Monday, April 8, 2019

within the circles of our lives






Within the circles of our lives
we dance the circles of the years,
the circles of the seasons
within the circles of the years,
the cycles of the moon
within the circles of the seasons,

the circles of our reasons
within the cycles of the moon.

Again, again we come and go,
changed, changing.  Hands
join, unjoin in love and fear,
grief and joy.  The circles turn,
each giving into each, into all.
Only music keeps us here,

each by all the others held.
In the hold of hands and eyes
we turn in pairs, that joining 
joining each to all again.

And then we turn aside, alone,
out of the sunlight gone

into the darker circles of return.



~ Wendell Berry
photo by Ansel Adams


Sunday, April 7, 2019

love - growth and evolution







Love is concerned with growth and evolution. 
It is — though as yet hardly acknowledged in that connection
 — a root-factor of ordinary human growth; 
for in so far as it is a hunger of the individual, 
the satisfaction of that hunger is necessary for individual growth
 — necessary (in its various forms) for physical, mental and spiritual nourishment,
 for health, mental energy, large affectional capacity, and so forth. 
And it is — though this too is not sufficiently acknowledged
 — a root-factor of the Evolution process. 
For in so far as it represents and gives rise to the union 
of two beings in a new form, it plainly represents a step in Evolution, 
and plainly suggests that the direction of that step 
will somehow depend upon the character and quality of the love concerned.
...
Love — even rude and rampant and outrageous love
 — does more for the moralizing of poor humanity 
than a hundred thousand Sunday schools.
 It cleans the little human soul from the clustered lies
 in which it has nested itself — from the petty conceits
 and deceits and cowardices and covert meannesses.
...
Self-consciousness is fatal to love. 
The self-conscious lover never ‘arrives.’
 … And so too the whole modern period of commercial civilization 
and Christianity has been fatal to love… They have bred the self-regarding
 consciousness in the highest degree; and so
 — though they may have had their uses 
and their parts to play in the history of mankind, 
they have been fatal to the communal spirit in society, 
and they have been fatal to the glad expression of the soul in private life.

Self-consciousness is fatal to love,
 which is the true expression of the soul.
 
 
~ Edward Carpenter
from Marriage in Free Society
 with thanks to brainpickings

 Carpenter was a poet and writer, he was a close friend of Rabindranath Tagore, and a friend of Walt Whitman.  He corresponded with many famous figures, such as Annie Besant, Isadora Duncan, Havelock Ellis, Roger Fry, Mahatma Gandhi, Keir Hardie, J. K. Kinney, Jack London, George Merrill, E. D. Morel, William Morris, Edward R. Pease, John Ruskin, and Olive Schreiner.
 
 Comments from Wikipedia
 
 

life in us






The life in us is like the water in the river. 
 It may rise this year higher than man has ever known it, 
and flood the parched uplands; even this may be the eventful year, 
which will drown out all our muskrats.  It was not always dry land 
where we dwell.  I see far inland the banks which the stream 
anciently washed,  before science began to record its freshets.

... Who does not feel his faith in a resurrection and immortality
 strengthened by hearing of this?  Who knows what beautiful
 and winged life, whose egg had been buried for ages 
under many concentric layers of woodenness
 in the dead dry life of society, deposited at first in the alburnum 
of the green and living tree, which has been gradually converted
 into the semblance of its well seasoned tomb - may unexpectedly
 come forth from amidst society's most trivial and handseled furniture,
 to enjoy its perfect summer life at last!



~ Henry David Thoreau
from Walden, "Conclusion," 1854
art by Roderick Maclver




Saturday, April 6, 2019

so both and oneful





..
we are so both and oneful
night cannot be so sky
sky cannot be so sunful
i am through you so i


~ e.e.cummings





.

the hermit





Early in the morning the hermit wakes, hearing
The roots of the fir tree stir beneath his floor.
Someone is there.  That strength buried
In earth carries up the summer world.  When
A man loves a woman, he nourishes her.
Dancers strew the lawn with the light of their feet.
When a woman loves the earth, she nourishes it.
Earth nourishes what no one can see.




~ Robert Bly
from Talking into the Ear of a Donkey





death and deepening





When the body is in the grave, dead and buried, or when there is a death of ego and its perspectives during one's lifetime, then a deeper spirit or soul can come to be.  A deepening of historical being occurs by way of an under-the-worldly point of view.  The descent into the underworld of souls (psychai, animae) is a descent into a soul-perspective or depth-perspective concerning history.  One might say that the descent into hell is actually the ascent of soul.  It brings a sense of soul into ascendancy in life, and it gives the human ego a perspective from a soulful point of view.  The descent is itself a resurrection.


In-fero means  "to carry inward," "to gather in."  Therefore... the descensus may be read as referring, not to some actual physical place, but rather to a "journey to the interior."  The descensus is ad inferos.  It is a "carrying inward."  Hell is a descensus, and encountering it is a "deepening." 


Tradition imagines the descent into hell as a descent into "darkness," or into a "hole," or into a "pit," or into "invisibility" (Hades' name means "invisible"), then no matter how a person may feel about such experiences of being in the "dark," in a "hole," in the "pits," or "invisible" to others, that person is encouraged to search such deep moments for their disclosures and expressions of profound "soul."





~ David Leroy Miller
from Hells and Holy Ghosts: 
A Theopoetics of Christian Belief



a waking







I was walled inside a dream.
Its walls had no consistency,
no weight: its emptiness was its weight.
The walls were hours and the hours
sorrow, hoarded forever.
The time of those hours was not time.

I leapt through a breach: in this world
it was four o’clock. The room was my room
and my ghost was in each thing.
I wasn't there. I looked out the window:
not a soul under the electric light.
Vigilant streetlamps, dirty snow,
houses and cars asleep, the insomnia
of a lamp, the oak that talks to itself,
the wind and its knives, the illegible
writing of the constellations.

The things were buried deep in themselves
and my eyes of flesh saw them
weary of being, realities
stripped of their names. My two eyes
were souls grieving for the world.
On the empty street the presence
passed without passing, vanishing
into its forms, fixed in its changes,
and turned now into houses, oaks, snow, time.
Life and death flowed on, blurred together.

Uninhabited sight, the presence
looked at me with nobody’s eyes:
a bundle of reflections over the cliffs.
I looked inside: the room was my room
and I wasn't there. Being lacks nothing
—always full of itself, always the same—
even though we are not there … Outside,
the clarities, still uncertain:
dawn in the jumble of the rooftops.
The constellations were being erased.




~ Octavio Paz
translated by Eliot Weinberger,
 from  A Tree Within
art by sara fairfax



you find a flower






You find a flower half-buried in leaves,
And in your eye its very fate resides.
Loving beauty, you caress the bloom;
Soon enough, you’ll sweep petals from the floor.

Terrible to love the lovely so,
To count your own years, to say “I’m old,”
To see a flower half-buried in leaves
And come face to face with what you are.



~ 寒山 Han Shan


Han-shan's early life was privileged. He was well educated, traveled, served in the military, went to war, competed unsuccessfully for government jobs, and finally married, moved to the country and became a gentleman farmer. As the years passed, he became increasingly dissatisfied with his life and disappointed in the world of men. One day he packed up some books and began to wander. His wanderings led him to a remote place called Cold Mountain, in the Tien Tai range in southern China, where he built a hut, dug a pond and planted some vegetables. 

~ comments from Wikipedia



Thursday, April 4, 2019

fallen in love








That day I saw beneath dark clouds
the passing light over the water
and I heard the voice of the world speak out,
I knew then, as I had before
life is no passing memory of what has been
nor the remaining pages in a great book
waiting to be read.

It is the opening of eyes long closed.
It is the vision of far off things
seen for the silence they hold.
It is the heart after years
of secret conversing
speaking out loud in the clear air.

It is Moses in the desert
fallen to his knees before the lit bush.
It is the man throwing away his shoes
as if to enter heaven
and finding himself astonished,
opened at last,
fallen in love with solid ground.




~ David Whyte







opening out









The opening out and out,
body yielding body:
the breaking
through which the new
comes, perching
above its shadow
on the piling up
darkened broken old
husks of itself:
bud opening to flower
opening to fruit opening
to the sweet marrow
of the seed -
taken
from what was, from
what could have been.
What is left
is what is.




~ Wendell Berry
art by Van Gogh

.

to leave even one's own first name behind








Of course, it is strange to inhabit the earth no longer,
to give up customs one barely had time to learn, 
not to see roses and other promising Things
in terms of a human future; no longer to be
what one was in infinitely anxious hands; to leave
even one's own first name behind, forgetting it
as easily as a child abandons a broken toy.
Strange to no longer desire one's desires.  Strange 
to see meanings that clung together once, floating away
in every direction.  And being dead is hard work
and full of retrieval before one can gradually feel
a trace of eternity. - Though the living are wrong to believe
in the too-sharp distinctions which they themselves have created.
Angels (they say) don't know whether it is the living 
they are moving among, or the dead.  The eternal torrent
whirls all ages along in it, through both realms
forever, and their voices are drowned out in its thunderous roar.



~ Rainer Maria Rilke
from Duino Elegies, The first Elegy
translation by Stephen Mitchell
art by Matisse



Wednesday, April 3, 2019

love the difficult







What is required of us in that we love the difficult and learn to deal with it.
In the difficult are the friendly forces, the hands that work on us.
Right in the difficult we must have our joys, our happiness, our dreams:
there against the depth of this background, they stand out,
there for the first time we see how beautiful they are.



~ Rainer Maria Rilke









Monday, April 1, 2019

there is this mystery


.


And yet, though we strain
against the deadening grip
of daily necessity,
I sense there is this mystery:

All life is being lived.

Who is living it, then?
Is it the things themselves,
or something waiting inside them,
like an unplayed melody in a flute?

Is it the winds blowing over the waters?
Is it the branches that signal to each other?

Is it flowers
interweaving their fragrances,
or streets, as they wind through time?

Is it the animals, warmly moving,
or the birds, that suddenly rise up?

Who lives it, then?  God, are you the one
who is living life?




~ Rainer Maria Rilke
from The Book of Pilgrimage, II,12


horses at midnight without a moon






Our heart wanders lost in the dark woods.
Our dream wrestles in the castle of doubt.
But there's music in us. Hope is pushed down
but the angel flies up again taking us with her.
The summer mornings begin inch by inch
while we sleep, and walk with us later
as long-legged beauty through
the dirty streets. It is no surprise
that danger and suffering surround us.
What astonishes is the singing.
We know the horses are there in the dark
meadow because we can smell them,
can hear them breathing.
Our spirit persists like a man struggling
through the frozen valley
who suddenly smells flowers
and realizes the snow is melting
out of sight on top of the mountain,
knows that spring has begun.




 ~ Jack Gilbert
from Refusing Heaven


you who let yourselves feel










You who let yourselves feel: enter the breathing
that is more than your own.
Let it brush your cheeks
as it divides and rejoins behind you.

Blessed ones, whole ones,
you where the heart begins:
You are the bow that shoots the arrows
and you are the target.

Fear not the pain. Let its weight fall back
into the earth;
for heavy are the mountains, heavy the seas.

The trees you planted in childhood have grown
too heavy. You cannot bring them along.
Give yourselves to the air, to what you cannot hold.



~ Rainer Maria Rilke
Sonnets to Orpheus, Part One, IV
translation by Joanna Macy