if i were the moon

  

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She kept a diary, in which she wrote impulsive thoughts.  

Seeing the moon in the sky, her own heart surcharged, 
she went and wrote: 

‘If I were the moon, I know where I would fall down.’

—D. H. Lawrence 
The Rainbow

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note to self

 

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You often live behind a wall of doubt and fear. But if you look at this wall steadily, you will see that it is built entirely out of your imagination. 

How to broach it? You need not, simply reside in the 'I-am' and stop fiddling around with things that do not exist.


—Nisargadatta

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If you understand, things are just as they are;

if you do not understand, things are just as they are.


―Zen Proverb

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among the multitudes

  

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When I confront a human being as my Thou and speak the basic word I-Thou to him, then he is no thing among things nor does he consist of things. 

He is no longer He or She, a dot in the world grid of space and time, nor a condition to be experienced and described, a loose bundle of named qualities. 

Neighborless and seamless, he is Thou and fills the firmament. Not as if there were nothing but he; but everything else lives in his light.

―Martin Buber

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I am who I am.
A coincidence no less unthinkable
than any other. 

I could have different 

ancestors, after all. 

I could have fluttered 

from another nest 

or crawled bescaled 

from another tree. 

Nature's wardrobe 

holds a fair 

supply of costumes: 

Spider, seagull, fieldmouse. 

each fits perfectly right off 

and is dutifully worn 

into shreds. 

I didn't get a choice either, 

but I can't complain. 

I could have been someone 

much less separate, 

someone from an anthill, shoal, or buzzing swarm, 

an inch of landscape ruffled by the wind. 

Someone much less fortunate, 

bred for my fur 

or Christmas dinner, 

something swimming under a square of glass. 

A tree rooted to the ground 

as the fire draws near. 

A grass blade trampled by a stampede 

of incomprehensible events. 

A shady type whose darkness 

dazzled some.

What if I'd prompted only fear, 

Loathing, 

or pity? 

If I'd been born 

in the wrong tribe 

with all roads closed before me? 

Fate has been kind 

to me thus far. 

I might never have been given 

the memory of happy moments 

My yen for comparison 

might have been taken away. 

I might have been myself minus amazement, 

that is, 

someone completely different.


—Wislawa Szymborska
Among the Multitudes

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here we stand

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I and this mystery; here we stand.

—Walt Whitman

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come to the conclusion

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You know you are. 

How do you know it? 

And with what do you know it? 

This is the sum total of my teaching needed to put you on the right track, its very quintessence.

Come to the conclusion: I am unborn, I was unborn and I shall remain unborn.

Be aware of being conscious and seek the source of consciousness.

That is all.


—Nisargadatta Maharaj

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sitting together

 

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We sit in this courtyard,
two forms, shadow outlines with one soul.

Birdsound, leaf moving, early evening star,
fragrant damp, and a sweet sickle curve of moon.

You and I in a round, unselved idling
in the garden-beauty detail.

The raucous parrots laugh,
and we laugh inside their laughter, 
the two of us on a bench in Konya, 
yet amazingly in Khorasan and Iraq as well.

Friends abiding this form,
yet also in another, outside of time, you and I.


—Rumi 

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sitting together

clearly

Earth and Moon as seen from Space by Japanese satellite Himawari-8

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The world is sacred, of course,
it is full of gods, numina,
great powers and presences.

We give some of them names –
Mars of the fields and the war;
Vesta the fire;
Ceres the grain;
Mother Tellus the earth;
the Penates of the storehouse.
The rivers, the springs.

And in the stormcloud and
the light is the great power
called the father god.

But they aren’t people.
They don’t love and hate,
they aren’t for or against.
They accept the worship due them,
which augments their power,
through which we live.


—Ursula K. Le Guin (1929 - 2018)

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This material dimension is just samsara. See it and you see samsara for what it’s worth. But what does it mean? 

Nothing but shifting names and changing forms. But when the ego drops away you experience this Flux. And it is beautiful not just because it is dazzling, but because the act of seeing it as it is necessitates the ego’s oblivion. The Veil is lifted and you see clearly.


—Chuang Tzu
excerpts

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wait - what ?

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love, and do as you like! —St. Augustine

 

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People who exude love are apt to give things away. They are in every way like rivers; they stream. And so when they collect possessions and things they like, they are apt to give them to other people. 

Because, have you ever noticed that when you start giving things away, you keep getting more?


—Alan Watts

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Effortlessly,
Love flows from God to man,
Like a bird
Who rivers the air
Without moving her wings.

Thus we move in His world
One in body and soul,
Though outwardly separate in form.

As the Source strikes the note,
Humanity sings -
The Holy Spirit is our harpist,
And all the strings
Which are touched in Love
Must sound.


—Mechtild of Magdeburg
(1210-1282)

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free(dom

 

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Imagining we have free will is
exactly as if water spoke to itself:  

I can make waves 
(yes! in the sea during a storm), 

I can rush downhill 
(yes! in the river bed), 

I can plunge down foaming and gushing 
(yes! in the waterfall), 

I can rise freely as a stream of water into the air 
(yes! in the fountain), 

I can, finally, boil away and disappear 
(yes! at a certain temperature); 

but I am doing none of these things now, 
and am of my own accord remaining quiet 
and clear water in the reflecting pond.


—Arthur Schopenhauer

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the law that marries all things

   

andy goldsworthy

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1.
The cloud is free only
to go with the wind. 

The rain is free
only in falling. 

The water is free only
in its gathering together, 

in its downward courses,
in its rising into the air. 

2.
In law is rest
if you love the law,
if you enter, singing, into it
as water in its descent. 

3.
Or song is truest law,
and you must enter singing;
it has no other entrance. 

It is the great chorus
of parts. The only outlawry
is in division. 

4.
Whatever is singing
is found, awaiting the return
of whatever is lost. 

5.
Meet us in the air
over the water,
sing the swallows. 

Meet me, meet me,
the redbird sings,
here here here here.


—Wendell Berry

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there is nothing new under the sun –Ecclesiastes 1:9

 

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There is nothing new you will find here. 

The work we are doing is timeless. 

It was the same ten thousand years ago. 

Centuries roll on.


—Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

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question

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Who is this self on whom we meditate?

Is it the self by which we see, hear, smell and taste,
Through which we speak in words? Is self the mind
By which we perceive, direct, understand,
Know, remember, think, will, desire and love?

These are but servants of the Self, who is
Pure consciousness.
The self is all in all.

He is all the gods, the five elements,
Earth, air, fire, water, and space; all creatures,
Great or small, born of eggs, of wombs, of heat,
Of shoots; horses, cows, elephants, men and women,
All beings that walk, all beings that fly,
And all that neither walk nor fly. Prajna
Is pure consciousness, guiding all. The world
Rests on Prajna, and prajna is Brahman.

Those who realize Brahman live in joy
And go beyond death. Indeed
They go beyond death.

Om shanti shanti shanti


—The Aitareya Upanishad, Part III
Eknath Easwaren version,
Easwaren's Classics of Indian Spirituality, Book 2

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question

 

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Do you think I know what I'm doing? 

That for one breath or half-breath I belong to myself?

As much as a pen knows what it's writing, 

or the ball can guess where it's going next. 


—Rumi 

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tell me why

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Our weaknesses are the way to God

Tell me why it is through the body
through torment of the body you speak to the spirit
why through leprosy fever deafness

You are a healer and not a priest
you take in your hands the head of the dying
from one lump you bring forth new life 
like bread you multiply the body

You come through bodies not through sunsets
and the hard strong hand of blood and flesh
holds in the palm like a sparrow
the muscle of the human heart


—Anna Kamienska
Astonishments

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Do not turn your head. 

Keep looking at the bandaged place.

That is where the light enters. 

And do not believe for a moment 

that you are healing yourself.

—Rumi

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listen

Don Nace • Just Passing Through

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Our hands imbibe like roots, so I place them on what is beautiful in this world. And I fold them in prayer, and they draw from the heavens, light. 

—St. Francis of Assisi

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In the morning there is a meaning. 

In the evening there is feeling.
 

—Gertrude Stein
Tender Buttons
1914

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if you live well

hero

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1. India

In India in their lives they happen
again and again, being people or
animals. And if you live well
your next time could be even better.

That's why they often look into your eyes
and you know some far-off story
with them and you in it, and some
animal waiting over at the side.

Who would want to happen just once?
It's too abrupt that way, and
when you're wrong, it's too late
to go back - you've done it forever.

And you can't have that soft look when you
pass, the way they do it in India.

2. Having It Be Tomorrow

Day, holding its lantern before it,
moves over the whole earth slowly
to brighten that edge and push it westward.
Shepherds on upland pastures begin fires
for breakfast, beads of light that extend
miles of horizon. Then it's noon and
coasting toward a new tomorrow.

If you're in on that secret, a new land
will come every time the sun goes
climbing over it, and the welcome of children
will remain every day new in your heart.
Those around you don't have it new,
and they shake their heads turning grey every
morning when the sun comes up. And you laugh.

3. Being Nice And Old

After their jobs are done old people
cackle together. They look back and shiver,
all of that was so dizzying when it happened;
and now if there is any light at all it
knows how to rest on the faces of friends.
And any people you don't like, you just turn
the page a little more and wait while they
find out what time is and begin to bend
lower; or you can turn away
and let them drop off the edge of the world.

4. Good Ways To Live

At night outside it all moves or
almost moves - trees, grass,
touches of wind. The room you have
in the world is ready to change.
Clouds parade by, and stars in their
configurations. Birds from far
touch the fabric around them - you can
feel their wings move. Somewhere under
the earth it waits, that emanation
of all things. It breathes. It pulls you
slowly out through doors or windows
and you spread in the thin halo of night mist.

—William Stafford
ways to live
written just over a month before William Stafford's death in August, 1993
hero

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sight

   

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Once

a single cell

found that it was full of light

and for the first time there was seeing

when

I was a bird

I could see where the stars had turned

and I set out on my journey

high

in the head of a mountain goat

I could see across a valley

under the shining trees something moving

deep

in the green sea

I saw the two sides of the water

and swam between them

I

look at you

in the first light of the morning

for as long as I can

—W. S. Merwin
hero

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relation is mutual

 

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I consider a tree.

I can look on it as a picture: stiff column in a shock of light, or splash of green shot with the delicate blue and silver of the background.

I can perceive it as movement: flowing veins on clinging, pressing pith, suck of the roots, breathing of the leaves, ceaseless commerce with the earth and air—and the obscure growth itself.

I can classify it in a species and study it as a type in its structure and mode of life. I can subdue its actual presence and form so sternly that I recognize it only as an expression of law—of the laws in accordance with which a constant opposition of forces is continually adjusted, or of those in accordance with which the component substances mingle and separate. I can dissipate it and perpetuate it in number, in pure material relation. In all this the tree remains my object, occupies space and time, and has its nature and constitution. 

It can, however, also come about, if I have both will and grace, that in considering the tree I become bound up in relation to it. The tree is now no longer It. I have been seized by the power of exclusiveness.

To effect this it is not necessary for me to give up any of the ways in which I consider the tree. There is nothing from which I would have to turn my eyes away in order to see, and no knowledge that I would have to forget. Rather is everything, picture and movement, species and type, law and number, indivisibly united in this event.

Everything belonging to the tree is in this: its form and structure, its colours and chemical composition, its intercourse with the elements and with the stars, are all present in a single whole.

The tree is not impression, no play of my imagination, no value depending on my mood: but it is bodied over against me and has to do with me, as I with it—only in a different way.

Let no attempt be made to sap the strength from the meaning of the relation: relation in mutual. The tree will have a consciousness, then, similar to our own? Of that I have no experience. But do you wish, through seeming to succeed in it with yourself, once again to disintegrate that which cannot be disintegrated? I encounter no soul or dryad of the tree, but the tree itself.


—Martin Buber
I and Thou
Ronald Gregor Smith version

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braiding sweetgrass

    

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In a mist of light 

falling with the rain

I walk this ground

of which dead men

and women I have loved

are part, as they

are part of me. In earth,

in blood, in mind,

the dead and living

into each other pass,

as the living pass

in and out of loves

as stepping to a song.

The way I go is

marriage to this place,

grace beyond chance,

love’s braided dance

covering the world.

—Wendell Berry

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When the blood of your veins returns to the sea and the dust of your bones returns to the ground, maybe then will you remember that this earth does not belong to you, you belong to this earth.

—Sweetgrass

Native American Prophet

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cosmic life

Mariya Golub

“Morning is Breathing”, 2020

Acrylic on Canvas, 80 × 90 cm

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Now we have to get back the cosmos, and it can’t be done by a trick. The great range of responses that have fallen dead in us have to come to life again. It has taken two thousand years to kill them. Who knows how long it will take to bring them to life.

When I hear modern people complain of being lonely then I know what has happened. They have lost the cosmos. 

It is nothing human and personal that we are short of. What we lack is cosmic life, the sun in us and the moon in us.

—D.H. Lawrence

Apocalypse

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wait

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love flows down

 

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Love comes with a knife, not some 
shy question, and not with fears 
for its reputation! I say 
these things disinterestedly. Accept them 
in kind. Love is a madman 

working his wild schemes, tearing off his clothes, 
running through the mountains, drinking poison, 
and now quietly choosing annihilation. 

You've been walking the ocean’s edge, 
holding up your robes to keep them dry. 
You must dive naked under and deeper under, 
a thousand times deeper! Love flows down. 

The ground submits to the sky and suffers 
what comes. Tell me, is the earth worse 
for giving in like that? 

Don’t put blankets over the drum! 
Open completely. Let your spirit-ear 
listen to the green dome’s passionate murmur. 

Let the cords of your robe be untied. 
Shiver in this new love beyond all 
above and below. The sun rises, but which way 
does night go? I have no more words. 

Let soul speak with the silent 
articulation of a face.


—Jelalludin Rumi 1207 – 1273
Coleman Barks version

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heart of the swallow

Beth Moon, The Lovers, Morondava, Madagascar, 2006

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They made love among the hazel shrubs

beneath the suns of dew,

entangling in their hair

a leafy residue.

Heart of the swallow

have mercy on them. 

They knelt down by the lake,

combed out the earth and leaves,

and fish swam to the water's edge

shimmering like stars.

Heart of the swallow

have mercy on them.

The reflections of trees were steaming

off the rippling waves.

O swallow let this memory

forever be engraved.

O swallow, thorn of clouds,

anchor of the air,

Icarus improved,

Assumption in formal wear,

O swallow, the calligrapher,

timeless second hand,

early ornithogothic,

a crossed eye in the sky,

O swallow, pointed silence,

mourning full of joy,

halo over lovers,

have mercy on them.

—Wislawa Szymborska

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love letters

   

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Every day, priests minutely examine the Law

And endlessly chant complicated sutras.

Before doing that, though, they should learn

How to read the love letters sent by the wind

and rain, the snow and moon.


—Ikkyu
Sonya Arutzen version

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all things change, no(thing perishes

 

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Everything must change
Nothing remains the same
Everyone must change
No one and nothing remains the same

The young becomes the old
Oh, mysteries unfold
Cause that's the way of time
Nothing and no one remains the same

There is so little in life you can be sure of 
Except the rain comes from the clouds
Sunlight from the sky
And, Hummingbirds do fly

The young becomes the old
And, mysteries do unfold
That's the way of time
Nothing, no one remains unchanged

There are so little things, so few things in life you can be sure of
Except
Rain comes from the clouds
Sunlight from the sky
And Hummingbirds do fly
Everything must change

Everything
Everything must change


—Bernard Ighner 

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Souls never die, but always on quitting one abode pass to another. All things change, nothing perishes. The soul passes hither and thither, occupying now this body, now that … 

As a wax is stamped with certain figures, then melted, then stamped anew with others, yet it is always the same wax. So, the Soul being always the same, yet wears at different times different forms.

―Pythagoras 

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