Monday, August 31, 2020

oh what is that beautiful thing that just happened?




At Blackwater Pond the tossed waters have settled
after a night of rain.


I dip my cupped hands. I drink
a long time. It tastes

like stone, leaves, fire. It falls cold
into my body, waking the bones. I hear them

deep inside me, whispering
oh what is that beautiful thing
that just happened?








~ Mary Oliver
photo by Eliot Porter


Sunday, August 30, 2020

room for all this






Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. 
We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem,
 but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. 

They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again
 and fall apart again. It’s just like that. 

The healing comes from letting there be room for all this to happen;
 room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy. When we think 
something is going to bring us pleasure, we don’t know 
what’s really going to happen. When we think something is going
 to give us misery, we don’t know. 

Letting there be room for not knowing is the most important thing of all.
 We try to do what we think is going to help. But we don’t know. 
We never know if we’re going to fall flat or sit up tall.

 When there’s a big disappointment, we don’t know if that’s the end of the story.
 It may just be the beginning of a great adventure.





~ Pema Chodron
art by van gogh



Friday, August 28, 2020

what survives




Rexroth and son, 1955



A long lifetime
Peoples and places
And the crisis of mankind -
What survives is the crystal -
Infinitely small -
Infinitely large -





~ Kenneth Rexroth





remembering rexroth







one of the leading poets of the San Francisco Renaissance, and he was considered a sort of father of the Beat movement, although he responded to this label by saying: "An entomologist is not a bug."  He said of San Francisco "It is the only city in the United States which was not settled overland by the westward-spreading puritan tradition, or by the Walter Scott, fake-cavalier tradition of the South. It had been settled, mostly, in spite of all the romances of the overland migration, by gamblers, prostitutes, rascals and fortune seekers who came across the Isthmus and around the Horn. They had their faults, but they were not influenced by Cotton Mather."

he loved California summer in the Sierra Nevada mountains, and almost every summer after that for the next 40 years. He said: "I have always felt I was most myself in the mountains. There I have done the bulk of what is called my creative work. At least it is in the mountains that I write most of my poetry. Life in the city in the winter seems too full of distractions and busy work. Who said poetry was emotion recollected in tranquility? I don't know about others, but I find most tranquility camped by a mountain lake at timber line.





Lying under the stars,
In the summer night,
Late while the autumn
Constellations climb the sky,
As the Cluster of Hercules
Falls down the west
I put the telescope by 
And watch Deneb
Move towards the zenith
My body is asleep. Only
My eyes and brain are awake.
The stars stand around me
Like gold eyes. I can no longer
Tell where I begin and leave off.
The faint breeze in the dark pines,
And the invisible grass,
The tipping earth, the swarming stars
Have an eye that sees itself.






The Earth will be going on a long time
Before it finally freezes;
Men will be on it; they will take names,
Give their deeds reasons.
We will be here only
As chemical constituents—
A small franchise indeed.
Right now we have lives,
Corpuscles, Ambitions, Caresses,
Like everybody had once—

Here at the year's end, at the feast
Of birth, let us bring to each other
The gifts brought once west through deserts—
The precious metal of our mingled hair,
The frankincense of enraptured arms and legs,
The myrrh of desperate, invincible kisses—
Let us celebrate the daily
Recurrent nativity of love,
The endless epiphany of our fluent selves,
While the earth rolls away under us
Into unknown snows and summers,
Into untraveled spaces of the stars.



~ Kenneth Rexroth
from Sacramental Acts


Thursday, August 27, 2020

she who reconciles









She who reconciles the ill-matched threads
of her life, and weave them gratefully
into a single cloth -
it's she who drives the loudmouths from the hall
and clears it for a different celebration


where the one guest is you.
In the softness of evening
it's you she receives.


You are the partner of her loneliness,
the unspeaking center of her monologues.
With each disclosure you encompass more
and she stretches beyond what limits her,
to hold you.





~ Rainer Maria Rilke
from
Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God




Wednesday, August 26, 2020

I'm slipping





.

I'm slipping.  I'm slipping away
like sand

slipping through fingers.  All
my cells

are open, and all
so thirsty.  I ache and swell

in a hundred places, but mostly
in the middle of my heart.

I want to die.  Leave me alone.
I free I  am almost there -

where the great terror
can dismember me.




~ Rainer Maria Rilke
from The Book of Hours


too many names







Mondays are meshed with Tuesdays
and the week with the whole year.
Time cannot be cut
with your weary scissors,
and all the names of the day
are washed out by the waters of night. 


No one can claim the name of Pedro,
nobody is Rosa or Maria,
all of us are dust or sand,
all of us are rain under rain.
They have spoken to me of Venezuelas,
of Chiles and of Paraguays;
I have no idea what they are saying.
I'm aware of the earth's skin
and I know that it doesn't have a name.


When I lived with the roots
I liked them more than the flowers,
and when I talked with a stone
it rang like a bell.


The spring is so long
that is lasts all winter:
time lost its shoes:
a year contains four centuries.


When I sleep all these nights,
what am I named or not named?
And when I wake up who am I
if I wasn't I when I slept?


This means that we have barely
disembarked into life,
that we've only just now been born,
let's not fill our mouths
with so many uncertain names,
with so many sad labels,
with so many pompous letters,
with so much yours and mine,
with so much signing of papers.


I intend to confuse things,
to unite them, make them new-born,
intermingle them, undress them,
until the light of the world
has the unity of the ocean,
a generous wholeness,
a fragrance alive and crackling.





~ Pablo Neruda

English version by Anthony Kerrigan
 image by Chris Behling
 
 
 

to heal the wound






I think most of us have been touched
 profoundly by our situation, the reality in which we live, 
and many of us need a kind of healing.

A number of people, including myself and many of my friends --
we need a little bit of time, of space, of privacy, of meditation,
in order to heal the wound that is very deep in ourselves. 

That does not mean that if sometimes I am absorbed in looking at a cloud
and not thinking about Vietnam, that does not mean that I don't care.
But I need the cloud to heal me and my deep wounds. Many of us are wounded,
and we understand and support each other in our need for healing.

We tend to imagine that the lifetime of a person is something like
using your pen in order to draw a line across a sheet of paper.
A person appears on this earth and lives and dies.
And we may think of the life of a person just like a line we trace
across a sheet of paper. But I think that is not true.

The life of a person is not confined to anything like a line
 you draw,o not go in one direction -
direction of the right side of a piece of paper, 
but you also go in other directions.
So the image of that line crossing the sheet of paper is not correct.
It goes in all directions. Not only four, or eight, or sixteen,
 but many, many.

So if we can see through to that reality, our notion of time will change.
That is why in meditation you can feel that you are not traveling in time
but we are, we are eternity. We are not caught by death, by change.
A few moments of being alive in that state of mind is a very good opportunity
for self purification. Not only will it affect our being,
but of course it affects our action -- our non-action.




~ Thich Nhat Hanh
with thanks to louie, louie






Tuesday, August 25, 2020

and all shall be well





We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;

At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.

Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well




~ T.S Eliot

from “Little Gidding,” Four Quartets



we travelers












We travelers, walking to the sun, can't see
Ahead, but looking back the very light
That blinded us shows us the way we came,
Along which blessings now appear, risen
As if from sightlessness to sight, and we,
By blessings brightly lit, keep going toward
That blessed light that yet to us is dark.



~ Wendell Berry




Monday, August 24, 2020

at the centre








When I am at the centre of my unrequited love
I cannot hold it as an object
It has no sharp edges to torture anyone
I breathe the fragrance of the longing
and the longing has no proprietor
"O my love" embraces the great wide sky
as the night picks through the constellations
lifting necklace after dripping necklace
for the delight of my true beloved
"O my love" cries out from every pore of snow
and the forest answers a from great height:
.
"O my love"




~ Leonard Cohen

.

Saturday, August 22, 2020

I learned through my body and soul



I learned through my body and soul
 that it was necessary for me to sin,
that I needed lust,
that I had to strive for property,
and experience nausea and the depths of despair
in order to learn not to resist them,
in order to learn to love the world ...



Hermann Hesse, from 'Siddhartha'
 


dark eyes







My love and my yearning for home
ignited in the heat of this night
like the sweet fragrance of foreign flowers
fanning the flames of a fierce fervor.

My love and my yearning for home
and all my fortune and misfortune
now stand like silent stanzas of a song
in the dark mirror of your mythic gaze.

My love and my yearning for home
have turned away from the noise of this world
and in your dark eyes
have built a vast, secret throne.





~ Hermann Hesse
from The seasons of the Soul
translated by Ludwig Max Fischer


Monday, August 17, 2020

cannot be thought, caught, or sought by understanding








For silence is not God, nor speaking; 
fasting is not God, nor eating; 
solitude is not God, nor company; 
nor any other pair of opposites.

  He is hidden between them, 
and cannot be found by anything your soul does, 
but only by the love of your heart.  

He cannot be known by reason, 
he cannot be thought, caught, 
or sought by understanding.  

But he can be loved and 
chosen by the true, loving will of your heart.




~ the cloud of unknowing



the singing bowl








Begin the song exactly where you are.
Remain within the world of which you're made.
Call nothing common in the earth or air.

Accept it all and let it be for good.
Start with the very breath you breathe in now,
This moment's pulse, this rhythm in your blood

And listen to it, ringing soft and low.
Stay with the music, words will come in time.
Slow down your breathing. Keep it deep and slow.

Become an open singing bowl, whose chime
Is richness out of emptiness,
And timelessness resounding into time.

And when the heart is full of quietness
Begin the Song exactly where you are.
 
 
 
 
 
~ Malcolm Guite
art by Joyce Huntington
with thanks to whiskey river