to breathe nothing but silence

.

Minds which are separated pretend to blend in one another's language.

The marriage of souls in concepts is mostly an illusion.

Thoughts which travel outward bring back reports from You from outward things, but a dialogue with You, uttered through the world, always ends by being a dialogue with my own reflection in the stream of time.  With You there is no dialogue, unless You choose a mountain, circle it with cloud and print Your words in fire upon the mind of Moses.

What was delivered to Moses on tablets of stone, as the fruit of lighting and thunder, 

is now more thoroughly born in our souls 

as quietly as the breath of our own being.

from Dialogues with Silence

To deliver oneself up, to hand oneself over, entrust oneself completely to the silence of a wide landscape of woods and hills, or sea, or desert; to sit still while the sun comes up over the land and fills its silences with light.  To pray and work in the morning and to labor in meditation in the evening when night falls upon that land and when the silence fills itself with darkness and with stars.  This is a true and special vocation.  There are few who are willing to belong completely to such silence, to let it soak into their bones, to breathe nothing but silence, to feed on silence, and to turn the very substance of their life into a living and vigilant silence.

Thomas Merton

from Thoughts in Solitude

sketch by the author

.

silence

.

The only silence we know is the silence when noise stops, the silence when thought stops - but that is not silence. Silence is something entirely different, like beauty, like love.  And this silence is not the product of a quiet mind, it is not the product of the brain cells which have understood the whole structure and say, 'for God's sake be quiet'; then the brain cells themselves produce the silence and that is not silence.  Nor is silence the outcome of attention in which the observer is observed; then there is no friction, but that is not silence.

You are waiting for me to describe what this silence is so that you can compare it, interpret it, carry it away and bury it.  It cannot be described.  What can be described is the known, and freedom from the known can come into being only when there is a dying every day to the known, to the hurts, the flatteries, to all the images you have made, to all your experiences - dying every day so that the brain cells themselves become fresh, young, innocent.  But that innocency, that freshness, that quality of tenderness and gentleness, does not produce love;  it is not the quality of beauty or silence.

That silence which is not the silence of the ending of noise is only a small beginning.  It is like going through a small hole to an enormous, wide, expansive ocean, to an immeasurable, timeless state.  But this you cannot understand verbally unless you have understood the whole structure of consciousness and the meaning of pleasure, sorrow and despair, and the brain cells themselves have become quiet.  Then perhaps you may come upon that mystery which nobody can reveal to you and nothing can destroy.  A living mind is a still mind, a living mind is a mind that has no center and therefore no space and time.  Such a mind is the limitless and that is the only truth, that is the only reality.

~ J. Krishnamurti

from Freedom from the Known

photo by Shreve Stockton

silence II

Silence is not a lack of words. 

Silence is not a lack of music. 

Silence is not a lack of curses. 

Silence is not a lack of screams. 

Silence is not a lack of colors 

or voices or bodies or whistling wind. 

Silence is not a lack of anything. 

Silence is resting, nestling 

in every leaf of every tree, 

in every root and branch. 

Silence is the flower sprouting 

upon the branch. 

Silence is the mother singing 

to her newborn babe. 

Silence is the mother crying 

for her stillborn babe. 

Silence is the life of all 

these babes, whose breath 

is a breath of God. 

Silence is seeing and singing praises. 

Silence is the roar of ocean waves. 

Silence is the sandpiper dancing 

on the shore. 

Silence is the vastness of a whale. 

Silence is a blade of grass. 

Silence is sound 

And silence is silence. 

Silence is love, even 

the love that hides in hate. 

Silence is the pompous queen 

and the harlot and the pimp 

hugging his purse on a crowded street. 

Silence is the healer dreaming 

the plant, the drummer drumming 

the dream. It is the lover's 

exhausted fall into sleep. 

It is the call of morning birds. 

Silence is God's beat tapping all hearts. 

Silence is the star kissing a flower. 

Silence is a word, a hope, a candle 

lighting the window of home. 

Silence is everything --the renewing sleep 

of Earth, the purifying dream of Water, 

the purifying rage of Fire, the soaring 

and spiraling flight of Air. It is all 

things dissolved into no-thing--Silence 

is with you always.....the Presence 

of I AM 

~ Elaine Maria Upton

a state of magical simplicity

To practice Zen means to realize one's existence 

moment after moment,

 rather than letting life unravel in regret of the past 

and daydreaming of the future.

To "rest in the present"

 is a state of magical simplicity, 

although attainment of this state is not as simple as it sounds.

~  Peter Matthiessen
 from 'Nine-Headed Dragon River'

saunter reverently

I don't like either the word [hike] or the thing.

People ought to saunter in the mountains - not 'hike!' 
 

Do you know the origin of that word saunter?

 It's a beautiful word. Away back in the middle ages 

people used to go on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, 

and when people in the villages through which they passed 

asked where they were going they would reply,
 

 'A la sainte terre', 'To the Holy Land.'
 

 And so they became known as sainte-terre-ers or saunterers. 

Now these mountains are our Holy Land,
 

and we ought to saunter through them reverently,

 not 'hike' through them.

― John Muir 

the wind

The day we die

the wind comes down

to take away

our footprints.

The wind makes dust

to cover up

the markings we left

while walking.

For otherwise 

the thing would seem

as if we were

still living.

Therefore the wind

is he who comes

to blow away

our footprints.

~ Southern Bushmen

from A Book of Luminous Things

edited by Czeslaw Milosz 

 

sufficient

Strong and content I travel the open road.

The earth, that is sufficient,

I do not want the constellations any nearer,

I know they are very well where they are,

I know they suffice for those who belong to them.

You road I enter upon and look around, I believe you are not all that is here,

I believe that much unseen is also here.

All seems beautiful to me,

I can repeat over to men and women You have done such good to me I would do the same to you,

I will recruit for myself and you as I go,

I will scatter myself among men and women as I go,

I will toss a new gladness and roughness among them,

Whoever denies me it shall not trouble me,

Whoever accepts me he or she shall be blessed and shall bless me.

Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons,

It is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.

Here is the test of wisdom,

Wisdom is not finally tested in schools,

Wisdom cannot be pass’d from one having it to another not having it,

Wisdom is of the soul, is not susceptible of proof, is its own proof,

Applies to all stages and objects and qualities and is content,

Is the certainty of the reality and immortality of things, and the excellence of things;

Something there is in the float of the sight of things that provokes it out of the soul.

Now I re-examine philosophies and religions,

They may prove well in lecture-rooms, yet not prove at all under the spacious clouds and along the landscape and flowing currents.

Here is realization,

Here is a man tallied—he realizes here what he has in him,

The past, the future, majesty, love—if they are vacant of you, you are vacant of them.

Only the kernel of every object nourishes;

Where is he who tears off the husks for you and me?

Where is he that undoes stratagems and envelopes for you and me?

The efflux of the soul is happiness, here is happiness,

I think it pervades the open air, waiting at all times,

Now it flows unto us, we are rightly charged.

Here rises the fluid and attaching character,

The fluid and attaching character is the freshness and sweetness of man and woman,

(The herbs of the morning sprout no fresher and sweeter every day out of the roots of themselves, than it sprouts fresh and sweet continually out of itself.)

Toward the fluid and attaching character exudes the sweat of the love of young and old,

From it falls distill’d the charm that mocks beauty and attainments,

Toward it heaves the shuddering longing ache of contact.

~ Walt Whitman
excerpts from Song of the Open Road 


 

half life

We walk through half our life

as if it were a fever dream

barely touching the ground

our eyes half open

our heart half closed.

Not half knowing who we are

we watch the ghost of us drift

from room to room

through friends and lovers

never quite as real as advertised.

Not saying half we mean

or meaning half we say

we dream ourselves

from birth to birth

seeking some true self.

Until the fever breaks

and the heart can not abide

a moment longer

as the rest of us awakens,

summoned from the dream,

not half caring for anything but love.

- Stephen Levine

from Breaking the Drought

kinship

~ Homeboy Industries

perishable

The nimble ovenbird, the dignity of pears,

The simplicity of oars, the imperishable

Engines inside slim fir seeds, all of these

Make clear how much we want the impermanent

To be permanent.  We want the hermit wren

To keep her eggs even during the storm.

But that's impossible. We are perishable;

Friends, we are salty, impermanent kingdoms.

~ Robert Bly

from Talking into the Ear of a Donkey

 

in time a man disappears

In time a man disappears

from his lifelong fields, from 

the streams he has walked beside,

from the woods where he sat and waited.

Thinking of this, he seems to 

miss himself in those places

as if always he has been there.

But first he must disappear,

and this he foresees with hope,

with thanks.  Let others come.

.

~ Wendell Berry

from Leavings

.

small beauties

After she’s gone to camp, in the early
evening I clear our girl’s breakfast dishes
from the rosewood table, and find a dinky
crystallized pool of maple syrup, the
grains standing there, round, in the night, I
rub it with my fingertip
as if I could read it, this raised dot of
amber sugar, and this time,
when I think of my father, I wonder why
I think of my father, of the Vulcan blood-red
glass in his hand, or his black hair gleaming like a
broken-open coal. I think I learned to
love the little things about him
because of all the big things
I could not love, no one could, it would be wrong to.
So when I fix on this image of resin
or sweep together with the heel of my hand a
pile of my son’s sunburn peels like
insect wings, where I peeled his back the night before camp, 

I am doing something I learned early to do, I am
paying attention to small beauties,
whatever I have - as if it were our duty to
find things to love, to bind ourselves to this world. 

 

 

 

--Sharon Olds

 'Little Things' from The Gold Cell

 

can you

2nd century BC Ink-on-silk manuscript of the Tao Te Ching

Can you keep your soul in its body,
hold fast to the one,
and so learn to be whole?
Can you center your energy,
be soft, tender,
and so learn to be a baby?

Can you keep the deep water still and clear,
so it reflects without blurring?
Can you love people and run things,
and do so by not doing?

Opening, closing the Gate of Heaven,
can you be like a bird with her nestlings?
Piercing bright through the cosmos,
can you know by not knowing?

To give birth, to nourish,
to bear and not to own,
to act and not lay claim,
to lead and not to rule:
this is mysterious power.

~   Lao Tzu

 from Tao Te Ching

 version by Ursula K. Le Guin

with thanks to brain pickings

the single face

The world is no more than the Beloved's single face;

In the desire of the One to know its own beauty, we exist.

Each place, each moment, sings its particular song of not-being and being.

Without reason, the clear glass equally mirrors wisdom and madness.

Those who claim knowledge are wrong; prayer just leads to trance;

Appearance and faith are mere lees in the Unknowing Wine.

Wherever the Footprint is found,

that handful of dust holds the oneness of worlds.

This earth, burnished by hearing the Name, is so certain of Love

That the sky bends unceasingly down, to greet its own light.

~ Ghalib

translated by Jane Hirshfield

from The Enlightened Heart,

An anthology of sacred poetry edited

by Stephen Mitchell

photo by eliot porter

skin around the organ

What we often forget is that thought is to be used
to correct life. It's not a way of life.

If you make thought the center of your life,
you're not going to live it.

So, what you have to do is be this kind of hysterical, emotional, vibrant creature
who lives at the top of his lungs for a lifetime and then
corrects around the edges so that he doesn't go insane
or drive his friends mad.

Thought is the skin around the organ.
The organ is full of blood and a beating heart,
a soul and the exaltation of being alive!




~ Ray Bradbury