for the explainers

Spell the spiel of cause and effect,

Ride the long rail of fact after fact;

What curled the plume in the drake's tail

And put the white ring round his neck?

~ Wendell Berry

from The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry

far off though very near

Musk lies in the musk deer’s own nave,
But roam in the forest he does – it to seek;
Alike, God pervades heart to heart,
But men of the world this don’t conceive.

In man himself the Master dwells,
But man, deluded, knows not this,
So similar to the musk deer who
Again and again the grass sniffs.
...

God exists, profuse, in each place,
So don’t think He’s less here and more there,
Those who say He’s far – He is far,
Those who know Him near – He’s near.

I knew God to be far away,
But He is ubiquitous – here and there;
Thou didst know Him to be far off,
He’s far off though very near.

 ~ Kabir

fallen out on the road

The small ruby everyone wants has fallen out on the road.

Some say its East of us, others West of us.

Some say "among primitive earth rocks," others "in the deep waters." 

Kabir's instinct told him it was inside, and what it was worth,

And he wrapped it up carefully in his heart cloth.

~ Kabir

from More Than True - The Wisdom of Fairy Tales by Robert Bly

 

 

The dead do not want us dead

The dead do not want us dead;

such petty errors are left for the living.

Nor do they want our mourning.

No gift to them - not rage, not weeping.

Return one of them, any one of them, to the earth,

and look: such foolish skipping,

such telling of bad jokes, such feasting!

Even a cucumber, even a single anise seed: feasting.

~  Jane Hirshfield

coda

Perhaps to love is to learn

to walk through this world.

To learn to be silent

like the oak and the linden of the fable.

To learn to see.

Your glance scattered seeds.

It planted a tree.

I talk

because you shake its leaves.

~ Octavio Paz

the weight

Two horses were put together in the same paddock.

Night and day. In the night and in the day

wet from heat and the chill of the wind

on it. Muzzle to water, snorting, head swinging

and the taste of bay in the shadowed air.

The dignity of being. They slept that way,

knowing each other always.

Withers quivering for a moment,

fetlock and the proud rise at the base of the tail,

width of back. The volume of them, and each other's weight.

Fences were nothing compared to that.

People were nothing. They slept standing,

their throats curved against the other's rump.

They breathed against each other,

whinnied and stomped.

There are things they did that I do not know.

The privacy of them had a river in it.

Had our universe in it. And the way

its border looks back at us with its light.

This was finally their freedom.

The freedom an oak tree knows.

That is built at night by stars.

~ Linda Gregg

from Chosen by the Lion

her portrait by jack richard smith

failure to see

Rather the flying bird, leaving no trace

Than the going beast

Marking the earth with his track.

The bird flies by and forgets

(As is only right).  The beast

Where he no longer is

(And is therefore no use)

Marks that he was there before

(Which is also no use).

For to remember is to betray

Nature, since the nature of yesterday

Is not nature.

What has been, is nothing.

Remembering

Is failure to see.

Move on, bird, move on, teach me

To move on.

~ Fernando Pessoa

as translated by Thomas Merton

art by Marefumi Komura

I want a different thing

Egocentricity is the process of wanting something other than
what is. Egocentricity means there is an "I" who [feels]
separate from everything else and doesn't like it; one thing is
happening, but I want a different thing to be happening
[which causes suffering]. Egocentricity is that constant
concern with how I feel, what I think, what I'm doing, what
I want - looking at what is and seeing it as inadequate.
My identity is maintained by the struggle of wanting
something other than what is [causing suffering].

Instead of spending our time trying to avoid suffering,
we must find the willingness to go directly into it.
Whenever anything causes us to suffer, we can know
two things: suffering is the same as egocentricity, and
when it arises, that is our best opportunity to end suffering.
As we open to suffering, as we embrace it, as we accept it,
our relationship to it changes. It is no longer horrible,
something to escape from. Suffering becomes just
another opportunity [for awareness], another chance for
freedom [from egocentricity].

~ Cheri Huber

art by Van Gogh

Cheri Huber is a Zen teacher and the author of eighteen popular books. 

She founded A Center for the Practice of Zen Buddhist Meditation in Mountain View, California

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

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

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