Saturday, August 1, 2020

the faraway







O'Keeffe grew to love the desert, which she called 
"the faraway." 
She felt that the thin, dry air enabled her to see farther, 
and she was awed by the seemingly infinite space 
that surrounded her.

 She would devote much of the rest of her career to painting desert scenery.




~ Georgia O'Keeffe

1918 photo by Alfred Stieglitz
from the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe



dive for dreams






dive for dreams
or a slogan may topple you
(trees are their roots
and wind is wind)
trust your heart
if the seas catch fire
(and live by love
though the stars walk backward)
honour the past
but welcome the future
(and dance your death
away at the wedding)
never mind a world
with its villains or heroes
(for good likes girls
and tomorrow and the earth)
in spite of everything
which breathes and moves, since Doom
(with white longest hands
neating each crease)
will smooth entirely our minds
-before leaving my room
i turn, and (stooping
through the morning) kiss
this pillow, dear
where our heads lived and were.

silently if, out of not knowable

silently if, out of not knowable
night's utmost nothing,wanders a little guess
(only which is this world)more my life does
not leap than with the mystery your smile
sings or if(spiraling as luminous
they climb oblivion)voices who are dreams,
less into heaven certainly earth swims
than each my deeper death becomes your kiss
losing through you what seemed myself,i find
selves unimaginably mine;beyond
sorrow's own joys and hoping's very fears
yours is the light by which my spirit's born:
yours is the darkness of my soul's return
-you are my sun,my moon,and all my stars



e. e. cummings
 art by the author





Friday, July 31, 2020

readings










~ William Stafford



Thursday, July 30, 2020

traveling through







Death is a favour to us,
But our scales have lost their balance.
The impermanence of the body
Should give us great clarity, deepening the wonder in our
Senses and eyes
Of this mysterious existence we share
And surely are just traveling through.

If I were in the tavern tonight,
Hafiz would call for drinks
And as the Master poured, I would be reminded
That all I know of life and myself is that
We are just a mid-air flight of golden wine
Between His Pitcher and His cup.


If I were in the tavern tonight,
I would buy freely for everyone in this world
Because our marriage with the Cruel Beauty
Of time and space cannot endure very long.


Death is a favour to us,
But our minds have lost their balance.
The miraculous existence and impermanence of
Form
Always makes the illumined ones
Laugh and sing.





~ Hafiz
from  The subject tonight is Love –  poems of Hafiz
Versions by Daniel Ladinsky

Tuesday, July 28, 2020

time will come





The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.






~ Derek Walcott



why is there a fear of death?

.





Questioner:  The fact of death stares everybody in the face,
 yet its mystery is never solved.  Must it always be so?


Krishnamurti:  Why is there a fear of death? 
 When we cling to continuity, there is the fear of death.
 Incomplete action brings the fear of death. 
 There is a fear of death as long as there is the desire for continuity
 in character, continuity in action, in capacity, in the name, and so on.
  As long as there is action seeking a result, there must be the thinker 
who is seeking continuity.  Fear comes into being when this continuity 
is threatened through death.  So, there is fear of death as long
 as there is the desire for continuity. 

     That which continues disintegrates.  Any form of continuity, 
however noble, is a process of disintegration.  In continuity there is never renewal, 
and only in renewal is there freedom from the fear of death.  If we see the truth 
of this, then we will see the truth in the false.  Then there would be the liberation 
from the false.  Then there would be no fear of death.  Thus living, experiencing,
 is in the present and not a means of continuity.

     Is it possible to live from moment to moment with renewal?
  There is renewal only in ending and not in continuity.  In the interval 
between the ending and the beginning of another problem,
 there is renewal.

     Death, the state of non-continuity, the state of rebirth, is the unknown.
  Death is the unknown.  The mind, which is the result of continuity,
 cannot know the unknown.  It can know only the known.  It can only act
 and have its being in the known, which is continuous.  So the known is in fear
 of the unknown.  The known can never know the unknown, and so death 
remains the mystery.  If there is an ending from moment to moment,
 from day to day, in this ending the unknown comes into being.

     Immortality is not the continuation of "me".  The me and the mine is of time,
 the result of action towards an end.  So there is no relationship between the me
 and the mine and that which is immortal, timeless.  We would like to think 
there is a relationship, but this is an illusion.  That which is immeasurable 
cannot be caught in the net of time.

     There is fear of death where there is search for fulfillment. 
 Fulfillment has no ending.  Desire is constantly seeking and changing
 the object of fulfillment, and so it is caught in the net of time. 
 So the search for self-fulfillment is another form of continuity, 
and frustration seeks death as a means of continuity.  Truth is not continuous. 
 Truth is a state of being, and being is action without time.  This being
 can be experienced only when desire, which gives birth to continuity,
 is wholly and completely understood.  Thought is founded on the past,
 so thought cannot know the unknown, the immeasurable.  
The thought process must come to an end.  
Then only the unknowable comes into being.



.
~ J. Krishnamurti
from a talk in Bombay March 14 1948
art by Klimt




Sunday, July 26, 2020

silence shall be my answer






All things change and die and disappear.
Questions arrive, assume their actuality, and disappear.
In this hour I shall cease to ask them 
and silence shall be my answer.
The world that Your love created,
that the heat has distorted,
that my mind is always misinterpreting,
shall cease to interfere with our voices.



~ Thomas Merton
from Dialogues with Silence
.
The true contemplative is not one who prepares his mind for a particular message
 that he wants or expects to hear, but is one who remains empty
 because he knows that he can never expect to anticipate the words 
that will transform his darkness into light.  He does not even anticipate
 a special kind of transformation.  He does not demand light instead of darkness.
  He waits in silence, and, when he is "answered," it is not so much by a word
 that bursts into his silence.  It is by his silence itself, suddenly, inexplicably
 revealing itself to him as a word of great power, full of the voice of God.



from The Climate of Monastic Prayer
(one of last books he prepared for publication)
sketch by the author



Saturday, July 25, 2020

when we no longer know what to do






It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,

and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.



~  Wendell Berry

how to be







Make a place to sit down.
Sit down.  Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection,  reading,  knowledge,
skill -- more of each
than you have  -- inspiration,
work,  growing older,  patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity.  Any readers
who like your work,
doubt their judgment.
Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly.  Live
a three - differential life;
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.
Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of silence,  like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.




~ Wendell Berry
photo - Sitting Bull
by F.A. Rinehart





Friday, July 24, 2020

a journey of one inch







And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, 
no matter how long, 
but only by a spiritual journey, 
a journey of one inch, 
very arduous and humbling and joyful, 
by which we arrive at the ground at our feet, 
and learn to be at home.




~ Wendell Berry
(Collected Poems)
photo by: Kathleen Connally




Thursday, July 23, 2020

the language we’ve inherited





The language we’ve inherited confuses (this). 

We say “my” body and “your” body and “his”
 body and “her” body, but it isn’t that way. … 

This Cartesian “Me,” this autonomous little homunculus 
who sits behind our eyeballs looking out through them 
in order to pass judgment on the affairs of the world,
 is just completely ridiculous. 

This self-appointed little editor of reality
 is just an impossible fiction that collapses
 the moment one examines it.



~ Robert M. Pirsig
from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance




opposites




.



With all its eyes the natural world looks out
into the Open.  Only our eyes are turned 
backward, and surround plant, animal, child 
like traps, as they emerge into their freedom.
We know what is really out there only from
the animal's gaze;

 for we take the very young
child and force it around, so that it sees
objects - not the Open, which is so
deep in animals' faces.  Free from death.
We, only, can see death; the free animal
has its decline in back of it, forever,
and God in front, and when it moves, it moves
already in eternity, like a fountain.

Never, not for a single day, do we have 
before us that pure space into which flowers 
endlessly open. Always there is World
and never Nowhere without the No: that pure
unseparated element which one breathes
without desire and endlessly knows. 

 A child 
may wander there for hours, through the timeless
stillness, may get lost in it and be 
shaken back. Or someone dies and is it.
For , nearing death, one doesn't see death; but stares
beyond, perhaps with an animal's vast gaze.
Lovers, if the beloved were not there
blocking the view, are close to it, and marvel...
As if by some mistake, it opens for them
behind each other.. But neither can move past
the other, and it changes back to World.
Forever turned toward objects, we see in them
the mere reflection of the realm of freedom,
which we have dimmed. Or when some animal
mutely, serenely, looks us through and through.
That is what fate means: to be opposite,
to be opposite and nothing else, forever.




~ Rainer Maria Rilke
excerpt from the Duino Elegies, #8
translated by Stephen Mitchell
photo by shreve stockton

.

habit - fear - security - exclusion






.

 For if we think of this existence of the individual as a larger or smaller room,
 it appears evident that most people learn to know only a corner of their room, 
a place by the window, a strip of floor on which they walk up and down. 


Thus they have a certain security. And yet that dangerous insecurity
 is so much more human which drives the prisoners in Poe’s stories
 to feel out the shapes of their horrible dungeons 
and not be strangers to the
 unspeakable terror of their abode.

We, however, are not prisoners. No traps or snares are set about us, 
and there is nothing which should intimidate or worry us.
 We are set down in life as in the element to which we best correspond,
 and over and above this we have through thousands of years 
of accommodation become so like this life, that when we hold still
 we are, through a happy mimicry, scarcely to be distinguished
 from all that surrounds us. 


We have no reason to mistrust our world, 
for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, 
those abysses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them.
 And if only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels
 us that we must always hold to the difficult, then that which now still seems
 to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful.


 How should we be able to forget those ancient myths about dragons
 that at the last moment turn into princesses; 


perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting 
to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its 
deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.




~ Rainer Maria Rilke





Wednesday, July 22, 2020

Coltrane - compassion










~ John Coltrane


The divine force — God, as Coltrane defined it —
 breathes through us all, said Coltrane, 
and the last years of his life can be seen as an attempt —
 sometimes a struggle —
 to breathe God through his horn.

“Once you become aware of this force for unity in life,” 
wrote Coltrane in the liner notes for 1965’s Meditations,
 his acknowledged follow-up to A Love Supreme.
 “You can’t forget it. It becomes part of everything you do… 
my goal in meditating on this through music however remains… 
to uplift people as much as I can. To inspire them
 to realize more and more their capacities for
 living meaningful lives.”

 comments by Sean Murphy


compassion









~ Joseph Goldstein