When you are old and grey

.

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
.
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
.
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
.
~ William Butler Yeats

.

sublime generosity

.

I was dead, then alive.

Weeping, then laughing.

.

The power of love came into me,

and I became fierce like a lion,

then tender like the evening star.

.

He said, "You're not mad enough.

You don't belong in this house."

.

I went wild and had to be tied up.

He said, "Still not wild enough

to stay with us!"

.

I broke though another layer

into joyfulness.

.

He said, "It's not enough."

I died.

.

He said, "You're a clever little man,

full of fantasy and doubting."

.

I plucked out my feathers and became a fool.

He said, "Now you're the candle

for this assembly."

.

But I'm no candle. Look!

I'm scattered smoke.

.

He said, "You are the sheikh, the guide."

But I'm not a teacher. I have not power.

.

He said, "You already have wings.

I cannot give you wings."

.

But I wanted his wings.

I felt like some flightless chicken.

.

Then nw events said to me,

"Don't move. A sublime generosity is

coming toward you."

.

And old love said, "Stay with me."

.

I said, "I will."

.

You are the fountain of the sun's light.

I am a willow shadow on the ground.

You make my raggedness silky.

.

The soul at dawn is like darkened water

that slowly begins to say Thank you, thank you.

.

Then at sunset, again, Venus gradually

changes into the moon and then the whole nightsky.

.

This comes of smiling back

at your smile.

.

The chess master says nothing,

other than moving the silent chess piece.

.

That I am part of the ploys

of this game makes me

amazingly happy.

.

~ Rumi

.

who empty the self

.

I honor those who try

to rid themselves of any lying,

who empty the self

and have only clear being there.

.

~ Rumi

.

In your light I learn how to love

.

In your light I learn how to love.
In your beauty, how to make poems.
.
You dance inside my chest,
where no one sees you,
.
but sometimes I do,
and that sight becomes this art.
.
~ Rumi

..

I go by a field

.
I go by a field where once
I cultivated a few poor crops.
It is now covered with young trees,
for the forest that belongs here
has come back and reclaimed its own.
And I think of all the effort
I have wasted and all the time,
and of how much joy I took
in that failed work and how much 
it taught me. For in so failing
I learned something of my place,
something of myself, and now
I welcome back the trees.
.
~ Wendell Berry
.

The law is the husk of faith

.
The highest good is not to seek to do good,
but to allow yourself to become it.
The ordinary person seeks to do good things,
and finds that they can not do them continually.
.
The Master does not force virtue on others,
thus she is able to accomplish her task.
The ordinary person who uses force,
will find that they accomplish nothing.
.
The kind person acts from the heart,
and accomplishes a multitude of things.
The righteous person acts out of pity,
yet leaves many things undone.
The moral person will act out of duty,
and when no one will respond
will roll up his sleeves and use force.
.
When the Tao is forgotten, there is righteousness.
When righteousness is forgotten, there is morality.
When morality is forgotten, there is the law.
The law is the husk of faith,
and trust is the beginning of chaos.
.
Our basic understandings are not from the Tao
because they come from the depths of our misunderstanding.
The master abides in the fruit and not in the husk.
She dwells in the Tao,
and not with the things that hide it.
This is how she increases in wisdom.
.
~ Tao Teh Ching, by Lao Tzu

Drink your tea slowly

.

Drink your tea slowly and reverently,
as if it is the axis
on which the world earth revolves
– slowly, evenly, without
rushing toward the future;
Live the actual moment.
Only this moment is life.


~ Thich Nhat Hanh

.

I will not leave you.

You worry that I will leave you.

I will not leave you.

Only strangers travel.

Owning everything,

I have no where to go.

~Leonard Cohen

Thoreau's Journal

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Each town should have a park, or rather a primitive forest, of five hundred or a thousand acres, where a stick should never be cut for fuel, a common possession forever, for instruction and recreation. We hear of cow commons and ministerial lots, but we want men-commons and lay lots, inalienable forever. Let us keep the New World new, preserve all the advantages of living in the country. There is meadow and pasture and wood-lot for the town’s poor. Why not a forest and huckleberry field for the town’s rich? All Walden Wood might have been preserved for our park forever, with Walden in its midst, and the Easterbrooks Country, an unoccupied area of some four square miles, might have been our huckleberry-field. If any owners of these tracts are about to leave the world without natural heirs who need or deserve to be specially remembered, they will do wisely to abandon their possession to all, and not will them to some individual who perhaps has enough already. As some give to Harvard College or another institution, why might not another give a forest or huckleberry-field to Concord? A town is an institution which deserves to be remembered. We boast of our system of education, but why stop at schoolmasters and schoolhouses? We are all schoolmasters, and our schoolhouse is the universe. To attend chiefly to the desk or schoolhouse while we neglect the scenery in which it is placed is absurd. If we do not look out we shall find our fine schoolhouse standing in a cow-yard at last.

~ Henry David Thoreau

moving ahead

Once more my deeper life goes on with more strength,

as if the banks through which it moves had widened out.

Trees and stones seem more like me each day,

and the paintings I see seem more seen into:

with my senses, as with the birds, I climb

into the windy heaven out of the oak,

and in the ponds broken off from the blue sky

my feeling sinks, as if standing on fishes.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

translation by Robert Bly

To be great be entire

.

To be great be entire:

Of what is yours nothing 

exaggerate or exclude

Be whole in each thing. Put all that you are

Into the least you do

Like that on each place the whole moon

Shines for she lives aloft.

.

~ Fernando Pessoa

.

Her face was in a bed of hair

.

Her face was in a bed of hair,

Like flowers in a plot-

Her hand was whiter than the sperm

That feeds the sacred light.

Her tongue more tender than the tune

That totters in the leaves-

Who hears may be incredulous,

Who witnesses, believes.

.

~ Emily Dickinson

.

the cure

.

Love is the cure,
for your pain will keep giving birth to more pain
until your eyes constantly exhale love
as effortlessly as your body yields its scent.


.


~ Rumi

 

 

 

 

here is a smile and a gentleness

There is a smile and a gentleness

inside. When I learned the name

 

and address of that, I went to where

you sell perfume. I begged you not

 

to trouble me so with longing. Come

out and play! Flirt more naturally.

 

Teach me how to kiss. On the ground

a spread blanket, flame that's caught

 

and burning well, cumin seeds browning,

I am inside all of this with my soul.

 

 

 

 

~ Rumi

all which isn't singing is mere talking

.
all which isn't singing is mere talking
and all talking's talking to oneself
(whether that oneself be sought or seeking
master or disciple sheep or wolf)
.
gush to it as diety or devil
-toss in sobs and reasons threats and smiles
name it cruel fair or blessed evil-
it is you (ne i)nobody else
.
drive dumb mankind dizzy with haranguing
-you are deafened every mother's son-
all is merely talk which isn't singing
and all talking's to oneself alone
.
but the very song of(as mountains
feel and lovers)singing is silence
.
~ e.e.cummings


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