you must have chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star —Nietzsche

  

.

 

The wild. I have drunk it, deep and raw, and heard its primal, unforgettable roar. We know it in our dreams, when our mind is off the leash, running wild. 'Outwardly, the equivalent of the unconscious is the wilderness: both of these terms meet, one step even further on, as one,' wrote Gary Snyder. 'It is in vain to dream of a wildness distinct from ourselves.' 'There is none such,' wrote Thoreau. 'It is the bog in our brains and bowels, the primitive vigor of Nature in us, that inspires the dream.'

And as dreams are essential to the psyche, wildness is to life.

We are animal in our blood and in our skin. We were not born for pavements and escalators but for thunder and mud. More. We are animal not only in body but in spirit. Our minds are the minds of wild animals. 

Artists, who remember their wildness better than most, are animal artists, lifting their heads to sniff a quick wild scent in the air, and they know it unmistakably, they know the tug of wildness to be followed through your life is buckled by that strange and absolute obedience. ('You must have chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star,' wrote Nietzsche.) Children know it as magic and timeless play. Shamans of all sorts and inveterate misbehavers know it; those who cannot trammel themselves into a sensible job and life in the suburbs know it.

What is wild cannot be bought or sold, borrowed or copied. It is unmistakable, unforgettable, unshameable, elemental as earth and ice, water, fire and air, a quintessence, pure spirit, resolving into no constituents. Don't waste your wildness: it is precious and necessary.


—Jay Griffiths
Wild: An Elemental Journey

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things will happen

 

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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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I want to let go -
so I don't give a damn about fine writing,
I'm rolling my sleeves up.
The dough's rising...
Oh what a shame
I can't bake cathedrals...
that sublimity of style
I've always yearned for...
Child of our time -
haven't you found the right shell for your soul?

Before I die I 
shall
bake a cathedral. 


—Edith Södergran

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you, neighbor god

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I want to live where soul meets body

And let the sun wrap its arms around me

And bathe my skin in water cool and cleansing

And feel, feel what its like to be new

Cause in my head there’s a greyhound station

Where I send my thoughts to far off destinations

So they may have a chance of finding a place

where they’re far more suited than here

I cannot guess what we'll discover

When we turn the dirt with our palms cupped like shovels

But I know our filthy hands can wash one another’s

And not one speck will remain

And I do believe it’s true

That there are roads left in both of our shoes

But if the silence takes you

Then I hope it takes me too

So brown eyes I hold you near

Cause you’re the only song I want to hear

A melody softly soaring through my atmosphere

Where soul meets body

Where soul meets body

Where soul meets body

And I do believe it’s true

That there are roads left in both of our shoes

But if the silence takes you

Then I hope it takes me too

So brown eyes I hold you near

Cause you’re the only song I want to hear

A melody softly soaring through my atmosphere

A melody softly soaring through my atmosphere

A melody softly soaring through my atmosphere

A melody softly soaring through my atmosphere

.

You, neighbor god, if sometimes in the night
I rouse you with loud knocking, I do so
only because I seldom hear you breathe
and know: you are alone.
And should you need a drink, no one is there
to reach it to you, groping in the dark.
Always I hearken. Give but a small sign.
I am quite near.

Between us there is but a narrow wall,
and by sheer chance; for it would take
merely a call from your lips or from mine
to break it down,
and that without a sound.

The wall is builded of your images.

They stand before you hiding you like names.
And when the light within me blazes high
that in my inmost soul I know you by,
the radiance is squandered on their frames.

And then my senses, which too soon grow lame,
exiled from you, must go their homeless ways.


—Rainer Maria Rilke 
Poems from the Book of Hours 

 

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be still and know that I Am

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Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. 

Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result - eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly - in you.

—Bill Bryson
A Short History of Nearly Everything

. 

Let your mind and heart release all that disturbs you.

Let your body be still,
and all the frettings of your body, and all that surrounds it.

Let the earth and sea and air be still, and heaven itself;
and then think of spirit
as streaming, pouring, rushing, and shining
into you, through you, and out from you in all directions while you sit quiet.

—Plotinus

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later that night
i held an atlas in my lap
ran my fingers across the whole world
and whispered
where does it hurt?

it answered
everywhere
everywhere
everywhere.

—Warsan Shire
What They Did Yesterday Afternoon

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whiskeyriver

buffleheadcabin

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Be a good animal, true to your instincts. —D. H. Lawrence

  

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You are not a drop in the ocean.

You are the entire ocean in a drop.


—Rumi

strange world

.

a voice out of this world
calls on our souls
not to wait any more
get ready to move
to the original home

your real home
your real birth place
is up here with the heavens
let your soul take a flight
like a happy phoenix

you've been tied up
your feet in the mud
your body roped to a log
break loose your ties
get ready for the final flight

make your last journey
from this strange world
soar for the heights
where there is no more
separation of you and your home

God has created
your wings not to be dormant
as long as you are alive
you must try more and more
to use your wings to show you're alive

these wings of yours
are filled with quests and hopes
if they are not used
they will wither away
they will soon decay

you may not like
what i'm going to tell you
you are stuck
now you must seek
nothing but the source


—Rumi 
Ghazal 945 
Nader Khalili translation

.

Perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us yesterday,

separate, in the evening.

—Rainer Maria Rilke

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question

 

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You ask me how to pray to someone who is not.
All I know is that prayer constructs a velvet bridge
And walking it we are aloft, as on a springboard,
Above landscapes the color of ripe gold
Transformed by a magic stopping of the sun.

That bridge leads to the shore of Reversal
Where everything is just the opposite and the word 'is'
Unveils a meaning we hardly envisioned.

Notice: I say we; there, every one, separately,
Feels compassion for others entangled in the flesh
And knows that if there is no other shore.
We will walk that aerial bridge all the same.


—Czesław Miłosz
Robert Hass version

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open secret

  

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Think of the phoenix coming up out of ashes,
but not flying off.
For a moment we have form. 
We can't see.

How can we be conscious and you be conscious
at the same time and separate?

Copper when an alchemist works on it loses its copper qualities. 
Seeds in Spring
begin to be trees, no longer seed. Brushwood
put in the fire changes. 

The snow-world melts.
You step in my footprint and it's gone.


—Rumi
Coleman Barks version
 

 

.

 

 

the song sings the singer

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My grandma told me that the Universe is singing in the snowflakes, the raindrops, in the trees, the water, and all Creation. Physicists call this holistic holographic universe. Lakotas call it Taku Wakan Skan Skan/Mitakuye Oyasin, which means everything is connected and related in divine rhythm, vibration.

Remember, the Lakotas know that the song sings the singer. The Spirit sings the song.

—Basil Braveheart

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all the light we cannot see

.

The most incredible pictures you’ve ever seen – Earth as art. The USGS National Center for EROS used various combinations of satellite images from Landsat 7 and Terra Satellites to create the vivid RGB composites seen here. The satellites acquired the images in black and white, and then assigned a different ‘false color’ to each radiation wavelength, or spectral bands, most of which are invisible to the naked eye.

Earth as you’ve never seen it

.

We all come into existence as a single cell, smaller than a speck of dust. Much smaller. Divide. Multiply. Add and subtract. Matter changes hands, atoms flow in and out, molecules pivot, proteins stitch together, mitochondria send out their oxidative dictates; we begin as a microscopic electrical swarm. The lungs the brain the heart. Forty weeks later, six trillion cells get crushed in the vise of our mother’s birth canal and we howl. Then the world starts in on us.

[…]

One night Werner and Jutta tune in to a scratchy broadcast in which a young man is talking in feathery, accented French about light. The brain is locked in total darkness, of course, children, says the voice. It floats in a clear liquid inside the skull, never in the light. And yet the world it constructs in the mind is full of light. It brims with color and movement. So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light? The broadcast hisses and pops. “What is this?” whispers Jutta.

Werner does not answer. The Frenchman’s voice is velvet. His accent is very different from Frau Elena’s, and yet his voice is so ardent, so hypnotizing, that Werner finds he can understand every word. The Frenchman talks about optical illusions, electromagnetism; there’s a pause and a peal of static, as though a record is being flipped, and then he enthuses about coal.

Consider a single piece glowing in your family’s stove. See it, children? That chunk of coal was once a green plant, a fern or reed that lived one million years ago, or maybe two million, or maybe one hundred million. Can you imagine one hundred million years? Every summer for the whole life of that plant, its leaves caught what light they could and transformed the sun’s energy into itself. Into bark, twigs, stems. Because plants eat light, in much the way we eat food. But then the plant died and fell, probably into water, and decayed into peat, and the peat was folded inside the earth for years upon years—eons in which something like a month or a decade or even your whole life was just a puff of air, a snap of two fingers.

[…]

Open your eyes, concludes the man, and see what you can with them before they close forever, and then a piano comes on, playing a lonely song that sounds to Werner like a golden boat traveling a dark river, a progression of harmonies that transfigures Zollverein: the houses turned to mist, the mines filled in, the smokestacks fallen, an ancient sea spilling through the streets, and the air streaming with possibility.


—Anthony Doerr
All the Light We Cannot See

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Imagine the most extreme example, a human being who does not possess the power to forget, who is damned to see becoming everywhere; such a human being would no longer believe in his own being, would no longer believe in himself, would see everything flow apart in turbulent particles, and would lose himself in this stream of becoming; like the true student of Heraclitus, in the end he would hardly even dare to lift a finger. 

All action requires forgetting, just as the existence of all organic things requires not only light, but darkness as well.

—Rodrigo Quian Quiroga

Borges and Memory: Encounters with the Human Brain

Scientific American, Nov 2, 2012

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we answer each other’s prayers.

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That which is awake even in our sleep,
Giving form in dreams to the objects of
Sense craving, that indeed is pure light,
The one Self, containing all the cosmos.

As the same fire assumes different shapes
When it consumes objects differing in shape,
So does the one Self take the shape of every being. 

As the same air assumes different shapes
When entering objects differing in shape,
So does the one Self fill the shape of all beings.

The one Self multiplies into the heart of all beings,
Changeless amidst the transformations,
Conscious in all beings.
We answer each other’s prayers.

The Self is the light reflected by all.
We shine for each other.

Knowing the senses to be separate
from the Self, and the sense experience
To be fleeting, we grieve no more.

When the five senses are stilled, when the mind
Is stilled, when the intellect is stilled,
There is Yoga, the stillness of unity.

From the heart there radiates a hundred
and one vital tracks. One of them rises
To the top of the head. This way leads to the truth.

The one love, not larger than the thumb,
Is ever enshrined in the heart. 

Know thyself to be the one Self.
Know thyself to be the one Self.


lessons from Eknath Easwaren’s 

The Katha Upanishad

.

little darling

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I believe the first living cell

Had echoes of the future in it, and felt

Direction and the great animals, the deep green forest

And whale’s-track sea; I believe this globed earth

Not all by chance and fortune brings forth her broods,

But feels and chooses. And the Galaxy, the firewheel

On which we are pinned, the whirlwind of stars in which our sun is one dust-grain, one electron, this giant atom of the universe

Is not blind force, but fulfils its life and intends its courses. 

 

“All things are full of God. 

Winter and summer, day and night

war and peace are God."

—Robinson Jeffers

De Rerum Virtute, II, excerpt

.

My heart is moved by all I cannot save:

so much has been destroyed

I have to cast my lot with those
who age after age, perversely,

with no extraordinary power,
reconstitute the world.


—Adrienne Rich
Dream of a Common Language

.

They can be like a sun, words. 

They can do for the heart what light can for a field. 

—John of the Cross

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unit(y

  

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When we say, ‘God is love’, we are saying something very great and true. But it would be senseless to grasp this saying in a simple-minded way as a simple definition, without analyzing what love is. For love is a distinguishing of two, who nevertheless are absolutely not distinguished for each other. 

The consciousness or feeling of the identity of the two—to be outside of myself and in the other—this is love.  

I have my self-consciousness not in myself but in the other. I am satisfied and have peace with myself only in this other— and I am only because I have peace with myself; if I did not have it, then I would be a contradiction that falls to pieces. 

This other, because it likewise exists outside itself, has its self-consciousness only in me, and both the other and I are only this consciousness of being-outside-ourselves and of our identity; we are only this intuition, feeling and knowledge of our unity.


[…]


For sense experience, two things cannot be in one and the same place; they exclude each other. But in the idea, distinctions are not posited as exclusive of each other; rather they are found only in this mutual inclusion of the one with the other. This is the truly supersensible [realm]…


—Hegel 
The Philosophy of Religion

.

philosophy

  

.

I used to sit in the cafe of existentialism,
lost in a blue cloud of cigarette smoke,
contemplating the suicide a tiny Frenchman
might commit by leaping from the rim of my brandy glass.

I used to hunger to be engaged
as I walked the long shaded boulevards,
eyeing women of all nationalities,
a difficult paperback riding in my raincoat pocket.

But these days I like my ontology in an armchair,
a rope hammock, or better still, a warm bath
in a cork-lined room--disengaged, soaking
in the calm, restful waters of speculation.

Afternoons, when I leave the house
for the woods, I think of Aquinas at his desk,
fingers interlocked upon his stomach,
as he deduces another proof for God's existence,

intricate as the branches of these bare November trees.
And as I kick through the leaves and snap
the windfallen twigs, I consider Leibniz on his couch
reaching the astonishing conclusion that monads,

those windowless units of matter, must have souls.
But when I finally reach the top of the hill
and sit down on the flat tonnage of this boulder,
I think of Spinoza, most rarefied of them all.

I look beyond the treetops and the distant ridges
and see him sitting in a beam of Dutch sunlight
slowly stirring his milky tea with a spoon.
Since dawn he has been at his bench grinding lenses,

but now he is leaving behind the saucer and table,
the smokey chimneys and tile roofs of Amsterdam,
even the earth itself, pale blue, aqueous,
cloud-enshrined, tilted back on the stick of its axis.

He is rising into that high dome of thought
where loose pages of Shelley float on the air,
where all the formulas of calculus unravel,
tumbling in the radiance of a round Platonic sun--

that zone just below the one where angels accelerate
and the ampitheatrical rose of Dante unfolds.
And now I stand up on the ledge to salute you, Spinoza,
and when I whistle to the dog and start down the hill,

I can feel the thick glass of your eyes upon me
as I step from the rock to glacial rock, and on her
as she sniffs her way through the leaves,
her tail straight back, her body low to the ground.


—Billy Collins
The Art of Drowning

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question

empty only of a separate existence

.

 

Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara,

Sitting in the depth of knowledge,

Lit the glow of his wisdom five elements

And saw that all of them are empty.

After this enlightenment he overcame the pain.

Listen, Shariputra,

Form - a void, emptiness - is the form

Form - is nothing but emptiness,

Void - it is nothing but a form.

The same is true for the senses,

Perceptions of mental activity and consciousness.

Listen, Shariputra,

All dharmas are empty properties.

They do not create and are not exterminable,

Are not dirty and are not cleaned,

Do not grow or shrink.

Hence, in the void

There is no form, no feelings, no perceptions,

No mental activity or consciousness.

There is no dependent origination

No eyes, no ears, no nose,

No tongue, no body, no mind.

There is no form, no sound, no smell,

No taste, no touch, no object of mind.

No sphere of elements, ranging from eye

And the ending of consciousness.

And it is not fading, from ignorance

And ending with death and decay.

There is no source of suffering and misery,

No Cessation of Suffering

And there is no way to end suffering.

There is no wisdom and no progress.

Since there is no progress, all the Bodhisattvas,

Relying on perfect wisdom,

No obstacles are in your mind.

With no obstacles, they overcome fear,

Forever exempt from error

And reach true nirvana.

Thanks to this perfect wisdom,

All the Buddhas of the past, present and future

Enter into a full, true and total enlightenment.

Therefore, to know that perfect wisdom

Expressed unsurpassed mantra,

The highest mantra, devastating suffering

Perfect and true.

Hence, the mantra Prajnaparamita

Must be declared.

Here is the mantra:

Gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha.

Gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha.

Gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha.

.

the softness of all phenomenal reality

.

Strongly influenced by the substrata of the native religion Bon (a form of Northeast Asian shamanism) and the later imports of Mahayana Buddhism and tantric ideas from India and Nepal, the Tibetan world view is uncompromising in its insistence on the “softness” of all phenomenal reality. The question of “apparent” versus “real” in relation to phenomenal existence, which has long been a preoccupation of Western philosophy, was in Tibet long ago firmly decided in favour of the former; stong pa nyid (“emptiness,” “voidness”) is part of everyday speech of a Tibetan and the explanation he offers for the many riddles of life. 

In the Tibetan view, all that exists is a mirage of the mind, imperfect images on a screen covering “absolute” reality, which can only be realized in liberation. Everything in the universe, then, has a meaning other than the apparent one, and the world is full of oracles and signs that need to be interpreted. 

Imagination reigns supreme and all that can be imagined is as real as all that exists. There is no place for the supernatural in this world since one may arbitrarily choose to regard everything either as miraculous or as commonplace. As David-Neel describes it, “None in Tibet deny that such events may take place, but no one regards them as miracles. Indeed, Tibetans do not recognize any supernatural agent. The so-called wonders, they think, are as natural as common daily events and depend on the clever handling of little known laws and forces.” 

Since phenomenal existence is believed to be created by the mind, then phenomenal reality can also be controlled, the relationship between its elements varied, and new phenomena created, by special types of mental effort involving concentrated meditation, elaborate rituals and the transforming power of mantra.


—Sudhir Kakar
Shamans, Mystics, and Doctors

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buffleheadcabin

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form is emptiness

.

 

Om Tryambakam Yajamahe
Sugandhim Pushtivardhanam 

Urvarukamiva Bandhanan 
Mrityor Mukshiya Maamritat 

We Meditate on the Three-eyed reality 
Which permeates and nourishes all like a fragrance. 
May we be liberated from death 
Even as the cucumber is severed from bondage to the creeper.


—Maha Mrityunjaya Mantra
from the Rig Veda

.

Could I ask you to explain the music of heaven for me?

Sounding the ten thousand things differently, so each becomes itself according to itself alone, who could make such music? 


—Chuang Tzu (369-286 BCE)

.

Within this earthen vessel are bowers and groves, 

and within it is the Creator:

Within this vessel are the seven oceans, 

and the unnumbered stars.

The touchstone and the jewel-appraiser are within;

And within this vessel the Eternal soundeth, 

and the spring wells up.

Kabir says: “Listen to me, my Friend!

My Beloved Lord is within."

—Kabir

  

.

We cannot, for example, draw a line around the eyes that is not necessarily arbitrary. There is no point at which the eyes begin or end, either in time or in space or conceptually. The eye bone is connected to the face bone, and the face bone is connected to the head bone, and the head bone is connected to the neck bone, and so it goes down to the toe bone, the floor bone, the earth bone, the worm bone, the dreaming butterfly bone. 

Thus, what we call our eyes are so many bubbles in a sea of foam. This is not only true of our eyes but of our other powers of sensation as well, including the mind.

—Red Pine :: The Heart Sutra

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wait

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