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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the drop that contains the sea

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Out of a great need
we are all holding hands
and climbing.

Not loving is a letting go.

Listen,

the terrain around here
is
far too
dangerous
for
that.


—Hafiz
  

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jaubaius

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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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call and answer

 

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Words, even if they come from
the soul, hide the soul, as fog

rising off the sea covers the sea,
the coast, the fish, the pearls.

It's noble work to build coherent
philosophical discourses, but

they block out the sun of truth.
See God's qualities as an ocean,

this world as foam on the purity
of that. Brush away and look

through the alphabet to essence,
as you do the hair covering your

beloved's eyes. Here's the mystery:
this intricate, astonishing world

is proof of God's presence even as
it covers the beauty. One flake

from the wall of a gold mine does
not give much idea what it's like

when the sun shines in and turns
the air and the workers golden.


—Rumi

.

I am where I was:

I walk behind the murmur,

footsteps within me, heard with my eyes,

the murmur is in the mind, I am my footsteps,

I hear the voices that I think,

the voices that think me as as I think them.

I am the shadow my words cast.


—Octavio Paz
closing lines to A Draft of Shadows
Eliot Weinberger translation 

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... treat each day as a word spoken to us. 

And yourself—as an answer to the word.


—Anna Kamieńska

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written in starlight

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Verse 1

These mist covered mountains

Are a home for me

But my home is the lowlands

And always will be

Someday you'll return to

Your valleys and your farms

And you'll no longer burn

To be brothers in arms


Verse 2

Through these fields of destruction

Baptisms of fire

I've witnessed your suffering

As the battle raged higher

And though they did hurt me so bad

In the fear and alarm

You did not desert me

My brothers in arms

Bridge

There's so many different worlds

So many different suns

And we have just one world

But we live in different ones


Verse 3

Now the sun's gone to hell

And the moon riding high

Let me bid you farewell

Every man has to die

But it's written in the starlight

And every line in your palm

We're fools to make war

On our brothers in arms

—Mark Knopfler
Berlin 2007

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I know you’re tired but come, this is the way. —Rumi

.

An ant hurries along a threshing floor
with its wheat grain, moving between huge stacks
of wheat, not knowing the abundance
all around. It thinks its one grain
is all there is to love.

So we choose a tiny seed to be devoted to.
This body, one path, one teacher.
Look wider and farther.

The essence of every human being can see,
and what that essence-eye takes in,
the being becomes. Saturn. Solomon!

The ocean pours through a jar,
and you might say it swims inside
the fish! This mystery gives peace to
your longing and makes the road home home.


—Rumi
Coleman Barks version

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you will(kiss me)go

 

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up into the silence the green
silence with a white earth in it

you will(kiss me)go

out into the morning the young
morning with a warm world in it

(kiss me)you will go

on into the sunlight the fine
sunlight with a firm day in it

you will go(kiss me

down into your memory and
a memory and memory

i)kiss me(will go)


—E. E. Cummings 

 .

Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own. —Heinlein

  

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Love seeks no cause beyond itself and no fruit;
it is its own fruit, its own enjoyment.

I love because I love;
I love in order that I may love.


—Saint Bernard

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She asked him, ′′Tell me something nice!“

 

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He answered her, ′′(∂ + m) ps = 0 ′′

This is the equation of Dirac, the most beautiful equation in physics. It describes the phenomenon of quantum connection, which alleges that if two separate systems interact with each other over a certain period of time and then separate, we can describe them as two different systems, but they will already exist as one unique system. What happens to one will continue to affect the other, regardless of the distance between them. It’s called quantum intertwining or quantum connection. Two particles that were at some point connected remain connected forever, even if they are light-years apart. This is what happens to two people when they are connected by what we humans call Love. 


—Unknown

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It’s that dream that we carry with us
that something wonderful will happen,
that it has to happen,
that time will open,
that the heart will open,
that doors will open,
that the mountains will open,
that wells will leap up,
that the dream will open,
that one morning we’ll slip in
to a harbor that we've never known.

—Olav H. Hauge
Robert Bly version

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The consciousness in you and the consciousness in me, 
apparently two, really one, seek unity and that is love.


—Nisargadatta

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night writing

'This doesn't compare to the feel of your skin'

 .

somewhere i have never traveled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will enclose me

though i have closed myself as fingers,

you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens

(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me,i and

my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,

as when the heart of this flower imagines

the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals

the power of your intense fragility:whose texture

compels me with the colour of its countries,

rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes

and opens;only something in me understands

the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)

nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands


 —E. E. Cummings

.

.

Even if I now saw you only once,  

I would long for you through worlds,  

worlds.


—Izumi Shikibu
The Ink Dark Moon, excerpt
Jane Hirshfield translation

 .

true lovers in each happening of their hearts
live longer than all which and every who;
despite what fear denies,what hope asserts,
what falsest both disprove by proving true

(all doubts,all certainties,as villains strive
and heroes through the mere mind’s poor pretend
—grim comics of duration:only love
immortally occurs beyond the mind)

such a forever is love’s any now
and her each here is such an everywhere,
even more true would truest lovers grow
if out of midnight dropped more suns than are

(yes;and if time should ask into his was
all shall,their eyes would never miss a yes)


—E. E. Cummings

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xLUNACHILDx

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love is more thicker than forget

  

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love is more thicker than forget
more thinner than recall
more seldom than a wave is wet
more frequent than to fall

it is most mad and moonly
and less it shall unbe
than all the sea which only
is deeper than the sea

love is less always than to win
less never than alive
less bigger than the least begin
less littler than forgive

it is most sane and sunly
and more it cannot die
than all the sky which only
is higher than the sky


—E. E. Cummings

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i am so glad and very

  

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i am so glad and very
merely my fourth will cure
the laziest self of weary
the hugest sea of shore

so far your nearness reaches
a lucky fifth of you
turns people into eachs
and cowards into grow

our can'ts were born to happen
our mosts have died in more
our twentieth will open
wide a wide open door

we are so both and oneful
night cannot be so sky
sky cannot be so sunful
i am through you so i

—E. E. Cummings

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love is every only god

  

.

love is every only god 

who spoke this earth so glad and big
even a thing all small and sad
man,may his mighty briefness dig

for love beginning means return
seas who could sing so deep and strong

one queerying wave will whitely yearn
from each last shore and home come young

so truly perfectly the skies
by merciful love whispered were,
completes its brightness with your eyes

any illimitable star


—E. E. Cummings

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hush

  

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Hush.

I am so close, I may look distant. 

So completely mixed with you, I may look separate. 

So out in the open, I appear hidden. 

So silent, because I am constantly talking with you.


—Rumi

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The clear bead at the center
changes everything. 

There are
no edges to my loving now.

You've heard it said there's
a window that opens from one
mind to another,

but if there's no wall, 
there's no need for
fitting the window, or the latch.

—Rumi

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