to Holderlin

We are not permitted to linger, even with what is most

intimate.  From images that are full, the spirit

plunges on to others that suddenly must be filled;

there are no lakes till eternity.  Here,

falling is best.  To fall from the mastered emotion 

into the guessed-at, and onward.

To you, O majestic poet, to you the compelling image,

O caster of spells, was a life, entire;  when you uttered it

a line snapped shut like fate,  there was a death

even in the mildest, and you walked straight into it; but

the god who preceded you led you out and beyond it.

O wandering spirit, most wandering of all!  How snugly

the others live in their heated poems and stay,

content, in their narrow smiles.  Taking part.  Only you 

move like the moon.  And underneath brightens and darkens

the nocturnal landscape, the holy, the terrified landscape,

which you feel in departures.  No one

gave it away more sublimely, gave it back

more fully to the universe, without any need to hold on.

Thus for years that you no longer counted, holy, you played

with infinite joy, as though it were not inside you,

but lay, belonging to no one, all around

on the gentle lawns of the earth, where the godlike children had left it.

Ah, what the greatest have longed for: you built it, free of desire,

stone upon stone, till it stood.  And when it collapsed,

even then you weren't bewildered.

Why, after such an eternal life, do we still

mistrust the earthly?  Instead of patiently learning from transience

the emotions for what future

slopes of the heart, in pure space?

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

from Uncollected Poems

translated by Stephen Mitchell

surprised by evening

There is unknown dust that is near us 

Waves breaking on shores just over the hill 

Trees full of birds that we have never seen 

Nets drawn with dark fish.

The evening arrives; we look up and it is there 

It has come through the nets of the stars 

Through the tissues of the grass 

Walking quietly over the asylums of the waters.

The day shall never end we think:

We have hair that seemed born for the daylight;

But at last the quiet waters of the night will rise 

And our skin shall see far off as it does under water.

~ Robert Bly

the gate of heaven is everywhere

~ Cynthia Bourgeault

Sophia in Nature - Robert Bly interviewed by Roar Bjonnes

Roar Bjonnes is editor of Prout Journal.The nature of the discourse is in poetic terms.

Bly: According to the Gnostic religion, Sophia looked down upon this planet of ours and decided to descend into it. She entered inside the stones, the trees, the birds, and the water. She went into fire and air. This is the story of Sophia.

Bjonnes: This reminds me of the Tantric concept of Shakti.

Bly: Yes, exactly. Sophia--like Shakti--is an active, powerful force, all-encompassing and all-pervading energy in nature. 

Bly: The ecology movement, then, is a response to the inability of the capitalist world to understand that Sophia is also in the rain-forest  Through the loss of the story of Sophia, the Christian Church has given permission to the capitalists to destroy nature. This was done partly by translating the word "Sophia" as "wisdom". This destroys the story and takes away the feminine quality. There have been many such errors in translating the Old Testament, and we are suffering from those mistakes today.

unharvested

A scent of ripeness from over a wall.

And come to leave the routine road

And look for what had made me stall,

There sure enough was an apple tree

That had eased itself of its summer load,

And of all but its trivial foliage free,

Now breathed as light as a lady's fan.

For there had been an apple fall

As complete as the apple had given man.

The ground was one circle of solid red.

May something go always unharvested!

May much stay out of our stated plan,

Apples or something forgotten and left,

So smelling their sweetness would be no theft.

~ Robert Frost

from The Collected Poems

found at writers almanac

see ourselves as we are

Relationship is the mirror in which we can see ourselves as we are. All life is a movement in relationship. There is no living thing on earth which is not related to something or other. Even the hermit, a man who goes off to a lonely spot, is related to the past, is related to those who are around him. There is no escape from relationship. In that relationship which is the mirror in which we can see ourselves, we can discover what we are, our reactions, our prejudices, our fears, depression, anxieties, loneliness, sorrow, pain, grief. We can also discover whether we love or there is no such thing as love. 

J. Krishnamurti

from Mind Without Measure

opening the heart through ecstatic poetry

~ Rumi

with Coleman Barks and David Darling

fear

At the root of all war is fear, not so much the fear men have of one another
as the fear they have of everything. It is not merely that they do not trust one another.
They do not even trust themselves.... They cannot trust anything because
they have ceased to know God.

It is not only our hatred of others that is dangerous but also and above all our hatred of ourselves: particularly that hatred of ourselves which is too deep and too powerful to be consciously faced. For it is this that makes us see our own evil in others

and unable to see it in ourselves....

As if this were not enough, we make the situation much worse
by artificially intensifying our sense of evil, and by increasing our propensity
to feel guilt even for things that are not in themselves wrong. In all these ways,
we build up such an obsession with evil, both in ourselves and in others,
that we waste all our mental energy trying to account for this evil, to punish it,
to exorcise it, or to get rid of it in any way we can.




~ Thomas Merton
excerpt from his 1962 essay: The Root of War is Fear

 

 

 

 

one sand grain among the others in winter wind

I wake with my hand held over the place of grief in my body.

"Depend on nothing," the voice advises, but even that is useless.

My ears are useless, my familiar and intimate tongue.

My protecting hand is useless, that wants to hold the single leaf to the tree

and say, Not this one, this one will be saved.

~ Jane Hirshfield

from After

peace

Perhaps peace is not, after all, something you work for,

or "fight for."  It is indeed "fighting for peace" that starts all 

the wars.  What, after all, are the pretexts of all these Cold

War crisis, but "fighting for peace"?  Peace is something you have

or do not have.  If you are yourself at peace, then there is at least 

some peace in the world.  Then share your peace with everyone,

and everyone will be at peace.  Of course I realize that arguments

 like this can be used as a pretext for passivity, for indifferent 

acceptance of every iniquity.  Quietism leads to war as surely as 

anything does.  But I am not speaking of quietism, because quietism 

is not peace, nor is it the way to peace.

~ Thomas Merton

from Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

how

Pardon all runners,

All speechless, alien winds,

All mad waters.

Pardon their impulses,

Their wild attitudes,

Their young flights, their reticence.

When a message has no clothes on

How can it be spoken.

~ Thomas Merton

from The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton

silence

silence

is

a

looking

bird:the

turn

ing;edge,of

life

(inquiry before snow

e.e. cummings

which

Which shouldn’t exist

in this world,

the one who forgets

or the one

who is forgotten?

Which is better,

to love

one who has died

or not to see

each other when you are alive?

Which is better,

the distant lover

you long for

or the one you see daily

without desire?

Which is the least unreliable

among fickle things—

the swift rapids,

a flowing river,

or this human world?

~ Izumi Shikibu

 translation by Jane Hirshfield

from  The Ink Dark Moon

~ Jane Hirshfield

from the San Francisco International Poetry Festival

there is none

Many have gone mad looking for a solid center,

but there is none.

We think of centering as only a continual narrowing

of focus until we touch the pearl

but in practice it is often a continual expansion

of focus until we become the ocean.

Our center is vast space, boundless awareness

indistinguishable from unconditional love.

Of course I play the fool when I dare allow

consciousness to describe itself!  Isn't that the birth

of the ego, the "I am this" that closed behind us

when we entered the body?

~ Stephen Levine

ripen

It is also good to love: because love is difficult. 

For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps 

the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, 

the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which

 all other work is merely preparation. 

That is why young people, who are beginners in everything, 

are not yet capable of love: it is something they must learn. 

With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered around their solitary, 

anxious, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love. 

But learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and therefore loving, 

for a long time ahead and far on into life, is: solitude, a heightened 

and deepened kind of aloneness for the person who loves. 

Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person 

(for what would a union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent?),

 it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, 

to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person; 

it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him 

and calls him to vast distances. 

Only in this sense, as the task of working on themselves 

("to hearken and to hammer day and night"), may young people 

use the love that is given to them. Merging and surrendering and 

every kind of communion is not for them (who must still, 

for a long, long time, save and gather themselves); it is the ultimate, 

is perhaps that for which human lives are as yet barely large enough.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

from Letter to a Young Poet, #7

art by picasso

comes naturally to an end

Love is something that is new, fresh, alive. 

It has no yesterday and no tomorrow. 

It is beyond the turmoil of thought.

It is only the innocent mind which knows what love is, 

and the innocent mind can live in the world which is not innocent.

 To find this extraordinary thing which man has sought 

endlessly through sacrifice, through worship, 

through relationship, through sex, 

through every form of pleasure and pain,

 is only possible when thought 

comes to understand itself 

and comes naturally to an end. 

Then love has no opposite, 

then love has no conflict.

~ J. Krishnamurti

from Freedom from the Known

art by van gogh

hearing music at dawn

It is sweet to hear music when the night

Is just retreating from the smoky branches

And the sun's enemies are throwing down their gloves.

Music is always reminding us whom we love,

One or two notes dissolve the auditor's mind

So we are swimming once more in the old river.

We are all failed farmers learning to play whist.

We have a lot of hands to play before midnight.

Someone else will have to worry about time.

I'm always glad when I hear that an old hen

Has been seen crossing the road at dusk.

It means our old teacher is still all right.

We keep remembering Barborossa's life.

A little whiskey fits in well with our lives.

The time of the Depression is not really over.

Poems like this amount to some form of music.

We dance for two hours.  When we look up,

We see that all the musicians have disappeared.

~ Robert Bly

from Talking into the Ear of a Donkey

the key

Morning unlocks the lake

as a woman with many keys might

come to open a house

where others are sleeping.

Enjoying the quiet possession.

Wiping the shelves of the mountain

with a lemony rag until they catch.

It is not hers. Those who live

there will claim it with raised voices,

with the closet doors' casual banging.

But for now, a single rowboat

drifts on the silvery water.

The oars are banked, the one sound

drips from the blades and widens

toward the enormous, dark-held shore.

There, the house is dreaming:

a red barrette on a wooden dresser,

somehow important.

~ Jane Hirshfield

from The Lives of the Heart

art by Elizabeth Torak

supposed to be

It is hard to be as popular as we are supposed to be. 

The superego or interior judge has altered its requirements ...

For one who fails to become successful and well-loved, 

punishment is swift and thorough. 

Self-esteem receives a battering from the inside, 

everyone feels insignificant and unseen until, in desperation, 

we finally agree to go on a talk show and tell it all. 

Once that moment is over, 

and universal love has not poured over our heads 

following the program, we fall still farther.

~ Robert Bly

from The Sibling Society

water

I was born in a drouth year. That summer 

my mother waited in the house, enclosed 

in the sun and the dry ceaseless wind, 

for the men to come back in the evenings, 

bringing water from a distant spring. 

veins of leaves ran dry, roots shrank. 

And all my life I have dreaded the return 

of that year, sure that it still is 

somewhere, like a dead enemy's soul. 

 Fear of dust in my mouth is always with me, 

and I am the faithful husband of the rain, 

I love the water of wells and springs 

and the taste of roofs in the water of cisterns. 

I am a dry man whose thirst is praise 

of clouds, and whose mind is something of a cup. 

My sweetness is to wake in the night 

after days of dry heat, hearing the rain.

....

Like the water

of a deep stream,

love is always too much.

We did not make it.

Though we drink till we burst,

we cannot have it all,

or want it all.

In its abundance

it survives our thirst.

In the evening we come down to the shore

to drink our fill,

and sleep,

while it flows

through the regions of the dark.

It does not hold us,

except we keep returning to its rich waters

thirsty.

We enter,

willing to die,

into the commonwealth of its joy.

~ Wendell Berry

... while you're alive

~ Bill Moyers

 interview with Robert Bly

a delicious disease

~ Ibn Hazm

read by Robert Bly

sight, taste, touch, hearing, stopped

~ St. John of the Cross

read by Robert Bly

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

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

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)

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

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

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

the lips of insanity

~ Coleman Barks

~ Rumi

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

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

meditation

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche