To a Stranger

Passing stranger! you do not know
How longingly I look upon you,
You must be he I was seeking,
Or she I was seeking
(It comes to me as a dream)

I have somewhere surely
Lived a life of joy with you,
All is recall'd as we flit by each other,
Fluid, affectionate, chaste, matured,

You grew up with me,
Were a boy with me or a girl with me,
I ate with you and slept with you, your body has become
not yours only nor left my body mine only,

You give me the pleasure of your eyes,
face, flesh as we pass,
You take of my beard, breast, hands,
in return,

I am not to speak to you, I am to think of you
when I sit alone or wake at night, alone
I am to wait, I do not doubt I am to meet you again
I am to see to it that I do not lose you.






~ Walt Whitman

Seventh Day Seventh Month

.

Tangle together like painted

Clouds on a screen, then,

Thighs enlaced, heads together

On the pillow we sing softly

To the full moon and watch time pass.

The declining moon marks the hours.

Suddenly we are seized by grief and fear.

Three o’clock in the morning

Has gone by but we cannot

Get enough of one another. Insatiable

Passion, night swift as the shuttle

In the loom. Oh heaven, what is

Your price for one more hour?

~ Kuan Yun She

if

.

 

 

If we are peaceful.

If we are happy.

We can smile and blossom

Like a flower.

 

And everyone

In our family,

Our entire society

Will benefit

From our peace.

 

 

 

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Our deepest fear

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.

Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.

It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.

We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?

Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God.

Your playing small does not serve the world.

There is nothing enlightened about shrinking

so that other people won't feel insecure around you.

We are all meant to shine, as children do.

We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us.

It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone.

And as we let our own light shine,

we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.

As we are liberated from our own fear,

our presence automatically liberates others.

~ Marianne Williamson

For you to hear me

.

For you to hear me

my words

thin themselves out, at times,

like the trails of gulls on the shore.

A necklace of bones, a crazed rattle

for your fingers smooth as grapes.

And I look at my words from a distance.

More than mine they are yours.

Like tendrils they climb my ancient suffering.

They climb, like this, inside damp walls.

It is you the guilty one in this blood-wet round.

They are escaping from my dark covert.

You pervade everything, you, pervade everything.

They live, before you, in the solitude you enter,

and are accustomed, more than you, to my sadnesses.

Now I want them to say what I want them to tell you,

for you to hear as I want you to hear me.

The winds of misery may still bring them down.

Hurricanes of dream may still make them tumble.

You attend other voices, in my voice of pain,

Cries, of ancient mouths: blood, of ancient pleas.

Love me. Don’t leave me, friend. Follow me.

Follow me, friend, in this wave of misery.

They go on being miserly, with your love, my words.

You enter everything, you, enter everything.

I make, out of all this, an infinite necklace,

for your white fingers, smooth as grapes.

.

~ Pablo Neruda

Give me your hand

Give me your hand

 

Make room for me to lead

and follow you

beyond this rage of poetry.

 

Let othes have

the privacy of 

touching words

and love of loss

 of love.

 

For me 

Give me your hand.

 

 

 

~ Maya Angelou

 

 

 

 

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

.

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