Wednesday, March 9, 2011

moses and the shepherd



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Moses heard a shepherd on the road praying. 
"God, where are you? I want to help you, to fix your shoes 
and comb your hair. I want to wash your clothes 
and pick the lice off. I want to bring you milk 
and kiss your little hands and feet when it's time
for you to go to bed. I want to sweep your room
and keep it neat. God, my sheep and goats are yours. 
All I can say remembering you is aaayyyyy
and aaahhhhhhhhhhhh."
.
Moses could stand it no longer. 
"Who are you talking to?"
"The one who made us and made
the earth and made the sky."
.
"Don't talk about shoes 
and socks with God! And what's this with your little
hands? Such blasphemous familiarity sounds like
you're chatting with your uncles. Only something 
that grows needs milk. Only someone with feet 
needs shoes. Not God!" 
.
The shepherd repented
and tore his clothes and wandered out into 
the desert. A sudden revelation came then to Moses:
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You have separated me from one of my own. 
Did you come as a prophet to unite or to sever?
I have given each being a separate and unique way
of seeing and knowing and saying that knowledge.
.
What seems wrong to you is right for him. 
What is poison to one is honey to someone else. 
Purity and impurity, sloth and diligence in worship,
these mean nothing to me. I am apart from all that. 
.
Ways of worshiping are not to be ranked as better 
or worse. Hindus do Hindu things. The Dravidian
Muslims in India do what they do. It's all praise, 
and it's all right. I am not glorified in acts
.
of worship. It's the worshipers! I don't hear 
the words they say. I look inside at the humility.
That broken-open lowliness is the reality. Forget
phraseology! I want burning, burning. Be friends
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with your burning. Those who pay attention to ways
of behaving and speaking are one sort. Lovers who
burn are another. Don't impose a property tax
on a burned-out village. Don't scold the lover. 
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The "wrong" way he talks is better than a hundred
"right" ways of others. 
Inside the Kaaba
it doesn't matter which way you point 
your prayer rug!
The ocean diver doesn't need snowshoes!
The love-religion has no code or doctrine. 
Only God. 
So the ruby has nothing engraved on it!
It doesn't need markings. 
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God began speaking
deeper mysteries to Moses, vision and words, 
which cannot be recorded here. Moses left himself
and came back. He went to eternity and came 
back here. Many times this happened. 
.
It's foolish of me 
to try and say this. If I did say it, 
it would uproot human intelligence. 
.
Moses ran after the shepherd, following the bewildered 
footprints, 
in one place moving like a castle
across a chessboard. In another, sideways, 
like a bishop. 
Now surging like a wave cresting,
now sliding down like a fish, 
with always his feet
making geomancy symbols in the sand, 
recording his
wandering state. 
.
Moses finally caught up with him. 
"I was wrong. God has revealed to me that there are
no rules for worship. Say whatever and however
your loving tells you to. 
Your sweetest blasphemy
is the truest devotion. Through you a whole world
is freed. 
Loosen your tongue and don't worry 
what comes out. It's all the light of the spirit."
.
The shepherd replied, "Moses, Moses, 
I've gone beyond even that.
You applied the whip, 
and my horse shied and jumped out of itself.
The divine nature and my human nature came together. 
Bless your scolding hand.
.
I can't say what has happened.
What I'm saying now is not my real condition.
It can't be said."
.
The shepherd grew quiet.
When you look in a mirror, you see yourself, 
not the state of the mirror. 
The flute player
gives breath into a flute, and who makes the music?
The flute player!
Whenever you speak praise
or thanksgiving to God, it's always like
this dear shepherd's simplicity.

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~ Rumi
translation by Coleman Barks

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Tuesday, March 8, 2011

music is in the piano only when it is played





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We are not one with this world. We are not
the complexity our body is, nor the summer air
idling in the big maple without purpose.
We are a shape the wind makes in these leaves
as it passes through. We are not the wood
any more than the fire, but the heat which is a marriage
between the two. We are certainly not the lake
nor the fish in it, but the something that is
pleased by them. We are the stillness when
a mighty Mediterranean noon subtracts even the voices of
insects by the broken farmhouse. We are evident
when the orchestra plays, and yet are not part
of the strings or brass. Like the song that exists
only in the singing, and is not the singer.
God does not live among the church bells
but is briefly resident there. We are occasional
like that. A lifetime of easy happiness mixed
with pain and loss, trying always to name and hold
on to the enterprise under way in our chest.
Reality is not what we marry as a feeling. It is what
walks up the dirt path, through the excessive heat
and giant sky, the sea stretching away.
He continues past the nunnery to the old villa
where he will sit on the terrace with her, their sides
touching. In the quiet that is the music of that place,
which is the difference between silence and windlessness.

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~ Jack Gilbert
with thanks to saturn rising

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I melted in it and came home







I exhausted myself, looking.
No one ever finds this by trying.

I melted in it and came home,
where every jar is full,
but no one drinks.



~ Lalla
from Naked Songs
translations by Coleman Barks




Monday, March 7, 2011

green-stripped melons






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They lie
under stars in a field.
They lie under rain in a field.
Under sun.
.
Some people
are like this as well—
like a painting
hidden beneath another painting.
.
An unexpected weight
the sign of their ripeness.

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~ Jane Hirshfield
from Alaska Quarterly

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Sunday, March 6, 2011

overspilling








Of all that God has shown me
I can speak just the smallest word,
Not more than a honey bee
Takes on his foot
From an overspilling jar.


~ Mechtild of Magdeburg
from Women in Praise of the Sacred




Saturday, March 5, 2011

with you



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O my Lord,
the stars glitter
and the eyes of men are closed.
Kings have locked their doors
and each lover is alone with his love.
.
Here, I am alone with you.

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~ Rabi'a
from Women in Praise of the Sacred
art by Leonardo da Vinci

Friday, March 4, 2011

I was passionate



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I was passionate,
filled with longing,
I searched
far and wide.

But the day
that the Truthful One
found me,
I was at home.



~ Lalla
translated by Jane Hirshfield


Thursday, March 3, 2011

All will come again into its strength


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All will come again into its strength:
the fields undivided, the waters undammed,
the trees towering and the walls built low.
And in the valleys, people as strong
and varied as the land.
.
And no churches where God
is imprisoned and lamented
like a trapped and wounded animal.
The houses welcoming all who knock
and a sense of boundless offering
in all relations, and in you and me.
.
No yearning for an afterlife, no looking beyond,
no belittling of death,
but only longing for what belongs to us
and serving earth, least we remain unused.





~ Rainer Maria Rilke
 The Book of Pilgrimage, II,25

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the kings of the world are old and feeble








The kings of the world are old and feeble.
They bring forth no heirs.

Their sons are dying before they are men,
and their pale daughters
abandon themselves to the brokers of violence.

Their crowns are exchanged for money
and melted down into machines,
and there is no health in it.

Does the ore feel trapped
in coins and gears?  In the petty life
imposed upon it
does it feel homesick for earth?

If metal could escape
from coffers and factories,
and the torn-open mountains
close around it again,

we would be whole.





~ Rainer Maria Rilke
from The Book of Pilgrimage, II,24

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Wednesday, March 2, 2011

no miracles, please


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All who seek you
test you.
And those who find you 
bind you to image and gesture.
.
I would rather sense you
as the earth senses you.
In my ripening 
ripens
what you are.
.
I need from you no tricks
to prove you exist.
Time, I know,
is other than you.
.
No miracles, please.
just let your laws
become clearer
from generation to generation.

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~ Rainer Maria Rilke
from The Book of Pilgrimage, II,15

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violence






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I believe that 
those who have used violence 
have betrayed all true revolution, 
they have changed nothing, 
they have simply enforced with greater brutality
 the anti-spiritual and anti-human drives 
that are destructive of truth and love in man.
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~ Thomas Merton
from A Life in Letters

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cold light



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Diamond-like clarity travels cold
the manifold currents, cracks self-concern,
reveals self-suffering, crumbles
the crooked walls of the darkness
of presumed otherness
This far-reaching indifference of wisdom
vision unfolds an always lurking compassion
only when fused in communal warmth,
only by passage in the movement of breath
Breath, the reach of hearts,
the rhythm of living and dying,
the reach solitary voices
meeting in the night.

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~ Jane Hirshfield
from After

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Tuesday, March 1, 2011

the sanity I had been taught







When the desire for the Friend became real,
all existence fell behind.
The Beloved wasn't interested in my reasoning,
I threw it away and became silent.
The sanity I had been taught became a bore,
it had to be ushered off.
Insane, silent and in bliss,
I spend my days with my head
at the feet of My Beloved. 



~ Abu-Said Abil-Kheir


Shaikh Abu-Said Abil-Kheir was one of the earlier Sufi poets. He lived more than two centuries before Jelaluddin Rumi yet, like Rumi, much of his mysticism follows a similar path of annihilation in divine Love.
Abu-Said's poetry ranges from the ecstatic and celestial, to struggles with abandonment. His poetry has an immediacy and even a sort of devoutly wry petulance that can draw comparisons with the great Bengali poet, Ramprasad.
Abu Said referred to himself as “Nobody, Son of Nobody,” to convey the mystic's sense of having completely merged or disappeared into the Divine, leaving no trace of the ego behind.
He lived in Mayhana in what is modern day Turkmenistan, just north of Iran and Afghanistan in Central Asia.


with thanks to poetry chaikhana


Monday, February 28, 2011

conceit



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It is conceit that kills us 
and makes us cowards instead of gods. 
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Under the great Command: Know thy self, and that thou art mortal! 
we have become fatally self-conscious, fatally self-important, fatally entangled in the cocoon coils of our conceit. 
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Now we have to admit we can't know ourselves, we can only know about ourselves. 
And I am not interested to know about myself any more, 
I only entangle myself in the knowing. 
.
Now let me be myself, 
now let me be myself, and flicker forth, 
now let me be myself, in the being, one of the gods. 
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~ D.H. Lawrence

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for a leader




 


 
 
 

May the gift of leadership awaken in you as a vocation,
Keep you mindful of the providence that calls you to serve.
 
As high over the mountains the eagle spreads its wings,
May your perspective be larger than the view from the foothills.
 
When the way is flat and dull in times of gray endurance,
May your imagination continue to evoke horizons.
 
When thirst burns in times of drought,
May you be blessed to find the wells.
 
May you have the wisdom to read time clearly
And know when the seed of change will flourish.
 
In your heart may there be a sanctuary
For the stillness where clarity is born.
 
May your work be infused with passion and creativity
And have the wisdom to balance compassion and challenge.
 
May your soul find the graciousness
To rise above the fester of small mediocrities.
May your power never become a shell
Wherein your heart would silently atrophy.
May you welcome your own vulnerability
As the ground where healing and truth join.
 
May integrity of soul be your first ideal.
The source that will guide and bless your work.
 
 
 


~ John O'Donohue
from To Bless the Space Between Us
photo by Reuters






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