dying each minute, never accumulating

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To understand the beauty and the extraordinary nature of death, there must be freedom from the known.  In dying to the known is the beginning of the understanding of death, because then the mind is made fresh, new, and there is no fear.  Therefore one can enter into the state called death.  So, from the beginning to the end, life and death are one.  The wise man understands time, thought, and sorrow, and only he can understand death. The mind that is dying each minute, never accumulating, never gathering experience, is innocent, and is therefore in a constant state of love.

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~ J. Krishnamurti, from a talk on July 28th 1964

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a natural action

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"The more you sense the rareness and value of your own life,

the more you realize that how you use it, 

how you manifest it, is all your responsibility. 

We face such a big task so, naturally, 

such a person sits down for a while.

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It's not an intended action, it's a natural action."

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~ Kobun Chino

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To us all towns are one, all men our kin

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To us all towns are one, all men our kin.

Life's good comes not from others' gift, nor ill.

Man's pains and pains' relief are from within.

Death’s no new thing, nor do our blossoms thrill

When joyous life seems like a luscious draught.

When grieved, we patient suffer; for, we deem

This much-praised life of ours a fragile raft

Borne down the waters of some mountain stream

That o’er huge boulders roaring seeks the plain

Tho’ storms with lightning’s flash from darkened skies.

Descend, the raft goes on as fates ordain.

Thus have we seen in visions of the wise !

We marvel not at the greatness of the great;

Still less despise we men of low estate.

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~ Kaniyan Poongundran

(Translated by G.U.Pope)

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How do I love thee?

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How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday's
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right.
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints — I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! — and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

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~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

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Untouchable

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All you want me to bring back is a rock. No gifts,

no fine words - not even these. But you must 

understand I have spent a lifetime making my way 

to the edge of this stream where I sit in the spent

leaves writing what I know cannot be written. As 

twilight thickens over my fingers, I realize these 

words are falling short of the page. At last I see

your stone, luminescent in the gurgling darkness.

Forgive me for returning empty-handed, but if

I touch it now, I may never get home.

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~ Jim Sagel

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I am thinking of the space between the stars

Estrella Fugaz

 

I am thinking of the space between the stars when

a tail of fire abruptly blazes in the San Ildefonso sky.

Just so unpredictably did I tumble from orbit, my

identity engulfed in flames.  Yet, my only wish is to

fall out of myself again and again.

 

****

Runoff

 

Braced against the current, I battle the swollen creek

for a foothold on these ricks polished by the water's

desire for the sea, the same insatiable thirst that

surges though my blood.

 

~ Jim Sagel, from 'unexpected turn'

Always in the big woods

Always in the big woods when you leave familiar ground and step off alone into a new place there will be, along with the feelings of curiosity and excitement, a little nagging of dread. It is the ancient fear of the unknown, and it is your first bond with the wilderness you are going into. What you are doing is exploring. You are undertaking the first experience, not of the place, but of yourself in that place. It is an experience of essential loneliness, for nobody can discover the world for anyone else. It is only after we have discovered it for ourselves that it becomes a common ground and a common bond, and we cease to be alone.

~ Wendell Berry

bamboo

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What exists wants to persist.

Even the knock of bamboo on bamboo

spilled outward continues.

And you who have lived - restless, ambitious, aggrieved.

A Walter,  a Shirley, a Tim.

A Carlos,  a Teisha,  a Haavo.

Do not think it unchanged, this world you are leaving.

~ Jane Hirshfield

from Come, Thief

Old men sleeping in speeding cars

Old men sleeping

in speeding cars,

a hawk on a boulder

dripping with fog,

ten deer

in an autumn meadow,

yellow

aspen,

bishop pines

by the ocean.

These all speak more

as our stiff-

ness re-

laxes

into new birth.

The worth

of things

cracks open

and shows

the intestines.

Glittering

gold

trembling

on darkness.

~ Michael McClure

Quiet minds

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Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or

frightened but go on in fortune or

misfortune at their own private pace,  like

a clock during a thunderstorm.

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~ Robert Louis Stevenson

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sometimes

Sometimes I go about pitying myself,
and all the time.
I am being carried on great winds across the sky.




~ Ojibway


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Know the Self as lord of the chariot

Know the Self as lord of the chariot,

The body as the chariot itself,

The discriminating intellect as

The Charioteer, and the mind as reins.

The senses, say the wise, are the horses;

Selfish desires are the roads they travel.

When the Self is confused with the body,

Mind, and senses, they point out, he seems

To enjoy pleasure and suffer sorrow.

When a person lacks discrimination

And his mind is undisciplined, the senses

Run hither and thither like wild horses.

But they obey the rein like trained horses

When one has discrimination and 

Has made the mind one-pointed...

...

Knowing the senses to be separate

From the Self, and the sense experience

To be fleeting, the wise grieve no more.

Above the senses is the mind, above

The mind is the intellect, above that

Is the ego, and above the ego

Is the unmanifested Cause...

~ Katha Upanishad

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The unknown evokes wonder

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The unknown evokes wonder. If you lose your sense of wonder, you lose the sacramental majesty of the world. Nature is no longer a presence, it is a thing.  Your life becomes a dead cage of fact.  The sense of the eternal recedes, and time is reduced to routine.  Yet the flow of our lives cannot be stopped.  This is one of the amazing facts about being in the dance of life.  There is no place to step outside.  There is no neutral space in human life.  There is no place to go to get out of it.  There is no little cabin down at the bottom of the garden where the force and familiarity of life stop, and you can sit there in a space outside your life and yourself and look in on both. Once you are in life, it embraces you totally.

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~ John O'Donohue, from 'Eternal Echoes'

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out at the edges

I.

Somewhere, out at the edges, the night

Is turning and the waves of darkness

Begin to brighten the shore of dawn.

II.

I arise today

In the name of Silence

Womb of the Word,

In the name of Stillness

Home of Belonging,

In the name of Solitude

of the Soul and the Earth.

I arise today

Blessed by all things,

Wings of breath,

Delight of eyes,

Wonder of whisper,

Intimacy of touch,

Eternity of soul,

Urgency of thought,

Miracle of health,

Embrace of God.

May I live this day

Compassionate of heart,

Gentle in word,

Gracious in awareness,

Courageous in thought,

Generous in love.

~ John O' Donohue

from Eternal Echoes

 

 

 

it needs forever

Anna: There you are, Harlan.  I've called and called.  What are you doing?

Harlan: Looking.

Anna: At what?

Harlan: The river.

Anna: You've never seen enough, have you,  of that river you looked at all your life?

Harlan: It never does anything twice.   It needs forever to be in all its times and aspects and acts.  To know it in time is only to begin to know it.  To paint it, you must show it as less than it is.  That is why as a painter I never was at rest.  Now I look and do not paint.  This is the heaven of a painter - only to look, to see without limit.  It's as if a poet finally were free to say only the simplest things.
For a moment they are still again, both continuing to look, in  opposite directions, at the river.

Anna: That is our music, Harlan.  Do you hear it?

Harlan: Yes, I hear.

Anna: I think it will always be here.  It draws us back out of eternity as once it drew us together in time.  Do you remember, Harlan, how we played?  And how, in playing, we no longer needed to say what we needed to say?

Harlan: I'm listening. But I heard here too, remember, another music, farther off, more solitary,  closer -

Anna: To what, Harlan?

Harlan: I'm not so sure I ever know.  Closer to the edge of modern life,  I suppose - to where the life of living things actually is lived;  closer to the beauty that saves and consoles this earth.  I wanted to spend whole days watching the little fish that flicker along the shore.

Anna: Yes.  I know you did.

Harlan: I wanted
to watch, every morning forever,the world shape itself again out of the drifting fog.

Anna: Your music,  then,   was it in those things?

Harlan: It was in them and beyond them,  always almost out of hearing.

Anna: Because of it you made the beautiful things you made,  for yourself alone, and yet, I think, for us both.  You made them for us both,  as for yourself,  for what we were together required those things of you alone.

Harlan: To hear that music,  I needed to be alone and free.

Anna: Free, Harlan?

Harlan: I longed for the perfection of the single one.  When the river rose and the current fled by,  I longed to cast myself adrift,  to take that long,  free downward-flowing as my own.  I know the longing of an old rooted tree to lean down upon the water.

Anna: I know that.  I knew that all along.  And then was when I loved you most.  What brought me to you was knowing the long, solitary journey that was you,  yourself - the thought of you in a little boat, adrift and free.  But, Harlan, why did you never go?  Why did you not just drift away, solitary and free,  living on the free charity of the seasons, wintering in caves as sometimes you said you'd like to do?

Harlan: Oh,  Anna, because I was lonely!  The perfection of the single one is not perfection, for it is lonely.

Anna: From longing  for the perfection of the single one,  I called you into longing for the perfection of the union of two,

Harlan: which also was imperfect, for we were not always at one, and I never ceased, quite, to long for solitude.

Anna: And yet, of the two imperfections, the imperfection of the union of two is by far the greater and finer - as we understood.

Harlan: Yes, my dear,  Anna,  that I too understood.  It is better, granting imperfection in both ways, to be imperfect and together than to be imperfect and alone.

Anna: And so this is the heaven of lovers that we have come to - to live again in our separateness, so that we may live again together, my Harlan.




~ Wendell Berry
from  Sonata at Payne Hollow



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