another unity

Spring overall. But inside us
there's another unity.

Behind each eye here,
one glowing weather.

Every forest branch moves differently
in the breeze, but as they sway
they connect at the roots.




~ Rumi
art by Christi Belcourt

nothing except what he is

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.

A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.

A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. . . . Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one’s suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness. 

~ Hermann Hesse

from  Trees: Reflections and Poems

beyond my solitude

Beyond my solitude is another solitude, 
and to him who dwells therein, 
my aloneness is a crowded market-place and my silence a confusion of sounds.

Too young am I and too restless to seek that above-solitude.  
The voices of yonder valley still hold my ears, 
and its shadows bar my way and I cannot go.

Beyond these hills is a grove of enchantment and to him who dwells therein, 
my peace is but a whirlwind and my enchantment an illusion.

To young am I and too riotous to seek that sacred grove.  
The taste of blood is clinging in my mouth, 
and the bow and the arrows of my fathers yet linger in my hand and I cannot go.

Beyond this burdened self lives my freer self; and to him, 
my dreams are a battle fought in twilight and my desires, the rattling of bones.

Too young am I and too outraged to be my freer self.

And how shall I become my freer self unless I slay my burdened selves, 
or unless all men become free?

How shall my leaves fly singing upon the wind unless my roots shall wither in the dark?

How shall the eagle in me soar against the sun until my fledglings leave the nest 
which I with my own beak have built for them?

~ Kahlil Gibran

from Poems, Parables and Drawings

two poem by Rumi

I would love to kiss you.

The price of kissing is your life.

Now my loving is running toward my life shouting,

What a bargain, Let's buy it.

 .....

When I am with you, we stay up all night.

When you're not here, I can't go to sleep.

Praise God for these two insomnias!

And the difference between them.

~ Rumi

translation by Coleman Barks

 

in praise of Sophia

Friend, don't be angry at the Teacher's discipline,

nor lose your taste for his rebukes,

for the Teacher only corrects those whom he loves, 

as a mother watches constantly her favorite son.

The man who finds the ecstatic mother is a joyful man,

and the man who gains consciousness from her,

for the gain from her is better than gain from silver,

and the profit from that acquisition better than gold.

She is more precious than jewels,

and nothing you desire can compare with her.

She has long life in her right hand,

and riches and reputation in her left.

Along her path there is much pleasure,

and her path goes through the places of peace.

She is a tree of life for those who bring her inside,

those who hold her firmly inside are called happy.

The Secret One through the ecstatic mother founded the earth,

through consciousness he made the skies go around,

by secret knowledge the oceans broke open,

and the clouds let the dew down.

~ from Proverbs: 3:11-20

translated by Aaron Blon

 

Ich stehe mir im Weg

People don't realize how much they are in the grip of ideas.

We live among ideas much more than we live in nature.

~ Saul Bellow

doing so,
"Ich stehe mir im Weg"
I stand in my own way.

take no account of all that happens

Abide in peace, 

banish cares, 

take no account of all that happens, 

and you will serve God 

according to His good pleasure, and rest in Him. 

~ Saint John of the Cross 

amputation

Susila was on the point of turning to catch the

expression of delight on Dugald's upturned face; then, checking herself,

she looked down at the ground. There was no Dugald any more; there was

only this pain, like the pain of the phantom limb that goes on haunting the

imagination, haunting even the perceptions of those who have undergone an

amputation. "Amputation," she whispered to herself, "amputation ..."

 

Feeling her eyes fill with tears, she broke off. Amputation was no excuse

for self-pity and, for all that Dugald was dead, the birds were as beautiful as

ever and her children, all the other children-, had as much need to be loved

and helped and taught. 

 

If his absence was so constantly present, that was

to remind her that henceforward she must love for two, live for two, take

thought for two, must perceive and understand not merely with her own

eyes and mind but with the mind and eyes that had been his and, before

the catastrophe, hers too in a communion of delight and intelligence.

~ aldous huxley

from Island

seawater stiffens cloth

Seawater stiffens cloth long after it's dried.

As pain after it's ended stays in the body:

A woman moves her hands oddly

because her grandfather passed through

a place he never spoke of.  Making

instead the old jokes with angled fingers.

Call one thing another's name long enough,

it will answer.  Call pain seawater, tree, it will answer.

Call it a tree whose shape of branches happened.

Call what branching happened a man

whose job it was to break fingers or lose his own.

Call fingers angled like branches what peel and cut apples,

to give to a girl who eats them in silence, looking.

Call her afterward tree, call her seawater angled by silence.

~ Jane Hirshfield

from Come, Thief

no superstition in the breath

Sometimes when I meditate

there is nothing left of me

but the breath

all the rest of me inseparable

from all the rest of you.

There is no superstition in the breath

only in the mind and body surrounding.

The mind and body are suspicious,

full of fables and myths;

but there is no superstition in the breath.

With each exhalation

wordless sensation migrates

from the nostrils to the belly and back again

brings water to the fields,

brings breath down the cord from mother to child,

brings blood to the sacrifice of love and war,

brings bright offerings to the temple;

sings into the dark,

assuring the aspirant bent in the shadow

the breath that never ends,

whether dropped to our knees below the cross,

or easy in the slippers of the Beloved,

and certainly behind the diamond brow,

sighs the sigh heard 'round the world.

That famous ten percent we are supposed 

to have use of our brain seems true

of the rest of the body and mind as well.

We occupy very little of ourselves

A few percent perhaps...

We barely inhabit the breath

living in the shallows of our life.

Our ordinary breath hollowed by fear and anger,

lost behind the nostrils somewhere near the heart,

lost somewhere between the back of the cave 

and to top of Jacob's ladder...our cells

are starving for breath.

The breath does not lie.

It has nothing to say

It simply is

overflowing with sensation

met crossing the bright field

inviting the body and the rest of the mind

to enter subtle as the breath

subtler levels of being...

The fable of each inhalation, like the first

firing of the imagination (full of the superstition of "I")

and animating the body; that first inhalation

still being drawn...

And last exhalation suspended in myth

begun to be expelled soon after birth.

Taking each breath as if it were the last,

before we enter the enormity at the center

of each breath.

Though superstition surrounds the first breath

and is rarely discarded even with the last,

these two breaths - separated by joyful swoons

and plaintive cries - come together in the great silence,

the bitter tears before and after

the great peace between breaths

when mind slows to wisdom and the body

knows itself, as T. S. Eliot nearly says,

for the very first time.

The wise man, the flying woman, dwells

in the space between breaths as faint echoes

drop over the edge and fade into

the vast chasm of silence.

Letting go at the end of each out-breath

stills the enormity.

Occasionally in the meditation hall my breath

nearly stopped.  I needed nothing more 

as thought stilled, and the wind-blown mind

settled.  As the drum stopped.

Breath and fear surrendered.

"If the breath never returns

the universe will breath for me."

Overcoming the distrust, not holding

to the last breath or grasping at the next.

Letting go completely of control of the breath.

Trusting a breath unshaped by pretense

or superstition, a breath that breaths itself

from the oceanic tides between planets ...

a breath like the one before

the one that created the universe,

that began thought, and forgot

its original face.

~Stephen Levine

from Breaking the Drought

photo by Diane Varner

the etchings of trauma

~ Rupert Spira 

 

nothing

I have a feeling that my boat

has struck, down there in the depths,

against a great thing.

And nothing

happens! Nothing... Silence... Waves...

-Nothing happens? Or has everything happened,

and are we standing now, quietly, in the new life?

~ Juan Ramon Jimenez

translated by Robert Bly

Van Gogh reuses a canvas that he’d already painted 

some two and a half years earlier in Nuenen: x-ray photos

 reveal the head of a woman with a cap under Patch of grass.

trauma

More often than not, we feel so enmeshed in the life we have that the prospect of change appears remote or impossible.  Thus, we continue on the tracks that we have laid down for ourselves,  We are unable to think in new ways and we gradually teach ourselves to forget the other horizons.  We unlearn desire.  Quietly, over time, we succumb to the dependable script of the expected life and become masters of the middle way.  We avoid extremes and after a while we no longer even notice the pathways off to the side and no longer sense the danger and disturbance that could be experienced "out there."  We learn to fit our chosen world with alarming precision and regularity.  Often it takes a huge crisis or trauma to crack the dead shell that has grown ever more solid around us.  Painful as that can be, it does resurrect the longing of the neglected soul.  It makes a clearance.  Again we can see the horizons and feel their attraction.  Though we may wince with vulnerability as we taste the exhilaration of freedom, we feel alive!

John O'Donohue

from The Invisible Embrace: Beauty

don't look at things through your concepts

If you don't look at things through your concepts, you'll never be bored. 

Every single thing is unique. 

Every sparrow is unlike every other sparrow despite the similarities. 

It's a great help to have similarities, so we can abstract, 

so that we can have a concept. 

It's a great help, from the point of view of communication, 

education, science. 

But it's also very misleading and a great hindrance

 to seeing this concrete individual. 

If all you experience is your concept,

 you're not experiencing reality,

 because reality is concrete. 

The concept is a help, 

to lead you to reality, 

but when you get there, 

you've got to intuit or experience it directly.

~ Anthony de Mello

problem?

There is a story of a man who came to see the Buddha because he had heard that the Buddha was a great teacher. He had some problems in his life, and he thought the Buddha might be able to help him straighten them out.

The Buddha listened patiently to the man as he laid out all his difficulties and worries, and then waited for the Buddha to say the words that would put everything right for him.

The Buddha said, "I can't help you."

"What do you mean?" said the man.

"Everybody's got problems," said the Buddha. "In fact, we've all got eighty-three problems, each one of us. Eighty-three problems, and there's nothing you can do about it. If you work really hard on one of them, maybe you can fix it - but if you do, another one will pop right into its place."

The man was furious. "I thought you were a great teacher! I thought you could help me!"

The Buddha said, "Well, maybe it will help you with the eighty-fourth problem."

"The eighty-fourth problem?" said the man. "What's the eighty-fourth problem?"

The Buddha said, "You want to not have any problems."

- Steve Hagen

from Buddhism Plain and Simple

art by Alex Arshansky