the promise

Stay, I said

to the cut flowers.

They bowed

their heads lower.

Stay, I said to the spider,

who fled.

Stay, leaf.

It reddened,

embarrassed for me and itself.

Stay, I said to my body.

It sat as a dog does,

obedient for a moment,

soon starting to tremble.

Stay, to the earth

of riverine valley meadows,

of fossiled escarpments,

of limestone and sandstone.

It looked back

with a changing expression, in silence.

Stay, I said to my loves.

Each answered,

Always.

~ Jane Hirshfield

on finding a guide

You wear coarse wool, but you're a king,

as the soul's energy hides, as love

remembers. You enter this room in a human

shape and as the atmosphere we breathe.

You are the central pole through the nine

levels connecting them and us to absolute

absence. So that we can have what we want,

you give failure and frustration. You want

only the company of the lion and the lion

cub, no wobbly legs. That man there, you

suggest, might remove his head before

entering the temple. Then he could listen

without ears to a voice that says, My

creature. A month of walking the road, you

make that distance in one day. Never mind

gold and silver payments. When you feel

generous, give your head. My beauty,

you have no need for a guide. The one

who follows and the one who leads are

inseparable, as the moon and the circle

around it. An Arab drags his camel town

to town. You go through your troubles

and changing beliefs, both no different from

the moon moving across or basil growing

and getting cut for a bouquet. It doesn't

matter you've been lost. The hoopoe is

still looking for you. It's another

beginning, my friend, this waking in a

morning with no haze, and help coming

without your asking! A glass submerged

is turning inside the wine. With grief

waved away, sweet gratefulness arrives.

~ Rumi 

Coleman Barks, Nevit Ergin version

kindness

~ James Ishmael Ford 

and yet

The world of dew --
A world of dew it is indeed,
And yet, and yet . . .

 

 

 

 

Issa 

 

 

 

on trust in the heart

The perfect way knows no difficulties
Except that it refuses to make preferences;
Only when freed from hate and love
It reveals itself fully and without disguise;
A tenth of an inch's difference,
And heaven and earth are set apart.
If you wish to see it before your own eyes
Have no fixed thoughts either for or against it.

To set up what you like against what you dislike -
That is the disease of the mind:
When the deep meaning (of the Way) is not understood,
Peace of mind is disturbed to no purpose.

The Way is perfect like unto vast space,
It is indeed due to making choice
That its Suchness is lost sight of.

Pursue not the outer entanglements,
Dwell not in the inner Void;
Be serene in the oneness of things,
And dualism vanishes by itself.

When you strive to gain quiescence by stopping motion,
The quiescence thus gained is ever in motion;
As long as you tarry in dualism,
How can you realize oneness?

And when oneness is not thoroughly understood,
In two ways loss is sustained:
The denying of reality is the asserting of it,
And the asserting of emptiness is the denying of it.

Wordliness and intellection -
The more with them, the farther astray we go:
Away, therefore, with wordliness and intellection,
and there is no place where we cannot pass freely.

When we return to the root, we gain the meaning;
When we pursue external objects we lose the reason.
The moment we are enlightened within,
We go beyond the voidness of a world confronting us.

Transformations going on in an empty world which confronts us
Appear real all because of ignorance:
Try not to seek after the true.
Only cease to cherish opinions.

~  Seng-ts'an

from Zen: a way of life 

by Christmas Humphreys

to unite

~ Dalai Lama

find out

When I met my Guru, he told me: 
"You are not what you take yourself to be. Find out what you are. 
Watch the sense 'I am', find your real Self."
 I obeyed him, because I trusted him. I did as he told me.
 All my spare time I would spend looking at myself in silence. 
And what a difference it made, and how soon! 

My teacher told me to hold on to the sense 'I am' tenaciously
 and not to swerve from it even for a moment. 
I did my best to follow his advice and in a comparatively short time 
I realized within myself the truth of his teaching. 
All I did was to remember his teaching, his face, his words constantly.
 This brought an end to the mind; in the stillness of the mind 
I saw myself as I am -- unbound. 

I simply followed (my teacher's) instruction which was to focus the mind 
on pure being 'I am', and stay in it. I used to sit for hours together, 
with nothing but the 'I am' in my mind and soon peace and joy
 and a deep all-embracing love became my normal state.
 In it all disappeared -- myself, my Guru, the life I lived,
 the world around me. Only peace remained 
and unfathomable silence.

~ Nisargadatta Maharaj

art by Deloros DiCamillo

talk

You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts;
And when you can no longer dwell in the solitude of your heart

 you live in your lips, and sound is a diversion and a pastime.
And in much of your talking, thinking is half murdered.
For thought is a bird of space, that in a cage of words may indeed

 unfold its wings but cannot fly.

There are those among you who seek the talkative through fear of being alone.
The silence of aloneness reveals to their eyes their naked selves 

and they would escape.

And there are those who talk, and without knowledge or forethought

 reveal a truth which they themselves do not understand.
And there are those who have the truth within them, but they tell it not in words.
In the bosom of such as these the spirit dwells in rhythmic silence.

When you meet your friend on the roadside

or in the marketplace, let the spirit in

you move your lips and direct your tongue.

Let the voice within your voice speak to the

ear of his ear...

~ Kahlil Gibran

from The Prophet

 

a ramage for a mountain

Silent in the moonlight, no beginning or end.

So the binding things  are lost, then found again,

The tines dug out of the snow, the singing so low

The other cannot hear it.  Some sounds do fit

Thick cords and strong fingers.  Slowly the mountain

Enters the man who walks on its slopes alone.

He walks, he sits down, he finds a stone;

No one has seen it, he sits down and is alone.

~ Robert Bly

from Talking into the Ear of a Donkey

this giving up

Can you find another market like this?

Where, with your one rose

you can buy hundreds of rose gardens?

Where, for one seed you get a whole wilderness?

For one weak breath, the divine wind?

You have been fearful of being absorbed

in the ground, or drawn up by the air.

Now your waterbead lets go

and drops into the ocean, where it came from.

This giving up is not a repenting.

It is a deep honoring of yourself.

When the ocean comes to you as a lover,

marry, at once, quickly for God's sake.

Don't postpone it. Existence has no better gift.

No amount of searching will find this.

A perfect falcon, for no reason,

has landed on your shoulder, and become yours.

~ Rumi

translation by Coleman Barks

giving up all trying

I wearied myself searching for the friend

With efforts beyond my strength

I came to the door

And saw how powerfully the locks were bolted

And the longing in me became that strong

And then I saw that I was gazing from within the presence

Only after that waiting and giving up all trying

Did Lalla flow out from where I knelt

Gently I weep for my mind,

caught in its illusion of ownership.

Mind,  you're not who you think you are.

You're dancing over a pit.

Soon you'll fall through,

And these things,  you've valued

And collected will be left behind.

~ Lalla

watering the horse

How strange to think of giving up all ambition!

Suddenly I see with such clear eyes

The white flake of snow

That has just fallen in the horse's mane!

~ Robert Bly

live at the root

A lover was telling his beloved

how much he loved her, how faithful

he had been, how self-sacrificing, getting up

at dawn every morning, fasting, giving up

wealth and strength and fame,

all for her.

There was a fire in him.

He didn't know where it came from,

but it made him weep and melt like a candle.

"You've done very well", she said, "but listen to me.

All this is the decor of love, the branches

and leaves and  blossoms.  You must live

at the root to be a true lover."

"Where is that! Tell me!"

"You've done the outward acts,

but you haven't died.  You must die."

When he heard that, he lay back on the ground

laughing, and died. He opened like a rose

that drops to the ground and died laughing.

That laughter was his freedom,

and his gift to the eternal.

~ Rumi

what dying teaches

~ Frank Ostaseski

 

under pressure

Powerful engines from the blue sky.

We live on a construction site where everything shivers,

where the ocean depths can suddenly open.

A hum in seashells and telephones.

You can see beauty if you look quickly to the side.

The heavy grainfields run together in one yellow river.

The restless shadows in my head want to go out there.

They want to crawl in the grain and turn into something gold.

Night finally.  At midnight I go to bed.

The dinghy sets out from the ship.

On the water you are alone.

The dark hull of society keeps on going.

~ Tomas Transtromer

from Half Finished Heaven

translated by robert bly

art by van gogh