Thursday, August 4, 2011

exclude nothing







.

We must assume our existence as broadly as we in any way can; 
everything, even the unheard-of, must be possible in it. 
That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us:
to have courage for the most strange, 
the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter. 

That mankind has in this sense been cowardly has done life endless harm; 
the experiences that are called "visions," the whole so-called "spirit-world," 
death, all those things that are so closely akin to us, 
have by daily parrying been so crowded out of life 
that the senses with which we could have grasped them are atrophied. 

 But fear of the inexplicable has not alone impoverished the existence of the individual; 
the relationship between one human being and another has also been cramped by it, 
as though it had been lifted out of the riverbed of endless possibilities 
and set down in a fallow spot on the bank, to which nothing happens. 

For it is not inertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves 
from case to case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed: 
it is shyness before any sort of new, unforeseeable experience 
with which one does not think oneself able to cope. 

But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, 
not even the most enigmatical, will live the relation to another as something alive 
and will himself draw exhaustively from his own existence. 
For if we think of this existence of the individual as a larger or smaller room,
 it appears evident that most people learn to know only a corner of their room, 
a place by the window, a strip of floor on which they walk up and down. 
Thus they have a certain security. 

And yet that dangerous insecurity is so much more human 
which drives the prisoners in Poe's stories to feel out the shapes of their horrible dungeons 
and not be strangers to the unspeakable terror of their abode. 
We, however, are not prisoners. 
No traps or snares are set about us, 
and there is nothing which should intimidate or worry us. 

We are set down in life as in the element to which we best correspond, 
and over and above this we have through thousands of years of accommodation 
become so like this life, that when we hold still we are, through a happy mimicry, 
scarcely to be distinguished from all that surrounds us. 

We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. 
Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abuses belong to us; 
are dangers at hand, we must try to love them. 

And if only we arrange our life according to that principle 
which counsels us that we must always hold to the difficult, 
then that which now still seems to us the most alien 
will become what we most trust and find most faithful. 

How should we be able to forget those ancient myths about dragons 
that at the last moment turn into princesses; 
perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting 
to see us once beautiful and brave. 
Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being 
something helpless that wants help from us. 





~ Rainer Maria Rilke


the hawk in his nest









.

It's all right if this suffering goes on for years. 
It's all right if the hawk never finds his own nest.
It's all right if we never receive the love we want. 

It's all right if we listen to the sitar for hours.
It doesn't matter how softly the musician plays.
Sooner or later the melody will say it all. 

It doesn't matter if we regret our crimes or not.
The mice will carry all our defeats into Asia,
And the Tuva throat-singers will tell the whole story. 

It's all right if we can't remain cheerful all day.
The task we have accepted is to go down
To renew our friendship with the ruined things. 

It's all right if people think we are idiots.
It's all right if we lie face down on the earth.
It's all right if we open the coffin and climb in. 

It's not our fault that things have gone wrong.
Let's agree it was Saturn and the other old men
Who have arranged these series of defeats for us.




~ Robert Bly
from Talking into the Ear of a Donkey


Thursday, July 28, 2011

the darkness that comes with every infinite fall







.

You see, I want a lot.
Perhaps I want everything:
the darkness that comes with every infinite fall
and the shivering blaze of every step up.

So many live on and want nothing
and are raised to the rank of prince
by the slippery ease of their light judgments.

But what you love to see are faces
that so work and feel thirst…

You have not grown old, and it is not too late
to dive into your increasing depths
where life calmly gives out its own secret.





~ Rainer Maria Rilke



Wednesday, July 27, 2011

maturity








.

A level of mental maturity is reached 
when nothing external is of any value 
and the heart is ready to relinquish all. 

Then the real has a chance and it grasps it. 
Delays, if any, are caused by the mind unwilling to see or to discard.


~ Nisargadatta Maharaj



Tuesday, July 26, 2011

silence and solitude








.

Trusting this more penumbral dimension brings us to new places in the human adventure. 
 But we have to let go in order to be; 
we have to stop forcing ourselves, 
or we will never enter our own belonging. 

 There is something ancient at work in us creating novelty. 
 In fact, you need very little in order to develop a real sense of your own spiritual individuality. 
 One of the things that is absolutely essential is silence, the other is solitude.




~ John O'Donohue
from Anam Cara



Monday, July 25, 2011

it depends on you







If in your heart you make
a manger for his birth,
then God will once again
become a child on earth.



~ Angelus Silesius



abundant heart




.
Because the pelicans circle and dive, the fish
Because the cows are fat, the rains
Because the tree is heavy with pears, the earth
Because the woman grows thin, the heart




~ Jane Hirshfield
from The Lives of the Heart



Sunday, July 24, 2011

heaven is only present






.
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.


~ Wendell Berry
from Leavings



silent in the moonlight





.
Silent in the moonlight, no beginning or end.
Alone, and not alone.  A man and a woman lie
On open ground, under an antelope robe.
They sleep under animal skin, looking up
At the old, clear stars.  How many years?
The robe thrown over them, rough
Where they sleep.  Outside, the moon, the plains
Silent in the moonlight, no beginning or end.




~ Robert Bly
from Talking into the Ear of a Donkey



Saturday, July 23, 2011

a sybil





.
Long before our time they called her old,
But she'd walk down the same road every day.
Her age became too much to say
In years — and, like a forest's, would be told 

In centuries. She comes to stand at dusk — 
Her spot each time the same — and to foretell.
She is a hollow, wrinkled husk,
Dark as a fire-gutted citadel. 

She has to turn her flock of talking loose
Or it will grow too crowded to relieve.
Flapping and screaming, words are flying all 

Around her. Then, returning home to roost,
They find a perch beneath her eyebrows' eaves,
And in that shadow wait for night to fall.




~ Rainer Maria Rilke
art by picasso

Friday, July 22, 2011

non-violence






.

Non-violence is perhaps the most exacting of all forms of struggle, 
not only because it demands first of all that one be ready to suffer evil 
and even face the threat of death without retaliation, 
but because it excludes mere transient self-interest, 
even political, from its considerations.





 ~ Thomas Merton

shark's teeth




.
Everything contains some
silence.  Noise gets
its zest from the
small shark's-tooth-
shaped fragments
of rest angled
in it. An hour
of city holds maybe
a minute of these
remnants of a time
when silence reigned,
compact and dangerous
as a shark.  Sometimes
a bit of a tail
or fin can still
be sensed in parks.


~ Kay Ryan
from The Best of It



born at each moment into the everlasting newness




.
My gaze is clear as a sunflower.
My way is to walk the roads
Looking right and left
And sometimes looking behind me...
What I see at each moment
Is that which I never
Caught sight of before.

I have the knack of full awareness
The knack of essential astonishment
That an infant might experience
If at birth he were aware
That he was actually born!
I feel myself born at each moment
Into the everlasting newness
of the world.

I believe in the world
As I believe in a daisy
Because I see it.
But I do not think about it
Because to think is to not-understand.
The world was not made 
For us to think about it
(To think is to have sick vision)
But for us to look at it and assent.

I have no philosophy: I have senses ...
If I talk of nature, that is not because
I know what nature is
But because I love it, and love is for this only:
For he who loves never knows what he loves
Or why he loves, or what love is.

Loving is eternal innocence
And the only innocence is not-thinking.



~ Fernando Pessoa
from The Keeper of the Flocks
translated by Thomas Merton
art by van gogh




poetry of gratefulness




.


.



Wednesday, July 20, 2011

the book of Camp Branch




.
Camp Branch, my native stream,
forever unreturning flows
from the town down to Cane Run
which flows to the river.  It is 
my native descent, my native
walk, my native thought
that stays and goes, passing
ever downward toward the sea.

Its sound is a song that flings up
the light to the undersides of leaves.
Its song and light are a way
of walking, a way of thought
moved by sound and sight.

It flows as deep in its hollow
as it can go, far down as it has
worn its way. Passing down
over its plunder of rocks, it makes
an irregular music.  Here 
is what I want to know.  Here
is what I am trying to say.

O brave Ross Feld, here is
no "fortification against time."
Here the fort has fallen 
and the water passes its benediction
over the shards, singing!

How much delight I've known
in navigating down the flow
by stepping stones, by sounding
stones, by words too that are
stepping and sounding stones.

Going down stone by stone,
the song of the water changes,
changing the way I walk
which changes my thought
as I go.  Stone to stone
the stream flows.  Stone to stone
the walker goes.  The words
stand stone still until
the flow moves them, changing
the sound - a new word -
a new place to step or stand.

In the notch of Camp Branch
the footing changes, year
to year, sometimes
day to day, as the surges
of the stream move the rocks.
Every walk, as Archie Ammons
said, "is a new walk." And so

go slow.  Let the mind
step with the feet
as the stream steps
downward over the rocks,
nowhere anywhere
but where it is.

In the crease of its making
the steep stream gathers
the seeps that come silently
down from the wooded slants.
Only there at the rockbed
of the branch do the waters break
into light, into singing

of water flowing over rocks
which, in its motion, the water
moves.  And so, singing, the song
changes, moved by music
harsh and crude: splashes,
slubbers, chuckles, and warbles,
the hollow tones of a bell,
a sustained pour, the small
fall steady as a column.

Sometimes, gentled, if you
stand while it flows, it seems
to meditate upon itself
and the hill's long changing
under the sun and rain.

A changing song,
a changing walk,
a changing thought.

A sounding stone,
a stepping stone,
a word
that is a sounding and a stepping
stone.

A language that is a stream flowing
and is a man's thought as he 
walks and thinks beside the stream.

His thoughts will hold
if the words will hold, if each
is a stone that will bear weight,
placed by the flow
in the flow.  The language too

descends through time, subserving
false economy, heedless power,
blown with the gas of salesmanship,
rattled with the sale of needless war,

worn by the mere unhearing
babble of thoughtlessness,
and must return to its own 
downward flow by the flowing
water, the muttered syllables,
the measureless music, the stream
flowing and singing, the man
walking and thinking, balanced
on unsure footholds
in the flowing stream.

"Make sense," I told myself,
the song of the tumbling waters
in my ears.  The sense you make
may make its way along the stream,
but it will not be the stream's sense
you make, nor yet your own
quite, for the flux of language
will make its claim too
upon your walk, upon the stream.

The words fall at last
onto the page, the turning leaf
in the Book of Camp Branch
in time's stream.  As the eye,
as the mind, moves from
moving water to turning page,
what is lost?  What, worse,
is lost if the words falsify
the stream in your walk beside it?
To be carried or to resist
you must be a stone
in the way.  You must be
a stone rolled away.

The song changes by singing
into a different song.
It sings by falling.  The water
descending in its old groove
wears it new.  The words descending
to the page render the possible
into the actual, by wear,
for better or worse, renew
the wearied mind.  This is only
the lowly stream of Camp Branch,
but every stream is lowly.
Only low in the land does 
the water flow.  It goes
to seek the level that is lowest,
the silence that gathers
many songs, the darkness
made of many lights,
and then by the sun is raised
again into the air.


~ Wendell Berry
from Leavings
art by Norma Herring