Sunday, February 4, 2024

Hokusai says









Hokusai says look carefully.
He says pay attention, notice.
He says keep looking, stay curious.
He says there is no end to seeing.

He says look forward to getting old.
He says keep changing,
you just get more who you really are.
He says get stuck, accept it, repeat yourself
as long as it’s interesting.

He says keep doing what you love.
He says keep praying.
He says every one of us is a child,

every one of us is ancient,
every one of us has a body.
He says every one of us is frightened.
He says every one of us has to find a way to live with fear.

He says everything is alive—
shells, buildings, people, fish, mountains, trees.
Wood is alive.
Water is alive.
Everything has its own life.
Everything lives inside us.
He says live with the world inside you.

He says it doesn’t matter if you draw, or write books.
It doesn’t matter if you saw wood, or catch fish.
It doesn’t matter if you sit at home
and stare at the ants on your verandah or the shadows of the trees
and grasses in your garden.

It matters that you care.
It matters that you feel.
It matters that you notice.
It matters that life lives through you.

Contentment is life living through you.
Joy is life living through you.
Satisfaction and strength
are life living through you.
Peace is life living through you.

He says don’t be afraid.
Don’t be afraid.
Look, feel, let life take you by the hand.
Let life live through you.
 
 
 
~ Roger Keyes

Saturday, February 3, 2024

a single word

 






A single word can brighten the face
of one who knows the value of words.
Ripened in silence, a single word
acquires a great energy for work.

War is cut short by a word,
and a word heals the wounds,
and there's a word that changes
poison into butter and honey.

Let a word mature inside yourself.
Withhold the unripened thought.
Come and understand the kind of word
that reduces money and riches to dust.

Know when to speak a word
and when not to speak at all.
A single word turns the universe of hell
into eight paradises.

Follow the Way. Don't be fooled
by what you already know. Be watchful.
Reflect before you speak.
A foolish mouth can brand your soul.

Yunus, say one last thing
about the power of words --
Only the word "I"
divides me from God.



~ Yunus Emre
from The Drop That Became the Sea: 
Lyric Poems of Yunus Emre 
Translated by Kabir Helminski and Refik Algan
with thanks to Poetry Chaikhana


Wednesday, January 31, 2024

all beings







All beings
are words of God,
His music, His
art.

Sacred books we are, for the infinite camps
in our
souls.

Every act reveals God and expands His Being.
I know that may be hard
to comprehend.

All creatures are doing their best
to help God in His birth
of Himself.

Enough talk for the night
He is laboring in me;

I need to be silent
for a while,

worlds are forming
in my
heart.


~ Meister Eckhart
from Love Poems from God
translation by Daniel Ladinsky



Sunday, January 28, 2024

the way it is

 





There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.


The morning before he died in the final year of his seventies,
 he drafted a poem containing these lines:

You can’t tell when strange things with meaning
will happen. I’m [still] here writing it down
just the way it was. “You don’t have to
prove anything,” my mother said. “Just be ready
for what God sends.” I listened and put my hand
out in the sun again. It was all easy.



~ William Stafford
from The Way It Is
with thanks to Maria Popova



Tuesday, January 23, 2024

"you can't think and hit at the same time" - Yogi Berra

 
 
 
Third Chinese Patriarch of Zen (The Hsin Hsin Ming)


 
 
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 mind's essential peace is disturbed to no avail.

The Way is perfect like vast space
where nothing is lacking and nothing 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 by passivity
your very effort fills you with activity.
As long as you remain in one extreme or the other
you will never know Oneness.

Those who do not live in the single Way
fail in both activity and passivity,
assertion and denial.
To deny the reality of things
is to miss their reality;
To assert the emptiness of things
is to miss their reality.

The more you talk and think about it,
the further astray you wander from the truth.
Stop talking and thinking,
and there is nothing you will not be able to know.




~ excerpt from
The Third Patriarch of Zen Hsin Hsin Ming by Seng-T'san
 Translated from the Chinese by Richard B. Clarke
 teachings of the Buddha

 

 
 
 

addicted to the external







It is strange to be here. The mystery never leaves you alone. Behind your image, below your words, above your thoughts, the silence of another world waits. A world lives within you. No one else can bring you news of this inner world. Through our voices, we bring out sound from the mountain beneath our soul. These sounds are words. There are so many talking all the time, loudly, quietly, in rooms, on streets, on TV, on radio, in the paper, in books. The noise of words keeps what we call the world there for us. We take each others’ sounds and make patterns and predictions, benedictions, and blasphemies. Each day, our tribe of language holds what we call the ‘world’ together. Yet the uttering of the world reveals how each of us relentlessly creates. Everyone is an artist. Each person brings out sound out of silence and coaxes the invisible to become visible.

Humans are new here. Above us, the galaxies dance out toward infinity. Under our feet is the ancient earth. We are beautifully molded from this clay. Yet the smallest stone is millions of years older than us. In your thoughts, the silent universe seeks echo.

An unknown world aspires towards reflection. Words are the oblique mirrors which hold your thought. You gaze into these word mirrors and catch glimpses of meaning, belonging shelter. Behind their bright surfaces is the dark and the silence. Words are like the god Janus, they face inwards and outwards at once.

If we become addicted to the external our interiority will haunt us. We will become hungry with a hunger no image, person or deed can still. To be wholesome, we must remain truthful to our vulnerable complexity. In order to keep our balance, we need to hold the interior and exterior, visible and invisible, known and unknown, temporal and eternal, ancient and new together. No one else can undertake this task for you. You are the one and only threshold of your inner world. This wholesomeness is holiness. To be holy is natural; to befriend the worlds that come to balance in you.

Behind the facade of image and distraction, each person is an artist in this primal and inescapable sense. Each one of us is doomed and privileged to be an inner artist who carries and shapes a unique world.

Human presence is a creative and turbulent sacrament, a visible sign of invisible grace.





~ John O'Donohue
from Anam Cara




Saturday, January 20, 2024

it’s enough

 
 


 
 
Now you too must learn to be satisfied with the many years
 you’ve already depended on your body. You should feel that it’s enough.

You can compare it to household utensils that you’ve had for a long time—
your cups, saucers, plates and so on. When you first had them 
they were clean and shining, but now after using them for so long,
 they’re starting to wear out. Some are already broken, some have disappeared, 
and those that are left are deteriorating: they have no stable form,
 and it’s their nature to be like that. Your body is the same way. 
It has been continually changing right from the day you were born, 
through childhood and youth, until now it has reached old age. 

Allow the mind to let go of its attachments. The time is ripe.

Even if your house is flooded or burnt to the ground, 
whatever the danger that threatens it,
 let it concern only the house. 
If there’s a flood, don’t let it flood your mind. 
If there’s a fire, don’t let it burn your heart.
 Let it be merely the house, that which is external to you, 
that is flooded and burned. Allow the mind to let go of its attachments.
 The time is ripe.

It is the same with your wealth, your possessions, and your family—
they are all yours only in name; they don’t really belong to you, 
they belong to nature.

It’s like the water of a river. It naturally flows down the gradient; 
it never flows against it, and that is its nature. If a person were to go
 and stand on a river bank and, seeing the water flowing swiftly 
down its course, foolishly want it to flow back up the gradient, 
he would suffer. Whatever he was doing, his wrong thinking 
would allow him no peace of mind. He would be unhappy
 because of his wrong view, thinking against the stream.


Find your real home
 
 
~  Ajahn Chah
excerpt from:
 First published on January 1, 1994 by permission of the Abbot, 
Wat Pah Nanachat, Thailand
found in Lions Roar
 
 
 
 
 

being afflicted

 






Being afflicted with bodily pain is like being struck by an arrow,
adding mental pain (aversion, displeasure, depression, or self-pity)
to physical pain is like being hit by a second arrow.

The wise person stops with the first arrow.
Simply by calling the pain by its true name, one can keep it from extending
beyond the physical, and thereby stop it from inflicting deep
and penetrating wounds upon the spirit.

Whatever feelings there may be—past, present, or future—
all feeling is not mine, not I, not my self.





~ The Buddha


Wednesday, January 17, 2024

of crime and punishment


 
 




Then one of the judges of the city stood forth and said,
 Speak to us of Crime and Punishment. 
 
 And he answered, saying: It is when your spirit goes wandering upon the wind, 
 That you, alone and unguarded, commit a wrong unto others and therefore unto yourself.
 
 And for that wrong committed must you knock and wait a while 
unheeded at the gate of the blessed. Like the ocean is your god-self;
 It remains for ever undefiled. And like the ether it lifts but the winged.
 
 Even like the sun is your god-self; It knows not the ways of the mole
 nor seeks it the holes of the serpent. But your god-self dwells not alone in your being. 
 
 Much in you is still man, and much in you is not yet man, 
But a shapeless pigmy that walks asleep in the mist searching for its own awakening.
 And of the man in you would I now speak. For it is he and not your god-self 
nor the pygmy in the mist, that knows crime and the punishment of crime.


Oftentimes have I heard you speak
of one who commits a wrong as though
he were not one of you…
but a stranger unto you
and an intruder upon your world…

But I say that even as the holy and the righteous
cannot rise beyond the highest
which is in each one of you,
So the wicked and the weak
cannot fall lower than the lowest
which is in you also…

And as a single leaf turns not yellow
but with the silent knowledge of the whole tree,
So the wrong-doer cannot do wrong
without the hidden will of you all…


Like a procession you walk together towards your god-self. 
 You are the way and the wayfarers. And when one of you falls down
 he falls for those behind him, a caution against the stumbling stone.
 
 Ay, and he falls for those ahead of him, who though faster and surer of foot, 
yet removed not the stumbling stone. And this also, though the word
lie heavy upon your hearts: The murdered is not unaccountable for his own murder,
 And the robbed is not blameless in being robbed. The righteous is not innocent 
of the deeds of the wicked, And the white-handed is not clean in the doings of the felon.
 
 Yea, the guilty is oftentimes the victim of the injured,
 And still more often the condemned is the burden bearer for the guiltless and unblamed. 
 You cannot separate the just from the unjust and the good from the wicked;
 For they stand together before the face of the sun even as the black thread
 and the white are woven together. And when the black thread breaks
 the weaver shall look into the whole cloth, and he shall examine the loom also. 
 
 If any of you would bring to judgement the unfaithful wife, 
Let him also weigh the heart of her husband in scales, and measure his soul
 with measurements. And let him who would lash the offender look 
unto the spirit of the offended. And if any of you would punish 
in the name of righteousness and lay the ax unto the evil tree,
 let him see to its roots; And verily he will find the roots of the good 
and the bad, the fruitful and the fruitless, all entwined together in the silent heart
 of the earth.
 
 And you judges who would be just, What judgement pronounce you upon him
 who though honest in the flesh yet is the thief in spirit? What penalty
 lay you upon him who slays in the flesh yet is himself slain in the spirit? 
 And how prosecute you him who in action is a deceiver and an oppressor, 
Yet who also is aggrieved and outraged? And how shall you punish 
those whose remorse is already greater than their misdeeds? 
 
 Is not remorse the justice which is administered by that very law
 which you would fain serve? Yet you cannot lay remorse upon the innocent 
nor lift it from the heart of the guilty. Unbidden shall it call in the night, 
that men may wake and gaze upon themselves. And you who would understand justice,
 how shall you unless you look upon all deeds in the fullness of light? 
 
Only then shall you know that the erect and the fallen
 are but one man standing in twilight between the night of his pigmy-self 
and the day of his god-self, And that the corner-stone of the temple
 is not higher than the lowest stone in its foundation. 
 
 



~ Kahlil Gibran
 from The Prophet
with thanks to love is a place





Monday, January 8, 2024

the one guest

 







She who reconciles the ill-matched threads
of her life, and weaves 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.



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



re-member, do not apologize

 






Anger is a teacher,
so let her teach you.

Let her point out all of the places
where you abandoned your sincerity
along the side of the road

simply to appease
someone else -

Where you stopped following
that great arch of your mythic life.

Let her show you where you have 
held yourself silent when the world

needed you to speak:
where your fierce wisdom
was cut off at the knees.

Our shadows have grown so grotesque,
we;ve mistaken them for culture,

but now is the time to re-member
what has been deliberately surppressed;
to prepare a grand feast for all the
ghosts who've been starved by neglect.

Do not apologize when feathers fall
like nighthawks from your fiery eyes.



~ April Tierney
from Memory Keeper



asking, listening

 






So often we are taught to ask
the wrong kinds of questions -

scratching our heads,
silently thinking

of all the things we want
from this bountiful life.

Instead, we should be shouting
into the unmarred air, "Life,
what do you want from me!?"

Then, spend the rest of our days
with heads bent to the wind,

listening.

The right kind of question
labors on Mystery's behalf;

its purpose is to praise
rather thank plunder

all the unseen futures

of our collective 
imagination.



~ April Tierney
from Memory Keeper



Wednesday, January 3, 2024

listen

 





In ‘To What Purpose is This Waste’, Rossetti dramatizes the arrogance 
and folly of supposed human superiority to plants and animals. 

The honey produced by the bees for themselves can only be imagined as waste
 if we think that human consumption is the natural goal of all production.

 Rossetti outlines how we often look down on small and seemingly insignificant creatures, 
like birds and insects. But in a vision offered by religious experience,
 the poet learns to silence her ‘proud tongue’ and instead listen 
to the sounds and murmurs of hedges and rivers, 
which ‘swell’ to ‘one loud hymn’. 

In order to change, she moves deeper into the countryside 
and re-orients her senses to ‘behold/ All hidden things’
 and to hear ‘all secret whisperings’.



‘Honey of wild bees in their ordered cells
Stored, not for human mouths to taste: –
I said, smiling superior down: What waste
Of good, where no man dwells’


A windy shell singing upon the shore:
A lily budding in a desert place;
Blooming alone
With no companion
To praise its perfect perfume and its grace:


And other eyes than our's
Were made to look on flowers,
Eyes of small birds and insects small:
The deep sun-blushing rose
Round which the prickles close
Opens her bosom to them all.
The tiniest living thing
That soars on feathered wing,
Or crawls among the long grass out of sight,
Has just as good a right
To its appointed portion of delight
As any King.




~ Christina Rossetti
from To What Purpose is this Waste?


Sunday, December 31, 2023

for a new beginning

 








In out-of-the-way places of the heart,
Where your thoughts never think to wander,
This beginning has been quietly forming,
Waiting until you were ready to emerge.

For a long time it has watched your desire,
Feeling the emptiness growing inside you,
Noticing how you willed yourself on,
Still unable to leave what you had outgrown.

It watched you play with the seduction of safety
And the gray promises that sameness whispered,
Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent,
Wondered would you always live like this.

Then the delight, when your courage kindled,
And out you stepped onto new ground,
Your eyes young again with energy and dream,
A path of plenitude opening before you.

Though your destination is not yet clear
You can trust the promise of this opening;
Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning
That is at one with your life’s desire.

Awaken your spirit to adventure;
Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;
Soon you will be home in a new rhythm,
For your soul senses the world that awaits you.



~ John O'Donohue

where new beginning might be ripening

 







Perhaps the art of harvesting the secret riches of our lives is best achieved 
when we place profound trust in the act of beginning. 
Risk might be our greatest ally. 
To live a truly creative life, we always need to cast a critical look
 at where we presently are, attempting always to discern 
where we have become stagnant and where new beginning might be ripening.
 There can be no growth if we do not remain open and vulnerable 
to what is new and different. I have never seen anyone take a risk for growth
 that was not rewarded a thousand times over.


There are days when Conamara is wreathed in blue Tuscan light. 
The mountains seem to waver as though they were huge dark ships 
on a distant voyage. I love to climb up into the silence
of these vast autonomous structures. What seems like a pinnacled summit
 from beneath becomes a level plateau when you arrive there.
 Born in a red explosion of ascending fire, the granite lies cold, 
barely marked by the millions of years of rain and wind. 
On this primeval ground I feel I have entered into a pristine permanence,
 a continuity here that knew the wind hundreds of millions of years
 before a human face ever felt it.

When we arrive into the world, we enter this ancient sequence. 
All our beginnings happen within this continuity. 
Beginnings often frighten us because they seem like lonely voyages
 into the unknown. Yet, in truth, no beginning is empty or isolated. 
We seem to think that beginning is setting out from a lonely point
 along some line of direction into the unknown. This is not the case. 
Shelter and energy come alive when a beginning is embraced… 
We are never as alone in our beginnings as it might seem at the time.
 A beginning is ultimately an invitation to open toward the gifts and growth 
that are stored up for us. 
To refuse to begin can be an act of great self-neglect.

Our very life here depends directly on continuous acts of beginning.



~ John O'Donohue