the voices

.

It's OK for the rich and the lucky to keep still,

no one wants to know about them anyway,

But those in need have to step forward,

have to say: I am blind,

or: I'm about to go blind,

or: nothing is going well with me,

or: I have a child who is sick,

or: right there I'm sort of glued together...

And probably that doesn't do anything either.

They have to sing; if they didn't sing, everyone

would walk past, as if they were fences or trees.

That's where you can hear good singing.

People really are strange: they prefer

to hear castratos in boychoirs.

But God himself comes and stays a long time

when the world of half-people start to bore him.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

translation by Robert Bly

art by van gogh

for the senses

May the touch of your skin 

Register the beauty

Of the otherness

That surrounds you.

May your listening be attuned

To the deeper silence

Where sound is honed

To bring distance home.

May the fragrance

Of a breathing meadow

Refresh your heart

And remind you you are

A child of the earth.

And when you partake

Of food and drink,

May your taste quicken 

To the gift and sweetness

That flows from the earth.

May your inner eye

See through the surfaces

And glean the real presence

Of everything that meets you.

May your soul beautify

The desire of your eyes 

That you might glimpse

The infinity that hides

In the simple sights 

That seem worn

To your usual eyes.

~ John O'Donohue

from To Bless the Space Between Us

the fleeting quality of the light

I would like to paint the way a bird sings

~ Claude Monet

 born in Paris in 1840

He met Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, and Frédéric Bazille; the four young artists became disillusioned with the meticulous detail that was fashionable in academic circles, and they began experimenting with a new style of landscape painting, producing rapid "sketches" using short, broken brushstrokes and trying to capture, above all, the fleeting quality of the light.

a quiet light

There is a quiet light that shines in every heart. It draws no

attention to itself, though it is always secretly there.

It is what illuminates our minds to see beauty, our desire 

to seek possibility, and our hearts to love life. Without this

subtle quickening our days would be empty and wearisome, and

no horizon would ever awaken our longing. Our passion for life

is quietly sustained from somewhere in us that is welded to

the energy and excitement of life. This shy inner light is what

enables us to recognize and receive our very presence here 

as blessing. We enter the world as strangers who all at once 

become heirs to a harvest of memory, spirit, and dream that has 

long preceded us and will now enfold, nourish, and sustain us.

The gift of the world is our first blessing.

~ John O'Donohue

from the introduction to To Bless the Space Between Us

art by Leonardo Da Vinci

starting a poem

You are alone. Then there's a knock 

On the door. It's a word. You

Bring it in. Things go

OK for a while. But this word 

Has relatives. Soon

They turn up. None of them work.

They sleep on the floor, and they steal

Your tennis shoes. 

You started it; you weren't

Content to leave things alone.

Now the den is a mess, and the

Remote is gone. 

That's what being married 

Is like. You never receive your

Wife only, but the

Madness of her family. 

Now see what's happened?

Where is your car? You won't 

Be able to find 

The keys for a week.

~ Robert Bly

art by Janet Sobel

on the death of the beloved

Though we need to weep your loss,

You dwell in that safe place in our hearts,

Where no storm or might or pain can reach you.

Your love was like the dawn

Brightening over our lives

Awakening beneath the dark

A further adventure of colour.

The sound of your voice

Found for us

A new music

That brightened everything.

Whatever you enfolded in your gaze

Quickened in the joy of its being;

You placed smiles like flowers

On the altar of the heart.

Your mind always sparkled

With wonder at things.

Though your days here were brief,

Your spirit was live, awake, complete.

We look towards each other no longer

From the old distance of our names;

Now you dwell inside the rhythm of breath,

As close to us as we are to ourselves.

Though we cannot see you with outward eyes,

We know our soul’s gaze is upon your face,

Smiling back at us from within everything

To which we bring our best refinement.

Let us not look for you only in memory,

Where we would grow lonely without you.

You would want us to find you in presence,

Beside us when beauty brightens,

When kindness glows

And music echoes eternal tones.

When orchids brighten the earth,

Darkest winter has turned to spring;

May this dark grief flower with hope

In every heart that loves you.

May you continue to inspire us:

To enter each day with a generous heart.

To serve the call of courage and love

Until we see your beautiful face again

In that land where there is no more separation,

Where all tears will be wiped from our mind,

And where we will never lose you again.

~ John O'Donohue

from To Bless the Space Between Us

art by Camille Pissarro

Pissarro

happy birthday Kurt

The Work of Karlfried Graf Dürckheim

with thanks to intense city

too simple for words

truth is too simple for words

before thought gets tangled up in nouns and 

verbs

there is a wordless sound

a deep breathless sigh

of overwhelming relief

to find the end of fiction

in this ordinary

yet extraordinary moment

when words are recognized

as words

and truth is recognized

as everything else

~ Nirmala

with thanks to poetry chaikhana

Nirmala is a contemporary spiritual teacher in the nondualist Advaita tradition. 

He traces his spiritual lineage through Neelam and H.W.L. Poonja to Ramana Maharshi.

love of the wind

.

We've spent a lot of time keeping some old men alive. 

I don’t’ think you should criticize us for that. 

Even old sailors keep their love of the wind. 

We know so little of our neighbor’s sorrow. 

He never told us what happened to his son. 

What can it mean that Jesus had no sister? 

We’ll never know anything better than a dog. 

It doesn't matter how deeply he sleeps. 

The sleeping dog leaves all the world for the floor. 

It’s all right if the family gathers together at night 

And sings like sailors when the wind rises. 

The roof of the house will last the night. 

I've never been an old friend to the wind. 

Don’t expect me to be happy about haystacks 

Scattered in a storm or blown-down barns. 

Don’t expect me to talk about the Spanish armada 

Getting into trouble off the Galway coast. 

Even old sailors keep their love of the wind.

~ Robert Bly

art by van gogh

carmel point

The extraordinary patience of things!
This beautiful place defaced with a crop of suburban houses -
How beautiful when we first beheld it,
Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs;
No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing,
Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop rockheads -
Now the spoiler has come: does it care?
Not faintly, It has all time, It knows the people are a tide
That swells and in time will ebb, and all
Their works dissolve.  Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty
Lives in the very grain of the granite,
Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff. - As for us:
We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident 
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.






~ Robinson Jeffers
art by Gordon Mortensen

790

Nature — the Gentlest Mother is,

Impatient of no Child —

The feeblest — or the waywardest —

Her Admonition mild —

In Forest — and the Hill —

By Traveller — be heard —

Restraining Rampant Squirrel —

Or too impetuous Bird —

How fair Her Conversation —

A Summer Afternoon —

Her Household — Her Assembly —

And when the Sun go down —

Her Voice among the Aisles

Incite the timid prayer

Of the minutest Cricket —

The most unworthy Flower —

When all the Children sleep —

She turns as long away

As will suffice to light Her lamps —

Then bending from the Sky —

With infinite Affection —

And infiniter Care —

Her Golden finger on Her lip —

Wills Silence — Everywhere —

~ Emily Dickinson

with thanks to writers almanac

lost in the forest

Lost in the forest, I broke off a dark twig

and lifted its whisper to my thirsty lips:

myabe it was the voice of the rain crying, 

a cracked bell, or a torn heart.

Something from far off it seemed

deep and secret to me, hidden by the earth,

a shout muffled by huge autumns,

by the moist half-open darkness of the leaves.

Wakening from the dreaming forest there, the hazel-sprig

sang under my tongue, its drifting fragrance

climbed up though my conscious mind

as if suddenly the roots I had left behind

cried out to me, the land I had lost with my childhood -

and I stopped, wounded by the wandering scent.

~ Pablo Neruda

.

a thought

Some thoughts

throw off 

a backward heat

as walls might,

at night, in summer.

It could happen 

this moment -

Some movement.

One word's almost

imperceptible shiver.

And what was

long cold

in your left palm,

long cold in your right palm,

might find itself

malleable, warmer.

An apricot

could be planted

in such a corner.

~ Jane Hirshfield

from Come, Thief

sadness and solitude

.

It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living. Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing. That is why the sadness passes: the new presence inside us, the presence that has been added, has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer even there, is already in our bloodstream. And we don’t know what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes. We can’t say who has come, perhaps we will never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens. And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to us as if from outside. The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate; and later on, when it “happens” (that is, steps forth out of us to other people), we will feel related and close to it in our innermost being. And that is necessary. It is necessary – and toward this point our development will move, little by little – that nothing alien happen to us, but only what has long been our own. People have already had to rethink so many concepts of motion; and they will also gradually come to realize that what we call fate does not come into us from the outside, but emerges from us. It is only because so many people have not absorbed and transformed their fates while they were living in them that they have not realized what was emerging from them; it was so alien to them that, in their confusion and fear, they thought it must have entered them at the very moment they became aware of it, for they swore they had never before found anything like that inside them. just as people for a long time had a wrong idea about the sun’s motion, they are even now wrong about the motion of what is to come. The future stands still, dear Mr. Kappus, but we move in infinite space.

And to speak of solitude again, it becomes clearer and clearer that fundamentally this is nothing that one can choose or refrain from. We are solitary. We can delude ourselves about this and act as if it were not true. That is all. But how much better it is to recognize that we are alone; yes, even to begin from this realization. It will, of course, make us dizzy; for all points that our eyes used to rest on are taken away from us, there is no longer anything near us, and everything far away is infinitely far. A man taken out of his room and, almost without preparation or transition, placed on the heights of a great mountain range, would feel something like that: an unequaled insecurity, an abandonment to the nameless, would almost annihilate him. He would feel he was falling or think he was being catapulted out into space or exploded into a thousand pieces: what a colossal lie his brain would have to invent in order to catch up with and explain the situation of his senses. That is how all distances, all measures, change for the person who becomes solitary; many of these changes occur suddenly and then, as with the man on the mountaintop, unusual fantasies and strange feelings arise, which seem to grow out beyond all that is bearable. But it is necessary for us to experience that too. We must accept our reality as vastly as we possibly can; everything, even the unprecedented, must be possible within it. This is in the end the only kind of courage that is required of us: the courage to face the strangest, most unusual, most inexplicable experiences that can meet us. The fact that people have in this sense been cowardly has done infinite harm to life; the experiences that are called it apparitions, the whole so-called “spirit world,” death, all these Things that are so closely related to us, have through our daily defensiveness been so entirely pushed out of life that the senses with which we might have been able to grasp them have atrophied. To say nothing of God. But the fear of the inexplicable has not only impoverished the reality of the individual; it has also narrowed the relationship between one human being and another, which has as it were been lifted out of the riverbed of infinite possibilities and set down in a fallow place on the bank, where nothing happens. For it is not only indolence that causes human relationships to be repeated from case to case with such unspeakable monotony and boredom; it is timidity before any new, inconceivable experience, which we don’t think we can deal with. But only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn't exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being. For if we imagine this being of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it is obvious that most people come to know only one corner of their room, one spot near the window, one narrow strip on which they keep walking back and forth. In this way they have a certain security. And yet how much more human is the dangerous in security that drives those prisoners in Poe’s stories to feel out the shapes of their horrible dungeons and not be strangers to the unspeakable terror of their cells. We, however, are not prisoners. No traps or snares have been set around us, and there is nothing that should frighten or upset us. We have been put into life as into the element we most accord with, and we have, moreover, through thousands of years of adaptation, come to resemble this life so greatly that when we hold still, through a fortunate mimicry we can hardly be differentiated from everything around us. We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors; if it has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience. How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

from Letters to a Young Poet 

The Eighth Letter

photo by Eliot Porter