Thursday, February 29, 2024

Matter is spirit moving slowly enough to be seen. —Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

   







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Matter, which appears to be dense, according to physics actually is made up mostly of empty space, with a few very small particles moving around like planets. At high energy, other particles pass through what appears to be solid matter.
… As you probe more deeply into matter, it appears to have more and more subtle properties. In my view, the implications of physics seem to be that nature is so subtle that it could be almost alive or intelligent.
… The question is whether matter is rather crude and mechanical, or whether it gets more and more subtle, and becomes indistinguishable from what people have called mind.


—David Bohm
from Dialogues with Scientists and Sages: The Search for Unity


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Reality is merely an illusion, although a very persistent one. 


—Albert Einstein




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Monday, February 26, 2024

the frightful reality of things

  






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Desperation is the raw material of drastic change.

Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.


―William S. Burroughs



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The frightful reality of things
Is my everyday discovery.
Each thing is what it is.
How can I explain to anyone how much
I rejoice over this, and find it enough?

To be whole, it is enough to exist.

I have written quite a number of poems
And may write many more, of course.
Each poem of mine explains it,
Though all my poems are different,
Because each thing that exists is always proclaiming it.

Sometimes I busy myself with watching a stone,
I don’t begin thinking whether it feels.
I don’t force myself to call it my sister,

But I enjoy it because of its being a stone,
I enjoy it because it feels nothing,
I enjoy it because it is not at all related to me.

At times I also hear the wind blow by
And find that merely to hear the wind blow makes
it worth having been born.

I don’t know what others will think who read this;
But I find it must be good because I think it
without effort,
And without the idea of others hearing me think,
Because I think it without thoughts,
Because I say it as my words say it.

Once they called me a materialist poet
And I admired myself because I never thought
That I might be called by any name at all.
I am not even a poet: I see.
If what I write has any value, it is not I who am
valuable.
The value is there, in my verses.
All this has nothing whatever to do with any will
of mine.


—Fernando Pessoa



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Friday, February 23, 2024

river run

 




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You cannot understand life and its mysteries as long as you try to grasp it. Indeed, you cannot grasp it, just as you cannot walk off with a river in a bucket. 

If you try to capture running water in a bucket, it is clear that you do not understand it and that you will always be disappointed, for in the bucket the water does not run. 

To “have” running water you must let go of it and let it run.


—Alan Watts


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Monday, February 19, 2024

a glossary of chickens

 




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There should be a word for the way
they look with just one eye, neck bent,
for beetle or worm or strewn grain.
“Gleaning,” maybe, between “gizzard”
and “grit.” 

And for the way they run toward
someone they trust, their skirts
hiked, their plump bodies wobbling:
“bobbling,” let’s call it, inserted
after “blowout” and before “bloom.”

There should be terms, too, for things
they do not do—like urinate or chew—
but perhaps there already are.

I’d want a word for the way they drink,
head thrown back, throat wriggling,
like an old woman swallowing
a pill; a word beginning with “S,”
coming after “sex feather” and before “shank.”

And one for the sweetness of hens
but not roosters.

We think that by naming we can understand,
as if the tongue were more than muscle.


—Gary Whitehead

 

 

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Tuesday, February 13, 2024

birth(right

 






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Your love should never be offered to the 
mouth of a stranger,
Only to someone
Who has the valor and daring
To cut pieces of their soul off with a knife 
Then weave them into a blanket
To protect you.


—Hafiz

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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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Sunday, February 11, 2024

i drool all over :)

 






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Sanskrit has ninety-six words for love; ancient Persian has eighty, Greek three, and English only one. This is indicative of the poverty of awareness or emphasis that we give to that tremendously important realm of feeling.

Eskimos have thirty words for snow, because it is a life-and death matter to them to have exact information about the element they live with so intimately.

If we had a vocabulary of thirty words for love … we would immediately be richer and more intelligent in this human element so close to our heart. 

An Eskimo probably would die of clumsiness if he had only one word for snow; we are close to dying of loneliness because we have only one word for love. 

Of all the Western languages, English may be the most lacking when it come to feeling. 


—Robert Johnson
The Fisher King and the Handless Maiden




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From Alto Cedro I go to Marcané,
Then to Cueto, I go to Mayarí
 
The love I have for you
I can't deny it
I drool all over
And I can't help it
 
When Juanica and Chan Chan
Sifted sand in the sea
The way she was shaking the "sieve"
was making Chan Chan embarrassed!
 
Clear the road of straws
'Cause I want to sit down
On this trunk that I see
And I can't arrive there that way
 



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Thursday, February 8, 2024

always coming home

  






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Please bring strange things.
Please come bringing new things.
 
Let very old things come into your hands.
Let what you do not know come into your eyes.
Let desert sand harden your feet.
Let the arch of your feet be the mountains.
Let the paths of your fingertips be your maps
and the ways you go be the lines on your palms.
 
Let there be deep snow in your inbreath
and your outbreath be the shining of ice.
May your mouth contain the shapes of strange words.
May you smell food cooking you have not eaten.
May the spring of a foreign river be your navel.
May your soul be at home where there are no houses.
 
Walk carefully, well loved one,
walk mindfully, well loved one,
walk fearlessly, well loved one.
Return with us, return to us,
be always coming home.


—Ursula Le Guin
Initiation Song from the Finders' Lodge





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Wednesday, February 7, 2024

listen

  






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Love said to me, there is nothing that is not me.

Be silent.


—Rumi




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Sunday, February 4, 2024

Be still, my heart, these great trees are prayers. —Rabindranath Tagore

   






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Ah listen, for Silence is not lonely:
Imitate the magnificent trees
That speak no word of their rapture, but only
Breathe largely the luminous breeze. 


—D. H. Lawrence
Corot, Love Poems and Others



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Saturday, February 3, 2024

journey of the breath

  





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Of the two spoiled, barn-sour geldings
we owned that year, it was Red—
skittish and prone to explode
even at fourteen years—who'd let me
hold my face to his own: the massive labyrinthine
caverns of the nostrils, the broad plain
up the head to the eyes.

He'd let me stroke 
his coarse chin whiskers and take
his soft meaty underlip
in my hands, press my man's carnivorous
kiss to his grass-nipping under half of one,

just so that I could smell
the long way his breath had come from the rain
and the sun, the lungs and the heart, 
from a world that meant no harm. 


—Robert Wrigley
Kissing a Horse


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The horse's mind

Blends

So swiftly

Into the hay's mind.


—Fazil Husnu Daglarca
Talat Sait Halman version

 

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you and i

  






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Some time when the river is ice
ask me mistakes I have made.
Ask me whether what I have done is my life.
Others have come
in their slow way
into my thought,
and some have tried to help or to hurt:
ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.
I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look 
at the silent river and wait.
We know the current is there, hidden;
and there are comings and goings from miles 
away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.


—William Stafford
ask me 


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the bud stands for all things

  






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The bud stands for all things,  
even for those things that don't flower,  
for everything flowers, from within, 
of self-blessing;


though sometimes it is necessary 
to reteach a thing its loveliness,  
to put a hand on its brow of the flower  
and retell it in words and in touch 
it is lovely  
until it flowers again from within, 
of self-blessing;
as Saint Francis put his hand on the creased 
forehead of the sow, 
and told her in words and in touch 
blessings of earth on the sow, 

and the sow began remembering 
all down her thick length, from the earthen snout 
all the way through the fodder and slops to the 
spiritual curl of the tail, 
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine 
down through the great broken heart 
to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering 
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths 
sucking and blowing beneath them: 
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.


—Galway Kinnell
Saint Francis And The Sow




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Friday, February 2, 2024

sweet(hearts







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A leaf says,
“Sweethearts—don’t pick me,
For I am busy doing
God’s work. 

I am lowering my veins and roots
Like ropes
With buckets tied to them
Into the earth’s deep
Lake.  

I am drawing water
That I offer like a rose to
The sky.  

I am a singing cleaning woman
Dusting all the shelves in
The air
With my elegant green
Rags.  

I have a heart.
I can know happiness like
You.


—Hafiz


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Thursday, February 1, 2024

like rain

   





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Love, if you love me,
lie next to me.
Be for me, like rain,
the getting out

of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-
lust of intentional indifference.
Be wet
with a decent happiness.


—Robert Creeley
The Rain, excerpt


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