Friday, April 24, 2020

my companion






You went away but remained in me
And thus became my peace and happiness.

In separation, separation left me
And I witnessed the Unknown.

You were the hidden secret of my longing,
Hidden deep within my conscience deeper than a dream.

You were my true friend in the day
And in darkness my companion.




~ Mansur al-Hallaj 
translated by Mahmood Jamal



from Wikipedia

Al-Hallaj was born around 858 in Fars province of Persia to a cotton-carder (Hallaj means "cotton-carder" in Arabic). His grandfather was a Zoroastrian. His father lived a simple life, and this form of lifestyle greatly interested the young Al-Hallaj. As a youngster he memorized the Qur'an and would often retreat from worldly pursuits to join other mystics in study.
.
Al-Hallaj later married and made a pilgrimage to Mecca, where he stayed for one year, facing the mosque, in fasting and total silence. After his stay at the city, he traveled extensively and wrote and taught along the way. He traveled as far as India and Central Asia gaining many followers, many of whom accompanied him on his second and third trips to Mecca. After this period of travel, he settled down in the Abbasid capital of Baghdad.
.
During his early lifetime he was a disciple of Junayd Baghdadi and Amr al-Makki, but was later rejected by them both. Sahl al-Tustariwas also one of Al-Hallaj's early teachers.
.
Among other Sufis, Al-Hallaj was an anomaly. Many Sufi masters felt that it was inappropriate to share mysticism with the masses, yet Al-Hallaj openly did so in his writings and through his teachings. He thus began to make enemies. This was exacerbated by occasions when he would fall into trances which he attributed to being in the presence of God.
.
During one of these trances, he would utter Arabic: أنا الحق‎ Anā l-Ḥaqq "I am The Truth," which was taken to mean that he was claiming to be God, since al-Ḥaqq "the Truth" is one of the Ninety Nine Names of Allah. In another controversial statement, al-Hallaj claimed "There is nothing wrapped in my turban but God," and similarly he would point to his cloak and say, ما في جبتي إلا الله Mā fī jubbatī illā l-Lāh "There is nothing in my cloak but God."
.
These utterances led to a long trial, and his subsequent imprisonment for 11 years in a Baghdad prison. He was publicly crucified on March 26, 922.



.

Thursday, April 23, 2020

a question the bundle had


.



When summer was nearly over,
The bundles would stand in the stubble
Whispering.  One said: "For a while,
It looked like I might get away."

"I could have done it -
No one would have noticed.
But it was hard to know
If I should go singly, or with others."

Each of us resembles that
Bundle.  For years we waited
For the right moment to escape.
Perhaps it was that moment in July

When the thunder came.  But the next
Day it was too late.  And we
Ended up in the thresher.
Were we right to wait?



~ Robert Bly
an early Vincent Van Gogh




the silent refuge










~ Gangaji



 

are you prepared?






These Things whose essential life you want to express first ask you, 
"Are you free?  Are you prepared to devote all your love to me...?" 
 And if the Thing sees that you are otherwise occupied with even a particle
 of your interest, it shuts itself off;  it may perhaps give you some slight sign
 of friendship, a word or a nod, but it will never give you its heart, 
entrust you with its patient being, its sweet sidereal constancy, 
which makes it so like the constellations in the sky.  

In order for a Thing to speak to you, you must regard it for a certain time
 as the only one that exists, as the one and only phenomenon which, 
through your laborious and exclusive love, is now placed at the center of the universe,
 and which, in that incomparable place, is on the day attended by angels.




~ Rainer Maria Rilke 
from a letter to Baladine Klossowska
translated by Stephen Mitchell




a flow of aliveness






animated by a flow of aliveness
 that resists crystallizing into a system of thought or belief -
 although it does not hesitate to enjoy
 thought and belief for the delight or communion they may reveal.

open, free-wheeling, inclusive
 in view and practice, non-definitive, experimental, non-sectarian,
 warm-hearted, and non-attached. 

 embraces the full range of human experience 
while settling nowhere, 
capable of a subtle openness and 
... equally open to spontaneous delight and sensual extravagance. ...
grateful for beauty in all its forms of disclosure, 
recognizing happiness and grief and all 
emotions in between as free offerings of the Unnameable into Itself.

it negates conclusion-making while affirming the indefinable.  
A kind of love-mysticism, it loves
 the edginess and poignancy of human life 
while seeing through its apparency to the stillness within.  

Present without agenda, kind without being moralistic, 
it reaches across the seeming divisions between
 people and societies with the confidence of the light 
that is common to us all.



 ~ Pir Elias Amidon
excerpts from Free Medicine



Wednesday, April 22, 2020

a default setting - cracks open possibility








In the wake of an earthquake, bombing, major storm, most people are altruistic, urgently engaged in caring for themselves and those around them, strangers and neighbors, as well as friends and loved ones.

These remarkable societies suggest that, just as many machines reset themselves to their original settings after a power outage, so human beings reset themselves to something altruistic, communitarian, resourceful, and imaginative after a disaster, that we revert to something we already know how to do. The possibility of paradise is already within us as a default setting.

Disaster demonstrates this, since among the factors determining whether you will live or die are the health of your immediate community and the justness of your society. We need ties to survive, but they along with purposefulness, immediacy, and agency also give us joy—the startling, sharp joy I found over and over again in accounts of disaster. These accounts of disaster demonstrate that the citizens any paradise requires—the people who are brave enough, resourceful enough, and generous enough—already exist. The possibility of paradise hovers on the cusp of coming into being, so much so that it takes powerful forces to keep such a paradise at bay. If Paradise nowadays most often arises in hell, that’s because the chaos of that hell suspends the ordinary rules and routines; it is not its hellishness but its disruptiveness that cracks open possibility.

The ideal societies we hear of are mostly far away or long ago or both, situated in some primordial society before the fall or a spiritual kingdom in a remote Himalayan fastness. The implication is that we here and now are far from capable of living such ideals. But what if paradise flashed up among us from time to time—at the worst of times? What if we glimpsed it in the jaws of hell? These flashes give us, as the long ago and far away do not, a glimpse of who else we ourselves may be and what else our society could become. This is a paradise of rising to the occasion that points out as well how the rest of the time most of us fall down from the heights of possibility, down into diminished selves and dismal societies. Many now do not even hope for a better society, but they recognize it when they run into it, and that discovery shines out even through the namelessness of their experience. Others recognize it, grasp it, and make something of it, and longterm social and political transformations, both good and bad, arise from the wreckage. The door to this era’s potential paradises is in hell.

The word emergency comes from emerge, to rise out of, the opposite of merge, which comes from mergere: to be within or under a liquid, immersed, submerged. An emergency is a separation from the familiar, a sudden emergence into a new atmosphere, one that often demands we ourselves rise to the occasion. Catastrophe comes from the Greek kata, or down, and streiphen, or turning over: it means an upset of what is expected and was originally used to mean a plot twist. To emerge into the unexpected is not always terrible, though these words have evolved to imply ill fortune. The word disaster comes from the Latin compound of dis-, or away, without, and astro, star or planet, literally without a star. It originally suggested misfortune due to astrologically generated trouble, as in the blues musician Albert King’s classic “Born Under a Bad Sign.”

In some of the disasters of the 20th century—the big northeastern blackouts in 1965 and 2003, the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake in the San Francisco Bay Area, 2005’s Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast—the loss of electrical power meant that the light pollution blotting out the night sky vanished. In these disaster-struck cities, people suddenly found themselves under the canopy of stars still visible in small and remote places. On the warm night of August 15, 2003, the Milky Way could be seen in New York City, a heavenly realm long lost to view until the blackout that hit the northeast late that afternoon. You can think of the current social order as something akin to this artificial light: another kind of power that fails in disaster. In its place appears a reversion to improvised, collaborative, cooperative and local society. However beautiful the stars of a suddenly visible night sky, few nowadays could find their way by them, but the constellations of solidarity, altruism and improvisation are within most of us and reappear at these times. People know what to do in a disaster. The loss of power, the disaster in the modern sense, is an affliction, but the reappearance of these old heavens is its opposite. This is the paradise entered through hell.




~ Rebecca Solnit
excerpts from  A Paradise Built in Hell: 
The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster


 

Saturday, April 18, 2020

for grief






When you lose someone you love,
Your life becomes strange,
The ground beneath you gets fragile,
Your thoughts make your eyes unsure;
And some dead echo drags your voice down
Where words have no confidence.
Your heart has grown heavy with loss;
And though this loss has wounded others too,
No one knows what has been taken from you
When the silence of absence deepens.

Flickers of guilt kindle regret
For all that was left unsaid or undone.

There are days when you wake up happy;
Again inside the fullness of life,
Until the moment breaks
And you are thrown back
Onto the black tide of loss.

Days when you have your heart back,
You are able to function well
Until in the middle of work or encounter,
Suddenly with no warning,
You are ambushed by grief.

It becomes hard to trust yourself.
All you can depend on now is that
Sorrow will remain faithful to itself.
More than you, it knows its way
And will find the right time
To pull and pull the rope of grief
Until that coiled hill of tears
Has reduced to its last drop.

Gradually, you will learn acquaintance
With the invisible form of your departed;
And, when the work of grief is done,
The wound of loss will heal
And you will have learned
To wean your eyes
From that gap in the air
And be able to enter the hearth
In your soul where your loved one
Has awaited your return
All the time. 





~ John O’Donohue
from To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings 
 
 
 
 

what you cannot hold








You who let yourselves feel: enter the breathing
that is more than your own.
Let it brush your cheeks
as it divides and rejoins beside you.

Blessed ones, whole ones,
you where the heart begins:
You are the bow that shoots the arrows
and you are the target.

Fear not the pain. Let its weight fall back
into the earth;
for heavy are the mountains, heavy the seas.

The trees you planted in childhood have grown
too heavy. You cannot bring them along.
Give yourselves to the air, to what you cannot hold.





~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Sonnets to Orpheus, Part One, IV
  translation by Macy and Barrows
 
 
 
 

Friday, April 17, 2020

bird song opera











not difficult








The Great Way is not difficult 
for those who have no preferences. 
*
When love and hate are both absent 
everything becomes clear and undisguised. 
*
Make the smallest distinction, however 
and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart. 
*
If you wish to see the truth 
then hold no opinions for or against anything. 
*
To set up what you like against what you dislike 
is the disease of the mind. 
*
When the deep meaning of things is not understood 
the minds essential peace is disturbed to no avail. 


The Way is perfect like vast space 
where nothing is lacking and nothing is in excess. 
*
Indeed, it is due to our choosing to accept or reject 
that we do not see the true nature of things. 
*
Live neither in the entanglements of outer things, 
nor in inner feelings of emptiness. 
*
Be serene in the oneness of things 
and such erroneous views will disappear by themselves. 
*
When you try to stop activity to achieve passivity 
your very effort fills you with activity. 
As long as you remain in one extreme or the other 
you will never know Oneness. 




Seng-T’san 

who goes there






midstream halt --
the horseman looks up
at the falling stars



~ H. F. Noyes
 from Haiku Enlightenment: New Expanded Edition 
  by Gabriel Rosenstock




vanishing







Birds vanishing in the sky, the last cloud fades,
sitting together, the mountain and I....
now, only the mountain remains



~~ Li Bai 
 from Haiku Enlightenment: New Expanded Edition 
  by Gabriel Rosenstock 



Thursday, April 16, 2020

in the mirror







‘O look, look in the mirror,
O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.

‘O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbor
With your crooked heart.’

It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
And the deep river ran on. 





~ W.H. Auden 




gentleness and great pain




Terri Roberts - Charlie's mother


a gunman barricaded himself inside a one-room Amish schoolhouse 
near Lancaster, Pa. Then he opened fire.

Charles "Charlie" Roberts killed five children and 
injured five others before killing himself.

The Amish community responded in a way that many found surprising:
 They forgave the shooter. And, in the years since, they have grown close to his family.

That week, the Robertses had a private funeral for their son, 
but as they went to the gravesite, they saw as many as 40 Amish start coming 
out from around the side of the graveyard, surrounding them like a crescent.

"Love just emanated from them," Terri says.

Terri finds it especially hard to accept that forgiveness 
when she thinks of one of the survivors, Rosanna.

"Rosanna's the most injured of the survivors," she explains.
 "Her injuries were to her head. She is now 15, still tube-fed and in a wheelchair. 
And she does have seizures, and when it gets to be this time of year,
 as we get closer to the anniversary date, she seizes more. 
And it's certainly not the life that this little girl should have lived."

Terri asked if it would be possible for her to help with Rosanna once a week.
"I read to her, I bathe her, dry her hair," says Terri, who herself is battling cancer.

"I will never forget the devastation caused by my son," says the 65-year-old Terri.
 "But one of the fathers the other night, he said, 'None of us would have ever chosen this.
 But the relationships that we have built through it, you can't put a price on that.' "


 from StoryCorps.org.



Wednesday, April 15, 2020

it was like this





It was like this:
you were happy, then you were sad,
then happy again, then not.

It went on.
You were innocent or you were guilty.
Actions were taken, or not.

At times you spoke, at other times you were silent.
Mostly, it seems you were silent - what could you say?

Now it is almost over.

Like a lover, your life bends down and kisses your life.

It does this not in forgiveness -
between you, there is nothing to forgive -
but with the simple nod of a baker at the moment
he sees the bread is finished with transformation.

Eating too, is a thing now only for others.

It doesn't matter what they will make of you
or your days: they will be wrong,
they will miss the wrong woman, miss the wrong man,
all the stories they tell will be tales of their own invention.

Your story was this: you were happy, then you were sad,
you slept, you awakened.
Sometimes you ate roasted chestnuts, sometimes persimmons.




~ Jane Hirshfield