there are numberless aspects to all things

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When the truth doesn’t fill our body and mind, we think we have had enough. When the truth fills our body and mind, we realize that something is missing. 

For example, when we look at the ocean from a boat, with no land in sight, it seems circular and nothing else. But the ocean is neither round nor square, and its features are infinite in variety. It is like a palace. It is like a jewel. Only to our eyes, only for a moment, does it seem circular. All things are like this. 

Although there are numberless aspects to all things, we see only as far as our vision can reach. And in our vision of all things, we must appreciate that although they may look round or square, the other aspects of oceans or mountains are infinite in variety, and that universes lie all around us. 

It is like this everywhere, right here, in the tiniest drop of water.


—Dogen

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the way in

 

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Who really respects the earthworm,
the farmworker far under the grass in the soil.
He keeps the earth always changing.
He works entirely full of soil,
speechless with soil, and blind.

He is the underneath farmer, the underground one,
where the fields are getting on their harvest clothes. 

Who really respects him, this deep and calm earth-worker,
this deathless, gray, tiny farmer in the planet's soil?


—Harry Martinson
the earthworm
Robert Bly version

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Sometimes the way to milk and honey is through the body.
Sometimes the way in is a song.
But there are three ways in the world: dangerous, wounding, and beauty. 

To enter stone, be water.
To rise through hard earth, be plant
desiring sunlight, believing in water. 

To enter fire, be dry.
To enter life, be food.


—Linda Hogan
the way in

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Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour

 

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Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.

This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing: 

Within a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,
A light, a power, the miraculous influence. 

Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous. 

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one . . .
How high that highest candle lights the dark. 

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.


—Wallace Stevens

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pray without ceasing

   

 

 

 

 

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What I wear is pants.

What I do is live.

How I pray is breathe.

—Thomas Merton 

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Rejoice evermore.
Pray without ceasing.
In everything give thanks.

I am not all the way capable of so much, but those are the right instructions.


—Wendell Berry

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quest(ions

   

 

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What in your life is calling you?

When all the noise is silenced, 
the meetings adjourned,
the lists laid aside, 
and the wild iris blooms by itself
in the dark forest,
what still pulls on your soul?


—Rumi 

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Through what roads and how did you find my soul? 

Who taught you the steps that would lead you to me? 

What flower, what stone, what smoke revealed my abode?


—Pablo Neruda
milky night

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What I want also wants me, is looking for me and attracting me. —Rumi

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Go deeper
Past thoughts into silence.

Past silence into stillness.
Past stillness into the heart.

Let love consume all that is left of you.


—Kabir

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this short life is long and beautiful

splendid!

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Speech is not of the tongue, but of the heart. The tongue is merely the intrument with which one speaks. 

As you speak, so is your heart. 

—Paracelsus

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Life is an island. People come out of the sea, 

cross the island, and return to the sea. 

But this short life is long and beautiful. 
 

—Martiros Saryan

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ditty of first desire

   

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In the green morning
I wanted to be a heart.
A heart. 

And in the ripe evening
I wanted to be a nightingale.
A nightingale. 

(Soul,
turn orange-colored.
Soul,
turn the color of love.)

In the vivid morning
I wanted to be myself.
A heart.

And at the evening's end
I wanted to be my voice.
A nightingale.

Soul,
turn orange-colored.
Soul,
turn the color of love. 

—Federico García Lorca

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Love (Rescue)

    

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Love means to learn to look at yourself
The way one looks at distant things
For you are only one thing among many.

And whoever sees that way heals his heart,
Without knowing it, from various ills.

A bird and a tree say to him: Friend.
Then he wants to use himself and things
So that they stand in the glow of ripeness.

It doesn't matter whether he knows what he serves:
Who serves best doesn't always understand.


—Czesław Miłosz
The Way One Looks At Distant Things
Robert Haas version

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y(our body is a divine stream

  

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Your body is a divine stream,
as is your spirit. 

When your two great rivers merge, one voice is found 
and the earth applauds 
in excitement. 
 
Shrines are erected to those songs 
the hand and heart have sung 
as they serve 
the world 

with a love, a love 
we cherish.


—St. John of the Cross

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this moment

  

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This moment is like this.

—Ajahn Sumedho



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