Friday, April 8, 2011

you, darkness, that I come from





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You, darkness, that I come from,
I love you more than all the fires
that fence in the world,
for the fire makes a circle of light for everyone
and then no one outside learns of you.

But the darkness pulls in everything-
shapes and fires, animals and myself,
how easily it gathers them! -
powers and people-

and it is possible a great presence is moving near me.

I have faith in nights.



~ Rainer Maria Rilke
photo:  passport picture



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a blessing for weddings

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Today when persimmons ripen
Today when fox-kits come out of their den into snow
Today when the spotted egg releases its wren song
Today when the maple sets down its red leaves
Today when windows keep their promise to open
Today when fire keeps its promise to warm
Today when someone you love has died
or someone you never met has died
Today when someone you love has been born
or someone you will not meet has been born
Today when rain leaps to the waiting of roots in their dryness
Today when starlight bends to the roofs of the hungry and tired
Today when someone sits long inside his last sorrow
Today when someone steps into the heat of her first embrace
Today, let this light bless you
With these friends let it bless you
With snow-scent and lavender bless you
Let the vow of this day keep itself wildly and wholly
Spoken and silent, surprise you inside your ears
Sleeping and waking, unfold itself inside your eyes
Let its fierceness and tenderness hold you
Let its vastness be undisguised in all your days

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~ Jane Hirshfield
from Tricycle magazine
art by chagall

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Thursday, April 7, 2011

explanations topple

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Explanations topple into their events, 
merely other events, smaller and less
significant.  They disappear, or die away 
like little cries at sundown, and the old trees 
receive the night again in dignity
and patience, present beyond the complex
lineages of cause and effect, each one
lost to us in what it is. For us, the privilege
is only to see, within the long shade,
the present standing of what has come and is
to come: the straight trunks aspiring
between earth and sky, bearing upon all years
the year's new leaves.

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~ Wendell Berry
from A Timbered Choir

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the Russians



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The Russians had few doctors on the front line.
My father's job was this: after the battle
Was over, he'd walk among the men hit,
Sit down and ask: 'Would you like to die on your
Own in a few hours, or should I finish it?'
Most said, 'Don't leave me.' The two would have
A cigarette. He'd take out his small notebook—
We had no dogtags, you know— and write the man's
Name down, his wife's, his children, his address, and what
He wanted to say. When the the cigarette was done,
The soldier would turn his head to the side. My father
Finished off four hundred men that way during the war.
He never went crazy. They were his people.

He came to Toronto. My father in the summers
Would stand on the lawn with a hose, watering
The grass that way. It took a long time. He'd talk
To the moon, to the wind. 'I can hear you growing'—
He'd say to the grass. 'We come and go.
We're no different from each other. We are all
Part of something. We have a home.' When I was thirteen,
I said, 'Dad, do you know they've invented sprinklers
Now?' He went on watering the grass.
'This is my life. Just shut up if you don't understand it.'

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~ Robert Bly
photo by Dmitri Bal'termants
with thanks to  when pen and paper meet

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the nick of time





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In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, 
I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, 
and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities,
 the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line. 
You will pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than in most men's, 
and yet not voluntarily kept, but inseparable from its very nature.

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~ Henry David Thoreau
from Economy, 1854

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imaginary career






At first a childhood, limitless and free
of any goals.  Ah sweet unconsciousness.
Then sudden terror, schoolrooms, slavery,
the plunge into temptation and deep loss.

Defiance.  The child bent becomes the bender,
inflicts on others what he once went through.
Loved, feared, rescuer, wrestler, victor,
he takes his vengeance, blow by blow.

And now in vast, cold, empty space, alone.
Yet hidden deep within the grown-up heart,
a longing for the first world, the ancient one...

Then, from His place of ambush, God leapt out.



~ Rainer Maria Rilke
from the Uncollected Poems




Wednesday, April 6, 2011

world was in the face of the beloved




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World was in the face of the beloved -,
but suddenly it poured out and was gone:
world is outside, world can not be grasped.
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Why didn't I,  from the full,  beloved face
as I raised it to  my lips,  why didn't I drink
world,  so near that I could almost taste it?
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Ah, I drank.  Insatiably I drank.
But I was filled up also,  with too much
world, and, drinking, I myself ran over.

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~ Rainer Maria Rilke
from Uncollected Poems
art by Robin Urton

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the most pertinent question




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The longest silence is the most pertinent question
most pertinently put.
Emphatically silent.
The most important question,
whose answers concern us more than any, 
are never put in any other way.

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~ Henry David Thoreau
from his journal, 1851

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Tuesday, April 5, 2011

ambition

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Three men met at a tavern table.  One was a weaver, another a carpenter and the third a ploughman. 
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Said the weaver, " I sold a fine linen shroud today for two pieces of gold.  Let us have all the wine we want."
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"And I," said the carpenter, "I sold my best coffin.  We will have a great roast with the wine."
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"I only dug a grave," said the ploughman, "but my patron paid me double.   Let us have honey cakes too."
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And all that evening the tavern was busy,  for they called often for wine and meat and cakes.  And they were merry.
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And the host rubbed his hands and smiled at his wife; for his guests were spending freely.
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When they left the moon was high, and they walked along the road singing and shouting together.
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The host and his wife stood in the tavern door and looked after them.
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"Ah!" said the wife, "these gentlemen!  So freehanded and so gay!  If only they could bring us such luck every day!  Then our son need not be a tavern-keeper and work so hard.  We could educate him, and he could become a priest."

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~ Kahlil Gibran
from Poems, Parables, and Drawings

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Monday, April 4, 2011

follow the perfume, not the tracks

Sunday, April 3, 2011

the moon





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After writing poems all day,
I go off to see the moon in the pines.
Far in the woods I sit down against a pine.
The moon has her porches turned to face the light,
But the deep part of her house is in the darkness.

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~ Robert Bly
from Eating the Honey of Words

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Saturday, April 2, 2011

the seven selves


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In the stillest hour of the night, as I lay half asleep, my seven selves sat together and thus conversed in whispers:
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First Self:
Here, in this madman,  I have dwelt all these years, with naught to do but renew his pain by day and recreate his sorrow by night.  I can bear my fate no longer, and now I rebel. 
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Second Self:
Yours is a better lot than mine, brother, for it is given me to be this madman's joyous self.   I laugh his laughter and sing his happy hours, and with thrice winged feet I dance his brighter thoughts.  It is I that would rebel against my weary existence.  
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Third Self:
And what of me, the love-ridden self, the flaming brand of wild passion and fantastic desires?  It is I the love-sick who would rebel against this madman.
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Fourth Self:
I ,  among you all, am the most miserable, for naught was given me but odious hatred and destructive loathing.  It is I, the tempest-like self, the one born in the black caves of Hell, who would protest against serving this madman.
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Fifth Self:
Nay, it is I, the thinking self, the fanciful self, the self of hunger and thirst, the one doomed to wander without rest in searching of unknown things and things not yet created; it is I, not you, who would rebel.
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Sixth Self:
And I, the working self, the pitiful labourer, who, with patient hands, and longing eyes, fashion the days into images and give the formless elements new and eternal forms - it is I, the solitary one, who would rebel against this restless madman.
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Seventh Self:
How strange that you all would rebel against this man, because each and every one of you has a preordained fate to fulfill.  Ah! Could I but be like one of you, a self with a determined lot!  But I have none, I am the do-nothing self, the one who sits in the dumb, empty nowhere and nowhen, while you are busy re-creating life.  Is it you or I, neighbours, who should rebel?
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When the seventh self thus spake the other six selves looked with pity upon him but said nothing more;  and as the night grew deeper one after the other went to sleep enfolded with a new and happy submission.
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But the seventh self remained watching and gazing at nothingness, which is behind all things.

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~ Kahlil Gibran
from Poems, Parables, and Drawings
art by Pema Rinzin


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they did not hear


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They did not hear my children
Singing in the jungle
They did not hear my sons
Singing in the tropical rain
They did not see my chosen ones
Dance to my dream.

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~ Thomas Merton
from The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton


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a thinking stillness


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Uninterrupted, capacious,
they ponder.
Able to house many beings 
without distraction.
Traveling upward
no farther than they go down.
Across an ocean, someone
describes them as standing wells -
they sway with contentment,
as if a yellow bird had
perched on their branches;
they are impervious 
to opinion, and still this is so.
It may be that some
keep secrets,
though every touch
alters their bodies.
It may be that some 
are geniuses of their kind.
I would like, even once,
 to embrace on in its own language,
though I imagine, too,
a transaction unrecoverably cold,
as if two widows of anciently 
warring families met on a bus:
Why should even one of them excuse us?
I have listened with pleasure 
through early snow to the sharp
report of their losses.
Mixed gasoline and oil for the saw,
polished the table with bees' wax,
added the extra, unneeded log.
My concern only.  The bus
diesel on, the woman gets off,
buttoning her coat.
Incense of resin and lignin, 
of copper and leaf-sap;
token of circumspection, 
coppice of tranquil indifference,
shore-edge of pure abstain;
meditation of beetles held lightless -
I slip you into her pocket.
Single bead of the rosary: manzanita, cedar,
maple, aspen, willow, tan oak, pine.

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~ Jane Hirshfield
from The Lives of the Heart

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I - notion alone can have "intentions"





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The I - notion alone can have "intentions"
 - for "ego" and "will" are synonymous.
Therefore the absence of the one 
is also absence of the other.
 
"Intentions" simply imply an act of will.  
The Taoist  wu wei does not imply phenomenal inactions,
 but the absence of volitional action. 
 
 The absence of volitional action implies the presence of noumenal action, 
which is the Taoist Te, the dynamic aspect of Tao
 What, then is noumenal action?
 
There is a positive implication in Shen Hui's definition of wu nein as a double absence, 
 the absence of no-thought or of non-conceptualization, which is the presence of that absence,
 and that presence is the suchness of thought which is precisely spontaneous action. 
 Non-volitional action (wu wei), whether perceptive, conceptive,
 or somatic is noumenal action, and noumenal action 
is the so-called "non-action" (non-volitional, 
non-egoitic action) of the Sage.


 
 
 
~ Wei Wu Wei
from All else is Bondage


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