Monday, April 29, 2019

the heat of midnight tears





Listen, my friend, this road is the heart opening,
kissing his feet, resistance broken, tears all night.

If we could reach the Lord through immersion in water,
I would have asked to be born a fish in this life.
If we could reach Him through nothing but berries and wild nuts
then surely the saints would have been monkeys when they came
from the womb!

If we could reach him by munching lettuce and dry leaves
then goats would surely get to the Holy One before us!

If the worship of stone stature could bring us all the way,
I would have adored a granite mountain years ago.

Mirabai says, "The heat of midnight tears will bring you to God."




~ Mirabai
translation by Robert Bly





unite yourselves to the formless being






Whoever now wishes to see properly what is the excellence
 and the profit of perfect detachment, let him take good heed 
of Christ's words when he spoke about his human nature
 and said to his disciples:  

"It is expedient for you that I go from you, 
for if I do not go, the Holy Spirit cannot come to you."  
(John 16:7) 

 This is just as if he were to say: 

"You have taken too much delight in my present image, 
so that the perfect delight of the Holy Spirit cannot be yours.  
So detach yourselves from the image, 
and unite yourselves to the formless being, 
for God's spiritual consolation is delicate; 
therefore he will not offer it to anyone except to him
 who disdains bodily consolations."



~ Meister Eckhart
from Meister Eckhart - 
Selections from his Essential Writings



dance of the cells



.






My friend, this body is made of bone and excited protozoa 
and it is with my body that I love the fields. 
How do I know what I feel but what the body tells me?
 Erasmus thinking in the snow, translators of Virgil 
who burn up the whole room, the man in furs reading the Arabic
 astrologer falls off his three-legged stool in astonishment, 
this is the body, so beautifully carved inside, 
with the curves of the inner ear, 
and the husk so rough,
 knuckle-brown.

As we walk, we enter the fields of other bodies, 
and every smell we take in the communities of protozoa see,
 and a being inside leaps up toward it, as a horse rears at the starting gate. 
When we come near each other, we are drawn down into 
the sweetest pools of slowly circling smells . . . slowly circling energies . . . 
The protozoa know there are odors the shape of oranges,
 of tornadoes, of octopuses . . .

The sunlight lay itself down before every protozoa, 
the night opens itself out behind it, 
and inside its own energy it lives!

So the space between two people diminishes,
 it grows less and less, no one to weep, they merge at last. 
The sound that pours from the fingertips awakens 
clouds of cells far inside the body, and beings unknown to us
 start out in a pilgrimage to their Saviour, to their holy place.
 Their holy place is a small black stone, that they remember
 from Protozoic times, when it was rolled away from a door . . . 
and it was after that they found their friends, who helped them
 to digest the hard grains of this world . . . 

The cloud of cells awakens, intensifies, swarms . . .
 the beings dance inside beams of sunlight so thin we cannot see them . . . 
to them each ray is a vast palace, with thousands of rooms. 
From the dance of the cells praise sentences rise to the voice
 of the man praying and singing alone in his room. 
He lets his arms climb above his head, and says,
 “Now do you still say cannot choose the road?”







~ Robert Bly
(for Lewis Thomas, and his The Lives of the Cell)
taken here from The News of the Universe:
 Poems of Twofold Consciousness 
photo: red amoeba




Sunday, April 28, 2019

as the web issues out of the spider




.


As the web issues out of the spider
And is withdrawn, as plants sprout
from the earth,
As hair grows from the body, even so,
The sages say, this universe springs from
The deathless Self, the source of life.



~ Mundaka Upanishad




Friday, April 26, 2019

and so I smile





The story about a man who was looking for his stray camel and asking after it.

You've lost a camel - now you seek it out;
On finding it, that it's yours you won't doubt.
You've lost the camel you are used to riding;
It has escaped your hold and now is hiding.
The caravan is ready to move on;
They have all packed up, but your camel's gone -
With parched lips you are searching left and right;
The caravan set off, and soon it's night.
Your things have just been left there on the ground,
While in your search you have been wandering round,
Asking: 'Who's seen a camel come this way?
It fled its stable earlier today.
About my camel pass me information
And I'll give you a generous compensation.'
You seek a clue like this from everyone,
So all the scoundrels see you and poke fun,
Jesting: 'We saw a camel head that way,
A reddish camel, searching for some hay.'
One asks, 'Was it crop-eared and quite perplexed?
'Its saddle was embroidered,' claims the next.
Another asks, 'Did it have just one eye?'
The next, 'Was it sick and about to die?'
Each wretch in hope of a reward from you
Presents to you his fabricated clue.



Explanation of the moral of the story about that person searching for his camel.

You've lost a camel that belongs to you
And everyone is offering you a clue;
You don't know where that camel chose to go,
But that their clues are false you clearly know.
A man who hasn't lost a camel now
Competes with you in searching anyhow;
He'll claim, 'I've lost a camel, everyone!
I'll give a big reward for her return.'
To share your camel is this mimic's aim;
Because he covets yours, he plays this game.
From false clues he can't tell a truthful clue,
But, for this mimic, your words serve as cue:
If you declare, 'That clues's false!' you will see 
Him do the same, but it's mimicry.
And if a man gives clues you think are true,
Sureness which leaves no doubt then comes to you:
Such clues heal your sick soul of all its pain;
You health, strength, and complexion you regain,
Your eyes light up, your feet feel quick anew,
Body like soul, and soul like spirit too!
'You were right, truthful friend!' you then will say,
In which are signs of truthful information.
You have truth's license and you've earned salvation!'
When someone's given such a clue, you'll say:
'It's time for action, so please lead the way!
Truth-teller, I will follow from behind;
With this clue my lost camel you will find.'
To that man who did not before possess
That camel, but who seeks it none the less,
More certainty will not come from this clue
Unless it's through a man whose search is true:
He'll see from your zeal that the clue is serious,
And that your screams of joy are not delirious.

That liar has no claim, but still I say
He's also lost a camel in a way;
Desire for someone else's veils his mind,
So he's forgotten what he's left behind.
The owner runs to search; he follows there;
Through greed, the owner's pain he starts to share:
A liar in the truthful's company
Will find his lies become truths suddenly.
Where your stray camel is when you've been brought,
This mimic finds his stray, which he'd not sought;
He first recalls her when he sees her, then
He covets no more those of other men.
That mimic's search first starts thus when his eyes
Notice his own lost camel by surprise:
He only seeks to find his camel when
By chance he sees her; he'd not searched till then.

From that point he learns to move on alone,
Now having opened his eyes to his own.
The truthful man asks, 'Have you left at last?
Is your concern about me in the past?'
He says, 'Till now I simply would pretend;
Desire made me your sycophantic friend,
But now I sympathize deep in my heart,
Though, through this search, we have been led apart.
I stole descriptions of her straight from you;
My soul was stunned, though, when mine came to view.
I wasn't seeking her, if truth be told -
Copper has now been overwhelmed by gold:
My evil deeds were righteous deeds somehow -
Folly has left and seriousness rules now!
My sins became the means to reach the Lord -
Don't criticize them any more, applaud!
Sincerity made you a seeker, while
My search led me to it, and so I smile:
Your search was due to your sincerity;
Sincerity, through seeking, came to me!
I sowed my fortune's seed in fertile soil,
Although I'd thought it would be fruitless toil.
It wasn't unpaid work to my surprise:
I sowed one seed and saw a hundred rise.
A thief had sneaked into a house at night -
He saw it was his own house in the light.'

Be warm, cold one, so more heat reaches you;
Accept the rough, so smoothness finds you too!
There was one camel in reality;
Words can't reach meaning's depth...




~ Rumi
from The Masnavi, Book Two
translation by Jawid Mojaddedi



too close to be explained







The contemplative life has nothing to tell you except to reassure you
and say that if you dare to penetrate your own silence
and dare to advance without fear into the solitude of your own heart
and risk the share of that solitude
with the lonely other who seeks God through you and with you,
then you will truly recover the light and the capacity to understand
what is beyond words and beyond explanations
because it is too close to be explained:
it is the intimate union in the depths of your heart,
of God’s spirit and your own innermost self,
so that you and He are in truth One Spirit.




~ Thomas Merton
from
The Hidden Ground of Love: Letters 
 art by Jenny Meechan

beneath your chosen path





When the garden of your unchosen lives has enough space to breathe beneath your chosen path, your life enjoys a vitality and a sense of creative tension.  Rilke refers to this as "the repository of unlived things."  You know that you have not compromised the immensity that you carry, and in which you participate.  You have not avoided the call of commitment; yet you hold your loyalty to your chosen path in such a way as to be true to the blessings and dangers of life's passionate sacramentality.
 No life is single.  Around and beneath each life is the living presence of these adjacencies.  Often, it is not the fact of our choosing that is vital, but rather the way we hold that choice.  In so far as we can, we should ensure that our chosen path is not a flight from complexity.  If we opt for complacency, we exclude ourselves from the adventure of being human. Where all danger is neutralized, nothing can ever grow.  
To keep the borders of choice porous demands critical vigilance and affective hospitality. To live in such a way invites risk and engages complexity.  Life cannot be neatly compartmentalized.  Once the psyche is engaged with such invitation and courage, it is no longer possible to practice tidy psychological housekeeping.  To keep one's views and convictions permeable is to risk the intake of new possibility, which can lead to awkward change.  Yet the integrity of growth demands such courage and vulnerability from us; otherwise the tissues of our sensibility atrophy and we become trapped behind the same predictable mask of behavior.



~ John O'Donohue
from Eternal Echoes



Thursday, April 25, 2019

The new rule




It's the old rule that drunks have to argue
and get into fights.
The lover is just as bad. he falls into a hole.
But down in that hole he finds something shining,
worth more than any amount of money or power.

Last night the moon came dropping its clothes in the street.
I took it as a sign to start singing,
falling up into the bowl of sky.
The bowl breaks. Everywhere is falling everywhere.
Nothing else to do.

Here's the new rule: break the wineglass,
and fall toward the glassblower's breath.

Inside this new love, die.
Your way begins on the other side.
Become the sky.
Take an axe to the prison wall.
Escape.
Walk out like someone suddenly born into color.
Do it now.
You're covered with thick cloud.
Slide out the side. Die,
and be quiet. Quietness is the surest sign
that you've died.
Your old life was a frantic running
from silence.
The speechless full moon
comes out now.

"I used to want buyers for my words.
Now I wish someone would buy me away from words.

I've made a lot of charmingly profound images,
scenes with Abraham, and Abraham's father, Azar,
who was also famous for icons.

I'm so tired of what I've been doing.

Then one image without form came,
and I quit.

Look for someone else to tend the shop.
I'm out of the image-making business.

Finally I know the freedom
of madness.

A random image arrives. I scream,
"Get out!" It disintegrates.

Only love.
Only the holder the flag fits into,
and wind. No flag. "




~  Rumi

version by Coleman Barks


when death is denied







When death is denied, life loses its depth. 
 The possibility of knowing who we are beyond name and form, 
the dimension of the transcendent, disappears from our lives because death is the opening into that dimension. 

People tend to be uncomfortable with endings, because every ending is a little death. 
 That's why in many languages the word for “good-bye” means “see you again.” 

Whenever an experience comes to an end -
 a gathering of friends, a vacation, your children leaving home - you die a little death. 
 A “form” that appeared in your consciousness as that experience dissolves. 
 Often this leaves behind a feeling of emptiness that most people try hard not to feel, not to face. 

If you can learn to accept and even welcome the endings in your life, 
you may find that the feeling of emptiness that initially felt uncomfortable turns into a sense of inner spaciousness that is deeply peaceful.

By learning to die daily in this way, you open yourself to life….
Whenever death occurs, whenever a life form dissolves, 
God, the formless and unmanifested, shines through the opening left by the dissolving form. 

 That is why the most sacred thing in life is death. 
 That is why the peace of God can come to you through contemplation and acceptance of death.







~ Eckhart Tolle




why we don't die





In late September many voices
Tell you you will die.
That leaf says it.  That coolness.
All of them are right.

Our many souls - what
Can they do about it?
Nothing.  They're already
Part of the invisible.

Our souls have been
Longing to go home
Anyway.  "It's late," they say.
"Lock the door, let's go."

The body doesn't agree.  It says,
"We buried a little iron
Ball under that tree.
Let's go get it."




~ Robert Bly
from Morning Poems



response and reconciliation





I

Ah life! Does no one answer?
His words rolled, bolts of lightning etched
in years that were boulders and now are mist.

Life never answers.
It has no ears and doesn't hear us;
it doesn't speak, it has no tongue.
It neither goes nor stays:
we are the ones who speak,
the ones who go,
while we hear from echo to echo, year to year,
our words rolling through a tunnel with no end.

That which we call life
hears itself within us, speaks with our tongues,
and through us, knows itself.
As we portray it, we become its mirror, we invent it.
An invention of an invention: it creates us
without knowing what it has created,
we are an accident that thinks.

It is a creature of reflections
we create by thinking,
and it hurls into fictitious abysses.
The depths, the transparencies
where it floats or sinks: not life, its idea.

It is always on the other side and is always other,
has a thousand bodies and none,
never moves and never stops,
it is born to die, and is born at death.
Is life immortal? Don't ask life,
for it doesn't even know what life is.

We are the ones who know
that one day it too must die and return
to the beginning, the inertia of the origin.
The end of yesterday, today, and tomorrow,
the dissipation of time
and of nothing, its opposite.

Then--will there be a then?
will the primogenious spark light
the matrix of the worlds,
a perpetual re-beginning of a senseless whirling?
No one answers, no one knows.
We only know that to live is to live for.


II

Sudden spring, a girl who wakes
on a green bed guarded by thorns;
tree of noon, heavy with oranges:
your tiny suns, fruits of cool fire,
summer gathers them in transparent baskets;
the fall is severe, its cold light
sharpens its knife against the red maples;
Januaries and Februaries: their beards are ice,
and their eyes sapphires that April liquefies,
the wave that rises, the wave that stretches out,
appearances-disappearances
on the circular road of the year

All that we see, all that we forget,
the harp of the rain, the inscription of the lightning,
the hurried thoughts, reflections turned to birds,
the doubts of the path as it meanders,
the wailing of the wind
as it carves the faces of the mountains,
the moon on tiptoe over the lake,
the breezes in gardens, the throbbing of night,
the camps of stars on the burnt field,
the battle of reflections on the white salt flats,
the fountain and its monologue,
the held breath of outstretched night
and the river that entwines it, the pine under the evening star
and the waves, instant statues, on the sea,
the flock of clouds that the wind herds
through drowsy valleys, the peaks, the chasms,
time turned to rock, frozen eras,
time maker of roses and plutonium,
time that makes as it razes.

The ant, the elephant, the spider, and the sheep,
our strange world of terrestrial creatures
that are born, eat, kill, sleep, play, couple,
and somehow know that they die;
our world of humanity, far and near,
the animal with eyes in its hands

that tunnels through the past and examines the future,
with its histories and uncertainties,
the ecstasy of the saint, the sophisms of the evil,
the elation of lovers, their meetings, their contentions,
the insomnia of the old man counting his mistakes,
the criminal and the just, a double enigma,
the Father of the People, his crematory parks,
his forests of gallows and obelisks of skulls,
the victorious and the defeated,
the long sufferings and the one happy moment,
the builder of houses and the one who destroys them,
this paper where I write, letter by letter,
which you glance at with distracted eyes,
all of them and all of it, all
is the work of time that begins and ends.



III

From birth to death time surrounds us
with its intangible walls.
We fall with the centuries, the years, the minutes.
Is time only a falling, only a wall?

For a moment, sometimes, we see

not with our eyes but with our thoughts-
time resting in a pause.
The world half-opens and we glimpse
the immaculate kingdom,
the pure forms, presences
unmoving, floating
on the hour, a river stopped:
truth, beauty, numbers, ideas

-and goodness, a word buried
in our century.

A moment without weight or duration,
a moment outside the moment:
thought sees, our eyes think.
Triangles, cubes, the sphere, the pyramid
and the other geometrical figures
thought and drawn by mortal eyes
but which have been here since the beginning,
are, still legible, the world, its secret writing,
the reason and the origin of the turning of things,
the axis of the changes, the unsupported pivot
that rests on itself, a reality without a shadow.

The poem, the piece of music, the theorem,
unpolluted presences born from the void,
are delicate structures
built over an abyss:
infinities fit into their finite forms,
and chaos too is ruled by their hidden symmetry.

Because we know it, we are not an accident:
chance, redeemed, returns to order.
Tied to the earth and to time,
a light and weightless ether,
thought supports the worlds and their weight,
whirlwinds of suns turned
into a handful of signs
on a random piece of paper.

Wheeling swarms
of transparent evidence
where the eyes of understanding
drink a water simple as water.

The universe rhymes with itself,
it unfolds and is two and is many
without ceasing to be one.

Motion, a river that runs endlessly
with open eyes through the countries of vertigo

-there is no above nor below, what is near is far--
returns to itself

-without returning, now turned
into a fountain of stillness.

Tree of blood, man feels, thinks, flowers,
and bears strange fruits: words.
What is thought and what is felt entwine,
we touch ideas: they are bodies and they are numbers.

And while I say what I say
time and space fall dizzyingly,
restlessly. They fall in themselves.
Man and the galaxy return to silence.

Does it matter? Yes--but it doesn't matter:
we know that silence is music and that
we are a chord in this concert.




–Octavio Paz
awarded the 1990 Nobel Prize for literature.
Response and Reconciliation was the last poem he published
before his death on April 19,1998

translated by Eliot Weinberger




vast inner solitude










What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours — that is what you must be able to attain.

You should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is something in you that wants to move out of it. This very wish, if you use it calmly and prudently and like a tool, will help you spread out your solitude over a great distance.




~ Rainer Maria Rilke
from his Letters To A Young Poet



Wednesday, April 24, 2019

the secret beauty








~ Jack Kornfield



 

Tuesday, April 23, 2019

for the anniversary of my death








Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveler
Like the beam of a lightless star

Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
And the shamelessness of men
As today writing after three days of rain
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
And bowing not knowing to what 


  ~ W.S. Merwin
 from The Second Four Books of Poems
 art by Hughie O'Donoghue

parts of a tune





One old man keeps humming the same few notes
of some song he thought he had forgotten 
back in the days when as he knows there was 
no word for life in the language
and if they wanted to say eyes or heart
they would hold up a leaf and he remembers
the big tree where it rose from the dry ground
and the way the birds carried water in their voice
they were all the color of their fear of the dark
and as he sits there humming he remembers
some of the words they come back to him now
he smiles hearing them come and go


~ W.S. Merwin
from The Shadow of Sirius