Thursday, December 16, 2010

When I speak of darkness, I mean the absence of knowledge




.
And so to stand firmly and avoid pitfalls, 
keep to the path you are on.  
Let your longing relentlessly beat upon the  cloud of unknowing 
that lies between you and your God.  
Pierce that cloud with the keen shaft of your love, 
spurn the thought of anything less, 
and do not give up this work for anything.  
.
For the contemplative work of love by itself will eventually heal you...
.
And so diligently persevere until you feel joy in it.  For in the beginning it is usual to feel nothing but a kind of darkness about your mind, or as it were, a cloud of unknowing.  You will seem to know nothing and to feel nothing except a naked intent toward God in the depths of your being.  Try as you might, this darkness and this cloud will remain between you and your God.  You will feel frustrated, for your mind will be unable to grasp him, and you heart will not relish the delight of his love.  But learn to be at home in this darkness. Return to it as often as you can, letting your spirit cry out to him whom you love.  
.
the fourteenth century anonymous author,
the Cloud of Unknowing
.

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

awaken...a meadow of delight






.
On the day when
The weight deadens
On your shoulders
And you stumble,
May the clay dance
To balance you.
And when your eyes
Freeze behind
The gray window
And the ghost of loss gets into you,
May a flock of colors,
Indigo, red, green
and azure blue,
Come to awaken in you
A meadow of delight.
When the canvas frays
In the curragh of thought
And a stain of ocean
Blackens beneath you,
May there come across the waters
A path of yellow moonlight
To bring you safely home.
May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
May the clarity of light be yours,
May the fluency of the ocean be yours,
May the protection of the ancestors be yours.
And, so may a slow
Wind work these words
Of love around you,
An invisible cloak
To mind your life.
~ John O'Donohue
from To Bless the Space Between Us
.


Monday, December 13, 2010

[you who never arrived]





You who never arrived
in my arms, Beloved, who were lost
from the start,
I don't even know what songs
would please you, I have given up trying
to recognize you in the surging wave of the next 
moment.  All the immense 
images in me - the far-off, deeply-felt landscape,
cities, towers, and bridges, and un-
suspected turns in the path,
and those powerful lands that were once
pulsing with the life of the gods -
all rise within me to mean
you, who forever elude me.

You, Beloved, who are all 
the gardens I have ever gazed at,
longing.  An open window
in a country house -, and you almost
stepped out, pensive, to meet me.  Streets that I chanced upon, -
you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and, startled, gave back
my too-sudden image.  Who knows?  perhaps the same
bird echoed through both of us 
yesterday, separate, in the evening...




~ Rainer Maria Rilke
from the Uncollected Poems
translated by Stephen Mitchell
.


Dusk in the Country







.
.
The riddle silently sees its image. It spins evening
among the motionless reeds.
There is a frailty no one notices
there, in the web of grass.
.
Silent cattle stare with green eyes.
They mosey in evening calm down to the water.
And the lake holds its immense spoon
up to all the mouths.
.
~ Harry Edmund Martinson
translation by Robert Bly
art by the author
.
.

beneath the seen






.

Is this the largest organism in the world? 
This 2,400-acre (9.7 km2) site in eastern Oregon
 had a contiguous growth of mycelium 
estimated at 1,665 football fields in size 
and 2,200 years old, this one fungus has killed the forest
 above it several times over, and in so doing has built deeper soil layers
 that allow the growth of ever-larger stands of trees. 
Mushroom-forming forest fungi are unique
 in that their mycelial mats can achieve
 such massive proportions.
.
~ from Wikipedia
.





Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome.
 It's true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears
 above the ground lasts only a single summer. 

Then it withers away - an ephemeral apparition. 
When we think of the unending growth and decay of life
 and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity.
 Yet I have never lost the sense of something that lives
 and endures beneath the eternal flux. What we see is blossom, 
which passes. The rhizome remains.


~ Carl Jung
from Memories, Dreams, Reflections



Your desiring cannot





.
.
Love is not condescending, never that,
nor books, nor any marking on paper,
nor what people say of each other.
.
Love is a tree
with branches reaching into eternity
and roots set deep in eternity,
and no trunk.
.
Have you seen it? The mind cannot.
Your desiring cannot.
.
The longing you feel for this love
comes from inside you.
.
When you become the Friend,
your longing will be as the man in the ocean
who holds to a piece of wood.
.
Eventually, wood, man, and ocean
become one swaying being,
Shams Tabriz, the secret of God.
.
~ Rumi
.

Sunday, December 12, 2010

once, more intimate



.
.
Yet in the alert, warm animal there lies
the pain and burden of an enormous sadness.
For it too feels the presence of what often 
overwhelms us: a memory, as if
the element we keep pressing toward was once
more intimate, more true, and our communion
infinitely tender.  Here all is distance;
there it was breath.  After that first home,
the second seems ambiguous and drafty.
.
Oh bliss of the tiny creature which remains
forever inside the womb that was its shelter;
joy of the gnat which, still within, leaps up
even at its marriage: for everything is womb.
And look at the half-assurance of the bird,
which knows both inner and outer, from its source,
as if it were the soul of an Etruscan,
flown out of a dead man received inside a space,
but with his reclining image as the lid.
And how bewildered is any womb-born creature
that has to fly.  As if terrified and fleeing
from itself, it zigzags through the air, the way
a crack runs through a teacup.  So the bat 
quivers across the porcelain of evening.
.
And we: spectators, always, everywhere,
turned toward the world of objects, never outward.
It fills us.  We arrange it.  It breaks down.
We rearrange it, then break down ourselves.
.
Who has twisted us around like this, so that
no matter what we do, we are in the posture
of someone going away? Just as, upon
the farthest hill, which shows him his whole valley
one last time, he turns, stops, lingers -,
so we live here, forever taking leave.
.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
excerpt from the Duino Elegies
.

Thursday, December 9, 2010

Knowing Nothing



.



Love is not the reason.
Love is the lure,
the thin goat staked out in the clearing.

The lion has stalked
the village for a long time.
It does not want the goat,
who stands thin and bleating,
tied to its bit of wood.

The goat is not the reason
The reason is the lion,
whose one desire is to enter -
Not the goat, which is
only the lure, only excuse,
but the one burning life
it has hunted for a long time
disguised as hunger.  Disguised as love.
Which is not the reason.

Or would you think
that the bones of a lion reason?
Would you think that the tongue?
The lion does not want the goat,
it wants only to live.  Alone if it must.
In pain if it must.  Knowing nothing.
Like the goat, it wants only to live.
Like love. Or would you think that the heart?









~ Jane Hirshfield
from Lives of the Heart
.

A Month of Days and Nights



.


Days that could have
been anything,
night that could have been anything,
turned with the leaves.

Then, someone played
the piano -
halting,
unpracticed, and perfect.

I listened to pity
and lowered my head in shame.
Ashamed not at my tears,
or even at what has been wasted,
but to have been dry-eyed so long.



~ Jane Hirshfield
from The lives of the Heart


.

Sunday, November 28, 2010

stay with that silence





...
There was a time we lost ourselves in others,
a time we ate the best of foods.
There was time we relied on the intellect,
a time we looked for fortune
but all this had no value in the end.
.
For a mouthful of food and some bitter herbs
we went everywhere,
we made so many plans
one day it was Rome,
the next day it was Africa.
.
We entered a raging battlefield, for what?
a few crumbs of bread.
.
Lose your soul in God's love, I swear
there is no other way.
.
Stay with that silence.
I once ran toward the knowledge of this world;
now the papers are packed, the pens are broken
O Saaqi, bring on the wine!
.
~ Rumi
from A Garden Beyond Paradise
version by Jonathan Star
.

Friday, November 26, 2010

Autumn Quince






.
How sad they are,
the promises we never return to.
They stay in our mouths,
roughen the tongue, lead lives of their own.
Houses built and unwittingly lived in;
a succession of milk bottles brought to the door
every morning and taken inside.
.
And which one is real?
The music in the composer's ear
or the lapsed piece the orchestra plays?
The world is a blurred version of itself --
marred, lovely, and flawed.
It is enough.
.
~ Jane Hirshfield
from Of Gravity & Angels
.

Wednesday, November 24, 2010

from "Among School Children"





.
.
Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul.
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
.
~ W. B. Yeats
.

Sunday, November 21, 2010

Be still




.
.
Be still.
Listen to the stones of the wall.
be silent, they try
To speak your
.
Name.
Listen
To the living walls.
Who are you?
Who
Are you? Whose
Silence are you?
.
Who (be quiet)
Are you (as these stones
Are quiet). Do not
Think of what you are
Still less of
What you may one day be.
Rather
Be what you are (but who?) be
The unthinkable one
You do not know.
.
~ Thomas Merton
excerpt from In Silence
.

emptiness and freedom



.
.
What can I say about the emptiness and freedom 
into whose door I entered for that half-minute, 
which was enough for a lifetime, 
because it was a new life altogether?  
.
There is nothing with which to compare it.  
I could call it nothingness, 
but it is an infinitely fruitful freedom, 
to lack all things and to lack my self 
in the fresh air of that happiness 
that seems to be above all modes of being.  
.
Don't let me build any more walls around it, or I will shut myself out.
.
~ Thomas Merton
from Dialogues with Silence
sketch by the author
.

Saturday, November 20, 2010

I wearied myself searching





I wearied myself searching for the friend
With efforts beyond my strength
I came to the door
And saw how powerfully the locks were bolted
And the longing in me became that strong
And then I saw that I was gazing from within the presence
Only after that waiting and giving up all trying
Did Lalla flow out from where I knelt


~ Lalla