relation(ships

.

Humans are tuned for relationship. The eyes, the skin, the tongue, ears, and nostrils—all are gates where our body receives the nourishment of otherness. This landscape of shadowed voices, these feathered bodies and antlers and tumbling streams—these breathing shapes are our family, the beings with whom we are engaged, with whom we struggle and suffer and celebrate.

For the largest part of our species’ existence, humans have negotiated relationships with every aspect of the sensuous surroundings, exchanging possibilities with every flapping form, with each textured surface and shivering entity that we happened to focus upon. All could speak, articulating in gesture and whistle and sigh a shifting web of meanings that we felt on our skin or inhaled through our nostrils or focused with our listening ears, and to which we replied—whether with sounds, or through movements, or minute shifts of mood.

The color of sky, the rush of waves—every aspect of the earthly sensuous could draw us into a relationship fed with curiosity and spiced with danger. Every sound was a voice, every scrape or blunder was a meeting—with Thunder, with Oak, with Dragonfly. And from all of these relationships our collective sensibilities were nourished.


—David Abram

.

internal relations

.

If man thinks of the totality as constituted of independent fragments, then that is how his mind will tend to operate, but if he can include everything coherently and harmoniously in an overall whole that is undivided, unbroken, and without a border then his mind will tend to move in a similar way, and from this will flow an orderly action within the whole.

... But let me emphasize that to have an approach of wholeness doesn’t mean that we are going to be able to capture the whole of existence within our concepts and knowledge. Rather it means first that we understand this totality as an unbroken and seamless whole in which relatively autonomous objects and forms emerge.

And secondly it means that in so far as wholeness is comprehended with the aid of the implicate order, the relationship between the various parts or sub wholes are ultimately internal. Wholeness is seen as primary while the parts are secondary, in the sense that what they are and what they do can be understood only in the light of the whole.

And perhaps I should also add here that in each sub whole there is a certain quality that does not come from the parts, but helps organize the parts. I could summarize this in the principle: The wholeness of the whole and the parts.

Each human being is therefore related to the totality, including nature and the whole of mankind. He is also therefore internally related to other human beings. How close that relationship is, has to be explored.

What I am further saying is that the quantum theory implies that ultimately the relationship of the parts and whole of matter in general is understood in a similar way. This approach of wholeness could help to end the far-reaching and pervasive fragmentation that arises out of the mechanistic world view.


—David Bohm

.

Be a good animal, true to your instincts. —D.H.Lawrence

.

Everything that happens is the message:
you read an event and be one and wait,
like breasting a wave, all the while knowing
by living, though not knowing how to live.

Or workers built an antenna -- a dish
aimed at stars -- and they themselves are its message,
crawling in and out, being worlds that loom,
dot-dash, and sirens, and sustaining beams.

And sometimes no one is calling but we turn up
eye and ear -- suddenly we fall into
sound before it begins, the breathing
so still it waits there under the breath --

And then the green of leaves calls out, hills
where they wait or turn, clouds in their frenzied
stillness unfolding their careful words:
"Everything counts. The message is the world."


—William Stafford
A Message from Space
from The Worth of Local Things

. 

you are a divine being

.

You are a divine being. You matter, you count.

You come from realms of unimaginable power and light,
and you will return to those realms.


—Terence McKenna

.

There is no less holiness at this time - as you are reading this - than there was on the day the Red Sea parted, or that day in the 30th year, in the 4th month, on the 5th day of the month as Ezekiel was a captive by the river Cheban, when the heavens opened and he saw visions of god. 

There is no whit less enlightenment under the tree at the end of your street than there was under Buddha’s bo tree. In any instant the sacred may wipe you with its finger. In any instant the bush may flare, your feet may rise, or you may see a bunch of souls in trees.


—Annie Dillard
For the Time Being

.

the way is in the heart

.

All things exist as they are perceived: at least in relation to the percipient. The mind is its own place, and of itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.

But poetry defeats the curse which binds us to be subjected to the accident of surrounding impressions. And whether it spreads its own figured curtain, or withdraws life’s dark veil from before the scene of things, it equally creates for us a being within our being.

It makes us the inhabitants of a world to which the familiar world is a chaos. It reproduces the common universe of which we are portions and percipients, and it purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being.

It compels us to feel that which we perceive, and to imagine that which we know. It creates anew the universe, after it has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration.


—Percy Bysshe Shelley
A Defence of Poetry

.

You are far from the end of your journey.
The way is not in the sky.
The way is in the heart.
See how you love

There is no fire like passion,
No crime like hatred,
No sorrow like separation,
No sickness like hunger,
And no joy like the joy of freedom

All that we are arises with our thoughts.
With our thoughts we make the world.
Speak or act with a pure mind
And happiness will follow you
As your shadow, unshakable.


—shakyamuni buddha

.

Live to the point of tears. —Albert Camus

.

The rhyme is the line's birthday, as you know,
and there are certain customary twins
in Russian as in other tongues. For instance,
love automatically rhymes with blood,
nature with liberty, sadness with distance,
humane with everlasting, prince with mud,
moon with a multitude of words, but sun
and song and wind and life and death with none.


—Vladimir Nabokov
An Evening of Russian Poetry

.

As we are a doomed race, chained to a sinking ship, as the whole thing is a bad joke, let us, at any rate, do our part; mitigate the suffering of our fellow-prisoners; decorate the dungeon with flowers and air-cushions; be as decent as we possibly can.


—Virginia Woolf

.

the greatest secret

.

For the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers.

The truth - that Love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.


—Viktor Frankl

.

 

everything is magnificent with existence

.

I said I will find what is lowly
and put the roots of my identity
down there: each day I'll wake up
and find the lowly nearby,
a handy focus and reminder,
a ready measure of my significance,
the voice by which I would be heard,
the wills, the kinds of selfishness
I could
freely adopt as my own:

but though I have looked everywhere,
I can find nothing
to give myself to:
everything is
magnificent with existence, is in
surfeit of glory:
nothing is diminished,
nothing has been diminished for me:

I said what is more lowly than the grass:
ah, underneath,
a ground-crust of dry-burnt moss:
I looked at it closely
and said this can be my habitat: but
nestling in I found
below the brown exterior
green mechanisms beyond the intellect
awaiting resurrection in rain: so I got up

and ran saying there is nothing lowly in the universe:
I found a beggar:
he had stumps for legs: nobody was paying
him any attention: everybody went on by:
I nestled in and found his life:
there, love shook his body like a devastation:
I said
though I have looked everywhere
I can find nothing lowly
in the universe:

I whirled though transfigurations up and down,
transfigurations of size and shape and place:

at one sudden point came still,
stood in wonder:
moss, beggar, weed, tick, pine, self, magnificent
with being!


—A. R. Ammons
Still

.

Love is the mystery of water and a star. —Pablo Neruda

.

Love in its essence is spiritual fire. 

—Seneca

.

In the end these things matter most:

How well did you love?

How fully did you love?

How deeply did you learn to let go?


—Buddha

.

Let your love flow outward through the universe,
To its height, its depth, its broad extent,
A limitless love, without hatred or enmity.

Then as you stand or walk,
Sit or lie down,
As long as you are awake,
Strive for this with a one-pointed mind;

Your life will bring heaven to earth.


—The Sutta-Nipāta

. 

i divide, in the sky, in the the seams, between the beams

.

Is anyone there
if so
are you real
either way are you
one or several
if the latter
are you all at once
or do you
take turns not answering
is your answer
the question itself
surviving the asking
without end
whose question is it
how does it begin
where does it come from
how did it ever
find out about you
over the sound
of itself
with nothing but its own
ignorance to go by


—W. S. Merwin
To The Soul

.

you where the heart begins

.

Human feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the earth: it does not wait for beauty — it flows with resistless force and brings beauty with it.


—George Eliot

.

You who let yourselves feel: enter the breathing
that is more than your own.
Let it brush your cheeks
as it divides and rejoins beside you.

Blessed ones, whole ones,
you where the heart begins:
You are the bow that shoots the arrows
and you are the target.

Fear not the pain. Let its weight fall back
into the earth;
for heavy are the mountains, heavy the seas.

The trees you planted in childhood have grown
too heavy. You cannot bring them along.
Give yourselves to the air, to what you cannot hold.


—Rainer Maria Rilke
Sonnets to Orpheus, Part One, IV

.

exercises

.

First, forget what time it is
for an hour
do it regularly every day

then forget what day of the week it is
and do this regularly for a week
then forget what country you are in
and practice doing it in company
for a week
and then do them together
for a week
with as few breaks as possible

follow these by forgetting to add
or to subtract
it makes no difference
you can change them
around after a week
both will help you later
to forget how to count

forget how to count
starting with your own age
starting with how to count backwards
starting with even numbers
with Roman numerals
starting with fractions of Roman numerals
with the old calendar
going on to the old alphabet
going on to the alphabet
forgetting it all until everything
is continuous again

go on to forgetting elements
starting with water
proceeding to earth
rising in fire

forget fire


—W. S. Merwin

.

People say that the soul, on hearing the song of creation, entered the body, but in reality the soul was the song itself. —Hafiz

.

I live my life in growing orbits which move out over this wondrous world, I am circling around God, around ancient towers and I have been circling for a thousand years.

And I still don't know if I am an eagle or a storm or a great song.


―Rainer Maria Rilke

 

.

you are that

.

Maharaj: There are many persons who have a great attachment to their own individuality. They want first and foremost to remain as an individual and then search, for they are not prepared to lose that individuality. While retaining their identity, they want to find out what is the truth. But in this process, you must get rid of the identity itself.

If you really find out what you are, you will see that you are not an individual, you are not a person, you are not a body. And people who cling to their body identity are not fit for this knowledge.

The names and forms that appear, with different colors and all that, their origin is water. But nobody says I'm water, they say I am the body. But if you see the origin of the body then ultimately the body has appeared only from water. All these plants and everything, all name and forms, they appear from water only. But still people don't identify themselves with water; they say I am the body.


—Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
The Ultimate Medicine, Dialogues

.

From the waters everything is made,

both what is manifest and what is Unmanifest. 

Therefore, all manifestation (murti) is water. 

—Prasna Upanishad 1.4-5

.

free(dom

.

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

.

certain(ty

.

Where does unbelief begin?
When I was young

there were degrees of certainty.
I could say, Yes I know that I have two hands.
Then one day I awakened on a planet of people whose hands occasionally
disappear.


—Anne Carson

.

wholeness is never lost

.

One day, I will be a bird, and will snatch my being out of my nothingness. 

The more my wings burn, the more I near my truth and arise from the ashes. 

—Mahmoud Darwish

.

this is the freedom of the universe

The Beautiful Bird Revealing the Unknown to a Pair of Lovers —Joan Miro

.

There is no insurmountable solitude. All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are.

And we must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence in order to reach forth to the enchanted place where we can dance our clumsy dance and sing our sorrowful song — but in this dance or in this song there are fulfilled the most ancient rites of our conscience in the awareness of being human and of believing in a common destiny.


—Pablo Neruda

 

 

. 

 

a half-open door

.

Cowardice breaks off on its path.
Anguish breaks off on its path.
The vulture breaks off in its flight.

The eager light runs into the open,
even the ghosts take a drink.

And our paintings see the air,
red beasts of the ice-age studios.

Everything starts to look around.
We go out in the sun by hundreds.

Every person is a half-open door
leading to a room for everyone.

The endless field under us.

Water glitters between the trees.

The lake is a window into the earth.


—Tomas Tranströmer
Half-Finished Heaven, excerpt
Robert Bly version

.

We live by waters breaking out of the heart. —Anne Carson

.

There is a profound ground of unity that is more pertinent and authentic than all the unilateral dimensions of our lives. This a man discovers when he is able to keep open the door of his heart. This is one’s ultimate responsibility, and it is not dependent upon whether the heart of another is kept open for him.

Here is a mystery: If sweeping through the door of my heart there moves continually a genuine love for you, it by-passes all your hate and all your indifference and gets through to you at your center. You are powerless to do anything about it. You may keep alive in devious ways the fires of your bitter heart, but they cannot get through to me.

Underneath the surface of all the tension, something else is at work. It is utterly impossible for you to keep another from loving you.


—Howard Thurman

.

There isn’t time - so brief is life - for bickerings, apologies, heartburnings, callings to account. There is only time for loving - and but an instant, so to speak, for that.


—Mark Twain
in a letter to Clara Spaulding
20 August 1886

.

beauti(ful

.

You suppose that you are the lock on the door
But you are the key that opens it

It’s too bad that you want to be someone else

You don’t see your own face, your own beauty
Yet, no face is more beautiful than yours.


—Rumi

.

present dreams

.

 

The person we seem to be in a dream has not projected it. That person is not the seer but an object seen by us, so it is part of the projection. However, because we mistake ourself to be that person so long as we are dreaming, it seems to us that that person is seeing the dream world.

The same is the case in our present dream. We who are seeing this dream now seem to be a person in it, so this person seems to us to be the seer, even though it is actually an object seen by us.

This is why we need to distinguish the seer from everything that is seen. 

Whatever person we seem to be is just a body and mind, which are objects seen by us, so as the seer of these objects we are distinct from them.


—Sri Sadhu Om, direct deciple of Ramana Maharshi
The Paramount Importance of Self Attention, pt 33, excerpt,
as recorded by *Michael James
Mountain Path, 2020-II April-June


Michael James assisted Sri Sadhu Om in translating Bhagavan’s Tamil writings and Guru Vācaka Kōvai. Many of his writings and translations have been published, and some of them are also available on his website, www.happinessofbeing.com.

.

There is another world, but it is inside this one —Paul Éluard

.

There are three states only, the waking, dream and sleep. Turiya is not a fourth one; it is what underlies these three. But people do not readily understand it. Therefore it is said that this is the fourth state and the only Reality. In fact it is not apart from anything, for it forms the substratum of all happenings; it is the only Truth; it is your very Being. The three states appear as fleeting phenomena on it and then sink into it alone. Therefore they are unreal.


—Ramana Maharishi
Talks with Ramana

.

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

.

the first dream

.

The Wind is ghosting around the house tonight
and as I lean against the door of sleep
I begin to think about the first person to dream,
how quiet he must have seemed the next morning

as the others stood around the fire
draped in the skins of animals
talking to each other only in vowels,
for this was long before the invention of consonants.

He might have gone off by himself to sit
on a rock and look into the mist of a lake
as he tried to tell himself what had happened,
how he had gone somewhere without going,

how he had put his arms around the neck
of a beast that the others could touch
only after they had killed it with stones,
how he felt its breath on his bare neck.

Then again, the first dream could have come
to a woman, though she would behave,
I suppose, much the same way,
moving off by herself to be alone near water,

except that the curve of her young shoulders
and the tilt of her downcast head
would make her appear to be terribly alone,
and if you were there to notice this,

you might have gone down as the first person
to ever fall in love with the sadness of another.

—Billy Collins

.

 

 

Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes. —Carl Jung

.

We have seen so much.

Reality has almost used us up ...

—Tomas Tranströmer

Windows and Stones

.

merrily, merrily

.

Always recognize the dreamlike qualities of life and reduce attachment and aversion. Practice good-heartedness towards all beings. Be loving and compassionate, no matter what others do to you. What they do will not matter so much when you see it as a dream. The trick is to have a positive intention during the dream.

This is the essential point.


—Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche

.

The world you can perceive is a very small world indeed.

And it is entirely private.

Take it to be a dream and be done with it.


—Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

.

the dream keeper

 

.

Bring me all of your dreams,

You dreamer,

Bring me all your

Heart melodies

That I may wrap them

In a blue cloud-cloth

Away from the too-rough fingers

Of the world.


—Langston Hughes

.

 

heart in place

.

Paradise is having a connection — roots in the garden, stem from the branch, current to the light. To be unaware of the connection is to have one’s heart in the wrong place — far out in the fruit instead of within, in the tree.


—Alan Watts
The Body Journal

.

But civilized human beings are alarmingly ignorant of the fact that they are continuous with their natural surroundings. It is as necessary to have air, water, plants, insects, birds, fish, and mammals as it is to have brains, hearts, lungs, and stomachs. The former are our external organs in the same way that the latter are our internal organs.

If then, we can no more live without the things outside than without those inside, the plain inference is that the words “I” and “myself ” must include both sides. The sun, the earth, and the forests are just as much features of your own body as your brain. Erosion of the soil is as much a personal disease as leprosy, and many “growing communities” are as disastrous as cancer.


—Alan Watts
Does it Matter? Essays on Man's Relation to Materiality

.

… I’m in words, made of words, others’ words, what others, the place too, the air, the walls, the floor, the ceiling, all words, the whole world is here with me, I’m the air, the walls, the walled-in one, everything yields, opens, ebbs, flows, like flakes, I’m all these flakes, meeting, mingling, falling asunder, wherever I go I find me, leave me, go towards me, come from me, nothing ever but me, a particle of me, retrieved, lost, gone astray…


—Samuel Beckett
The Unnamable

.

we must be very strong

and love each other

in order to go on living.


—Audre Lorde
Equinox (Undersong)


 

.

you are this

.

Wherever you are, you are one with the clouds and one with the sun and the stars you see.

You are one with everything.

That is more true than I can say, and more true than you can hear.


—Shunryu Suzuki

.

real(ly

.

Reality is what we take to be true. What we take to be true is what we believe. What we believe is based upon our perceptions. What we perceive depends upon what we look for. What we look for depends upon what we think.

What we think depends upon what we perceive. What we perceive determines what we believe. What we believe determines what we take to be true. What we take to be true is our reality.


—David Bohm

.

other(wise

.

Be suspicious of what you want.

—Rumi

.

If you are lugging a heavy bag,
do not fail to look inside it
to see whether what is inside is bitter or sweet.

If it is really worth bringing along, bring it;
otherwise, empty your sack
and redeem yourself from fruitless effort.

Only put into your sack
that which is worth bringing.


—Rumi

.

We are like the spider. We weave our life and then move along in it. 

We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream. 

This is true for the entire universe.

―The Upanishads

.

We are one, after all, you and I.

Together we suffer, together exist,
and forever will recreate each other.


—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

.

listen

.

The airy sky has taken its place leaning against the wall.
It is like a prayer to what is empty.

And what is empty turns its face to us and whispers:
“I am not empty, I am open.”


—Tomas Tranströmer
Robert Bly translation

.

energy dances

.

Now the argument is, well, maybe my perceptions are inaccurate, but somewhere there is accuracy, scientists have it with their instruments. That’s how we can find out what’s really real. But relativity, quantum mechanics, have demonstrated clearly that what you find out with instruments is true relative only to the instrument you’re using, and where that instrument is located in space-time. 

We think this is reality. But in philosophy, that’s called naïve realism: “What I perceive is reality.” And philosophers have refuted naïve realism every century for the last 2,500 years, starting with Buddha and Plato, and yet most people still act on the basis of naïve realism.

...The notion that ‘reality’ is a noun, a solid thing like a brick or a baseball bat, derives from the evolutionary fact that our nervous systems normally organize the dance of energy into such block-like ‘things,’ probably as instant bio-survival cues.

Such ‘things,’ however, dissolve back into energy dances — processes or verbs — when the nervous system is synergized with certain drugs or transmuted by yogic or shamanic exercises or aided by scientific instruments.

In both mysticism and physics, there is general agreement that ‘things’ are constructed by our nervous systems and that ‘realities’ (plural) are better described as systems or bundles of energy functions.


—Robert Anton Wilson

.

A thousand times I have ascertained and found it to be true: 

the affairs of this world are really nothing into nothing.

Still though, we should dance.

—Hafiz

 

 

.

 

80,000

Burning Man, from a drone in 2022

.

After two years of absence due to the health crisis, the Burning Man festival made a grand return. For this 9-day edition in 2022, nearly 80,000 festival-goers trod the sands of the Black Rock Desert in Nevada. And it was truly a sight to behold! For the first time since its creation, a show featuring 250 drones criss-crossed the Nevada sky, delivering a full-scale space invader spectacle.

Although ephemeral, Burning Man is one of the most anticipated artistic events in the United States. After two years of interruption due to the Covid-19 crisis, the grand festival makes a return for a Burning Man 2022 edition that promises to be wild! In addition to the usual caravans, magical decorations, and provocative artistic sculptures, the Black Rock City pulled out all the stops: nearly 250 drones played space invaders in the sky above the sands of the Black Rock Desert.

But what is Burning Man? It’s the world’s largest temporary artistic ecosystem. For 9 days, community creators and organizers come together to celebrate art and local initiatives from around the world. These individuals, called “Burners,” gather in the Nevada desert to create Black Rock City, a temporary metropolis.

Characterized for its unconventional culture, Burning Man is dedicated to producing a positive spiritual change on a global scale. “Our intention is to generate a society that connects each individual to their creative powers, to community participation, to the wider domain of civic life, and to the even larger world of nature that exists beyond society,” is written on the event’s official website.

However, Burning Man does not want to be defined as a festival but rather as a gathering of a community, at the heart of a temporary city in the Nevada desert. This event is known for the festive cremation of a giant puppet, in reference to its name Burning Man, meaning “the burning man” in French.

For this 2022 edition, more than 80,000 festival-goers, called “Burners,” gathered at Black Rock City. And as every year, the show was on point, but even more so this year! Each artistic creation is dedicated to art, self-expression, and autonomy for all.

To make a mark, the BRC 2022 wished to create a unique show in which over 250 drones played space invaders in the sky under the theme “Waking Dreams.” These were piloted by the festival-goers themselves. A regulation was carefully established to ensure compliance with the general flying conditions, in accordance with Black Rock City’s safety guidelines. These drones then delivered a spectacle at more than 400 feet, away from the crowds and emergency teams, and, of course, outside of the period of the Temple’s burning.


—Hasan Jasim

.

wait

.

circles

the observable universe

.

We clasp the hands of those who go before us,
and the hands of those who come after us;
we enter the little circle of each other's arms,
and the larger circle of lovers
whose hands are joined in a dance,
and the larger circle of all creatures,
passing in and out of life,
who move also in a dance,
to a music so subtle and vast
that no one hears it except in fragments.


—Wendell Berry

.

this is the essence of magic

.

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

.

If you are not willing to see more than is visible, you won’t see anything. —Ruth Bernhard

.

 

We are bees of the invisible.

Passionately we plunder the honey of the visible

in order to gather it in the great golden hive of the invisible.


—Rainer Maria Rilke
from a letter to Witold Hulewicz
November 13, 1925

.

Even though the senses are not able to detect most of the universe,

the invisible nevertheless exists.

—Massimo Citro and Ervin Laszlo 

The Basic Code of the Universe

. 

No person doubts that he exists, though he may doubt the existence of God. If he finds out the truth about himself and discovers his own source, this is all that is required.


—Ramana Maharshi

.

I’d woken up early, and I took a long time getting ready to exist. —Fernando Pessoa

.

My originality consists in putting logic of the visible 

to the service of the invisible.

—Odilon Redon

The Death of Buddha

.

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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No permanence is ours; we are a wave
That flows to fit whatever form it finds:
Through day or night, cathedral or the cave
We pass forever, craving form that binds.
 

—Hermann Hesse
from “Lament” in The Glass Bead Game
Clara and Richard Winston version

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Although from the beginning
I knew
the world is impermanent,
not a moment passes
when my sleeves are dry.


—Ryokan
Sky Above, Great Wind

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