the most courageous work

  

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Open the letter of the body’s life.

Inside the words, this body, your life, is a letter
to the king of the universe.

Go to a private place and open it and read to see if
the words are right. If they

are not, start another! And do not think it is easy to open
the body and read the secret

message. This is the most courageous work, not something
for children playing with knucklebones
in the dirt. Open to

the title page. Is what it says there the same as what you
have said it says? If

you are carrying a heavy sack, empty out the stones! Bring
only what should be given.


—Rumi

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Think in ways you've never thought before.
If the phone rings, think of it as carrying a message
Larger than anything you've ever heard,
Vaster than a hundred lines of Yeats.

Think that someone may bring a bear to your door,
Maybe wounded and deranged; or think that a moose
Has risen out of the lake, and he's carrying on his antlers
A child of your own whom you've never seen.

When someone knocks on the door,
Think that he's about
To give you something large: tell you you're forgiven,
Or that it's not necessary to work all the time,
Or that it's been decided that if you lie down no one will die.


—Robert Bly
Morning Poems

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Over these writings I bent my head.

Now you are considering them. If you

turn away I will look up: a bridge

that was there will be gone.

For the rest of your life I will stand here,

reaching across.

If these writings can bring a turn
or an echo that touches you - maybe
a face, a slant, a tune - you will stop
too and bend over them. When you
look up, your thought will reach
wherever I am.

I know it is strange. and there is no measure
for this. The only connection we make
is like a twinge when sometimes they change
the beat in music, and we sprawl with it
and hear another world for a minute
that is almost there.

—William Stafford
Sending These Messages

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