imagination, paths of spirit

~ John O'Donohue

reply to a letter

In the bottom drawer I find a letter which arrived for the first time twenty- six years ago. A letter written in panic, which continues to breathe when it arrives for the second time.

A house has five windows; through four of them daylight shines clear and still. The fifth window faces a dark sky, thunder and storm. I stand by the fifth window. The letter.

Sometimes a wide abyss separates Tuesday from Wednesday, but twenty-six years may pass in a moment. Time is no straight line. but rather a labyrinth. and if you press yourself against the wall, at the right spot, you can hear the hurrying steps and the voices, you can hear yourself walking past on the other side.

Was that letter ever answered? l don't remember, it was a long time ago. The innumerable thresholds of the sea continued to wander. The heart continued to leap from second to second, like the toad in the wet grass of a night in August.

The unanswered letters gather up above, like cirrostratus clouds foreboding a storm. They dim the rays of the sun. One day l shall reply. One day when I am dead and at last free to collect my thoughts. Or at least so far away from here that l can rediscover myself. When recently arrived I walk in the great city. On 25th Street, on the windy streets of dancing garbage. I who love to stroll and merge with the crowd, a capital letter T in the infinite body of text.

~ Tomas Tranströmer

translated by Göran Malmqvist

from The Blue House
art by emile claus

tribute

~ Jane Goodall

the blue house

It is night with glaring sunshine. I stand in the woods and look towards my house with its misty blue walls. As though I were recently dead and saw the house from a new angle.

It has stood for more than eighty summers. Its timber has been impregnated, four times with joy and three times with sorrow. When someone who has lived in the house dies it is repainted. The dead person paints it himself, without a brush, from the inside.

On the other side is open terrain. Formerly a garden, now wilderness. A still surf of weed, pagodas of weed, an unfurling body of text, Upanishads of weed, a Viking fleet of weed, dragon heads, lances, an empire of weed.

Above the overgrown garden flutters the shadow of a boomerang, thrown again and again. It is related to someone who lived in the house long before my time. Almost a child. An impulse issues from him, a thought, a thought of will: “create. . .draw. ..” In order to escape his destiny in time.

The house resembles a child’s drawing. A deputizing childishness which grew forth because someone prematurely renounced the charge of being a child. Open the doors, enter! Inside unrest dwells in the ceiling and peace in the walls. Above the bed there hangs an amateur painting representing a ship with seventeen sails, rough sea and a wind which the gilded frame cannot subdue.

It is always so early in here, it is before the crossroads, before the irrevocable choices. I am grateful for this life! And yet I miss the alternatives. All sketches wish to be real.

A motor far out on the water extends the horizon of the summer night. Both joy and sorrow swell in the magnifying glass of the dew. We do not actually know it, but we sense it: our life has a sister vessel which plies an entirely different route. While the sun burns behind the islands.

~ Tomas Tranströmer

translated by Göran Malmqvist

a blaze of light

There's a blaze of light

In every word

It doesn't matter which you heard

The holy or the broken Hallelujah


~ Leonard Cohen

My eyes so fix

upon your image

that whatever I gaze at

I imagine you.

~ Fakhruddin Iraqi

from Divine Flashes

after work

I stop the car along the pasture edge,

gather up bags of corncobs from the back,

and get out.

Two whistles, one for each,

and familiar sounds draw close in darkness—

cadence of hoof on hardened bottomland,

twinned blowing of air through nostrils curious, flared.

They come deepened and muscular movements

conjured out of sleep: each small noise and scent

heavy with earth, simple beyond communion,

beyond the stretched-out hand from which they calmly

take corncobs, pulling away as I hold

until the mid-points snap.

They are careful of my fingers,

offering that animal-knowledge,

the respect which is due to strangers;

and in the night, their mares' eyes shine, reflecting stars,

the entire, outer light of the world here.

~ Jane Hirshfield 

from Of Gravity and Angels

reflected

Reflected

in the dragonfly's eye -

mountains.

Kobayashi Issa

(1763-1828)

from Zen Poetry: Let the Spring Breeze Enter

translated by Lucien Stryk and Takashi Ikemoto

sea foam

Moment by moment you await understanding, 
spiritual perception, peace and good to arrive from nonexistence. 
Nonexistence, then, is God's factory from which He continually produces goods.

He has caused what is nonexistent to appear magnificently existent,
 while the truly existent He has caused to appear as nonexistent.

He has hidden the Sea, yet made the foam visible;

He has concealed the Wind, but displayed the dust.

The dust whirls in the air higher than a minaret: does it rise by itself? 
You see the dust borne high, but the Wind you don't see, although you can surmise it.

You see the white-capped waves tumbling in every direction, 
but without the Sea the foam has no way to move.

You see the foam by sense perception and the Sea by induction:

just as speech is manifest and thought is hidden.

~ Rumi
art by O'Keeffe

the "I" creature and the moon

There’s a moon in my body, but I can't see it!

A moon and a sun.

A drum never touched by hands, beating, and I can’t hear it! 

As long as a human being worries about when he will die,

and what he has that is his, all of his works are zero.

When affection for the I-creature and what it owns is dead,

then the work of the Teacher is over.

The purpose of labor is to learn;

when you know it, the labor is over.

The apple blossom exists to create fruit; when that

comes, the petal falls.

The musk is inside the deer, but the deer does not

look for it: it wanders around looking for grass.

~ Kabir

no problem

The problem is there is no problem and

the problem solvers have nothing to do

so they start creating problems out

of thin air, out of nothing. Then the problem

is not to see that there are big problems

everywhere and it is woe unto

him or her who cannot see or who will

not acknowledge the problems—they become

part of the problem, a big part of it,

their apathy or obstinacy holding

progress back until they are educated

to the fact that, one, there are big problems,

and, two, if you are not part of solving

them then you represent the problem

the problem solvers have been talking about

all along. So you see now how it is:

there is no problem worse than no problem.

~ Kevin McCaffrey

 from Laughing Cult

selective blindness

~ Margaret Heffernan

when I heard

When I heard the learn'd astronomer,

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before

me,

When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide

and measure them, 

When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with

much applause in the lecture-room,

How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,

Till rising and gliding out I wander' d off by myself,

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.

~  Walt Whitman

annunciation

It is not always joy

that is announced to you

in the mundane light.

Not always a wing

or a flood of new knowledge

delivering its atoms of change

to your body.

Sometimes it is

a wound delivered,

just as plainly as in those

paintings, her head tilted

up or down, in some angle

of understood responsibility.

No fanfare in the room

other than some structure inside

made flat

by what you have received,

the heart a putty-colored

folding chair knocked

to the ground.

And the room itself emptied,

this is part of the recognition.

The room a wound,

the light a wing on the floor,

the atoms of dust

in the shaft. And the quiet,

that is grief’s appetite.

~ Rick Barot

with thanks to Cerise Press

art by van gogh

without willing

Learn who it is within you who makes everything his own 

and says, “My God, my mind, my thought, my soul, my body.” 

Learn the sources of sorrow, joy, love, hate. 

Learn how it happens that one watches without willing, 

rests without willing, becomes angry without willing, 

loves without willing.

~ Hippolytus of Rome

thirst and ... mirage

The appearance of water in a mirage persists after the fact that it is a mirage has dawned on us. 

So it is with the world. 

Though knowing it to be unreal, it continues to manifest - 

but we do not try to satisfy our thirst with the water of the mirage. 

As soon as one knows that it is a mirage, 

one gives it up as useless and does not run after it to get water. 

~ Ramana Maharshi

to give myself utterly

I want to give myself

utterly

as this maple

that burned and burned

for three days without stinting

and then in two more

dropped off every leaf;

as this lake that,

no matter what comes

to its green-blue depths,

both takes and returns it.

In the still heart that refuses nothing,

the world is twice-born—

two earths wheeling,

two heavens,

two egrets reaching

down into subtraction;

even the fish

for an instant doubled,

before it is gone.

I want the fish.

I want the losing it all

when it rains and I want

the returning transparence.

I want the place

by the edge-flowers where

the shallow sand is deceptive,

where whatever

steps in must plunge,

and I want that plunging.

I want the ones

who come in secret to drink

only in early darkness,

and I want the ones

who are swallowed.

I want the way

the water sees without eyes,

hears without ears,

shivers without will or fear

at the gentlest touch.

I want the way it

accepts the cold moonlight

and lets it pass,

the way it lets

all of it pass

without judgment or comment.

There is a lake,

Lalla Ded sang, no larger

than one seed of mustard,

that all things return to.

O heart, if you

will not, cannot, give me the lake,

then give me the song.

~ Jane Hirshfield

art by Georgia O'Keeffe

wisdom of a storyteller

~ Elif Shafak

work song - part 2 a vision

If we will have the wisdom to survive,

to stand like slow growing trees

on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it...

then a long time after we are dead

the lives our lives prepare will live

here, their houses strongly placed

upon the valley sides...

The river will run

clear, as we will never know it...

On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down

the old forest, an old forest will stand,

its rich leaf-fall drifting on its roots.

The veins of forgotten springs will have opened.

Families will be singing in the fields...

Memory,

native to this valley, will spread over it

like a grove, and memory will grow

into legend, legend into song, song

into sacrament. The abundance of this place,

the songs of its people and its birds,

will be health and wisdom and indwelling

light. This is no paradisal dream.

Its hardship is its reality.

~ Wendell Berry
art by Andrew Wyeth

the holy longing

Tell a wise person, or else keep silent 

for the massman will mock it right away. 

I praise what is truly alive, 

what longs to be burned to death.

In the calm waters of the love-nights 

where you were begotten, where you have begotten, 

a strange feeling comes over you 

when you see the silent candle burning.

Now you are no longer caught 

in this obsession with darkness, 

and a desire for higher love-making 

sweeps you upward.

Distance does not make you falter, 

now, arriving in magic, flying, 

and, finally, insane for the light, 

you are the butterfly and you are the light.

And so long as you haven’t experienced 

this: to die and so to grow, 

you are only a troubled guest 

on the dark earth. 

~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

translation by Robert Bly

do not be ashamed

You will be walking some night

in the comfortable dark of your yard

And suddenly a great light will shine

round about you, and behind you

will be a wall you never saw before.

It will be clear to you suddenly

that you were about to escape,

And that you are guilty: you misread

The complex instructions, you are not

a member, you lost your card

or never had one. And you will know

that they have been there all along,

Their eyes on your letters and books,

their hands in your pockets,

their ears wired to your bed.

Though you have done nothing shameful.

They will want you to be ashamed.

They will want you to kneel and weep

and say you should have been like them.

And once you are ashamed,

reading the page they hold out to you,

Then such light as you have made

In your history will leave you.

They will no longer need to pursue you,

You will pursue them, begging forgiveness.

They will not forgive you.

There is no power against them.

It is only candor that is aloof from them,

only an inward clarity, unashamed,

that they cannot reach. Be ready.

When their light has picked you out

and their questions are asked, say to them:

“I am not ashamed.” A sure horizon

will come around you. The heron will begin

his evening flight from the hilltop.

~ Wendell Berry

from Antiques and Collectibles

elegy for a walnut tree

Old friend now there is no one alive

who remembers when you were young

it was high summer when I first saw you

in the blaze of day most of my life ago

with the dry grass whispering in your shade

and already you had lived through wars

and echoes of wars around your silence

through days of parting and seasons of absence

with the house emptying as the years went their way

until it was home to bats and swallows

and still when spring climbed toward summer

you opened once more the curled sleeping fingers

of newborn leaves as though nothing had happened

you and the seasons spoke the same language

and all these years I have looked through your limbs

to the river below and the roofs and the night

and you were the way I saw the world

~ W. S. Merwin

a struggle with water and wind

All my life’s a struggle with water and wind. 

two against one must be my story— 

as I make my way into the earth

 under the waves. There’s no country

 I can call my own. But I’ve learned

 to grow strong by being still. I know

 if I fail I’ll be broken, and all

 that’s part of me will be torn from me. 

Let me find my place 

 among the stones, and be held.

~ Lawrence Raab

from The Word Exchange

Anglo-Saxon Poems in Translation

who am i being?

~ Benjamin Zander

the great way is not difficult

The Great Way is not difficult 

for those who have no preferences. 

When love and hate are both absent 

everything becomes clear and undisguised.

Make the smallest distinction, however 

and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart.

If you wish to see the truth 

then hold no opinions for or against anything. 

To set up what you like against what you dislike 

is the disease of the mind. 

When the deep meaning of things is not understood 

the minds essential peace is disturbed to no avail. 

The Way is perfect like vast space 

where nothing is lacking and nothing is in excess. 

Indeed, it is due to our choosing to accept or reject 

that we do not see the true nature of things. 

Live neither in the entanglements of outer things, 

nor in inner feelings of emptiness.

Be serene in the oneness of things 

and such erroneous views will disappear by themselves.

When you try to stop activity to achieve passivity 

your very effort fills you with activity. 

As long as you remain in one extreme or the other 

you will never know Oneness.

~ Seng-T’san

a friend's umbrella

Ralph Waldo Emerson, toward the end

of his life, found the names

of familiar objects escaping him.

He wanted to say something about a window,

or a table, or a book on a table.

But the word wasn't there,

although other words could still suggest

the shape of what he meant.

Then someone, his wife perhaps,

would understand: "Yes, window! I'm sorry,

is there a draft?" He'd nod.

She'd rise. Once a friend dropped by

to visit, shook out his umbrella

in the hall, remarked upon the rain.

Later the word umbrella

vanished and became

the thing that strangers take away.

Paper, pen, table, book:

was it possible for a man to think

without them? To know

that he was thinking? We remember

that we forget, he'd written once,

before he started to forget.

Three times he was told

that Longfellow had died.

Without the past, the present

lay around him like the sea.

Or like a ship, becalmed,

upon the sea. He smiled

to think he was the captain then,

gazing off into whiteness,

waiting for the wind to rise. 

~ Lawrence Raab

from The History of Forgetting

found here: http://deathdeconstructed.blogspot.com/

the power of introverts

~ Susan Cain

all kinds of minds

~ Temple Grandin

happiness and bare consciousness

~ Matthieu Ricard

a hide

There's a skin or hide between ourselves and our inner being.  And in the West that skin is very thick.  Inside us there's a sea and that sea is your inner life, your spiritual life, and your sexual impulses - everything you've gotten from the memory stores of evolution.  Then there's the outside world made of buildings and automobiles.  And these two worlds can't rub against each other.  It's too painful.  Therefore you develop a hide exactly like a cow develops a hide.  You don't want her guts to rub against the barn.

~  Robert Bly

spoken to Lewis Hyde in an interview

taken here from Robert Bly - In This World

that lonesome valley

~ Pete Seeger and Joan Baez

the return of the rivers

All the rivers run into the sea;

yet the sea is not full;

unto the place from whence the rivers come,

thither they return again. 

It is raining today

in the mountains. 

It is a warm green rain

with love

in its pockets

for spring is here,

and does not dream

of death.

Birds happen music

like clocks ticking heaves

in a land

where children love spiders,

and let them sleep

in their hair. 

A slow rain sizzles

on the river

like a pan

full of frying flowers,

and with each drop

of rain

the ocean

begins again.

~ Richard Brautigan

moonlight sonata

Ludwig Van Beethoven actually intended for his pieces to be played a lot faster but no orchestra could manage it so they had to slow it down. Here is moonlight sonata 3rd movement played in the original intended tempo. Simply amazing.

~ Valentina Lisitsa

stanzas of the soul / the living flame of love

~ St. John of the Cross

sunflower

What sower walked over earth,

which hands sowed

our inward seeds of fire?

They went out from his fists like rainbow curves

to frozen earth, young loam, hot sand,

they will sleep there

greedily, and drink up our lives

and explode it into pieces

for the sake of a sunflower that you haven't seen

or a thistle head or a chrysanthemum.

Let the young rain of tears come.

Let the calm hands of grief come.

It's not all as evil as you think.

~ Rolf Jacobsen

translated by Robert Bly