Tuesday, February 15, 2011

in a stolen boat







push off what seemed safe: The fishing dock,
pitch pines, children glazed to sheen
by ruthless summers. Past
 
the jetty, past the past, to open sea--
all violet and green, that choppy path between doom and luck--
Put your back into it, and row.
 
 
 

~ April Bernard

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Monday, February 14, 2011

this love has no name








Holiness is falling in love with your own self.
This is devotion, and it is not different from love!
What you love you are devoted to and
what you are devoted to you love.

When this love has no object, and goes nowhere
but to itself, it will reveal itself to you in whatever
form you desire; manifest or unmanifest.

If you desire this love don't try to love a particular
person because this love has no personality, no
form, and no name. God is this love.



~ Papaji
from The Truth Is



in a train






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There has been a light snow.
Dark car tracks move in out of the darkness.
I stare at the train window marked with soft dust.
I have awakened at Missoula Montana utterly happy.

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~ Robert Bly

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Sunday, February 13, 2011

hidden things


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After Long Busyness

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I start out for a walk at last after weeks at the desk.
Moon gone plowing underfoot no stars; not a trace of light!
Suppose a horse were galloping toward me in this open field?
Every day I did not spend in solitude was wasted.
.


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Watering the Horse

How strange to think of giving up all ambition!
Suddenly I see with such clear eyes
The white flake of snow
That has just fallen in the horse's mane!

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~ Robert Bly


a life entirely given


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Hell is timely, for Hell is the thought
that Hell will go on, on and on, without end.
Heaven is only present, instantaneous and eternal,
a mayfly, a blue dayflower, a life entirely given,
complete forever in its hour.

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~ Wendell Berry
from Leavings
photo by magda berny


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Saturday, February 12, 2011

newness








When we are alone on a starlit night,
 when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn
 descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see 
children in a moment when they are really children, 
when we know love in our own hearts; or when, 
like the Japanese poet, Basho, we hear an old frog
 land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash - at such times
 the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, 
the "newness," the emptiness and the purity of vision that make
 themselves evident, all these provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance.


~ Thomas Merton
photo by Kathleen Connally




Thursday, February 10, 2011

One Valley


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Once I thought I could find
where it began
but that never happened
though I went looking for it
time and again
cutting my way past 
empty pools and dry waterfalls
where my dog ran straight up the stone
like an unmoored flame
.
it seemed that the beginning
could not be far then as I went on through the trees 
over the rocks toward the mountain
until I came out in the open
and saw no sign of it
.
where the roaring torrent
raced at one time
to carve farther down
those high walls in the stone
for the silence that I hear now
day and night on its way to the sea
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~ W.S. Merwin
from The Shadow of Sirius
photo by Ansel Adams

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a song on the end of the world







On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.

On the day the world ends
Women walk through the fields under their umbrellas,
A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the air
And leads into a starry night.

And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.

Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet
Yet is not a prophet, for he’s much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
There will be no other end of the world,
There will be no other end of the world.




~  Czeslaw Milosz 






Wednesday, February 9, 2011

losing a language




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A breath leaves the sentences and does not come back
yet the old still remember something that they could say
.
but they know now that such things are no longer believed
and the young have fewer words
.
many of the things the words were about
no longer exist
.
the noun for standing in mist by a haunted tree
the verb for I
.
the children will not repeat
the phrases their parents speak
.
somebody has persuaded them
that it is better to say everything differently
.
so that they can be admired somewhere
farther and farther away
.
where nothing that is here is known
we have little to say to each other
.
we are wrong and dark
in the eyes of the new owners
.
the radio is incomprehensible
the day is glass
.
when there is a voice at the door it is foreign
everywhere instead of a name there is a lie
.
nobody has seen it happening
nobody remembers
.
this is what the words were made
to prophesy
.
here are the extinct feathers
here is the rain we saw
.

~ W.S. Merwin
from Migration
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Tuesday, February 8, 2011

all their actions have vanished

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In an age when the Tao is followed,
no one rewards the talented
or pays special attention
to the lovely, the virtuous, or the wise.
Those who govern
are simply the highest branches
on the tree, and the people wander
in freedom, like deer in the woods.
They are honest but think nothing of it,
they naturally do what is right,
they are kind without any conception
of kindness, and are trustworthy
though they wouldn't know what that means.
They keep no records of their good deeds,
because good deeds are so common.
That is why all their actions
have vanished, without a trace.

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~ Stephen Mitchell
from The Second Book of the Tao

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metempsychosis









Some stories last many centuries,
others only a moment.
All alter over that lifetime like beach-glass,
grow distant and more beautiful with salt.

Yet even today, to look at a tree
and ask the story Who are you? is to be transformed.

There is a stage in us where each being, each thing, is a mirror.

Then the bees of self pour from the hive-door,
ravenous to enter the sweetness of flowering nettles and thistle.

Next comes the ringing a stone or violin or empty bucket
gives off --
the immeasurable's continuous singing,
before it goes back into story and feeling.

In Borneo, there are palm trees that walk on their high roots.
Slowly, with effort, they lift one leg then another.

I would like to join that stilted transmigration,
to feel my own skin vertical as theirs:
an ant-road, a highway for beetles.

I would like not minding, whatever travels my heart.
To follow it all the way into leaf-form, bark-furl, root-touch,
and then keep walking, unimaginably further.





~ Jane Hirshfield
from Given Sugar, Given Salt: Poems


photo of the Socratea exorrhiza or walking palm
which can move itself up to about a meter per year



Monday, February 7, 2011

beauty and love



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Look at something which you have seen which is actually marvelously beautiful: a statue, a poem, a lily in the pond, or a well-kept lawn. And when you see such a piece of beauty - no, no, when you see such, not piece - when you see such beauty what takes place? 
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At that moment, the very majesty of a mountain makes you forget yourself. Right? Have you ever been in that position? When you have seen that you don't exist, only that grandeur exists. But a few seconds later or a minute later the whole cycle begins, the confusion, the chatter. 
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So beauty is where you are not. Have you understood this? Do you understand, sir? Oh, what a crowd! The tragedy of it. Truth is where you are not. Beauty, love is where you are not. Because we are not capable to look at this extraordinary thing called truth.
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~ J. Krishnamurti
from a talk in Bombay, January 31st 1982


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the call away





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A cold wind flows over the cornfields;
Fleets of blackbirds ride that ocean.
I want to be in that wild, be
Outdoors, live anywhere in the wind.

I settle down, with my back against
A shed wall where no one can find me.
I stare out at the box elder leaves
Moving in this mysterious water.

What is it that I want? Not money,
Not a large desk, a house with ten rooms.
This is what I want to do: To sit here,
Take no part, be called away by wind.




~ Robert Bly
from Eating the Honey of Words: New and Selected Poems



to a writer of reputation



... the man must remain obscure.
                                   ~ Cezanne

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Having begun in public anonymity,
you did not count on this
literary sublimation by which
some body becomes a "name" -
as if you have died and have become
a part of mere geography.  Greet,
therefore, the roadsigns on the road.
.
Or perhaps you have become deaf and blind,
or merely inanimate, and may 
be studied without embarrassment
by the disinterested, the dispassionate,
and the merely curious,
not fearing to be overheard.
Hello to the grass, then, and to the trees.
.
Or perhaps you are secretly
still alert and moving, no longer the one
they have named, but another,
named by yourself,
carrying away this morning's showers
for your private delectation.
Hello, river.

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~ Wendell Berry
from Given

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to bring ourselves to birth







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One of the lovely things about being a human is that we are called in each moment to bring ourselves to birth.
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Part of the difficulty of our times is that we have reduced the magnificent adventure of being a human being to endless, wearisome projects of self-improvement and self-analysis according to the flattest and most boring maps that could be made


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~ John O'Donohue
from Beauty the Invisible Embrace

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