Tuesday, July 5, 2011

something that is neither yours nor from yourself







.

To belong to Allah
Is to see in your own existence
And in all that pertains to it
Something that is neither yours
Nor from yourself,
Something you have on loan;
To see your being in His Being,
Your subsistence in His Subsistence,
Your strength in His Strength:
Thus you will recognize in yourself
His title to possession of you
As Lord,
And your own title as servant:
Which is Nothingness. 



~ Thomas Merton
in response to writings of  Ibn Abbad



by technique?






.


All truly contemplatives souls have this in common: 
not that they gather exclusively in the desert, 
or that they shut themselves up in reclusion, 
but that where He is, there they are. 

And how do they find Him? By technique? 
There is no technique for finding Him. 
They find Him by His will. And His will, 
bringing them grace within and arranging their lives exteriorly, 
carries them infallibly to the precise place in which they can find Him. 
Even there they do not know how they have got there, 
or what they are really doing.



Thomas Merton
from  Thoughts in Solitude
sketch by the author

 

Sunday, July 3, 2011

entrance








.
Whoever you are: step out of doors tonight,
Out of the room that lets you feel secure.
Infinity is open to your sight.
Whoever you are.
With eyes that have forgotten how to see
From viewing things already too well-known,
Lift up into the dark a huge, black tree
And put it in the heavens: tall, alone.
And you have made the world and all you see.
It ripens like the words still in your mouth.
And when at last you comprehend its truth,
Then close your eyes and gently set it free.





~ Rainer Maria Rilke





sitting together





.
We sit in this courtyard,
two forms, shadow outlines with one soul.

Birdsound, leaf moving, early evening star,
fragrant damp, and a sweet sickle curve of moon.

You and I in a round, unselved idling
in the garden-beauty detail.

The raucous parrots laugh,
and we laugh inside their laughter, 
the two of us on a bench in Konya, 
yet amazingly in Khorasan and Iraq as well.

Friends abiding this form,
yet also in another, outside of time, you and I.



~ Rumi
translation by Coleman Barks
from The Big Red Book



the angel standing in the sun





.


by J.M.W. Turner
from the Tate Gallery, London

For those with eyes to see, the world is filled with the glory of God.





wine grapes for breakfast





.
Sweet
at first
on the tongue,
hours later
the red grapes
still sting,
as if trying 
to tell me something -
what the hook
tells the fish
perhaps,
or the wand
or stick hears
before conductor 
or mule driver
brings it down.


~ Jane Hirshfield
from Lives of the Heart



Monday, June 27, 2011

counsel





.
It is possible 
that even the best counsel
cannot be processed
by the body.
All supplements to
our personal chemistry
are screened by tiny fanatical secret organs
that refuse much more than
they accept.  It is hard
to add even minerals.
Iron tablets, for example,
are not correct
and pass through us like
windowless alien crafts.
What the body wants is so exact.



~ Kay Ryan
from The Best of It



song of a man who has come through







.

Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me!
A fine wind is blowing the new direction of Time.
If only I let it bear me, carry me, if only it carry me!
If only I am sensitive, subtle, oh, delicate, a winged gift!
If only, most lovely of all, I yield myself and am borrowed
By the fine, fine, wind that takes its course through the chaos of the world
Like a fine, an exquisite chisel, a wedge-blade inserted;
If only I am keen and hard like the sheer tip of a wedge
Driven by invisible blows,
The rock will split, we shall come at the wonder, we shall find the Hesperides.

Oh, for the wonder that bubbles into my soul,
I would be a good fountain, a good well-head,
Would blur no whisper, spoil no expression.

What is the knocking?
What is the knocking at the door in the night?
It is somebody wants to do us harm.

No, no, it is the three strange angels.
Admit them, admit them.




~ D.H. Lawrence
from The Complete Poems of  D.H. Lawrence
many thanks to poetry chaikhana





Sunday, June 26, 2011

a cedary fragrance







.

Even now,
decades after,
I wash my face with cold water –

Not for discipline,
nor memory,
nor the icy, awakening slap,

but to practice
choosing
to make the unwanted wanted.




~ Jane Hirshfield
 from Given Sugar, Given Salt
art by Cecile Chalouni


age





.
As some people age 
they kinden.
The apertures
of their eyes widen.
I do not think they weaken;
I think something weak strengthens
until they are more and more it,
like letting in heaven.
But other people are 
mussels or clams, frightened.
Steam or knife blades mean open.
They hear heaven, they think boiled or broken.



.
~ Kay Ryan
from The Best of It



Friday, June 24, 2011

avoiding discord leads to war






.
The goddess of discord, Eris, was naturally not popular in Olympus, and when the gods gave a banquet they were apt to leave her out.  Resenting this deeply, she determined to make trouble... into an important marriage celebration to which she was not invited she threw a golden a golden apple marked "For the Fairest."  Of course all the goddesses wanted it.  Zeus was asked to judge between Aphrodite, Hera, and Pallus Athena, but wisely refused.  He told them that prince Paris was an excellent judge of beauty, and that they should go to him.  He was not asked, however, to gaze at the radiant divinities and choose which seemed to him the fairest, but only to consider the bribes each offered and choose which seemed to him best worth taking.  What men cared about most was set before him.  Hera promised to make him Lord of Europe and Asia, Athena, that he would lead the Trojans to victory against the Greeks and lay Greece in ruins; Aphrodite, that the fairest woman in all the world should be his.  He gave Aphrodite the apple and in doing so, set the stage for the Trojan War.


~ Edith Hamilton
from Mythology - Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes


story originally from The Judgement of Paris which 
is part of the play Trojan Woman by Euripides









Tuesday, June 21, 2011

human being





.

.

Not Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu
Buddhist, sufi, or zen. Not any religion
or cultural system. I am not from the East
or the West, not out of the ocean or up

from the ground, not natural or ethereal, not
composed of elements at all. I do not exist,
am not an entity in this world or in the next,
did not descend from Adam and Eve or any

origin story. My place is placeless, a trace
of the traceless. Neither body or soul.
I belong to the beloved, have seen the two
worlds as one and that one call to and know,

first, last, outer, inner, only that
breath breathing human being.



~ Rumi
 translated by Coleman Barks
from The Essential Rumi




Saturday, June 18, 2011

a woman who was beautiful






.

A woman who was beautiful
one day
removed her face
her head became smooth
blind and deaf
safe from the snares of mirrors
and from looks of love

amid the reeds of the sun
her head hatched by a sparrowhawk
could not be found

secrets much more beautiful
for not having been said
words not written
steps erased
nameless ashes flown away
without marble plaque
desecrating memory

so many wings to break
before nightfall.



~ Alice (Rahon) Paalen
painting of Alice by her husband Wolfgang Paalen
with thanks to leda-swanson




Friday, June 17, 2011

lovers of all your elements?


.


.

And the priestess spoke again and said: 
Speak to us of Reason and Passion.
And he answered, saying:
Your soul is oftentimes a battlefield, upon which your reason 
and your judgment wage war against your passion and your appetite.
Would that I could be the peacemaker in your soul, 
that I might turn the discord and the rivalry of your elements into oneness and melody.
But how shall I, unless you yourselves be also the peacemakers, 
nay, the lovers of all your elements?

Your reason and your passion are the rudder and the sails of your seafaring soul.
If either your sails or your rudder be broken, you can but toss and drift, 
or else be held at a standstill in mid-seas.
For reason, ruling alone, is a force confining; and passion,
 unattended, is a flame that burns to its own destruction.
Therefore let your soul exalt your reason to the height of passion, 
that it may sing;
And let it direct your passion with reason, 
that your passion may live through its own daily resurrection, 
and like the phoenix rise above its own ashes.

I would have you consider your judgment and your appetite 
even as you would two loved guests in your house.
Surely you would not honour one guest above the other; 
for he who is more mindful of one loses the love and the faith of both.

Among the hills, when you sit in the cool shade of the white poplars, 
sharing the peace and serenity of distant fields and meadows -- 
then let your heart say in silence, "God rests in reason."
And when the storm comes, and the mighty wind shakes the forest, 
and thunder and lightning proclaim the majesty of the sky, -- 
then let your heart say in awe, "God moves in passion."
And since you are a breath in God's sphere, 
and a leaf in God's forest, 
you too should rest in reason and move in passion.



.
~ Kahlil Gibran
from The Prophet
with thanks to poetry chaikhana




Thursday, June 16, 2011

the tombs of the resurrected


.


.
This was the time which began with his feeling as general and anonymous as a slowly recovering convalescent.  He didn't love anything, unless it could be said that he loved existing.  The humble love that his sheep felt for him was no burden;  like sunlight falling through clouds, it dispersed around him and softly shimmered upon the meadows.  On the innocent trail of their hunger, he walked silently over pastures of the world.  Strangers saw him on the Acropolis, and perhaps for many years he was one of the shepherds in Les Baux, and saw petrified time outlast that noble family which, in spite of all their conquests under the holy numbers seven and three, could not overcome the fatal sixteen-rayed star on their own coat-of-arms.  Or should I imagine him at Orange, resting against the rustic triumphal arch?  Should I see him in the soul-inhabited shade of Alyscamps, where, among the tombs that lie open as the tombs of the resurrected, his glance chases a dragonfly?


.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
translated by Stephen Mitchell