.

They lived the slow and invisible interpenetration of their universes,

like two stars gravitating around a common axis, in ever tighter orbits,

whose clear destiny is to coalesce at some point in space and time.

 –Paolo Giordano, The Solitude of Prime Numbers

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via meandering wind

image via heart spirit mind 

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the bridge

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Between now and now,
between I am and you are,
the word bridge.

Entering it
you enter yourself:
the world connects
and closes like a ring.

From one bank to another,
there is always
a body stretched:
a rainbow.
I’ll sleep beneath its arches

–Octavio Paz 

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via artemis

image via heart spirit mind

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This morning

two birds

fell down the side of the maple tree

like a tuft of fire

a wheel of fire

a love knot

out of control as they plunged through the air

pressed against each other

and I thought

how I meant to live a quiet life

how I meant to live a life of mildness and meditation

tapping the careful words against each other

and I thought –

as though I were suddenly spinning, like a bar of silver

as though I had shaken my arms and lo! they were wings –

of the Buddha

when he rose from his green garden

when he rose in his powerful ivory body

when he turned to the long dusty road without end

when he covered his hair with ribbons and the petals of flowers

when he opened his hands to the world.

–Mary Oliver

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image via datura



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The heart has its own language. 

The heart knows a hundred thousand ways to speak.

—Rumi






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via datura

image via vivre !
Joshua Yeldham: “Love Owl - Morning Bay"
source: arthousegallery.com.au

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It doesn’t interest me if there is one God
or many gods.
I want to know if you belong or feel
abandoned.
If you know despair or can see it in others.
I want to know
if you are prepared to live in the world
with its harsh need
to change you. If you can look back
with firm eyes
saying this is where I stand. I want to know
if you know
how to melt into that fierce heat of living
falling toward
the center of your longing. I want to know
if you are willing
to live, day by day, with the consequence of love
and the bitter
unwanted passion of your sure defeat.

I have heard, in that fierce embrace, even
the gods speak of God.

–David Whyte
Self Portrait

from Fire in the Earth
©1992 Many Rivers Press


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via wait - what?
image via vivre!


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Enough. These few words are enough.

If not these words, this breath.

If not this breath, this sitting here.

This opening to the life

we have refused

again and again

until now.

Until now.

–David Whyte,
Where Many Rivers Meet

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image via a good thing happened

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the true love

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There’s a faith in loving fiercely the one who is rightfully yours
especially if you have waited years and especially if part of you never
believed you could deserve this loved and beckoning hand held
out to you this way.

I am thinking of faith now and the testaments of loneliness
and what we feel we are worthy of in this world.
Years ago in the Hebrides I remember an old man
who would walk every morning on the gray stones
to the shore of baying seals, who would press his
hat to his chest in the blustering salt wind and say his
prayer to the turbulent Jesus hidden in the waters.

And I think of the story of the storm and the people
waking and seeing the distant, yet familiar figure,
far across the water calling to them.
And how we are all preparing for that abrupt waking
and that calling and that moment when we have to say yes!
Except it will not come so grandly, so biblically,
but more subtly, and intimately in the face
of the one you know you have to love.
So that when we finally step out of the boat
toward them we find, everything holds us,
and everything confirms our courage.

And if you wanted to drown, you could,
But you don’t, because finally, after all
this struggle and all these years,
you don’t want to anymore.
You’ve simply had enough of drowning
and you want to live, and you want to love.
And you’ll walk across any territory,
and any darkness, however fluid,
and however dangerous to take the one
hand and the one life, you know belongs in yours.


–David Whyte

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image via datura

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Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love. 

It will not lead you astray.

—Rumi

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via wait - what?

image via larger loves

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Exhale only love.

—Rumi 

 

 

 

 

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via love is infinite

image via datura

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the love competition

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so great.

Lost

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Stand still.

The trees ahead and the bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,

And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,

Must ask permission to know it and be known.

The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,

I have made this place around you,

If you leave it you may come back again, saying Here.

No two trees are the same to Raven.

No two branches are the same to Wren.

If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,

You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.

. 

An old Native American elder story rendered into modern English by David Wagoner,
in The Heart Aroused - Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America
by David Whyte, Currency Doubleday, New York, 1996.

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image via datura

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Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing
there is a field.

I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass
the world is too full to talk about.

 

~ Rumi




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via love is infinite
image via datura



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And when you shake your colonies of hair,
you are a willow of bellropes.

All who have loved you clang:
a treeful of musical bruises.

It gives you something to hum,
an anthem, falling asleep.

~ Matthew Williams

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via A la recherche du temps perdu

image via datura

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evolution

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When you were a tadpole and I was a fish
In the Paleozoic time,
And side by side on the ebbing tide
We sprawled through the ooze and slime,
Or skittered with many a caudal flip
Through the depths of the Cambrian fen,
My heart was rife with the joy of life,
For I loved you even then.

Mindless we lived and mindless we loved
And mindless at last we died;
And deep in the rift of the Caradoc drift
We slumbered side by side.
The world turned on in the lathe of time,
The hot lands heaved amain,
Till we caught our breath from the womb of death
And crept into light again.

We were amphibians, scaled and tailed,
And drab as a dead man's hand;
We coiled at ease 'neath the dripping trees
Or trailed through the mud and sand.

Croaking and blind, with our three-clawed feet
Writing a language dumb,
With never a spark in the empty dark
To hint at a life to come.

Yet happy we lived and happy we loved,
And happy we died once more;
Our forms were rolled in the clinging mold
Of a Neocomian shore.
The eons came and the eons fled
And the sleep that wrapped us fast
Was riven away in a newer day
And the night of death was past.

Then light and swift through the jungle trees
We swung in our airy flights,
Or breathed in the balms of the fronded palms
In the hush of the moonless nights;
And, oh! what beautiful years were there
When our hearts clung each to each;
When life was filled and our senses thrilled
In the first faint dawn of speech.

Thus life by life and love by love
We passed through the cycles strange,
And breath by breath and death by death
We followed the chain of change.
Till there came a time in the law of life
When over the nursing side
The shadows broke and soul awoke
In a strange, dim dream of God.

I was thewed like an Auruch bull
And tusked like the great cave bear;
And you, my sweet, from head to feet
Were gowned in your glorious hair.
Deep in the gloom of a fireless cave,
When the night fell o'er the plain
And the moon hung red o'er the river bed
We mumbled the bones of the slain.

I flaked a flint to a cutting edge
And shaped it with brutish craft;
I broke a shank from the woodland lank
And fitted it, head and haft;
Then I hid me close to the reedy tarn,
Where the mammoth came to drink;
Through the brawn and bone I drove the stone
And slew him upon the brink.

Loud I howled through the moonlit wastes,
Loud answered our kith and kin;
From west and east to the crimson feast
The clan came tramping in.
O'er joint and gristle and padded hoof
We fought and clawed and tore,
And check by jowl with many a growl
We talked the marvel o'er.

I carved that fight on a reindeer bone
With rude and hairy hand;
I pictured his fall on the cavern wall
That men might understand.
For we lived by blood and the right of might
Ere human laws were drawn,
And the age of sin did not begin
Till our brutal tush were gone.

And that was a million years ago
In a time that no man knows;
Yet here tonight in the mellow light
We sit at Delmonico's.
Your eyes are deep as the Devon springs,
Your hair is dark as jet,
Your years are few, your life is new,
Your soul untried, and yet -

Our trail is on the Kimmeridge clay
And the scarp of the Purbeck flags;
We have left our bones in the Bagshot stones
And deep in the Coralline crags;
Our love is old, our lives are old,
And death shall come amain;
Should it come today, what man may say
We shall not live again?

God wrought our souls from the Tremadoc beds
And furnished them wings to fly;
We sowed our spawn in the world's dim dawn,
And I know that it shall not die,
Though cities have sprung above the graves
Where the crook-bone men make war
And the oxwain creaks o'er the buried caves
Where the mummied mammoths are.

Then as we linger at luncheon here
O'er many a dainty dish,
Let us drink anew to the time when you
Were a tadpole and I was a fish. 

~ Langdon Smith



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image via datura



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To kiss a forehead is to erase worry.

I kiss your forehead.

To kiss the eyes is to lift sleeplessness.

I kiss your eyes.

To kiss the lips is to drink water.

I kiss your lips.

To kiss a forehead is to erase memory.

I kiss your forehead.

~ Marina Tsvetaeva

trans. Ilya Kaminsky and Jean Valentine

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via A la recherche du temps perdu

image via datura

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All day I think about it, then at night I say it.
Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing?
I have no idea.
My soul is from elsewhere, I’m sure of that,
and I intend to end up there.

This drunkenness began in some other tavern.
When I get back around to that place,
I’ll be completely sober. Meanwhile,
I’m like a bird from another continent, sitting in this aviary.
The day is coming when I fly off,
but who is it now in my ear who hears my voice?
Who says words with my mouth?

Who looks out with my eyes? What is the soul?
  I cannot stop asking.
If I could taste one sip of an answer,
I could break out of this prison for drunks.
I didn’t come here of my own accord, and I can’t leave that way.
Whoever brought me here, will have to take me home.

This poetry. I never know what I’m going to say.
I don’t plan it.
When I’m outside the saying of it,
I get very quiet and rarely speak at all.

 

~ Rumi

 (trans. Coleman Barks)

 

 

 

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via saturn rising

image via larger loves

 

 

 

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I believe a strong woman
may be stronger than a man,
particularly if she happens
to have love in her heart.

I guess a loving woman is indestructible.

 

~ John Steinbeck

East of Eden

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via my restless thoughts

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Remember that you ought to behave in life as you would at a banquet.
As something is being passed around, it comes to you.
 
When it comes to you, stretch out your hand gently,
take a portion of it politely, but pass it on. 

Or, it has not come to you yet.
Do not project your desire to meet it.
So act always in life.
  

~ Epictetus


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image via ElemenoP

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When we get out of the glass bottles of our ego,

and when we escape like squirrels turning in the

cages of our personality

and get into the forests again,

we shall shiver with cold and fright

but things will happen to us

so that we don't know ourselves.

Cool, unlying life will rush in,

and passion will make our bodies taut with power,

we shall stamp our feet with new power

and old things will fall down,

we shall laugh, and institutions will curl up like

burnt paper.

 ~ D. H. Lawrence

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image via deja vu

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 Go deeper than love, for the soul has greater depth,
love is like the grass, but the heart is deep wild rock
molten, yet dense and permanent.

Go down to your deep old heart, and lose sight of yourself.

And lose sight of me, the me whom you turbulently loved.

Let us lose sight of ourselves, and break the mirrors.

For the fierce curve of our lives is moving again to the depth
out of sight, in the deep living.


~ D. H. Lawrence,
from 'Know Thyself More Deeply'



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image via wait - what?



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I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me.
 

That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly,
and my blood is part of the sea. 

There is not any part of me that is alone and absolute except my mind,
and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself,
it is only the glitter of the sun on the surfaces of the water.

~ D. H. Lawrence




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image via vivre !

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I never saw a wild thing
sorry for itself.

A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.

~ D. H. Lawrence

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whales weep not

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They say the sea is cold, but the sea contains

the hottest blood of all, and the wildest, the most urgent.

All the whales in the wider deeps, hot are they, as they urge

on and on, and dive beneath the icebergs.

The right whales, the sperm-whales, the hammer-heads, the killers

there they blow, there they blow, hot wild white breath
out of the sea!

And they rock, and they rock, through the sensual ageless ages

on the depths of the seven seas,

and through the salt they reel with drunk delight

and in the tropics tremble they with love

and roll with massive, strong desire, like gods.

Then the great bull lies up against his bride

in the blue deep bed of the sea,

 as mountain pressing on mountain, in the zest of life:

and out of the inward roaring of the inner red ocean
of whale blood

the long tip reaches strong, intense, like the maelstrom-tip,
and comes to rest

in the clasp and the soft, wild clutch of a she-whale's
fathomless body.

And over the bridge of the whale's strong phallus, linking
the wonder of whales

the burning archangels under the sea keep passing,
back and forth,
keep passing, archangels of bliss

from him to her, from her to him, great Cherubim

that wait on whales in mid-ocean, suspended
in the waves of the sea

great heaven of whales in the waters, old hierarchies.

And enormous mother whales lie dreaming suckling
their whale-tender young

and dreaming with strange whale eyes wide open in the waters of

the beginning and the end.

And bull-whales gather their women and whale-calves
in a ring

when danger threatens, on the surface of the ceaseless flood

and range themselves like great fierce Seraphim
facing the threat

encircling their huddled monsters of love.

And all this happens in the sea, in the salt

where God is also love, but without words:

and Aphrodite is the wife of whales

most happy, happy she!

and Venus among the fishes skips and is a she-dolphin

she is the gay, delighted porpoise sporting with love
and the sea

she is the female tunny-fish, round and
happy among the males

and dense with happy blood, dark rainbow bliss in the sea.

~ D. H. Lawrence 

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When love awakens in your life, in the night of your heart,
it is like the dawn breaking within you. 

Where before there was anonymity, now there is intimacy;
where before there was fear, now there is courage;
where before in your life there was awkwardness,
now there is a rhythm of grace and gracefulness;
where before you used to be jagged, now you are elegant
and in rhythm with your self. 

When love awakens in your life, it is like a rebirth,
a new beginning.

 

~ John O’Donohue

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via love is infinite

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Love in its essence 
is spiritual fire.

 ~ Seneca ~



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via vivre !



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