the greek ships

When the water holes go, and the fish flop about

In the mud, they can moisten each other faintly,

But it's best if they lose themselves in the river.

You know how many Greek ships went down

With their cargoes of wine.  If we can't get

To port, perhaps it's best to head for the bottom.

I've heard that the mourning dove never says

What she means.  Those of us who make up poems

Have agreed not to say what the pain is.

Eliot wrote his poems for years standing under

A bare light-bulb.  He knew he was a murderer,

And he accepted his punishment at birth.

The sitar player is searching: now in the back yard,

Now in the old dishes left behind on the table,

Now for the suffering on the underside of a leaf.

Go ahead, throw your good name into the water.

All those who have ruined their lives for love

Are calling to us from a hundred sunken ships.

~ Robert Bly

from My Sentence was a Thousand Years of Joy

why we tell stories

I 

Because we used to have leaves 

and on damp days 

our muscles feel a tug, 

painful now, from when roots 

pulled us into the ground 

and because our children believe 

they can fly, an instinct retained 

from when the bones in our arms 

were shaped like zithers and broke 

neatly under their feathers 

and because before we had lungs 

we knew how far it was to the bottom 

as we floated open-eyed 

like painted scarves through the scenery 

of dreams, and because we awakened 

and learned to speak 

2 

We sat by the fire in our caves, 

and because we were poor, we made up a tale 

about a treasure mountain 

that would open only for us 

and because we were always defeated, 

we invented impossible riddles 

only we could solve, 

monsters only we could kill, 

women who could love no one else 

and because we had survived 

sisters and brothers, daughters and sons, 

we discovered bones that rose 

from the dark earth and sang 

as white birds in the trees 

3 

Because the story of our life 

becomes our life 

Because each of us tells 

the same story 

but tells it differently 

and none of us tells it 

the same way twice 

Because grandmothers looking like spiders 

want to enchant the children 

and grandfathers need to convince us 

what happened happened because of them 

and though we listen only 

haphazardly, with one ear, 

we will begin our story 

with the word and

~ Lisel Mueller

from Alive Together: New and Selected Poems

still playing

Mind and body dropped off; 

dropped off mind and body!

This state should be experienced by everyone;

it is like piling fruit into a basket without a bottom,

like pouring water into a bowl With a pierced hole;

However much you may pile or pour you cannot fill it up.

When this is realized the pail bottom is broken through.

But while there is still a trace of conceptualizations

which makes you say ‘I have this understanding’

or ‘I have that realization’,

you are still playing with unrealities.

~ Dogen Zenji
.

Dogen was born about 1200 in Kyoto, Japan,

 he was drawn to the teachings of silent meditation. 

He established his own school of zen. 

.

the direct path - the progressive path

~ Rupert Spira

grounded values - open arms

~ Jean Vanier

longing

~ Rupert Spira

 

beyond the reach

I lost whatever ability I still had to distinguish subject from object, 
tell apart what remained of me and what was Bach’s music.
 Instead of Emerson’s transparent eyeball, egoless and one with all it beheld,
 I became a transparent ear, indistinguishable from the stream of sound
 that flooded my consciousness until there was nothing else in it,
 not even a dry tiny corner in which to plant an I and observe. Opened to the music,
 I became first the strings, could feel on my skin the exquisite friction
of the horsehair rubbing over me, and then the breeze of sound flowing past
 as it crossed the lips of the instrument and went out to meet the world,
 beginning its lonely transit of the universe. Then I passed down into the resonant
 black well of space inside the cello, the vibrating envelope of air formed 
by the curves of its spruce roof and maple walls. The instrument’s wooden 
interior formed a mouth capable of unparalleled eloquence —
 indeed, of articulating everything a human could conceive.
 But the cello’s interior also formed a room to write in and a skull in which to think
 and I was now it, with no remainder.

So I became the cello and mourned with it for the twenty or so minutes it took
 for that piece to, well, change everything. Or so it seemed; now, its vibrations subsiding,
 I’m less certain. But for the duration of those exquisite moments, Bach’s cello
 suite had had the unmistakable effect of reconciling me to death… Having let go
 of the rope of self and slipped into the warm waters of this worldly beauty —
 Bach’s sublime music, I mean, and Yo-Yo Ma’s bow caressing those four strings 
suspended over that envelope of air — I felt as though I’d passed 
beyond the reach of suffering and regret.

~ Michael Pollan 

from How to Change Your Mind: 
What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness,
 Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

 with thanks to brainpickings

 

compassion

.

.

The Grail Hero - particularly in the person of Parzival, the 'Great Fool' - is the forthright, simple, uncorrupted, noble son of nature, without guile, strong in the purity of the yearning of his heart.  ... His widowed, noble mother, in their forest retreat had told him of God and Satan, "distinguished for him dark and light."  However, in his own deeds light and dark were mixed.  He was not an angel or a saint, but a living, questing man of deeds, gifted with paired virtues of courage and compassion, to which was added loyalty.  And it was through his steadfastness in these - not supernatural grace - that he won, at last, the Grail.

Parzival makes two visits to the Grail Castle.  The first is a failure. 
 The Grail King is a wounded man, whose nature has been broken by castration in a battle. 
 Parzival spontaneously wishes to ask him, "What is wrong?"  But then, he has been told
 that a knight does not ask questions, and so, in order to preserve the image of himself 
as a noble knight, he restrains his natural impulse of compassion,
 and the Grail quest fails.

... in the end, as in the case of Parzival, the guide within will be his own noble heart alone, and the guide without, the image of beauty, the radiance of divinity, that wakes in his heart amor: the deepest, inmost seed of his nature, consubstantial with the process of the All, "thus come" And in this life-creative adventure the criterion of achievement will be ... the courage to let go the past , with its truths, its goals, its dogmas of "meaning," and its gifts: to die to the world and come to birth from within.

What the Holy grail symbolizes is the highest spiritual fulfillment of a human life.  
Each life has some kind of high fulfillment, and each has its own gift from the grail.
  The theme of compassion is part of the clue about how to get there and where it is. 
 It has to do with overcoming the same temptations that the Buddha overcame: 
of attachment to this, that, of the other life detail that has pulled you off course.

~ Joseph Campbell
 from: A Joseph Campbell Companion
 edited by Diane Osbon

.

humility

When humility delivers a man 

from attachment to his own words 

and his own reputation, 

he discovers that true joy is only possible 

when we have completely forgotten ourselves,

and it is only when we pay no more attention to our life 

and our own reputation and our own excellence 

that we are at last completely free to serve God for His sake alone.

~ Thomas Merton

on passion

In a state of passion without a cause, there is intensity free of all attachment;
but when passion has a cause, there is attachment , and attachment
 is the beginning of sorrow.  Most of us are attached; we cling to a person,
 to a country , to a belief, to an idea, and when the object of our attachment 
is taken away or otherwise loses its significance, we find ourselves empty,
 insufficient.  This emptiness we try to fill by clinging to something else, 
which again becomes the object of our passion.

When passion has a cause, it becomes lust.  When there is a passion for something
 - for a person, for an idea, for some kind of fulfillment - then out of the passion
 there comes contradiction, conflict, effort.  You strive to achieve or maintain
 a particular state, or to recapture one that has been and is gone. 
 But the passion of which I am speaking goes not give rise to contradiction, conflict. 
 It is totally unrelated to a cause, and therefore it is not an effect.

There can be passion only when there is total self-abandonment.  
One is never passionate unless there is a complete absence of what we call thought. 
 What we call thought is the response of the various patterns and experiences of memory, 
and where this conditioned response exists, there is no passion, there is no intensity. 
 There can be intensity only when there is a complete absence of the 'me'.

You will find out what love is, and what sorrow is, only when your mind
 has rejected all explanations and is no longer imagining, no longer seeking 
the cause, no longer indulging in words or going back in memory 
to its own pleasures and pains.  Your mind must be completely quiet, 
without a word, without a symbol, without an idea.  And then you will discover
 - or there will come into being - that state in which what we have called love, 
and what we have called sorrow and what we have called death are the same.  
 There is no longer any division between love and sorrow and death;  
and there being no division, there is beauty.  But to comprehend, to be in this state
 of ecstasy, there must be that passion which comes with the
 total abandonment of oneself.

~ J. Krishnamurti

from a talk in Saanen, Aug. 5th 1962

.

inside the fog that encloses trees

Inside the fog that encloses trees, they undergo the robbing of their leaves... 
Thrown into confusion by a slow oxidation, and humiliated by the sap's withdrawal
 for the sake of the flowers and fruits, the leaves, following the hot spells of August,
 cling less anyway. 

The up-and-down tunnels inside the bark deepen, and guide the moisture down to earth
 so as to break off with the animated parts of the tree. 

The flowers are scattered, the fruits taken away. 
This giving up of their more animated parts, 
and even of parts of their body, has become, since their earliest days, 
a familiar practice for trees. 

~ Francis Ponge

translation by Robert Bly
from News of the Universe 
- poems of the twofold world

the silence inside the illusion

Everything is ecstasy, inside. We just don’t know it because of our thinking-minds.
 But in our true blissful essence of mind it is known that everything is alright 
forever and forever and forever. Close your eyes, let your hands and nerve-ends drop,
 stop breathing for 3 seconds, listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world,
 and you will remember the lesson you forgot, which was taught in immense 
milky ways of cloudy innumerable worlds long ago and not even at all.
 It is all one vast awakened thing. I call it the golden eternity. It is perfect.
 We were never really born, we will never really die. It has nothing to do
 with the imaginary idea of a personal self, other selves, many selves everywhere,
 or one universal self. Self is only an idea, a mortal idea. That which passes
 through everything, is one thing. It’s a dream already ended. There’s nothing
 to be afraid of and nothing to be glad about. I know this from staring at mountains
 months on end. They never show any expression, they are like empty space. 
Do you think the emptiness of space will ever crumble away? 
Mountains will crumble, but the emptiness of space, which is the one universal
 essence of mind, the one vast awakenerhood, empty and awake, 
will never crumble away because it was never born.

~ Jack Kerouac

the guest is inside

.

The Guest is inside you, and also inside me;

you know the sprout is hidden inside the seed.

We are all struggling; none of us has gone far.

Let your arrogance go, and look around inside.

The blue sky opens out farther and farther,

the daily sense of failure goes away,

the damage I have done to myself fades,

a million suns come forward with light,

when I sit firmly in that world.

I hear bells ringing that no one has shaken,

inside "love" there is more joy than we know of,

rain pours down, although the sky is clear of clouds,

there are whole rivers of light.

The universe is shot through in all parts by a single sort of love.

How hard it is to feel that joy in all our four bodies!

Those who hope to be reasonable about it fail.

The arrogance of reason has separated us from that love.

With the word "reason" you already feel miles away.

How lucky Kabir is, that surrounded by all this joy

he sings inside his own little boat.

His poems amount to one soul meeting another.

These songs are about forgetting dying and loss.

They rise above both coming in and going out.

~ Kabir

version by Robert Bly

let it shine

Take off your traveling clothes and 

lay down your luggage, 

Pilgrim, shed your nakedness. 

Only the fire is absorbed by the Holy of Holies.

Let it shine.

~ Charles Wright

from Chickamauga

close with us

For too long, we have believed that the divine is outside us. 

This belief has strained our longing disastrously. 

 This is so lonely since it is human longing that makes us holy. 

 The most beautiful thing about us is our longing; 

 this longing is spiritual and has great depth and wisdom. 

 If you focus your longing on a faraway divinity, you put an unfair strain on your longing. 

 Thus it often happens that the longing reaches out towards the distant divine, 

but, because it over-strains itself, it bends back to become cynicism, emptiness or negativity. 

 This can destroy your sensibility. Yet we do not need to put any strain on our longing. 

 If we believe that the body is in the soul and the soul is divine ground, 
then the presence of the divine is completely here, close with us.

~ John O'Donohue

art by Odilon Redon