still and still moving

  

.

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered. 

There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter. 

Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.


—T. S. Eliot
East Coker V, Four Quartets, excerpt 

.

path(ways

       

.

In 19th century Suffolk small sickles called ‘hooks’ were hung on stiles and posts at the start of certain well-used paths: those running between villages, for example. A walker would pick up a hook and use it to lop off branches that were starting to impede passage. The hook would then be left at the other end of the path, for a walker coming in the opposite direction. In this manner the path was collectively maintained for general use.


—Robert Macfarlane
The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot

.

One does not stand still looking for a path. 

One walks; and as one walks,
a path comes into being.


—Mas Kodani

.

 

Walker, your footsteps 
are the road, and nothing more. 

Walker, there is no road, the road is made by walking. 

Walking you make the road, 
and turning to look behind 
you see the path you never 
again will step upon. 

Walker, there is no road, 
only foam trails on the sea.


—Antonio Machado
proverbs and songs #29

.

We are not separated from spirit, we are in it. —Plotinus

 

  . 

 

God turns you from one feeling to another

and teaches by means of opposites,

so that you will have two wings to fly,

not one.

—Rumi

.

The problem is not to find the answer, it’s to face the answer. —Terence McKenna

    

.

There'll never be a door. 

You're inside and the keep encompasses the world and has neither obverse nor reverse nor circling nor secret center.


—Jorge Luis Borges (1899 - 1986)
In Praise of Darkness

.

Scattered through the ordinary world there are books and artifacts and perhaps people who are like doorways into impossible realms, of impossible and contradictory truth.
 

—Jorge Luis Borges

.

Listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world. —Jack Kerouac

  

.

If you are silent, be silent out of love.

If you speak, speak out of love.


—Saint Augustine



.

the complexity of a sphere

   

.

The search for Reality is the most dangerous of all undertakings, for it destroys the world in which you live.

—Nisargadatta Maharaj

.

Buckminster Fuller defines a Sphere as “a multiplicity of discrete events, approximately equidistant in all directions from a Nuclear Center.

Ever since we discovered that Earth is round and turns like a mad spinning top, we have understood that reality is not what it seems: every glimpse of a new aspect of it is a deeply emotional experience. Another veil has fallen.

But the leap made by Einstein is unparalleled: spacetime is a field; the world is made only of fields and particles; space and time are not something else, something different from the rest of nature: they are just a field among the others.


—Carlo Rovelli
Reality Is Not What It Seems

.

behind the bodily world

 

.

The Maitri Upanishad mentions two aspects of Brahman, the higher and the lower. The higher Brahman being the unmanifest Supreme Reality which is soundless and totally quiescent and restful, the lower being the Shabda-Brahman which manifests itself into the everchanging restless cosmos through the medium of sound vibrations. 

The Upanishad says that “Two Brahmans there are to be known: One as sound and the other as Brahman Supreme.” The process of manifestation is from soundless to sound, from noumenality to phenomenality, from perfect quiescence of "being” to the restlessness of “becoming”.

—Sudhakar S.D, 1988, p83

.

All beings
are words of God,
His music, His
art.

Sacred books we are, for the infinite camps
in our
souls.

Every act reveals God and expands His Being.
I know that may be hard
to comprehend.

All creatures are doing their best
to help God in His birth
of Himself.

Enough talk for the night
He is laboring in me;

I need to be silent
for a while,

worlds are forming
in my
heart.

—Meister Eckhart

.

thinking of others

.

[Man] sees the morning as the beginning of a new day; he takes germination as the start in the life of a plant, and withering as its end. But this is nothing more than biased judgment on his part. 

Nature is one. There is no starting point or destination, only an unending flux, a continuous metamorphosis of all things.

—Masanobu Fukuoka

.

As you prepare breakfast, think of others
(do not forget the pigeon”s food)
As you wage your wars, think of others
(do not forget those who seek peace).
As you pay your water bill, think of others
(those who are nursed by clouds).
As you return home, to your home, think of others
(do not forget the people of the camps).
As you sleep and count the stars, think of others
(those who have nowhere to sleep).
As you express yourself in metaphor, think of others
(those who have lost the right to speak).
As you think of others far away, think of yourself
(say: If only I were a candle in the dark).


—Mahmoud Darwish
Think of Others

.

warp and woof

  

.

Over and over again—as Being and Becoming, as Eternity and Time, as Transcendence and Immanence, Reality and Appearance, the One and the Many—these two dominant ideas, demands, imperious instincts of man’s self will reappear; the warp and woof of his completed universe. 


—Evelyn Underhill 
Mysticism

.

Feast of the Epiphany

 

.

Today the Magi find, crying in the manger, the one they have followed as he shone in the sky.  

Today the Magi see clearly, in swaddling clothes, the one they have long awaited as he lay hidden among the stars.  

Today the Magi gaze in deep wonder at what they see: heaven on earth, earth in heaven, man in God, God in man, one whom the universe cannot contain now enclosed in a tiny body.  

As they look, they believe and do not question, as their symbolic gifts bear witness: incense for God, gold for a king, myrrh for one who is to die.


—St Peter Chrysologus

.

shanti, shanti, shanti

  

.

That is perfect. This is perfect.

Perfect comes from perfect.

Take perfect from perfect, the remainder is perfect. 

May peace and peace and peace be everywhere.


—The Isha Upanishad

💗

thin places

   

. 

In the point of rest at the center of our being, we encounter a world where all things are at rest in the same way. Then a tree becomes a mystery, a cloud a revelation, each man a cosmos of whose riches we can only catch glimpses. The life of simplicity is simple, but it opens to us a book in which we never get beyond the first syllable.

—Dag Hammarskjöld

.

Be the mystery.

In this uncontainable night,

be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,

the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,

say to the silent earth: I flow.

To the rushing water, speak: I am.

—Rainer Maria Rilke

.

tonight would be the night

   

.

The moon is full tonight
an illustration for sheet music,
an image in Matthew Arnold
glimmering on the English Channel,
or a ghost over a smoldering battlefield
in one of the history plays.

It's as full as it was
in that poem by Coleridge
where he carries his year-old son
into the orchard behind the cottage
and turns the baby's face to the sky
to see for the first time
the earth's bright companion,
something amazing to make his crying seem small.

And if you wanted to follow this example,
tonight would be the night
to carry some tiny creature outside
and introduce him to the moon.

And if your house has no child,
you can always gather into your arms
the sleeping infant of yourself,
as I have done tonight,
and carry him outdoors,
all limp in his tattered blanket,
making sure to steady his lolling head
with the palm of your hand.

And while the wind ruffles the pear trees
in the corner of the orchard
and dark roses wave against a stone wall,
you can turn him on your shoulder
and walk in circles on the lawn
drunk with the light.
You can lift him up into the sky,
your eyes nearly as wide as his,
as the moon climbs high into the night.


—Billy Collins

.

dear friends

   

  

.

Christmas Eve, 1513


I salute you. I am your friend, and my love for you goes deep. There is nothing I can give you which you have not. But there is much, very much, that, while I cannot give it, you can take.

No heaven can come to us unless our hearts find rest in it today. Take heaven! No peace lies in the future which is not hidden in this present little instant. Take peace! 

The gloom of the world is but a shadow. Behind it, yet within our reach, is joy. There is radiance and glory in darkness, could we but see. And to see, we have only to look. I beseech you to look!

Life is so generous a giver. But we, judging its gifts by their covering, cast them away as ugly or heavy or hard. Remove the covering, and you will find beneath it a living splendor, woven of love by wisdom, with power. 

Welcome it, grasp it, and you touch the angel's hand that brings it to you. Everything we call a trial, a sorrow or a duty, believe me, that angel's hand is there. The gift is there and the wonder of an overshadowing presence. Your joys, too, be not content with them as joys. They, too, conceal diviner gifts.

Life is so full of meaning and purpose, so full of beauty beneath its covering, that you will find earth but cloaks your heaven. Courage then to claim it; that is all! But courage you have, and the knowledge that we are pilgrims together, wending through unknown country home.

And so, at this time, I greet you, not quite as the world sends greetings, but with profound esteem and with the prayer that for you, now and forever, the day breaks and shadows flee away.


—Fra Giovanni

💗

need(ful things

  

.

An Athens marketplace amazed Diogenes with “How many things there are in the world of which Diogenes hath no need!” Lou had long since cut out fashion and all radio but the Red Sox. In the past few years she had let go her ties to people she did not like, to ironing, to dining out in town, and to buying things not necessary and that themselves needed care. She ignored whatever did not interest her. 

With those blows she opened her days like a pinata. A hundred freedoms fell on her. She hitched free years to her lifespan like a kite tail. Everyone envied her the time she had, not noticing that they had equal time.

—Annie Dillard

The Maytrees

.

We can live any way we want. The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse.

—Annie Dillard

.

Humanity i love you because you are perpetually putting the secret of life in your pants and forgetting it’s there and sitting down on it.


—E.E. Cummings

.

instructions

.

Always be drunk.

That's it!
The great imperative!

In order not to feel
Time's horrid fardel
bruise your shoulders,
grinding you into the earth,
get drunk and stay that way.

On what?
On wine, poetry, virtue, whatever.
But get drunk.

And if you sometimes happen to wake up
on the porches of a palace,
in the green grass of a ditch,
in the dismal loneliness
of your own room,
your drunkenness gone or disappearing,

ask the wind,
the wave,
the star,
the bird,
the clock,
ask everything that flees,
everything that groans
or rolls
or sings,
everything that speaks,

ask what time it is;

and the wind,
the wave,
the star,
the bird,
the clock
will answer you:

"Time to get drunk!

Don't be martyred slaves of Time,
Get drunk!
Stay drunk!
On wine, virtue, poetry, whatever!"


—Charles Baudelaire

.

lute music

   

.

Let us celebrate.

The Earth will be going on a long time
Before it finally freezes;
Men will be on it; they will take names,
Give their deeds reasons.
We will be here only
As chemical constituents—
A small franchise indeed. 

Right now we have lives,
Corpuscles, Ambitions, Caresses,
Like everybody had once—
Here at the year's end, at the feast
Of birth, let us bring to each other
The gifts brought once west through deserts—
The precious metal of our mingled hair,
The frankincense of enraptured arms and legs,
The myrrh of desperate, invincible kisses— 

Let us celebrate the daily
Recurrent nativity of love,
The endless epiphany of our fluent selves,
While the earth rolls away under us
Into unknown snows and summers,
Into untraveled spaces of the stars.


—Kenneth Rexroth

.

 

 

beginning (it is north everywhere)

  

.

Long before spring

king of the black cranes

rises one day

from the black

needle’s eye

on the white plain

under the white sky

the crown turns

and the eye

drilled clear through his head

turns

it is north everywhere

come out he says

come out then

the light is not yet

divided

it is a long way 

to the first

anything

come even so

we will start

bring your nights with you

—W.S. Merwin

The Carriers of Ladders, 

Pulitzer Prize for poetry, 1971

 

.

   

May the blessed sunlight shine on you like a great fire,
so that stranger and friend may come and warm himself at it.

And may light shine out of the two eyes of you,
like a candle set in the window of a house,
bidding the wanderer come in out of the storm.

And may the blessing of the rain be on you,
may it beat upon your Spirit and wash it fair and clean,
and leave there a shining pool where the blue of Heaven shines,
and sometimes a star.

And may the blessing of the earth be on you,
soft under your feet as you pass along the roads,
soft under you as you lie out on it, tired at the end of day;
and may it rest easy over you when, at last, you lie out under it.

May it rest so lightly over you that your soul may be out from under it quickly; up and off and on its way to God.

And now may the Lord bless you, and bless you kindly.

Amen

—Scottish blessing

.

the law of love

  

.

Love is the basis of the spirit
and the law of love is the basis of creation.

—Walter Russell

.

The sign of God’s love is to bestow three attributes on His lover: 

A generosity like that of the sea, 

a kindness like that of the sun, and, 

a humility like that of the earth.


—Bayazid

.

I wish that life should not be cheap, but sacred.

I wish the days to be as centuries, loaded, fragrant.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

.

would the heart

    

.

Ah! would the heart but be a manger for the birth, 
God would become once more a little child of earth.

Immeasurable is the Highest! Who but knows it?

And yet a human heart can perfectly enclose it.


—Angelus Silesius

 .

question

.

What is life?

It is the flash of a firefly in the night.

It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime.

It is the little shadow which runs across
the grass and loses itself in the sunset.


—Crowfoot
Blackfoot warrior and orator
1830 - 1890

.

Today is the winter solstice. The planet tilts just so to its star, lists and holds circling in a fixed tension between veering and longing, and spins helpless, exalted, in and out of that fleet blazing touch.


—Annie Dillard

The Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

.

You owe it to all of us to get on with what you’re good at.

—W. H. Auden

.

Shapechangers in Winter

  

.

This is the Solstice, the still point
of the sun, its cusp and midnight,
the year’s threshold
and unlocking, where the past
lets go of and becomes the future,
the place of caught breath


—Margaret Atwood 
Eating Fire

.

In the depth of winter,
I finally learned
that within me there lay
an invincible summer.

―Albert Camus

.

together in the whole night

 

.

 

They say the sun will come back
at midnight
after all
my one love

but we know how the minutes
fly out into
the dark trees
and vanish

like the great ʻōhiʻas and honey creepers
and we know how the weeks
walk into the
shadows at midday

at the thought of the months I reach for your hand
it is not something
one is supposed
to say

we watch the bright birds in the morning
we hope for the quiet
daytime together
the year turns into air

but we are together in the whole night
with the sun still going away
and the year
coming back


—W.S. Merwin
the solstice

.