of you…
but a stranger unto you
and an intruder upon your world…

But I say that even as the holy and the righteous
cannot rise beyond the highest
which is in each one of you,
So the wicked and the weak
cannot fall lower than the lowest
which is in you also…

And as a single leaf turns not yellow
but with the silent knowledge of the whole tree,
So the wrong-doer cannot do wrong
without the hidden will of you all…

Like a procession you walk together towards your god-self. 

 You are the way and the wayfarers. And when one of you falls down

 he falls for those behind him, a caution against the stumbling stone.

 

 Ay, and he falls for those ahead of him, who though faster and surer of foot, 

yet removed not the stumbling stone. And this also, though the word

lie heavy upon your hearts: The murdered is not unaccountable for his own murder,

 And the robbed is not blameless in being robbed. The righteous is not innocent 

of the deeds of the wicked, And the white-handed is not clean in the doings of the felon.

 

 Yea, the guilty is oftentimes the victim of the injured,

 And still more often the condemned is the burden bearer for the guiltless and unblamed. 

 You cannot separate the just from the unjust and the good from the wicked;

 For they stand together before the face of the sun even as the black thread

 and the white are woven together. And when the black thread breaks

 the weaver shall look into the whole cloth, and he shall examine the loom also. 

 

 If any of you would bring to judgement the unfaithful wife, 

Let him also weigh the heart of her husband in scales, and measure his soul

 with measurements. And let him who would lash the offender look 

unto the spirit of the offended. And if any of you would punish 

in the name of righteousness and lay the ax unto the evil tree,

 let him see to its roots; And verily he will find the roots of the good 

and the bad, the fruitful and the fruitless, all entwined together in the silent heart

 of the earth.

 

 And you judges who would be just, What judgement pronounce you upon him

 who though honest in the flesh yet is the thief in spirit? What penalty

 lay you upon him who slays in the flesh yet is himself slain in the spirit? 

 And how prosecute you him who in action is a deceiver and an oppressor, 

Yet who also is aggrieved and outraged? And how shall you punish 

those whose remorse is already greater than their misdeeds? 

 

 Is not remorse the justice which is administered by that very law

 which you would fain serve? Yet you cannot lay remorse upon the innocent 

nor lift it from the heart of the guilty. Unbidden shall it call in the night, 

that men may wake and gaze upon themselves. And you who would understand justice,

 how shall you unless you look upon all deeds in the fullness of light? 

 

Only then shall you know that the erect and the fallen

 are but one man standing in twilight between the night of his pigmy-self 

and the day of his god-self, And that the corner-stone of the temple

 is not higher than the lowest stone in its foundation. 

 

 

~ Kahlil Gibran

 from The Prophet

with thanks to love is a place

the one guest

 

She who reconciles the ill-matched threads

of her life, and weaves 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.

~ Rilke

from Rilke's Book of Hours

Love Poems to God

re-member, do not apologize

 

Anger is a teacher,

so let her teach you.

Let her point out all of the places

where you abandoned your sincerity

along the side of the road

simply to appease

someone else -

Where you stopped following

that great arch of your mythic life.

Let her show you where you have 

held yourself silent when the world

needed you to speak:

where your fierce wisdom

was cut off at the knees.

Our shadows have grown so grotesque,

we;ve mistaken them for culture,

but now is the time to re-member

what has been deliberately surppressed;

to prepare a grand feast for all the

ghosts who've been starved by neglect.

Do not apologize when feathers fall

like nighthawks from your fiery eyes.

~ April Tierney

from Memory Keeper

asking, listening

 

So often we are taught to ask

the wrong kinds of questions -

scratching our heads,

silently thinking

of all the things we want

from this bountiful life.

Instead, we should be shouting

into the unmarred air, "Life,

what do you want from me!?"

Then, spend the rest of our days

with heads bent to the wind,

listening.

The right kind of question

labors on Mystery's behalf;

its purpose is to praise

rather thank plunder

all the unseen futures

of our collective 

imagination.

~ April Tierney

from Memory Keeper

listen

 

In ‘To What Purpose is This Waste’, Rossetti dramatizes the arrogance 

and folly of supposed human superiority to plants and animals. 

The honey produced by the bees for themselves can only be imagined as waste

 if we think that human consumption is the natural goal of all production.

 Rossetti outlines how we often look down on small and seemingly insignificant creatures, 

like birds and insects. But in a vision offered by religious experience,

 the poet learns to silence her ‘proud tongue’ and instead listen 

to the sounds and murmurs of hedges and rivers, 

which ‘swell’ to ‘one loud hymn’. 

In order to change, she moves deeper into the countryside 

and re-orients her senses to ‘behold/ All hidden things’

 and to hear ‘all secret whisperings’.

‘Honey of wild bees in their ordered cells

Stored, not for human mouths to taste: –

I said, smiling superior down: What waste

Of good, where no man dwells’

A windy shell singing upon the shore:

A lily budding in a desert place;

Blooming alone

With no companion

To praise its perfect perfume and its grace:

And other eyes than our's

Were made to look on flowers,

Eyes of small birds and insects small:

The deep sun-blushing rose

Round which the prickles close

Opens her bosom to them all.

The tiniest living thing

That soars on feathered wing,

Or crawls among the long grass out of sight,

Has just as good a right

To its appointed portion of delight

As any King.

~ Christina Rossetti

from To What Purpose is this Waste?

for a new beginning

 

In out-of-the-way places of the heart,

Where your thoughts never think to wander,

This beginning has been quietly forming,

Waiting until you were ready to emerge.

For a long time it has watched your desire,

Feeling the emptiness growing inside you,

Noticing how you willed yourself on,

Still unable to leave what you had outgrown.

It watched you play with the seduction of safety

And the gray promises that sameness whispered,

Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent,

Wondered would you always live like this.

Then the delight, when your courage kindled,

And out you stepped onto new ground,

Your eyes young again with energy and dream,

A path of plenitude opening before you.

Though your destination is not yet clear

You can trust the promise of this opening;

Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning

That is at one with your life’s desire.

Awaken your spirit to adventure;

Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;

Soon you will be home in a new rhythm,

For your soul senses the world that awaits you.

~ John O'Donohue

where new beginning might be ripening

 

Perhaps the art of harvesting the secret riches of our lives is best achieved 

when we place profound trust in the act of beginning. 

Risk might be our greatest ally. 

To live a truly creative life, we always need to cast a critical look

 at where we presently are, attempting always to discern 

where we have become stagnant and where new beginning might be ripening.

 There can be no growth if we do not remain open and vulnerable 

to what is new and different. I have never seen anyone take a risk for growth

 that was not rewarded a thousand times over.

There are days when Conamara is wreathed in blue Tuscan light. 

The mountains seem to waver as though they were huge dark ships 

on a distant voyage. I love to climb up into the silence

of these vast autonomous structures. What seems like a pinnacled summit

 from beneath becomes a level plateau when you arrive there.

 Born in a red explosion of ascending fire, the granite lies cold, 

barely marked by the millions of years of rain and wind. 

On this primeval ground I feel I have entered into a pristine permanence,

 a continuity here that knew the wind hundreds of millions of years

 before a human face ever felt it.

When we arrive into the world, we enter this ancient sequence. 

All our beginnings happen within this continuity. 

Beginnings often frighten us because they seem like lonely voyages

 into the unknown. Yet, in truth, no beginning is empty or isolated. 

We seem to think that beginning is setting out from a lonely point

 along some line of direction into the unknown. This is not the case. 

Shelter and energy come alive when a beginning is embraced… 

We are never as alone in our beginnings as it might seem at the time.

 A beginning is ultimately an invitation to open toward the gifts and growth 

that are stored up for us. 

To refuse to begin can be an act of great self-neglect.

Our very life here depends directly on continuous acts of beginning.

~ John O'Donohue

the true love

 

There is a faith in loving fiercely

the one who is rightfully yours,

especially if you have

waited years and especially

if part of you never believed

you could deserve this

loved and beckoning hand

held out to you this way.

I am thinking of faith now

and the testaments of loneliness

and what we feel we are

worthy of in this world.

Years ago in the Hebrides,

I remember an old man

who walked every morning

on the grey stones

to the shore of baying seals,

who would press his hat

to his chest in the blustering

salt wind and say his prayer

to the turbulent Jesus

hidden in the water,

and I think of the story

of the storm and everyone

waking and seeing

the distant

yet familiar figure

far across the water

calling to them

and how we are all

preparing for that

abrupt waking,

and that calling,

and that moment

we have to say yes,

except it will

not come so grandly

so Biblically

but more subtly

and intimately in the face

of the one you know

you have to love

so that when

we finally step out of the boat

toward them, we find

everything holds

us, and everything confirms

our courage, and if you wanted

to drown you could,

but you don’t

because finally

after all this struggle

and all these years

you simply don’t want to

any more

you’ve simply had enough

of drowning

and you want to live and you

want to love and you will

walk across any territory

and any darkness

however fluid and however

dangerous to take the

one hand you know

belongs in yours.

~ David Whyte

from The House of Belonging

To learn from animal being

 

Nearer to the earth's heart, 

Deeper within its silence:

Animals know this world

In a way we never will.

We who are ever

Distanced and distracted

By the parade of bright

Windows thought opens;

Their seamless presence

Is not fractured thus.

Stranded between time

Gone and time emerging,

We manage seldom

To be where we are:

Whereas they are always

Looking our from

The here and now.

May we learn to return 

And rest in the beauty

Of animal being,

Learn to lean low,

Leave our locked minds,

And with freed senses

Feel the earth

Breathing with us.

May we enter 

Into lightness of spirit,

And slip frequently into

The feel of the wild.

Let the clear silence 

Of our animal being

Cleanse our hearts

Of corrosive words.

May we learn to walk

Upon the earth

With all their confidence

And clear-eyed stillness

So that our minds

Might be baptized

In the name of the wind

And the light and the rain.

~ John O'Donohue

from To Bless the Space Between Us

at ease

 

The more that we’re at ease, the more we’re willing to open up a bit.

 When our attitude is not oriented exclusively around ‘me’ 

we experience a greater readiness to share. 

There is a sense of wanting all our friends to be at ease 

that gradually expands to encompass the whole population around us, 

the whole region. 

This being at ease with ourselves, accepting, 

or having a certain affection for our own state of being, 

can be steadily expanded to include others. 

This is the true beginning of meditation practice. 

~ Tsoknyi Rinpoche

from Fearless Simplicity: 

The Dzogchen Way of Living Freely in a Complex World

benefits for others

 

The only source of every kind of benefit for others

 is awareness of our own condition.  

When we know how to help ourselves,

 and how to work with our own situation…

our feelings of compassion arise spontaneously, 

without the need to hold ourselves to the rules of behavior

 of any religious doctrine.    

~ Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche 

Caring for Each Other and Our World - Jack Kornfield's Dec 2023 Community Talk

 

~ Jack Kornfield

simply

 

I'm too alone in the world, yet not alone enough

to make each hour holy

I'm too small in the world, yet not small enough

to be simply in your presence, like a thing-

just as it is.

I want to know my own will

 and to move with it.

And I want, in the hushed moments

when the nameless draws near,

to be among the wise ones-

or alone.

I want to mirror your immensity.

I want never to be too weak or too old

to bear the heavy, lurching image of you.

I want to unfold.

Let no place in me hold itself closed,

for where I am closed, I am false.

I want to stay clear in your sight.

~ Rilke's Book of Hours

The Book of Monastic Life

the way it is with children

.

I believe in all that has never yet been spoken.

I want to free what waits within me

so that what no one has dared to wish for

.

may for once spring clear

without my contriving.

.

If this is arrogant, God, forgive me,

but this is what I need to say.

May what I do flow from me like a river,

no forcing and no holding back,

the way it is with children.

.

Then in these swelling and ebbing currents,

these deepening tides moving out, returning,

I will sing you as no one ever has,

.

streaming through widening channels

into the open sea.

.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

from Rilke's Book of Hours

translation by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy

.

from a place of gratefulness

It is only from such a place of gratefulness that we can perform beautiful acts — 

from a place of absolute, ravishing appreciation for the sheer wonder of being alive at all, 

each of us an improbable and temporary triumph over the staggering odds 

of nonbeing and nothingness inking the ledger of spacetime.

 But because we are human, because we are batted about by the violent immediacies of everyday life, 

such gratitude eludes us as a continuous state of being. We access it only at moments, 

only when the trance of busyness lifts and the blackout curtain of daily demands

 parts to let the radiance in, those delicious moments when we find ourselves 

awash in nonspecific gladness, grateful not to this person, grateful not for this turn of events,

 but grateful at life — a diffuse gratitude that irradiates every aspect and atom 

of the world, however small, however unremarkable, however coated 

with the dull patina of habit. In those moments, everything sings, 

everything shimmers. 

In those moments, we are most alive.

~ Seneca

from Letters from a Stoic

as if to demonstrate an eclipse

 

I pick an orange from a wicker basket

and place it on the table

to represent the sun.

Then down at the other end

a blue and white marble

becomes the earth

and nearby I lay the little moon of an aspirin.

I get a glass from a cabinet,

open a bottle of wine,

then I sit in a ladder-back chair,

a benevolent god presiding

over a miniature creation myth,

and I begin to sing

a homemade canticle of thanks

for this perfect little arrangement,

for not making the earth too hot or cold

not making it spin too fast or slow

so that the grove of orange trees

and the owl become possible,

not to mention the rolling wave,

the play of clouds, geese in flight,

and the Z of lightning on a dark lake.

Then I fill my glass again

and give thanks for the trout,

the oak, and the yellow feather,

singing the room full of shadows,

as sun and earth and moon

circle one another in their impeccable orbits

and I get more and more cockeyed with gratitude.

~ Billy Collins

from Nine Horses

with thanks to The Marginalian by Maria Popova

image by James McCue/The Virtual Telescope

a great light

 

I saw a great light come down over London,

And buildings and cars and people were still

They were held wherever they were under the sky’s

Clear humming radiance as it descended --

Everywhere, in shops, behind desks and on trains

Everything stopped as the stillness came down

And touched the crown of our heads

As our eyes closed, and the sky filled us

And our minds became the sky --

And everyone, regardless of crime class or creed

Was touched; as slowly we began to stir

Out of this penetrated light-filled sleep

Dizzily as the hand completed its dialing,

And the train lurched forward

And I saw faces looking at one another questioning,

I saw people meeting eye to eye and standing

Half amazed by each other’s presence

I saw their mouths silently shaping the word why

Why didn’t we know this? and yet knowing

They already knew, and without words

We all stood searching for the gesture

That would say it --

As the lights went green, and we drove on.

~ Jay Ramsay

from The Longing in Between: Sacred Poetry from Around the World

(A Poetry Chaikhana Anthology) Edited by Ivan M. Granger

Yes! No!

How necessary it is to have opinions! I think the spotted trout
lilies are satisfied, standing a few inches above the earth. I
think serenity is not something you just find in the world,
like a plum tree, holding up its white petals.

The violets, along the river, are opening their blue faces, like
small dark lanterns.

The green mosses, being so many, are as good as brawny.

How important it is to walk along, not in haste but slowly,
looking at everything and calling out

Yes! No! The

swan, for all his pomp, his robes of grass and petals, wants
only to be allowed to live on the nameless pond. The catbrier
is without fault. The water thrushes, down among the sloppy
rocks, are going crazy with happiness. Imagination is better
than a sharp instrument. To pay attention, this is our endless
and proper work.

 

 

 ~ Mary Oliver

from White Pine: Poems and Prose Poems

with thanks to Poetry Chaikhana

 

 

no word for “war”

Trying to explain it to them

Leaves one feeling ridiculous and obscene.

Their houses, like white bowls,

Sit on a prairie of ancient snowfalls

Caught beyond thaw or the swift changes

Of night and day.

They listen politely, and stride away.

With spears and sleds and barking dogs

To hunt for food. The women wait

Chewing on skins or singing songs,

Knowing that they have hours to spend,

That the luck of the hunter is often late.

Later, by fires and boiling bones

In streaming kettles, they welcome me,

Far kin, pale brother,

To share what they have in a hungry time

In a difficult land. While I talk on

Of the southern kingdoms, cannon, armies,

Shifting alliances, airplanes, power,

They chew their bones, and smile at one another.

~ Mary Oliver

the hurt you embrace

The hurt you embrace becomes joy.

Call it to your arms where it can

change.  A silkworm eating leaves

makes a cocoon.  Each of us weaves

a chamber of leaves and sticks.

Silkworms begin to truly exist

as they disappear inside that room.

Without legs, we fly.  When I stop

speaking, this poem will close,

and open its silent wings...

~ Rumi

blessing for the interim time

 

When near the end of day, life has drained

Out of light, and it is too soon

For the mind of night to have darkened things,

No place looks like itself, loss of outline

Makes everything look strangely in-between,

Unsure of what has been, or what might come.

In this wan light, even trees seem groundless.

In a while it will be night, but nothing

Here seems to believe the relief of darkness.

You are in this time of the interim

Where everything seems withheld.

The path you took to get here has washed out;

The way forward is still concealed from you.

The old is not old enough to have died away;

The new is still too young to be born.”

You cannot lay claim to anything;

In this place of dusk,

Your eyes are blurred;

And there is no mirror.

Everyone else has lost sight of your heart

And you can see nowhere to put your trust;

You know you have to make your own way through.

As far as you can, hold your confidence.

Do not allow confusion to squander

This call which is loosening

Your roots in false ground,

That you might come free

From all you have outgrown.

What is being transfigured here in your mind,

And it is difficult and slow to become new.

The more faithfully you can endure here,

The more refined your heart will become

For your arrival in the new dawn.

~ John O’Donohue

from To Bless the Space Between Us