Monday, August 12, 2019

singing image of fire







A hand moves, and the fire's whirling takes different shapes:
All things change when we do.
The first word, "Ah," blossoms into all others.
Each of them true.



~ Kukai (774-835)
translation by Jane Hirshfield




Thursday, August 8, 2019

to be gentle






It is Spring in the mountains.
I come alone seeking you.
The sound of chopping wood echoes
Between the silent peaks.
The streams are still icy.
There is snow on the trail.
At sunset I reach your grove
In the stony mountain pass.
You want nothing, although at night
You can see the aura of gold
And silver ore all around you.
You have learned to be gentle
As the mountain deer you have tamed.
The way back forgotten, hidden
Away, I become like you,
An empty boat, floating, adrift.




~  Tu Fu (712-770)
translation by Kenneth Rexroth



Monday, August 5, 2019

allowing heartbreak allows healing






There come a point where it is more important to just let our heart break
 and get on with it than to keep trying to figure out why 
we are so often in pain or who's at fault and what sort of punishment they deserve.  

It takes a lot of work to get healed, to merge the heart and the disheartened.  
But even in the least observation, it becomes clear that no one needs any excuse
 for being in so much pain.  Wherever there is expectation or broken hope,
 disappointment or loss, there is the stuff of Shakespearean malady.

Healing is entering, with mercy and awareness, 
into those areas of ourselves we have withdrawn from with fear
 and a sense of helplessness. Healing is reoccupying those parts of ourselves
 that we abandoned because of mental or physical pain.
 Healing is replacing our merciless reactions with a merciful response.

Without mercy, we don't have a chance.  
And that chance is the breadth of heart that is our birthright.




~ Stephen Levine
from Untended Sorrow
art by Van Gogh



 

Saturday, August 3, 2019

a room




.



A room does not turn its back on grief.
Anger does not excite it.
Before desire, it neither responds
nor draws back in fear.

Without changing expression,
it takes
and gives back;
not a tuft in the mattress alters.

Windowsills evenly welcome
both heat and cold.
Radiators speak or fall silent as they must.

Doors are not equivocal,
floorboards do not hesitate or startle.
Impatience does not stir the curtains,
a bed is neither irritable nor rapacious.

Whatever disquiet we sense in a room
we have brought there.

And so I instruct my ribs each morning,
pointing to hinge and plaster and wood -

You are matter, as they are.
See how perfectly it can be done.
Hold, one day more, what is asked.



~ Jane Hirshfield
from The Lives of the Heart
art by Pierre Bonnard




The gate of heaven is everywhere.

~ Thomas Merton


Friday, August 2, 2019

I worried








I worried a lot. Will the garden grow, will the rivers 
flow in the right direction, will the earth turn 
as it was taught, and if not how shall 
I correct it? 

Was I right, was I wrong, will I be forgiven, 
can I do better? 

Will I ever be able to sing, even the sparrows 
can do it and I am, well, 
hopeless. 

Is my eyesight fading or am I just imagining it, 
am I going to get rheumatism, 
lockjaw, dementia? 

Finally I saw that worrying had come to nothing. 
And gave it up. And took my old body 
and went out into the morning, 
and sang.




~ Mary Oliver
from Swan: Poems and Prose Poems



among trees

.




I go among trees and sit still.
All my stirring becomes quiet
around me like circles on water.
My tasks lie in their places
where I left them, asleep like cattle.

Then what is afraid of me comes
and lives a while in my sight.
What it fears in me leaves me,
and the fear of me leaves it.
It sings, and I hear its song.

Then what I am afraid of comes.
I live for a while in its sight.
What I fear in it leaves it,
and the fear of it leaves me.
It sings, and I hear its song.

After days of labor,
mute in my consternations,
I hear my song at last,
and I sing it. As we sing,
the day turns, the trees move.





~ Wendell Berry
 photo by Kathleen Connally
 
 
 
.

Tolstoy on kindness








The kinder and the more thoughtful a person is, 
the more kindness he can find in other people.

Kindness enriches our life; with kindness mysterious things
 become clear, difficult things become easy, 
and dull things become cheerful.

You should respond with kindness toward evil done to you, 
and you will destroy in an evil person that pleasure which he derives from evil.

Kindness is for your soul as health
 is for your body: you do not notice it when you have it.

Love is real only when a person can sacrifice himself 
for another person. Only when a person forgets himself for the sake of another,
 and lives for another creature, only this kind of love can be called true love,
 and only in this love do we see the blessing and reward of life. 
This is the foundation of the world.

Nothing can make our life, or the lives of other people, 
more beautiful than perpetual kindness.



 ~ Leo Tolstoy
from A Calendar of Wisdom: Daily Thoughts to Nourish 
the Soul, Written and Selected from the World's Sacred Texts




 

Thursday, August 1, 2019

canned goods








~ Greg Brown

floating on an idea of me






fall into the breath,
stilled mind sank into
a bright bubble, sinking
down through the sea,
through ocean bottom,
through the minds floor.
no control

nothing here of my own
floating on the idea of me
just awareness observing
thoughts, ideas, perceptions
appearing and disappearing
on the surface of
an imagined thinker

free from entanglement
watching the habitual trinkets
the call and response of senses
immersed within absolute stillness
beyond name and form
a Pure Land
 of our inherent nature


 
 ~ adapted form Becoming Kuan Yin
by Stephen Levine


 

Monday, July 29, 2019

prioritizing well-being








~ Nicola Sturgeon 



Sunday, July 28, 2019

Becoming Kuan Yin - The evolution of Compassion







the Chinese character for "Benevolence."  
It is the character that represent "person" along with that of the number "2."  
Recognizing that when 2 are present, benevolence is a natural occurrence.  
Benevolence eases duality. It is one of the Maha Viharas,
 great abodes of the true heart.


To know Kuan Yin we need to let go of all that is unloved, 

judged, forged from old mind clingings. She is the unconditional love 
behind the conditioned mind.
Some ancient force is called forth in surrendering
 hindrance after hindrance of our secret wretchedness 
and obvious suffering, to yield to the light of our Original Heart.



~ Stephen Levine







Saturday, July 27, 2019

millennium blessing





There is a grace approaching
that we shun as much as death,
it is the completion of our birth.

It does not come in time,
but in timelessness
when the mind sinks into the heart
and we remember.

It is an insistent grace that draws us
to the edge and beckons us surrender
safe territory and enter our enormity.

We know we must pass
beyond knowing
and fear the shedding.

But we are pulled upward
none-the-less
through forgotten ghosts
and unexpected angels,
luminous.

And there is nothing left to say
but we are That.

And that is what we sing about.




~ Stephen Levine
from Breaking the Drought, Visions of Grace



Thursday, July 25, 2019

from so simple a beginning







It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, 
clothed with many plants of many kinds, 
with birds singing on the bushes,
 insects flitting about and worms crawling
 through the damp earth, 
and to reflect that these forms, so different
 yet so dependent on each other in so complex a manner,
 have all been produced by simple laws.There is grandeur in this
 view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed
 by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, 
whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity,
 from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful 
and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.





Charles Darwin
from On The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection
 
 
 

in this world of yes






love is a place
through this place of
love move
(with brightness of peace)
all places


yes is a world
in this world of
yes live
(skillfully curled)
all worlds




e.e.cummings




Wednesday, July 24, 2019

symbols






Traditionally, the value of the symbol is precisely in its apparent uselessness
 as a means of simple communication.  It is ordered toward communion,
 not to communication. Because it is not an efficient mode of communicating
 information, the symbol can achieve a higher purpose, beyond 
cause and effect. Instead of establishing a new contact by a meeting of minds
 in the sharing of news, the symbol tells nothing new:
 it revives our awareness of what we already know,
 and deepens our awareness. What is "new" in the symbol is the ever new
 discovery of a new depth and a new actuality in what is and always has been.
.The function of the symbol is to manifest a union that already exists
 but is not fully realized.  The symbol awakens awareness or restores it.  
Therefore it does not aim at communication but at communion. 
 Communion is the awareness of participation in an ontological reality: 
in the mystery of being, of human love, of redemptive mystery, 
of contemplative truth,



~ Thomas Merton 
from Merton's Palace of Nowhere 
by James Finley