Love is not consolation. It is light. —Friedrich Nietzsche

  

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All that passes descends,
and ascends again unseen
into the light: the river
coming down from sky
to hills, from hills to sea,
and carving as it moves,
to rise invisible,
gathered to light, to return
again. "The river's injury
is its shape." I've learned no more.

We are what we are given
and what is taken away;
blessed be the name
of the giver and taker.

For everything that comes
is a gift, the meaning always
carried out of sight
to renew our whereabouts,
always a starting place.
And every gift is perfect 
in its beginning, for it
is "from above, and cometh down
from the Father of lights."
Gravity is grace.


—Wendell Berry 
The Gift of Gravity, excerpt

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the wisdom of nondiscrimination

    

 

 

 

 

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My right hand has written all the poems
that I have composed.
My left hand has not written a single poem.
But my right hand does not think,
‘Left Hand, you are good for nothing.’  

My right hand does not have a superiority complex.
That is why it is very happy.
My left hand does not have any complex at all.
In my two hands there is the kind of wisdom
called the wisdom of nondiscrimination.

One day I was hammering a nail
and my right hand was not very accurate
and instead of pounding on the nail
it pounded on my finger. 

My right hand put the hammer down and took care
of my left hand in a very tender way,
as if it were taking care of itself.

It did not say, ‘Left Hand, you have to remember
that I have taken good care of you
and you have to pay me back in the future.’ 

There was no such thinking…

And my left hand did not say,
‘Right Hand, you have done me a lot of harm
— give me that hammer, I want justice.’ 

My two hands know that they are members
of one body; they are in each other.


—Thich Nhat Hanh (treasure

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saying grace

  

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... when you crush an apple with your teeth, say to it in your heart:

Your seeds shall live in my body,

And the buds of your tomorrow shall blossom in my heart,

And your fragrance shall be my breath,

And together we shall rejoice through all the seasons.


―Kahlil Gibran

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every(thing is sentient

  

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In 1909, the biologist Jakob von Uexküll noted that every animal exists in its own unique perceptual world — a smorgasbord of sights, smells, sounds and textures that it can sense but that other species might not. These stimuli defined what von Uexküll called the Umwelt — an animal’s bespoke sliver of reality. 

A tick’s Umwelt is limited to the touch of hair, the odor that emanates from skin and the heat of warm blood. A human’s Umwelt is far wider but doesn’t include the electric fields that sharks and platypuses are privy to, the infrared radiation that rattlesnakes and vampire bats track or the ultraviolet light that most sighted animals can see.

The Umwelt concept is one of the most profound and beautiful in biology. It tells us that the all-encompassing nature of our subjective experience is an illusion, and that we sense just a small fraction of what there is to sense. 

It hints at flickers of the magnificent in the mundane, and the extraordinary in the ordinary. And it is almost antidramatic: It reveals that frogs, snakes, ticks and other animals can be doing extraordinary things even when they seem to be doing nothing at all.


—Ed Yong (treasure
NY Times Opinion, 6-21-22

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I regard consciousness as fundamental, matter as derivative from consciousness. —Max Planck

    

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Your mind is the knife that cuts the continuum of space and time into neat slices of linear experience.

At this moment, you are seamlessly flowing with the cosmos. There is no difference between your breathing and the breathing of the rain forest, between your bloodstream and the world’s rivers, between your bones and the chalk cliffs of Dover.


—Deepak Chopra

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For intervals, then, throughout our lives we savor a concurrence, the great blending of our chance selves with what sustains all chance. 

We ride the wave and are the wave.

And with renewed belief inner and outer we find our talk turned to prayer, our prayer into truth: for an interval, early, we become at home in the world.


—William Stafford

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Take me to the other side of this night,

where I am you, we are us,

the kingdom where pronouns are intertwined

… and the sea sang with the murmur of light.


—Octavio Paz

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door of be(ing

  

 

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door of being, dawn and wake me,
allow me to see the face of this day,
allow me to see the face of this night,
all communicates, all is transformed,
arch of blood, bridge of pulse,
take me to the other side of this night,
where I am you, we are us,
the kingdom where pronouns are intertwined,

door of being: open your being
and wake ....


—Octavio Paz
Sandstone, excerpt

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dance, in your blood

. 

Inside water, a waterwheel turns.
A star circulates the moon.

We live in the night ocean wondering,
What are these lights?

You have said who you are
I am what I am.
Your actions is my head,
my head here in my hands
with something circling inside.
I have no name

for what circles

so perfectly.

A secret turning in us
makes the universe turn.
Head unaware of feet,
and feet head. Neither cares.
They keep turning.

This moment this love comes to rest in me,
many beings in one being.
In one wheat grain a thousand sheaf stacks.
Inside the needle’s eye a turning night of stars.

Keep walking, though there’s no place to get to.
Don’t try to see through the distances.
That’s not for human beings. Move within,
but don’t move the way fear makes you move.

Walk to the well.
Turn as the earth turns and the moon turn,
circling what they love.
Whatever circles comes from the center.

I circle your nest tonight,
around and around until morning
when a breath of air says, Now,
and the Friend holds up like a goblet
some anonymous skull.

No better love than love with no object,
no more satisfying work than work with no purpose.
If I could give up tricks and cleverness,
that would be the cleverest trick!

Some nights, stay up until dawn,
as the moon sometimes does for the sun.
Be a full bucket pulled up the dark way
of a well, then lifted out into light.

I am so small I can barely be seen.
How can this great love be inside me?
Look at your eyes. They are small,
but they see enormous things.

When you feel your lips becoming infinite
and sweet, like the moon in a sky,
when you feel that spaciousness inside,
Shams of Tabriz will be there too.

The sun is love. The lover,
a speck circling the sun.
A Spring wind moves to dance
any branch that isn’t dead.

Something opens our wings.
Something makes boredom and hurt disappear.
Someone fills the cup in front of us.
We taste only sacredness.

Held like this, to draw in milk,
no will, tasting clouds of milk,
never so content.

I stand up. and this one of me
turns into a hundred of me.
They say I circle around you.
Nonsense. I circle around me.

I have lived on the lip
of insanity, wanting to know reasons,
knocking on a door. It opens.
I’ve been knocking from the inside!

Real value comes with madness,
matzub below, scientist above.

Whoever finds love
beneath hurt and grief
disappears into emptiness
with a thousand new disguises.

Dance, when you’re broken open.
Dance, if you’ve torn the bandage off.
Dance in the middle of fighting.
Dance in your blood.
Dance, when you’re perfectly set free.

—Rumi: Selected Poems

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there is nothing less real than this body that I touch

  

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The body provides something for the spirit to look after and use.

—Alan Turing

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It is the best joke there is, that we are here, and fools—that we are sown into time like so much corn, that we are souls sprinkled at random like salt into time and dissolved here, spread into matter, connected by cells right down to our feet, and those feet likely to fell us over a tree root or jam us on a stone. 

The joke part is that we forget it. 

Give the mind two seconds alone and it thinks it’s Pythagoras. 

We wake up a hundred times a day and laugh.


―Annie Dillard
Holy the Firm

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Creation, invention: there is nothing more real than this body that I imagine; there is nothing less real than this body that I touch that turns into a heap of salt or vanishes into a column of smoke. 

With that smoke my desire will invent another body. 


—Octavio Paz
An Erotic Beyond: Sade
Elliot Weinburger version

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Discover yourself.

There is in the body a current of energy, affection and intelligence, which guides, maintains and energizes the body.

Discover that current and stay with it.


—Nisargadatta Maharaj

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The soul is the same in all living creatures, although the body of each is different. —Hippocrates

  

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Your body is away from me, but there is a window open
from my Heart to yours. 

From this window, like the moon,
I keep sending news secretly.


—Rumi

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Let come what comes, let go what goes. See what remains. —Sri Ramana Maharshi

 

 

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The human skin is an artificial boundary: the world wanders into it, 

and the self wanders out of it, traffic is two-way and constant. 

—Bernard Wolfe 

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We all tend to see our bodies as ‘frozen sculptures’ – solid, fixed, material objects, when in truth they are more like rivers, constantly changing, flowing patterns of intelligence. 

Your adipose tissue (fat cells) fill up with fat and empty out constantly, so that all of it is exchanged every three weeks. 

You acquire a new stomach lining every five days. Your skin is new every five weeks. Your skeleton, seeming so solid and rigid, is entirely new every three months. 

You appear to be the same outwardly, yet you are like a building whose bricks are constantly being replaced by new ones. Every year, fully 98 percent of the atoms and molecules in your body are replaced.

To change the printout of the body, we must learn to rewrite the software of the mind.


—Deepak Chopra

. 

Prior to the advent of brain, there was no color and no sound in the universe, nor was there any flavor or aroma and probably rather little sense and no feeling or emotion. 

Before brains the universe was also free of pain and anxiety.

—Roger Sperry

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The brain is silent, the brain is dark, the brain tastes nothing, the brain hears nothing. All it receives are electrical impulses—not the sumptuous chocolate melting sweetly, not the tingling caress, not the pastels of peach and lavender at sunset over a coral reef—just impulses.


—Diane Ackerman
A Natural History of the Senses 

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the brilliance of matter

  

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Chronological time is what we measure by clocks and calendars; it is always linear, orderly, quantifiable, and mechanical. Kairotic time is organic, rhythmic, bodily, leisurely, and aperiodic; it is the inner cadence that brings fruit to ripeness, a woman to childbirth, a man to change his direction in life.


—Sam Keen

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To search the final reality of stone beyond the accident of time, I seek the love of matter. The materiality of stone, its essence, to reveal its identity—not what might be imposed but something closer to its being. 

Beneath the skin is the brilliance of matter.


—Isamu Noguchi
Listening to Stone

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We all start from “naive realism,” i.e., the doctrine that things are what they seem. We think that grass is green, that stones are hard, and that snow is cold. 

But physics assures us that the greenness of grass, the hardness of stones, and the coldness of snow are not the greenness of grass, the hardness of stones, and the coldness of snow that we know in our own experience, but something very different. 


—Bertrand Russell

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the undressing

  

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Should you really
open your eyes and see,
you would behold
your image in all images…

And should you
open your ears and listen,
you would hear your own voice
in all voices…


—Kahlil Gibran

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The soul has been given its own ears to hear things the mind does not understand.

If you want to know who someone is, what is flowing through or not flowing, stay in a listening posture. 

Close your eyes inside your companion’s shadow. 


—Rumi

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There are only beings, everywhere. —Teilhard de Chardin

  

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Well the road is wide,
And waters run on either side,
And my shadow went with fading light,
Stretching out towards the night.

'Cause the Sun is low,
And I yet have still so far to go,
My lonely heart is beating so,
Tired of the wonder.

But there's a sign ahead,
Though I think it's the same one again,
And I'm thinking 'bout my only friend,
And so I find my way home.

When I need to get home
You're my guiding light,
You're my guiding light.

Well the air is cold,
And yonder lies my sleeping soul,
By the branches broke like bones,
This weakened tree no longer holds.

But the night is still,
And I have not yet lost my will,
Oh and I will keep on moving 'till,
'till I find my way home.

When I need to get home,
You're my guiding light,
You're my guiding light.

.

We are slowed down sound and light waves, a walking bundle of frequencies tuned into the cosmos. 

We are souls dressed up in sacred biochemical garments and our bodies are the instruments through which our souls play their music.


—Albert Einstein

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In the ocean are many bright strands and many dark strands like veins that are seen when a wing is lifted up.

Your hidden self is blood in those, those veins that are lute strings that make ocean music – not the sad sound of surf, but the sound of no shore.


—Rumi

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your(self

 

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Be kind to yourself; 

it is the only one and perishable.

—Allen Ginsberg

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If you put your hands on this oar with me, they will never harm another, and they will come to find they hold everything you want.

If you put your hands on this oar with me, they will no longer lift anything to your mouth that might wound your precious land, that sacred earth that is your body.

If you put your soul against this oar with me, the power that made the universe will enter your sinew from a source not outside your limbs, but from a holy realm that lives within us.

Exuberant is existence, time a husk.
When the moment cracks open, ecstasy leaps out and devours space;
love goes mad with the blessings, like my words give.

Why lay yourself on the torturer’s rack of the past and future?
The mind that tries to shape tomorrow beyond its capacity will find no rest.

Be kind to yourself, dear - to our innocent follies.
Forget any sound or touch you knew that did not help you dance.
You will come to see that all evolves us.

If you put your heart against the earth with me, in serving every creature, our Beloved will enter you from our sacred realm and we will be, we will be happy.


—Rumi
Love Poems From God
Daniel Ladinsky version

 

 

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other(wise

  

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Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come to being. 

—Teilhard de Chardin

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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.

Ideas, language, even the phrase
'each other'
doesn’t make any sense.


—Rumi

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questions

  

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It is every intelligent man's experience ... wrong-doing recoils on the doer sooner or later. Why is this so? 
Because the Self is one in all.

When seeing others you are only seeing yourself in their shapes. 'Love they neighbor as thyself' means that you should love him because he is your Self.


—Ramana Maharshi
S. S. Cohen, 15th August, 1948

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The picture of names and forms, the one who sees, the cohesive screen, and the pervading light – all these are he, who is oneself.

If oneself is a form, the world and God will be likewise; if oneself is not a form, who can see their forms? How? 

Can the seen be otherwise than the eye? 

The eye is oneself, the infinite eye.

Without a body, is there a world? 

Leaving the body, is there anyone who has seen a world?

The world is a form of five sense-impressions, not anything else. Those five sense-impressions are impressions to the five sense organs. Since the mind alone perceives the world by way of the five sense organs, is there a world besides the mind?


—Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi

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What happens when your soul
begins to awaken
your eyes
and your heart
and the cells of your body
to the great Journey of Love?

First there is wonderful laughter
and probably precious tears

and a hundred sweet promises
and those heroic vows
no one can ever keep.

But still God is delighted and amused
you once tried to be a saint.

What happens when your soul
begins to awake in this world

to our deep need to love

and serve the Friend?

Oh, the Beloved

will send you

one of his wonderful, wild companions –

Like Hafiz.

—Hafiz

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looking for God

  

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I long for You so much

I follow barefoot Your frozen tracks 

That are high in the mountains

That I know are years old.

I long for You so much 
I have even begun to travel
Where I have never been before.

Hafiz, there is no one in this world

Who is not looking for God.

Everyone is trudging along

With as much dignity, courage

And style

As they possibly 

Can.


—Hafiz

Daniel Ladinsky translation

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stay at the center of the circle and let all things take their course. —Lao Tzu

  

      .

They asked al-Hallaj, "To which religious School do you belong?
he answered, "God's own."

He who limned 
a thousand worlds with paint -
you layabout! - do you expect
He'll use your color or mine?

Our paints and tints
are but opinions and fantasy,
He is colorless
and we must adopt His hue.

Look: a shadow lies crooked upon the ground because the very earth is laid rough; but no, that crookedness is straightness itself, for the perfection, the "straightness" of the eyebrow is in its sinuous curve.

Only because it is bent
is this piece of wood a bow.
Reality is a sphere: wherever you place your finger,
there is its dead center.


—Fakhruddin 'Iraqi
Divine Flashes

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This place where you are right now, 

God circled on a map for you.


—Hafiz

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A person is neither a thing nor a process, but an opening through which the Absolute can manifest.

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In East Asia generally, the notion of a Supreme Being, so essential to Western religions, is replaced by that of a Supreme State of Being, an impersonal perfection from which beings including man are separated only by delusion.


―John Blofeld
Taoism: The Road to Immortality


 

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When the mind that is subtle goes out through the brain and the sense-organs, the gross names and forms appear; when it stays in the Heart, the names and forms disappear. Not letting the mind go out, but retaining it in the Heart is what is called ‘inwardness’ (antarmukha). Letting the mind go out of the Heart is known as ‘externalisation’ (bahirmukha).

Thus, when the mind stays in the Heart, the ‘I’ which is the source of all thoughts will go, and the Self which ever exists will shine.

Whatever one does, one should do without the egoity ‘I’.
If one acts in that way, all will appear as of the nature of Siva.

'Who am I?’ is not a mantra.

It means that you must find out where in you arises the I-thought which is the source of all other thoughts. But if you find this vichara marga (self enquiry) too hard for you, you can go on repeating “I, I” and that will lead you to the same goal.

There is no harm in using ‘I’ as a mantra.

It is the first name of God.


—Ramana Maharshi

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signs on the frontier

  

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It is not only the body that is, in you, the object of reading: the body matters insofar as it is part of a complex of elaborate elements, not all visible and not all present, but manifested in visible and present events: the clouding of your eyes, your laughing, the words you speak, your way of gathering and arranging your hair, your initiatives and your reticences, and all the signs that are on the frontier between you and usage and habits and memory and prehistory and fashion, all codes, all the poor alphabets by which one human being believes at certain moments that he is reading another human being.


—Italo Calvino
If on a winter's night a traveler

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It is entirely conceivable that life’s splendour forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from our view, deep down, invisible, far off. It is there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. 

If you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it will come. 

This is the essence of magic, which does not create but summons.

—Franz Kafka

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So what can they tell us,

the writers of dreambooks,

the scholars of oneiric signs and omens,

the doctors

with couches for analyses—

if anything fits,

it’s accidental,

and for one reason only,

that in our dreamings,

in their shadowings and gleamings,

in their multiplings, inconceivablings,

in their haphazardings and widescatterings at times

even a clear-cut meaning may slip through.

—Wisława Szymborska

Dreams, excerpt

Clare Cavanaugh and Stanisław Barańczak version

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hallo

    

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You look at the world and it may seem whole or it may seem broken, but then the world looks back and some sort of reciprocity that is not of any school of poetry or any single denomination happens, and in our absolute attention we feel attended to: for here there is no place that does not see you.


—Rainer Maria Rilke

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“Hallo, Rabbit,’ he said, ‘is that you?’

'Let's pretend it isn't,' said Rabbit, 'and see what happens.'”

—A. A. Milne

 

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A Ritual To Read To Each Other

  

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If you don't know the kind of person I am 
and I don't know the kind of person you are 
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world 
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star. 

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind, 
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break 
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood 
storming out to play through the broken dyke. 

And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail, 
but if one wanders the circus won't find the park, 
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty 
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact. 

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy, 
a remote important region in all who talk: 
though we could fool each other, we should consider-- 
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark. 

For it is important that awake people be awake, 
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give--yes, no, or maybe-- should be clear: 
the darkness around us is deep.


—William Stafford

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in(visible

 

butterfly eggs

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Every person, from morning till evening, is making invisible forms in space by what he says. 

He is creating invisible vibrations around him, and so he is creating an atmosphere.


—Hazrat Inayat Khan
The Mysticism of Sound and Music

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Standing on the bare ground, a mean egoism vanishes. 

I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson 

 

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