Friday, May 17, 2019

steps out of the circle









The self steps out of the circle;
it stops wanting to be
the farmer, the wife, and the child.

It stops trying to please
by learning everyone's dialect;
it finds it can live, after all,
in a world of strangers.

It sends itself fewer flowers;
it stops preserving its tears in amber.

How splendidly arrogant it was
when it believed the gold-filled tomb
of language awaited its raids!
Now it frequents the junkyards
knowing all words are secondhand.

It has not chosen its poverty,
this new frugality.
It did not want to fall out of love
with itself. Young,
it celebrated itself
and richly sang itself,
seeing only itself
in the mirror of the world.

It cannot return. It assumes
its place in the universe of stars
that do not see it. Even the dead
no longer need it to be at peace.
Its function is to applaud.





~ Lisel Mueller
 from Alive Together: New and Selected Poems
 



Thursday, May 16, 2019

for the asking






Augustine said his soul
was a house so cramped
God could barely squeeze in.
Knock down the mean partitions,
he prayed, so You may enter!
Raise the oppressive ceilings!

Augustine's soul 
 didn't become a mansion large enough
to welcome, along with God, the woman he'd loved,
except for his mother (though one, perhaps,
his son's mother, did remain to inhabit
a small dark room).  God, therefore,
would never have felt
fully at home as his guest.

Nevertheless,
it's clear desire
fulfilled itself in the asking, revealing prayer's
dynamic action, that scoops out channels
like water on stone, or builds like layers
of grainy sediment steadily
forming sandstone. The walls, with each thought,
each feeling, each word he set down,
expanded, unnoticed; the roof
rose, and a skylight opened.




~ Denise Levertov
from for lovers of god everywhere
by roger housden
 art by Yayoi Kusama


 

the fabric of things








I thought I’d lost you. But you said: I’m imbued
in the fabric of things, the way
that wax lost from batik shapes

the pattern where the dye won’t take.
I make the space around you,

and so allow you shape. And always
you’ll feel the traces of that wax
soaked far into the weave:
the air around your gestures,

the silence after you speak.
That’s me, the slight wind between
your hand and what you’re reaching for,
chair and paper, book or cup:

that close, where I am: between
where breath ends, air starts.







~ Mark Doty
art by: Dali




a standing ground




Flee fro the prees, and dwelle with sothfastnesse;
Suffyce unto thy thyng, though hit be smal...

~ Geoffrey Chaucer
from Good Counsel of Chaucer




However just and anxious I have been,
I will stop and step back
from the crowd of those who may agree
with what I say, and be apart.
There is no earthly promise of life or peace
but where the roots branch and weave
their patient silent passages in the dark;
uprooted, I have been furious without an aim.
I am not bound for any public place,
but for ground of my own
where I have planted vines and orchard trees,
and in the heat of the day climbed up
into the healing shadow of the woods.
Better than any argument is to rise at dawn
and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.



~ Wendell Berry
from Farming Poems




thorn witness





.


Apparent shapes and meanings change.
Creature hunts down creature. Bales

get unloaded and weighed to determine
price. None of any of this pertains

to the unseen fire we call the Beloved.
That presence has no form, and cannot

be understood or measured. Take
your hands away from your face. If

a wall of dust moves across the plain,
there's usually an army advancing

under it. When you look for the Friend,
the Friend is looking for you. Carried

by a strong current, you and the others
with you seem to be making decisions,

but you're not. I weave coarse wool.
I decide to talk less. By my actions

cause nothing. A thorn grows next to
the rose as its witness. I am that

thorn for whom simply to be is an act
of praise. Near the rose, no shame.




~ Rumi
translation by Coleman Barks, with Nevit Ergin 
from The Glance




a symbolic universe







There is no remedy against this reversal of the natural order. Man cannot escape from his own achievement. He cannot but adopt the conditions of his own life. No longer in a merely physical universe, man lives in a symbolic universe. Language, myth, art, and religion are parts of this universe. They are the varied threads which weave the symbolic net, the tangled web of human experience. All human progress in thought and experience refines and strengthens this net. No longer can man confront reality immediately; he cannot see it, as it were, face to face. Physical reality seems to recede in proportion as man's symbolic activity advances. Instead of dealing with the things themselves man is in a sense constantly conversing with himself.

He has so enveloped himself in linguistic forms, in artistic images, in mythical symbols or religious rites that he cannot see or know anything except by the interposition of this artificial medium. His situation is the same in the theoretical as in the practical sphere. Even here man does not live in a world of hard facts, or according to his immediate needs and desires. He lives rather in the midst of imaginary emotions, in hopes and fears, in illusions and disillusions, in his fantasies and dreams. 'What disturbs and alarms man,' said Epictetus, 'are not the things, but his opinions and fantasies about the things.





 ~  Ernst Cassirer 
from An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture


 

weave project









~ David Brooks



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