Sunday, April 14, 2013

a delicious disease









~ Ibn Hazm
read by Robert Bly



Saturday, April 13, 2013

sight, taste, touch, hearing, stopped









~ St. John of the Cross
read by Robert Bly



Friday, April 12, 2013

the present




I wanted to give you something —
no stone, clay, bracelet,
no edible leaf could pass through.
Even a molecule's fragrance by then too large.
Giving had been taken, as you soon would be.
Still, I offered the puffs of air shaped to meaning.
They remained air.
I offered memory on memory,
but what is memory that dies with the fallible inks?
I offered apology, sorrow, longing. I offered anger.
How fine is the mesh of death. You can almost see through it.
I stood on one side of the present, you stood on the other.




~ Jane Hirshfield
from Come, Thief



Friday, April 5, 2013

the light that’s blazing




A story is like water
that you heat for your bath.

It takes messages between the fire
and your skin. It lets them meet,
and it cleans you!

Very few can sit down
in the middle of the fire itself
like a salamander or Abraham.
We need intermediaries.

A feeling of fullness comes,
but it usually takes some bread
to bring it.

Beauty surrounds us,
but usually we need to be walking
in a garden to know it.

The body itself is a screen
to shield and partially reveal
the light that’s blazing
inside your presence.

Water, stories, the body,
all the things we do, are mediums
that hide and show what’s hidden.

Study them,
and enjoy being washed
with a secret we sometimes know,
and then not.





~ Rumi
translation by Coleman Barks
from The Essential Rumi



Thursday, April 4, 2013

once, I





Once, I
was seven Spanish bullocks in a high meadow,
sleepy and nameless.

As-ifness strange to myself, but complete.

Light on the neck-nape
of time
as two wings of one starling,

or lovers so happy
neither needs think of the other.




~ Jane Hirshfield
from Poetry (April 2013)




Wednesday, April 3, 2013

a new loveliness





You cannot live without dying. 
You cannot live if you do not die psychologically every minute. 
This is not an intellectual paradox. To live completely, 
wholly, every day as if it were a new loveliness,
 there must be dying to everything of yesterday, 
otherwise you live mechanically, 
and a mechanical mind can never know what 
love is or what freedom is.




~ J. Krishnamurti
from Freedom from the Known
art by van gogh



an hour is not a house





An hour is not a house,
a life is not a house,
you do not go through them as if
they were doors to another.

Yet an hour can have shape and proportion,
four walls, a ceiling.
An hour can be dropped like a glass.

Some want quiet as others want bread.
Some want sleep.

My eyes went
to the window, as a cat or dog left alone does.




~ Jane Hirshfield
from Poetry, April 2013




Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Hildegard von Bingen





Listen: there was once a king sitting on his throne. 
Around him stood great and wonderfully beautiful columns 
ornamented with ivory, bearing the banners of the king with great honor. 
Then it pleased the king to raise a small feather from the ground, 
and he commanded it to fly. The feather flew, 
not because of anything in itself but because the air bore it along.
Thus am I, a feather on the breath of God.




 - visionary, poet, composer, naturalist, healer, and theologian - 
founded convents; corresponded with secular and ecclesiastical leaders, 
as well as a vast range of people of lesser rank; and 
ventured forth as a monastic trouble-shooter, 
consultant exorcist, and visiting preacher. 

Even more remarkable for a woman of her time was the body of written work she produced. 
Its range - from natural history and medicine to cosmology, 
music, poetry, and theology - 
 possesses great beauty


.


extraordinary creativity was her accomplishment in music. 
In the poetry and melody of her songs, she reveals the full authority,
 intelligence and striking originality of her genius.




~ Hildegard von Bingen




Wednesday, March 27, 2013

multiplicity in properties




He who has lifted the veil sees multiplicity in properties, 
not in Essence; hence he knows that changes in properties 
cannot touch Essence, which owns a perfection subject to no mutability. 
Light merely seems to change as it shines through colored glass, but

light has no color.
Its rays shine through the glass
and only then 
do hues and tints appear.

Don't you understand?

Come then into my eyes
and...look!

and you will see

a sun shining
through a thousand bits of glass
beaming to plain sight through each
a ray of color
Why should any difference appear
between this one and that?
All light is one
but colors a thousandfold.




~ Fakhruddin 'Iraqi
from Divine Flashes



Saturday, March 23, 2013

the lips of insanity










~ Coleman Barks
~ Rumi




Friday, March 22, 2013

wait for the hour





Always trust yourself and your own feeling, 
as opposed to argumentations, discussion, 
or introductions of that sort; if it turns out that you are wrong, 
then the natural growth of your inner life will eventually guide you to other insights. 

Allow your judgments their own silent, undisturbed development, 
which, like all progress, must come from deep within 
and cannot be forced or hastened. 

Everything is gestation and then birthing. 
To let each impression and each embryo of a feeling come to completion,
 entirely in itself, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, 
beyond the reach of one’s own understanding, and with deep humility 
and patience to wait for the hour when a new clarity is born: 
this alone is what it means to live as an artist: in understanding as in creating.



~Rainer Maria Rilke
from Letters to a young poet, letter 3
translation by Stephen Mitchell
image found at art42

Tuesday, March 19, 2013

many waves





each image painted
on the canvas of existence
is the form
of the artist himself.
Eternal Ocean
spews forth new waves,
"Waves" we call them;
but there is only the Sea.

Many and disparate waves do not make the sea a multiplicity;
no more do the Names make the Named more than One.
When the sea breathes they call it mist;
when mist piles up they call it clouds.
It falls again,
they name it rain;
it gathers itself and rejoins the sea.
And it is now the same sea it ever was.


~ Fakhruddin 'Iraqi
from Divine Flashes



Sunday, March 17, 2013

meditation






~ Jiddu Krishnamurti, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche



Saturday, March 16, 2013

utterance




Sitting over words
very late I have heard a kind of whispered sighing
not far
like a night wind in pines or like the sea in the dark
the echo of everything that has ever
been spoken
still spinning its one syllable
between the earth and silence




~ W. S. Merwin
 from The Rain in the Trees


the conditional





Say tomorrow doesn't come. 
Say the moon becomes an icy pit. 
Say the sweet-gum tree is petrified. 
Say the sun's a foul black tire fire. 
Say the owl's eyes are pinpricks. 
Say the raccoon's a hot tar stain. 
Say the shirt's plastic ditch-litter. 
Say the kitchen's a cow's corpse. 
Say we never get to see it: bright 
future, stuck like a bum star, never 
coming close, never dazzling. 
Say we never meet her. Never him. 
Say we spend our last moments staring 
at each other, hands knotted together,
clutching the dog, watching the sky burn. 
Say, It doesn't matter. Say, That would be 
enough. Say you'd still want this: us alive, 
right here, feeling lucky.



~ Ada Limón
with thanks again to Lisa


about this poem the author said,
"There is so much to worry about. 
All the time, so much worry. 
Here, I wanted to take all the worry as far out as I could 
and then stamp it out 
under the heavy black boot of love."