other desires are substitutes

A spirit that lives in this world

and does not wear the shirt of love,

such an existence is a deep disgrace.

Be foolishly in love,

because love is all there is.

There is no way into presence

except through a love exchange.

If someone asks, But what is love?

answer, Dissolving the will.

True freedom comes to those

who have escaped the questions

of freewill and fate.

Love is an emperor.

The two worlds play across him.

He barely notices their tumbling game.

Love and lover live in eternity.

Other desires are substitutes

for that way of being.

How long do you lay embracing a corpse?

Love rather the soul, which cannot be held.

Anything born in spring dies in the fall,

but love is not seasonal.

With wine pressed from grapes,

expect a hangover.

But this love path has no expectations.

You are uneasy riding the body?

Dismount. Travel lighter.

Wings will be given.

Be clear like a mirror

reflecting nothing.

Be clean of pictures and the worry

that comes with images.

Gaze into what is not ashamed

or afraid of any truth.

Contain all human faces in your own

without any judgment of them.

Be pure emptiness.

What is inside that? you ask.

Silence is all I can say.

Lovers have some secrets

That they keep.

~ Rumi
photo by Eliot Porter

struggle?

 

When you surrender, the problem ceases to exist. Try to solve it, or conquer it, 

and you only set up more resistance. I am very certain now that… 

if I truly become what I wish to be, the burden will fall away. 

The most difficult thing to admit, and to realize with one’s whole being, 

is that you alone control nothing. 

To be able to put yourself in tune or rhythm with the forces beyond, 

which are the truly operative ones, that is the task

 — and the solution, if we can speak of “solutions.”

One thing I don’t worry about… is what people think, 

how they misinterpret things. There’s nothing you can do about that… 

What amazes me more and more is how much people do understand 

when you give them the full dose, when you hold back nothing.

One has to permit people to become desperate, to become wholly lost, 

that only then are they ready for the right word, only then can they 

avail themselves of the truth. To withhold it then is a crime. 

But to nurse them along is a worse crime. And there is where much

 of the conflict centers, about that point. The human instinct to spare 

the other person his agony (which is his means of salvation, 

in any sense of the word) is a fallacious instinct. Here the subtle temptations, 

the vicious and insidious ones, because so confused and entangled, 

enter in. On this so-called human plane it is the ego which commands — 

often in the most amazing disguises. The temptation to be good, 

to do good, gets us all some time or other.

 It’s the last ruse, I feel, of the ego.

This clamor and agitation which I seem to create all about me, 

even from a distance, 

proceeds from me. 

I know it.

Have I not become more and more aware latterly that the things 

I deeply desire come without struggle? … 

All the struggle, then, is phantom play. 

The fighting with shadows. 

This I know.

~ Henry Miller

from A Literate Passion: 

Letters of Anaïs Nin & Henry Miller

with thanks to The Marginalian by Maria Popova

photo Henry Miller on his bike

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

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

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

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

"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

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

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

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

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?