A Letter (to Ed McClanahan)

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Dear Ed,

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I dreamed that you and I were sent to Hell.

The place we went to was not fiery

or cold, was not Dante's Hell or Milton's,

but was, even so, as true a Hell as any.

It was a place unalterably public

in which crowds of people were rushing

in weary frenzy this way and that,

as when classes change in a university

or at quitting time in a city street,

except that this place was wider far

than we could see, and the crowd as large 

as the place.  In that crowd every one

was alone.  Every one was hurrying.

Nobody was sitting down.  Nobody

was standing around.  All were rushing

so uniformly frantic, that to average them

would have stood them still.  It was a place 

deeply disturbed.  We thought, you and I,

that we might get across and come out

on the other side, if we stayed together,

only if we stayed together.  The other side

would be a clear day in a place we would know.

We joined hands and hurried along,

snatching each other through small openings 

in the throng.  But the place was full

of dire distractions, dire satisfactions.

We were torn apart, and I found you 

breakfasting upon a huge fried egg.

I snatched you away: "Ed! Come on!"

And then, still susceptible, I met

a lady whose luster no hell could dim.

She took all my thought.  But then,

in the midst of my delight, my fear

returned: "Oh! Damn it all! Where's Ed?"

I fled, searching, and found you again.

We went on together.  How this ended

I do not know.  I woke before it could end.

But, old friend, I want to tell you

how fine it was, what a durable

nucleus of joy it gave my fright

to force that horrid way with you, how

heavenly, let us say, in spite of Hell.

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P.S.

Do you want to know shy

you were distracted by an egg, and I

by a beautiful lady?  That's Hell.

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~ Wendell Berry

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The body is a single creature

God, how I hate names

of the body's chemicals and anatomy,

the frore and glum department

of its parts, each alone in the scattering

of the experts of Babel.

The body

is a single creature, whole

its life is one, never less that one, or more,

so is its world, and so

are two bodies in their love for one another

one.  In ignorance of this

we talk ourselves to death.

~  Wendell Berry

The abyss of no-meaning

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The abyss of no-meaning-what

can prevail against it?  Love

for the water in its standing

fall through the hill's wrist

from the town down to the river.

There is no love but this,

and it extends from Heaven

to the land destroyed,

to the hurt man in his cage,

to the dead man in his grave.

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~ Wendell Berry

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Sorrows of the Moon

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Tonight the moon dreams in a deeper languidness,
And, like a beauty on her cushions, lies at rest;
While drifting off to sleep, a tentative caress
Seeks, with a gentle hand, the contour of her breast;
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As on a crest above her silken avalanche,
Dying, she yields herself to an unending swoon,
And sees a pallid vision everywhere she’d glance,
In the azure sky where blossoms have been strewn.
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When sometime, in her weariness, upon her sphere
She might permit herself to sheda furtive tear,
A poet of great piety, a foe of sleep,
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Catches in the hollow of his hand that tear,
An opal fragment, iridescent as a star;
Within his heart, far from the sun, it’s buried deep.
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~  Charles Baudelaire 
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This is what you shall do

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This is what you shall do:
Love the earth and sun and the animals,
Despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks,
Stand up for the stupid and crazy,
Devote your income and labors to others,
Hate tyrants, argue not concerning God,
Have patience and indulgence toward the people,
Take off your hat to nothing known or unknown,
Or to any man or number of men,
Go freely with powerful uneducated persons,
And with the young and with the mothers of families,
Read these leaves in the open air,
Every season of every year of your life,
Reexamine all you have been told,
At school at church or in any book,
Dismiss whatever insults your own soul,
And your very flesh shall be a great poem,
And have the richest fluency not only in its words,
But in the silent lines of its lips and face,
And between the lashes of your eyes,
And in every motion and joint of your body.

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~  Walt Whitman

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the thorns

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I was a child. I remember, I used to pick

once, wild roses.

They has so many thorns,

but I didn’t wanted to break them.

I thought they were - buds,

and they are going to bloom.

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I met you, then. Oh, how many,

how many thorns you had!

but I didn’t wanted to undress you -

I thought they will bloom.

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Today, everything passes

in front of my eyes and I smile.

I smile and I wander through valleys

Playful, in the blowing of the wind.

I was a child.

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~   Lucian Blaga

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my love is building a building

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my love is building a building

around you,a frail slippery

house,a strong fragile house

(beginning at the singular beginning

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of your smile)a skilful uncouth

prison,a precise clumsy

prison(building thatandthis into Thus,

Around the reckless magic of your mouth)

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my love is building a magic,a discrete

tower of magic and(as i guess)

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when Farmer Death(whom fairies hate)shall

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crumble the mouth-flower fleet

He'll not my tower, 

                                                     laborious, casual

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where the surrounded smile

                                                 hangs

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                                                                            breathless

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e. e. cummings
art by Sandy Eastoak,  http://www.sandyeastoak.com/
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"wandering-on"

 

 

Samsara literally means "wandering-on." 

 

Many people think of it as the Buddhist name 

for the place where we currently live. 

But in the early Buddhist texts,
 it's the answer,
 not to the question,

 "Where are we?"

 but to the question,

 "What are we doing?"

 Instead of a place,

 it's a process:

 
 the tendency to keep creating worlds

 and then moving into them.

 As one world falls apart,

 you create another one and go there. 

At the same time, you bump into other people

 who are creating their own worlds, too.

The process can sometimes be enjoyable.

 In fact, it would be perfectly innocuous

 if it didn't entail so much suffering. 

The worlds we create keep caving in and killing us.

 

 Moving into a new world requires effort:

 not only the pains and risks of taking birth, 

but also the hard knocks -

 mental and physical -

 that come from going through 

childhood into adulthood, 

over and over again.

 

 

 
- Geoffrey DeGraff

not all

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink

Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;

Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink

And rise and sink and rise and sink again;

Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,

Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;

Yet many a man is making friends with death

Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.

It well may be that in a difficult hour,

Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,

Or nagged by want past resolution’s power,

I might be driven to sell your love for peace,

Or trade the memory of this night for food.

It well may be. I do not think I would.

~  Edna St. Vincent Millay

The Family Garden

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Tell me again about your garden
           Tell me how you planted, in the small
                      flat of mountain land, corn seed

and bean seed, how your finger poked the soil
           then you dropped in three dark bean seeds
                      for every yellow seed of corn.

Trees and mountains collared your land,
           but the fenced garden opened freely
                      to sun and warm summer rains.

Your potato rows bulged in July. You ached
           from digging them up, your hands down in dirt,
                      the cool lump of a tuber, brown-spotted,

just recovered, a greeting, like shaking hands.
           Baskets full of bumpy brown potatoes filled
                      your basement until fall, until you gave

away what you could, throwing out the rest.
           You gave away honey from the white hive too,
                      that box of bees beside the garden,

honey stored in Mason jars, a clearest honey
           nectar from lin tree blossoms and wild flowers.
                      The bright taste of honey on the tongue

spoke of the place, if a place can be known
           by the activity of bees and a flavor in the mouth,
                      if a person can be known by small acts

such as these, such as the way you rocked
           summer evenings from a chair on the porch
                      tending your inner garden, eyes closed.

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~ Hank Hudepohl

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Our lives are not as limited as we think they are; 

the world is a wonderfully weird place;

 consensual reality is significantly flawed; 

no institution can be trusted, 

but love does work; 

all things are possible; 

and we all could be happy and fulfilled

 if we only had the guts to be truly free

 and the wisdom to shrink our egos 

and quit taking ourselves so damn seriously.

 

 

 

— Tom Robbins

 

 

 

To walk inside yourself

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To walk inside yourself and and meet no one for hours -
that is what you must be able to attain.
To be solitary as you were when you were a child,
when the grown-ups walked around
involved with matters that seemed large and important
because they looked so busy
and because you didn't understand a thing
about what they were doing.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

He'd loved always his reasons for climbing trees

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...

And so, he thought, he would need to climb

the tree itself.  He'd climbed trees many times

in play when he was a boy, and many times 

since, when he'd a reason.  He'd loved

always his reasons for climbing trees.

But he'd come now to the age of remembering, 

and he remembered his boyhood fall from an apple tree,

and being brought in to his mother, his wits

dispersed, not knowing where he was,

though where he was was this world still.

If that should happen now, he thought, 

the world he waked up in would not be this one.

The other world is nearer to him now.

But trailing his rope untied as yet to anything

but himself, he climbed up once again and stood 

where only birds and the wind had been before,

and knew it was another world, after all,

that he had climbed up into.  There are

no worlds but other world: the world

of the field mouse, the world of the hawk, 

the world of the beetle, the world of the oak,

the worlds of the unborn, the dead, and all

the heavenly host, and he is alive

in those worlds while living in his own.

Known or unknown, every world exists 

because the others do.

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The treetops

are another world, smelling of bark,

a stratum of freer air and larger views,

from which he saw the world he'd lived in

all day until now, its intimate geography changed

by his absence and by the height he saw it from.

The sky was a little larger, and all around

the aerial topography of treetops, green and gray,

the ground almost invisible beneath.

He perched there, ungravitied as a bird,

knotting his rope and looking about, worlded

in worlds on worlds, pleased, and unafraid.

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There are no worlds but other worlds

and all the other worlds are here,

reached or almost reachable by the same

outstretching hand, as he, perched upon 

his high branch, almost imagined flight.

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~ Wendell Berry, from: 'A Timbered Choir'
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unstable as water

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They were as unstable as water, and like water would perhaps finally prevail.  Since the dawn of life, in successive waves they had been dashing themselves against the coast of flesh.  Each wave was broken, but, like the sea, wore away ever so little of the granite on which it failed, and some day, ages yet, might roll unchecked over the place where the material world had been, and God would move upon the face of those waters.  One such wave (and not the least) I raised and rolled before the branch of an idea, till it reached its crest, and toppled over and fell at Damascus.  The wash of that wave, thrown back by the resistance of vested things, will provide the matter of the following wave, when in fullness of time the sea shall be raised once more.

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~ T. E. Lawrence, from: 'The Seven Pillars of Wisdom'

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In order to arrive

In order to arrive there,

To arrive where you are,

To get from where you are not,

You must go by a way

Wherein there is no ecstasy.

In order to arrive at what you do not know

You must go by a way

Which is the way of ignorance.

In order to possess what you do not possess

You must go by the way

Of dispossession.

In order to arrive at what you are not

You must go through the way

In which you are not.

And what you do not know

Is the only thing you know

And what you own is what you do not own

And where you are is where you are not.

~  T.S. Eliot