Wednesday, February 5, 2020

thief of hearts







Thief of hearts,
you have ransacked
this beggar's hut,
left me
nothing.

All I see
now
is the print
of your pilfering hand
everywhere.
 
 
 
 
Ivan Granger 
from Real Thirst
art by Van Gogh




Tuesday, February 4, 2020

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





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 

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 

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


Monday, February 3, 2020

grounded values - open arms









~ Jean Vanier

Sunday, February 2, 2020

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
 

Saturday, February 1, 2020

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
.

Friday, January 31, 2020

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





Thursday, January 30, 2020

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