Wednesday, May 15, 2019

terror within









It has always been much easier (because it has always seemed much safer) to give a name to the evil without than to locate the terror within. 

And yet, the terror within is far truer and far more powerful than any of our labels: the labels change, the terror is constant. And this terror has something to do with that irreducible gap between the self one invents — the self one takes oneself as being, which is, however, and by definition, a provisional self — and the undiscoverable self which always has the power to blow the provisional self to bits. 

It is perfectly possible — indeed, it is far from uncommon — to go to bed one night, or wake up one morning, or simply walk through a door one has known all one’s life, and discover, between inhaling and exhaling, that the self one has sewn together with such effort is all dirty rags, is unusable, is gone: and out of what raw material will one build a self again? 

The lives of men — and, therefore, of nations — to an extent literally unimaginable, depend on how vividly this question lives in the mind. It is a question which can paralyze the mind, of course; but if the question does NOT live in the mind, then one is simply condemned to eternal youth, which is a synonym for corruption.








~ James Baldwin
from The Price of the Ticket
art by picasso






Tuesday, May 14, 2019

a mustard seed






Become as a child,
become deaf, become blind!
Your own substance
must become nothingness;
drive all substance, all nothingness far from you!
Leave space, leave time,
eschew also all physical representation.
Go without a way
the narrow footpath,
then you will succeed in finding the desert.


 ~ Anonymous
(excerpt from Granum Sinapis) - found here in for lovers of god everywhere 
by roger housden


...the writer suggests we have only to let go of all striving and effort and open ourselves to the deep waters of existence. Without technique, without trying to seek anything, being only awake and attentive to the moment, we may enter the desert, the luminous ground of silence.  


pour yourself out like a fountain









Want the change. Be inspired by the flame
where everything shines as it disappears.
The artist, when sketching, loves nothing so much
as the curve of the body as it turns away.

What locks itself in sameness has congealed.
Is it safer to be gray and numb?
What turns hard becomes rigid
and is easily shattered.

Pour yourself out like a fountain.
Flow into the knowledge that what you are seeking
finishes often at the start, and, with ending, begins.

Every happiness is the child of a separation
it did not think it could survive. And Daphne, becoming a laurel,
dares you to become the wind.







~ Rainer Maria Rilke
The Sonnets to Orpheus, Part Two, XII



this bleeding separation




In the school of mind you
learn a lot, and become
a true scholar for many to look up to.
In the school of Love, you become
a child to learn again.

*****

A pious one with a hundred beads on your rosary,
or a drunkard in a tavern,
any gift you bring the Beloved will be accepted
as long as you come in longing.
It is this most secret pain,
this bleeding separation,
which will guide you to your Heart of Hearts.

*****

If you do not give up the crowds
you won't find your way to Oneness.
If you do not drop your self
you won't find your true worth.
If you do not offer all you
have to the Beloved,
you will live this life free of that
pain which makes it worth living.





~ Abu-Said Abil-Kheir
English version by Vraje Abramian
from Nobody, Son of Nobody: 
Poems of Shaikh Abu-Saeed Abil-Kheir



no edges now



 





The clear bead at the center
changes everything.

There are
no edges to my loving now.

You've heard it said there's
a window that opens from one
mind to another, but if there's
no wall, there's no need for
fitting the window, or the latch.



~ Rumi

Monday, May 13, 2019

farewell letter





She wrote me a letter
after her death
and I remember
a kind of happy light
falling on the envelope
as I sat by the rose tree
on her old bench
at the back door,
so surprised by its arrival
wondering what she would say,
looking up before I could open it
and laughing to myself
in silent expectation.

Dear son, it is time
for me to leave you.
I am afraid that the words
you are used to hearing
are no longer mine to give,
they are gone and mingled
back in the world
where it is no longer
in my power
to be their first
original author
not their last loving bearer.
You can hear
motherly
words of affection now
only from your own mouth
and only
when you speak them
to those
who stand
motherless
before you.

As for me I must forsake
adulthood
and be bound gladly
to a new childhood.
You must understand
this apprenticeship
demands of me
an elemental innocence
from everything
I ever held in my hands. 

I know your generous soul
is well able to let me go
you will in the end
be happy to know
my God was true
and I find myself
after loving you all so long,
in the wide,
infinite mercy
of being mothered myself. 


P.S. All your intuitions are true.




~ David Whyte
photo by edward steichen



Sunday, May 12, 2019

mother









if there are any heavens my mother will (all by
herself) have
one. It will not be a pansy heaven nor
a fragile heaven of lilies-of-the-valley but
it will be a heaven of blackred roses

my father will be (deep like a rose
tall like a rose)

standing near my

(swaying over her
silent)
with eyes which are really petals and see

nothing with the face of a poet really which
is a flower and not a face with
hands
which whisper
This is my beloved my

(suddenly in sunlight

he will bow,

and the whole garden will bow) 
 
 
 
 
~ e. e. cummings
 from  Like a perhaps hand: Poems. Gedichte
 
 


Friday, May 10, 2019

no shape





The river has no shape, but it takes on the boundaries which it carves out for itself,
so is the mind boundless, until it creates a prison for its own thoughts.



~ Samurai Warrior Wisdom
 
 





unites us with all living beings





People whom we love are a fire that feeds our lives . . . 
But to feel the affection that comes from those whom we do not know . . . 
That is something still greater and more beautiful 
because it widens out the boundaries of our being, 
and unites us with all living beings.



~ Pablo Neruda



prayer of the heart




In meditation we do not seek to know about God as though he were an object like other objects which submit to our scrutiny and can be expressed in clear scientific ideas. We seek to know God himself, beyond the level of all the objects which he has made and which confront us as “things” isolated from one another, “defined,” “delimited,” with clear boundaries. The infinite God has no boundaries and our minds cannot set limits to him or to his love. His presence is then “grasped” in the general awareness of loving faith; it is “realized” without being scientifically and precisely known, as we know a specimen under a microscope. His presence cannot be verified as we would verify a laboratory experiment. Yet it can be spiritually realized as long as we do not insist on verifying it. As soon as we try to verify the spiritual presence as an object of exact knowledge, God eludes us.

In a word, God is invisibly present to the ground of our being: our belief and love attain to him, but he remains hidden from the arrogant gaze of our investigating mind which seeks to capture him and secure permanent possession of him in an act of knowledge that gives power over him. It is in fact absurd and impossible to try to grasp God as an object which can be seized and comprehended by our minds.

The knowledge of which we are capable is simply knowledge about him. It points to him in analogies which we must transcend in order to reach him. But we must transcend ourselves as well as our analogies, and in seeking to know him we must forget the familiar subject-object relationship which characterizes our ordinary acts of knowing. Instead, we know him insofar as we become aware of ourselves as known through and through by him. We “possess” him in proportion as we realize ourselves to be possessed by him in the inmost depths of our being. Meditation or “prayer of the heart” is the active effort we make to keep our hearts open so that we may be enlightened by him and filled with this realization of our true relationship to him. Therefore the classic form of “meditation” is repetitive invocation of the name of Jesus in the heart emptied of images and cares.

Hence the aim of meditation in the context of Christian faith, is not to arrive at an objective and apparently “scientific” knowledge about God, but to come to know him through the realization that our very being is penetrated with his knowledge and love for us.




~ Thomas Merton
from On Meditation
sketch by the author



an ordinary act







Though he was ill and in pain,
in disobedience to the instruction he
would have received if he had asked,
the old man got up from his bed,
dressed, and went to the barn.
The bare branches of winter had emerged
through the last leaf-colors of fall,
the loveliest of all, browns and yellows
delicate and nameless in the gray light
and the sifting rain.  He put feed
in the troughs for eighteen ewe lambs,
sent the dog for them,. and she
brought them.  They came eager
to their feed, and he who felt 
their hunger was by their feeding 
eased.  From no place in the time
of present places, within no boundary
nameable in human thought,
they had gathered once again,
the shepherd, his sheep, and his dog
with all the known and the unknown
round about to the heavens' limit.
Was this his stubbornness or bravado?
No.  Only an ordinary act
of profoundest intimacy in a day
that might have been better.  Still
the world persisted in its beauty,
he in his gratitude, and for this
he had most earnestly prayed.



~ Wendell Berry
from Leavings


Violence






We are trying to understand violence as a fact, not as an idea, as a fact which exists in the human being, and the human being is myself.  And to go into the problem I must be completely vulnerable, open, to it.  I must expose myself to myself - not necessarily expose myself to you because you may not be interested - but I must be in a state of mind that demands to see this thing right to the end and at no point stops and says I will go no further.

Now it must be obvious to me that I am a violent human being.  I have experienced violence in anger, violence in my sexual demands, violence in hatred, creating enmity, violence in jealousy and so on - I have experienced it, I have known it, and I say to myself, 'I want to understand this whole problem not just one fragment of it expressed in war, but this aggression in man which also exists in the animals and of which I am a part.'

Violence is not merely killing another.  It is violence when we use a sharp word, when we make a gesture to brush away a person, when we obey because there is fear.  So violence isn't merely organized butchery in the name of God, in the name of society or country.  Violence is much more subtle, much deeper, and we are inquiring into the very depths of violence.

When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent.  Do you see why it is violent?  Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind.  When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence.  So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.

The moment you protect your family, your country, a bit of coloured rag called a flag, a belief, an idea, a dogma, the thing that you demand or that you hold, that very protection indicates anger.  So can you look at anger without any explanation or justification, without saying, 'I must protect my ...? Can you look at anger as if it were something by itself?  Can you look at it completely objectively, which means neither defending it nor condemning it? Can you?

But to be beyond violence I cannot suppress it, I cannot deny it, I cannot say, 'Well, it is a part of me and that's that', or  'I don't want it'.  I have to look at it, I have to study it, I must become very intimate with it and I cannot become intimate with it if I condemn it or justify it...  you have to learn how to look at anger, how to look at your husband, your wife, your children; you have to listen to the politician, you have to learn why you are not objective, why you condemn or justify.  You have to learn that you condemn and justify because it is part of the social structure you live in, your conditioning as a German or an Indian or a Negro or an American or whatever you happen to have been born with all the dulling of the mind that this conditioning results in.  

To live completely, fully, in the moment is to live with what is, the actual, without any sense of condemnation or justification... the face of violence is not only outside you but inside you.




~ J. Krishnamurti
excerpt from: Freedom from the Known




Thursday, May 9, 2019

I am, you anxious one







I am, you anxious one.

Don't you sense me, ready to break
into being at your touch?
My murmurings surround you like shadowy wings.
Can't you see me standing before you
cloaked in stillness?
Hasn't my longing ripened in you
from the beginning
as fruit ripens on a branch?

I am the dream you are dreaming.
When you want to awaken, I am that wanting:
I grow strong in the beauty you behold.
And with the silence of stars I enfold
your cities made by time.




~ Rainer Maria Rilke
art by Luca Longobardi

Tuesday, May 7, 2019

bad year






Even in this bad year,
the apples grow heavy and round.
Three friends and I trade stories:
biopsy, miscarriage, solitude,
a parent's unravelling body or mind.
What is reliable? What do you hold?
I demand of the future, later.
The future - whose discretion is perfect -
says nothing, but rolls another
apple loose from its grip.
A hopeful yellow jacket comes to hunt
the crack, the point of easy entry.




~ Jane Hirshfield
from  After


darkmotherscream




Darkmotherscream is a Siberian dance,
cry from prison or a yell for help,
or, perhaps, God has another word for it -
ominous little grin – darkmotherscream.

Darkmotherscream is the ecstasy of the sexual gut;
We let the past sink into darkmotherscream also.
You, we – oooh with her eyes closed
woman moans in ecstasy – darkmother, darkmotherscream.

Darkmotherscream is the original mother of languages.
It is silly to trust mind, silly to argue against it.
Prognosticating by computers
We leave out darkmotherscream.

“How’s it going?” Darkmotherscream.
“Motherscream! Motherscream!”
“OK, we’ll do it, we’ll do it.”

The teachers can’t handle darkmotherscream.
That is why Lermontov is untranslatable.
When the storm sang in Yelabuga,
What did it say to her? Darkmotherscream.

Meanwhile go on dancing, drunker and drunker.
“Shagadam magadam – darkmotherscream.”
Don’t forget – Rome fell
not having grasped the phrase: darkmotherscream.



~ Andrei Voznesensky
translated by Robert Bly and Vera Dunham
art by Jackson Pollock