Saturday, March 19, 2011

wonderment and a delicious trouble

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This is the spirit that Beauty must ever induce, wonderment and a delicious trouble, longing and love and a trembling that is all delight.  For the unseen all this may be felt as for the seen;  and this is the Soul's feel for it, every Soul in some degree, but those the more deeply that are the more truly apt to this higher love - just as all take delight in the beauty of the body but all are not stung as sharply , and those only that feel the keener wound are known as Lovers.  These Lovers, then, lovers of the beauty outside of sense, must be made to declare themselves.

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~ Plotinus
from the Enneads 
woodcut by Harlan Hubbard
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beautiful beyond being





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That, beautiful beyond being, is said to be Beauty - for
It gives beauty from itself in a manner appropriate to each,
It causes the consonance and splendour of all,
It flashes forth upon all, after the manner of light , the
Beauty producing gifts of its flowing ray,
It calls to itself,
When it is called beauty.

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~ Pseudo-Dionysius
from The Divine Names

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Thursday, March 17, 2011

to being late




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Again again you are
the right time after all
.
not according to 
however we planned it
.
unforeseen and yet
only too well known
mislaid horizon
where we come to ourselves
as though we had been expected
.
you are where it appears now
and will stay from now on 
in its own good time
it was you we came to 
in the first place
hearing voices around us
before we knew what they said
.
but you always surprise us 
it is you that we 
hurry to
while you go on waiting
to the end of space
.
and when we get to you
we stop and listen
trying to hear whether
you are still there

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~ W.S. Merwin
from Present Company

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remember






You who worry with travel plans,
read again the place in the Qur'an
where Moses is taking the Jewish nation out of slavery.

You so frantic to have more money,
recall what they abandoned to wander in the wilderness.

You who feel hurt by some neglect,
remember the pavilions and houses they left behind.

You that lead the community through difficulties,
read about the abundant fountains
they walked away from to have freedom.

You who dress in clothes that appear to have elegant meaning,
you with so much charm,
remember how your face will decay to dirt.

You with lots of property, read again,
They left their gardens and the quietly running streams.

You who smile at a funerals going by,
you that love language, measure the wind in stanzas,
and recall the exodus, the wandering forty-year sacrifice.
Remember Egypt.




~ Rumi
from The Big Red Book
translations by Coleman Barks




like a holy face held in my dark hands





Lord, the great cities are lost and rotting.
Their time is running out...
The people there live harsh and heavy,
crowded together, weary of their own routines.

Beyond them waits and breathes your earth,
but where they are it cannot reach them.

Their children waste their days
on doorsteps, always in the same shadow.
They don't know that somewhere 
wind is blowing through a field of flowers.

The young girls have only strangers to parade before,
and no one sees them truly;
so, chilled,
they close.

And in back rooms they live out the nagging years 
of disappointed motherhood.  Their dying is long
and hard to finish:  hard to surrender
what you never received.

Their exit has no grace or mystery.
It's a little death, hanging dry and measly
like a fruit inside them that never ripened.

III, 4/5


God, give us each our own death,
the dying that proceeds 
from each of our lives:
.
the way we loved,
the meanings we made,
our need.

III, 6

For we are only the rind and the leaf.

The great death, that each of us carries inside,
is the fruit.

Everything enfolds it.

III,7

I thank you, deep power
that works me ever more lightly
in ways I can't make out.
The day's labor grows simple now,
and like a holy face
held in my dark hands.

I, 62


~ Rainer Maria Rilke
excerpts from The Book of Poverty and Death
translation by anita barrows and joanna macy

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Wednesday, March 16, 2011

to help those who need it

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

ask much

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Ask much, the voice suggested, and I startled.
Feeling my body like the trembling body of a horse
tied to its tree while the strange noise
passes over its ears.
I who in extremity had always wanted less,
even of eating, of sleeping.
Agile, the voice did not speak again, but waited.
"Want more" -
a cure for longing I had not thought of.
But that is how it is with wells.
Whatever is taken refills to the steady level.
The voice agreed, though softly, to quiet the feet of the horse:
A cup taken out, a cup reappears; a bucketful taken, a bucket.

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~ Jane Hirshfield
from After

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Monday, March 14, 2011

the bell zygmunt

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For fertility, a new bride is lifted to touch it with her left hand,
or possibly kiss it.
The sound close in, my friend told me later, is almost silent.
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At ten kilometers, even those who have never heard it know what it is.
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If you stand near during thunder, she said,
you will hear a reply.
.
She who cooked lamb and loved wine and wild-mushroom pastas.
She who when I saw her last was silent as the great Zygmunt mostly is,
a ventilator's clapper between her dry lips.
.
Because I could, I spoke.  She laid her palm on my cheek to answer.
And soon again, to say it was time to leave.
.
I put my lips near the place a tube went into
the back of one hand.
The kiss - as if it knew what I did not yet - both full and formal.
.
As one would kiss the ring of a cardinal, or the rim
of that cold iron bell, whose speech can mean "Great joy,"
or - equally - "The city is burning. Come."

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~ Jane Hirshfield
from After

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Sunday, March 13, 2011

eternity




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Exultation is the going
Of an inland soul to sea,
Past the houses - past the headlands -
into deep Eternity -
.
Bred as we, among the mountains,
Can the sailor understand
The divine intoxication
Of the first league out from land?

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~ Emily Dickinson

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Saturday, March 12, 2011

who has looked long on naked beauty may never return to the world





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I thought that there were two rules in life— 
never count the cost and
 never do anything unless you can do it wholeheartedly. 
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Now is the time to live.

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with thanks once again to rebel girl
photo of Everett by Dorothea Lange
art by the author
song by Dave Alvin

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Beauty isolated is terrible and unbearable, 
and the unclouded sight other kills the beholder. 
His only refuge is in insignificant things, 
in labor that keeps the mind from thought, 
and in companionship that gives back to the ego some of its former virility. 
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But he who has looked long 
on naked beauty may never return to the world, 
and though he should try, he will find 
its occupation empty and vain, 
and human intercourse purposeless and futile. 
Alone and lost, he must die on the altar of beauty.

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Friday, March 11, 2011

unapproachable by any path



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I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. That is my point of view, and I adhere to that absolutely and unconditionally. Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or to coerce people along any particular path. If you first understand that, then you will see how impossible it is to organize a belief. A belief is purely an individual matter, and you cannot and must not organize it. If you do, it becomes dead, crystallized; it becomes a creed, a sect, a religion, to be imposed on others. This is what everyone throughout the world is attempting to do. Truth is narrowed down and made a plaything for those who are weak, for those who are only momentarily discontented. Truth cannot be brought down, rather the individual must make the effort to ascend to it. You cannot bring the mountain-top to the valley. If you would attain to the mountain-top you must pass through the valley, climb the steeps, unafraid of the dangerous precipices. You must climb towards the Truth, it cannot be "stepped down" or organized for you. Interest in ideas is mainly sustained by organizations, but organizations only awaken interest from without. Interest, which is not born out of love of Truth for its own sake, but aroused by an organization, is of no value. The organization becomes a framework into which its members can conveniently fit. They no longer strive after Truth or the mountain-top, but rather carve for themselves a convenient niche in which they put themselves, or let the organization place them, and consider that the organization will thereby lead them to Truth.

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~ J. Krishnamurti
from a talk given in 1929, 
when he dissolved the Order of the Star of the East

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taking up the pilgrim's staff


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There will be no rest in the houses:
the stir
of departure -
someone being carried to his grave,
and another, taking up the pilgrim's staff,
to ask in unknown places for the path
where he knows you are waiting.
.
So many are drawn now to move toward you,
the roads are never empty.
There are so many 
we can't make out their faces
or know their names,
and when they finally reach you
they are tired.
.
I have seen them moving like a tide.
Since then, I think the winds themselves
are stirred by the blowing of their cloaks,
and subside again when they lie down,
.
so great is their going across the plains.

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~ Rainer Maria Rilke
from The Book of Pilgrimage, II,27

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a walk


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My eyes already touch the sunny hill,
going far ahead of the road I have begun.
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
it has its inner light, even from a distance –



and changes us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it, we already are;
a gesture waves us on, answering our own wave …
but what we feel is the wind in our faces.









~ Rainer Maria Rilke
translated by Robert Bly



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be still, it is the wind that sings



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I am a pipe the wind blows through,
Be still, it is the wind that sings.
The course of my life and the things that I do
And the seeming false and the seeming true
Are the tune of the wind that neither knows
Good and ill, nor joys and woes.
But the ultimate awe is deeper yet
Than song or pipe or storm;
For pipe and tune are the formless wind
That seemed for a while to take form.
And words are good to escape from words
And strife to escape from strife,
But silence drinks in all the waves
Of song and death and life


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~ Arthur Osborne
with thanks to  noornalini  via It's like this

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Thursday, March 10, 2011

passion without motive





In this torn desert world there is no love because pleasure and desire play the greatest roles, yet without love your daily life has no meaning.  And you cannot have love if there is no beauty.  Beauty is not something you see - not a beautiful tree, a beautiful picture, a beautiful building or a beautiful woman.  There is beauty only when your heart and mind know what love is.  Without love and that sense of beauty there is no virtue, and you know very well that, do what you will, improve society, feed the poor, you will only be creating more mischief, for without love there is only ugliness and poverty in your own heart and mind.  But when there is love and beauty, whatever you do is right, whatever you do is in order.  If you know how to love, then you can do what you like because it will solve all other problems.

So we reach a point:  can the mind come upon love without discipline, without thought, without enforcement, without any book, any teacher or leader - come upon it as one comes upon a lovely sunset?  

It seem to me that one thing is absolutely necessary and that is passion without motive - passion that is not the result of some commitment or attachment, passion that is not lust.  A man who does not know what passion is will never know love because love can come into being only when there is total self-abandonment.


~ J. Krishnamurti
from Freedom from the Known