Thursday, November 30, 2023

you must have chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star —Nietzsche

  





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The wild. I have drunk it, deep and raw, and heard its primal, unforgettable roar. We know it in our dreams, when our mind is off the leash, running wild. 'Outwardly, the equivalent of the unconscious is the wilderness: both of these terms meet, one step even further on, as one,' wrote Gary Snyder. 'It is in vain to dream of a wildness distinct from ourselves.' 'There is none such,' wrote Thoreau. 'It is the bog in our brains and bowels, the primitive vigor of Nature in us, that inspires the dream.'

And as dreams are essential to the psyche, wildness is to life.

We are animal in our blood and in our skin. We were not born for pavements and escalators but for thunder and mud. More. We are animal not only in body but in spirit. Our minds are the minds of wild animals. 
Artists, who remember their wildness better than most, are animal artists, lifting their heads to sniff a quick wild scent in the air, and they know it unmistakably, they know the tug of wildness to be followed through your life is buckled by that strange and absolute obedience. ('You must have chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star,' wrote Nietzsche.) Children know it as magic and timeless play. Shamans of all sorts and inveterate misbehavers know it; those who cannot trammel themselves into a sensible job and life in the suburbs know it.

What is wild cannot be bought or sold, borrowed or copied. It is unmistakable, unforgettable, unshameable, elemental as earth and ice, water, fire and air, a quintessence, pure spirit, resolving into no constituents. Don't waste your wildness: it is precious and necessary.


—Jay Griffiths
Wild: An Elemental Journey




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Wednesday, November 29, 2023

you, neighbor god








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I want to live where soul meets body
And let the sun wrap its arms around me
And bathe my skin in water cool and cleansing
And feel, feel what its like to be new

Cause in my head there’s a greyhound station
Where I send my thoughts to far off destinations
So they may have a chance of finding a place
where they’re far more suited than here

I cannot guess what we'll discover
When we turn the dirt with our palms cupped like shovels
But I know our filthy hands can wash one another’s
And not one speck will remain

And I do believe it’s true
That there are roads left in both of our shoes
But if the silence takes you
Then I hope it takes me too
So brown eyes I hold you near
Cause you’re the only song I want to hear
A melody softly soaring through my atmosphere

Where soul meets body
Where soul meets body
Where soul meets body

And I do believe it’s true
That there are roads left in both of our shoes
But if the silence takes you
Then I hope it takes me too
So brown eyes I hold you near
Cause you’re the only song I want to hear

A melody softly soaring through my atmosphere
A melody softly soaring through my atmosphere
A melody softly soaring through my atmosphere
A melody softly soaring through my atmosphere




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You, neighbor god, if sometimes in the night
I rouse you with loud knocking, I do so
only because I seldom hear you breathe
and know: you are alone.
And should you need a drink, no one is there
to reach it to you, groping in the dark.
Always I hearken. Give but a small sign.
I am quite near.

Between us there is but a narrow wall,
and by sheer chance; for it would take
merely a call from your lips or from mine
to break it down,
and that without a sound.

The wall is builded of your images.

They stand before you hiding you like names.
And when the light within me blazes high
that in my inmost soul I know you by,
the radiance is squandered on their frames.

And then my senses, which too soon grow lame,
exiled from you, must go their homeless ways.


—Rainer Maria Rilke 
Poems from the Book of Hours 

 


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

  




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You are not a drop in the ocean.
You are the entire ocean in a drop.


—Rumi









Tuesday, November 28, 2023

strange world








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a voice out of this world
calls on our souls
not to wait any more
get ready to move
to the original home

your real home
your real birth place
is up here with the heavens
let your soul take a flight
like a happy phoenix

you've been tied up
your feet in the mud
your body roped to a log
break loose your ties
get ready for the final flight

make your last journey
from this strange world
soar for the heights
where there is no more
separation of you and your home

God has created
your wings not to be dormant
as long as you are alive
you must try more and more
to use your wings to show you're alive

these wings of yours
are filled with quests and hopes
if they are not used
they will wither away
they will soon decay

you may not like
what i'm going to tell you
you are stuck
now you must seek
nothing but the source


—Rumi 
Ghazal 945 
Nader Khalili translation




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Perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us yesterday,
separate, in the evening.

—Rainer Maria Rilke



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open secret

  






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Think of the phoenix coming up out of ashes,
but not flying off.
For a moment we have form. 
We can't see.

How can we be conscious and you be conscious
at the same time and separate?

Copper when an alchemist works on it loses its copper qualities. 
Seeds in Spring
begin to be trees, no longer seed. Brushwood
put in the fire changes. 

The snow-world melts.
You step in my footprint and it's gone.


—Rumi
Coleman Barks version
 

 

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Saturday, November 25, 2023

question




empty only of a separate existence



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Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara,
Sitting in the depth of knowledge,
Lit the glow of his wisdom five elements
And saw that all of them are empty.
After this enlightenment he overcame the pain.

Listen, Shariputra,
Form - a void, emptiness - is the form
Form - is nothing but emptiness,
Void - it is nothing but a form.
The same is true for the senses,
Perceptions of mental activity and consciousness.
Listen, Shariputra,
All dharmas are empty properties.
They do not create and are not exterminable,
Are not dirty and are not cleaned,
Do not grow or shrink.

Hence, in the void
There is no form, no feelings, no perceptions,
No mental activity or consciousness.
There is no dependent origination
No eyes, no ears, no nose,
No tongue, no body, no mind.
There is no form, no sound, no smell,
No taste, no touch, no object of mind.
No sphere of elements, ranging from eye
And the ending of consciousness.

And it is not fading, from ignorance
And ending with death and decay.
There is no source of suffering and misery,
No Cessation of Suffering
And there is no way to end suffering.
There is no wisdom and no progress.
Since there is no progress, all the Bodhisattvas,
Relying on perfect wisdom,
No obstacles are in your mind.
With no obstacles, they overcome fear,
Forever exempt from error
And reach true nirvana.
Thanks to this perfect wisdom,
All the Buddhas of the past, present and future
Enter into a full, true and total enlightenment.

Therefore, to know that perfect wisdom
Expressed unsurpassed mantra,
The highest mantra, devastating suffering
Perfect and true.
Hence, the mantra Prajnaparamita
Must be declared.
Here is the mantra:

Gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha.
Gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha.
Gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha.




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Friday, November 24, 2023

this is how you become everything that lives

  





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You are the daughter of the sea, oregano's first cousin.
Swimmer, your body is pure as the water;
cook, your blood is quick as the soil.
Everything you do is full of flowers, rich with the earth.
Your eyes go out toward the water, and the waves rise;
your hands go out to the earth and the seeds swell;
you know the deep essence of water and the earth,
conjoined in you like a formula for clay.

Naiad: cut your body into turquoise pieces,
they will bloom resurrected in the kitchen.
This is how you become everything that lives.

And so at last, you sleep, in the circle of my arms
that push back the shadows so that you can rest--
vegetables, seaweed, herbs: the foam of your dreams.


—Pablo Neruda
love sonnet, XXXIV


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Wednesday, November 22, 2023

love and love and nothing else

 







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The holiest of all holidays are those 

 Kept by ourselves in silence and apart; 

The secret anniversaries of the heart …


—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Holidays, excerpt



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Sunday, November 19, 2023

frothy wakings

 






Tracks made by atomic particles from a particle accelerator, a device that speeds up the particles.




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The eye can’t see protons, electrons, and other subatomic particles, but a camera records their frothy wakes in a chamber of liquefied neon and hydrogen at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois. Physicists study the tracks to learn about the characteristics of the particles that produced them. 

—National Geographic 1978



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When you ask what are electrons and protons I ought to answer that this question is not a profitable one to ask and does not really have a meaning. The important thing about electrons and protons is not what they are but how they behave, how they move. 
I can describe the situation by comparing it to the game of chess. In chess, we have various chessmen, kings, knights, pawns and so on. If you ask what a chessman is, the answer would be that it is a piece of wood, or a piece of ivory, or perhaps just a sign written on paper, or anything whatever. It does not matter. 
Each chessman has a characteristic way of moving and this is all that matters about it. The whole game of chess follows from this way of moving the various chessmen.

—Paul A. M. Dirac (1902 - 1984)



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Saturday, November 18, 2023

atom of the universe

 






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The 1930s had seen monumental advances in atomic science and radiation research and the spectacular discovery of nuclear fission in 1938 was overshadowed by the outbreak of war just a year later. But physicists were quick to realize the devastating potential of their new discovery.

Albert Einstein co-signed a letter to then president Roosevelt with a warning: "It is conceivable that extremely powerful bombs of a new type... may thus be constructed." So the US developed their own bomb before any other nation could. The test was considered a great success and just 21 days later the United States dropped a similar atomic bomb, the so-called Fat Man, on the city of Nagasaki, Japan.

If it had not been for the deadly pressures of war nuclear science may have followed a very different and likely slower path. The exploration of the atom, one of the tiniest particles of matter, had until then been little more than a curiosity, the domain of at first philosophers and then gentlemen scholars.

Small improvements in experimental methods and equipment brought small breakthroughs until the fateful revelation that atoms and their nuclei were indeed not the end of the Russian doll. A discovery that led directly to New Mexico and then Japan.

As the glow from that first nuclear explosion faded it left behind a new thirst to understand what our universe was actually made of and how it came to be. That journey, the quest to discover what makes up everything, would see scientists delve ever deeper down a rabbit hole of matter and mass of fields and particles and even further back in time in a century-long quest to answer the immortal question: 

What is at its most fundamental level everything, and perhaps even more importantly is any of it really real at all?



—Leila Battison




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Friday, November 17, 2023

the less i seek my source

 






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I'm trying to tell you something about my life
Maybe give me insight between black and white
And the best thing you've ever done for me
Is to help me take my life less seriously
It's only life after all

Well, darkness has a hunger that's insatiable
And lightness has a call that's hard to hear
And I wrap my fear around me like a blanket
I sailed my ship of safety 'til I sank it
I'm crawling on your shores

And I went to the doctor, I went to the mountains
I looked to the children, I drank from the fountains
There's more than one answer to these questions pointing me in a crooked line
And the less I seek my source for some definitive
Closer I am to fine
Closer I am to fine

And I went to see the doctor of philosophy
With a poster of Rasputin and a beard down to his knee
He never did marry or see a B-grade movie
He graded my performance, he said he could see through me
I spent four years prostrate to the higher mind
Got my paper and I was free

I went to the doctor, I went to the mountains
I looked to the children, I drank from the fountains
There's more than one answer to these questions pointing me in crooked line
And the less I seek my source for some definitive
Closer I am to fine
Closer I am to fine

I stopped by the bar at 3 A.M
To seek solace in a bottle or possibly a friend
And I woke up with a headache like my head against a board
Twice as cloudy as I'd been the night before
And I went in seeking clarity

I went to the doctor, I went to the mountains
I looked to the children, I drank from the fountain

We go to the doctor, we go to the mountains
We look to the children, we drink from the fountain

We go to the Bible, we go through the workout
We read up on revival, we stand up for the lookout
There's more than one answer to these questions pointing me in a crooked line
And the less I seek my source for some definitive
Closer I am to fine
Closer I am to fine
Closer I am to fine

—Indigo Girls
Closer To Fine


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hey!



 



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I am yours.

Don’t give myself back to me.


—Rumi


:)







Wednesday, November 15, 2023

say i am

 





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There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. 
They make themselves manifest. 
They are what is mystical.


—Ludwig Wittgenstein
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus






Out of this same light, out of the central mind, 

We make a dwelling in the evening air, 

In which being there together is enough.


—Wallace Stevens




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Sunday, November 12, 2023

bless










this is how love catches up and wants to be our friend, as we hold 

each other, and the good secret inside slides forth continuous


—Rumi




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We offer gratitude to and for all friends

Who create, remake and refine one another;

Who point to stars and keep us from the dark;

Who help us hear the music in the silent places ...

Who hold us and will not let us go.


—Marge Ackley



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beauti(ful

  






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The small person
Builds cages for everyone
She
Sees.

Instead, the sage,
Who needs to duck her head,
When the moon is low,
Can be found dropping keys, all night long
For the beautiful,
Rowdy,
Prisoners.


—Hafiz


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Saturday, November 11, 2023

Time is not a line, but a series of now-points. —Taisen Deshimaru

 


Night Sea, 1963Agnes Martin
oil, gold, canvas



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In my best moments I think "Life has passed me by” and I am content.


—Agnes Martin



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Light is a power. A great power, by which we exist, but which exists beyond our needs, in itself. Sunlight and starlight are time, and time is light. In the sunlight, in the days and years, life is. 
In a dark place life may call upon the light, naming it. But usually when you see a wizard name or call upon some thing, some object to appear, that is not the same, he calls upon no power greater than himself, and what appears is an illusion only. 
To summon a thing that is not there at all, to call it by speaking its true name, that is a great mastery, not lightly used. Not for mere hunger’s sake. 
Yarrow, your little dragon has stolen a cake.


Ursula K. Le Guin
A Wizard of Earthsea 


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Friday, November 10, 2023

all in good time

 




 

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In India it is considered a great sin to awaken anyone who is asleep. If a man is asleep, do not wake him; let him sleep; it is the time for him to sleep; it will not do to wake him before his time. Thus a mystic understands also that a person who is taking his time to wake up must not be awakened to give him the mystic’s idea. 

It would be a sin, because he is not prepared to understand it, and his beliefs would be shaken. Let him go on thinking God is in Benares; let him think He is in the temple of Buddha; let him think He is in heaven; let him think He is in the seventh heaven above the sky. 

It is the beginning; he will evolve in time and arrive at the same stage. The rest he is having just now is good for him. The awakening comes, all in its good time.


—Hazrat Inayat Khan

 

 

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No, the point is not only does time fly and do we die, but that in these reckless conditions we live at all, and are vouchsafed, for the duration of certain inexplicable moments, to know it.


—Annie Dillard
 

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borrowed time

 


Lars Leber photo




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They used to say we're living on borrowed
time but even when young I wondered
who loaned it to us? In 1948 one grandpa
died stretched tight in a misty oxygen tent,
his four sons gathered, his papery hand
grasping mine. Only a week before, we were fishing.
 
Now the four sons have all run out of borrowed time
while I'm alive wondering whom I owe
for this indisputable gift of existence.
Of course time is running out. It always
has been a creek heading east, the freight
of water with its surprising heaviness
following the slant of the land, its destiny.
 
What is lovelier than a creek or riverine thicket?
Say it is an unknown benefactor who gave us
birds and Mozart, the mystery of trees and water
and all living things borrowing time.
Would I still love the creek if I lasted forever?


—Jim Harrison
Songs of Unreason



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Thursday, November 9, 2023

the cold before the moonrise

 





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Instantaneous architectures
hanging over a pause,
apparitions neither named
nor thought, wind-forms,
insubstantial as time
and, like time, dissolved.

Made of time, they are not time;
they are the cleft, the interstice,
the brief vertigo of between
where the diaphanous flower opens:
high on its stalk of a reflection
it vanishes as it turns.

Never touched, the clarities
seen with the eyes closed:
transparent birth
and the crystalline fall
in the instant of this instant
that forever is still here.

Outside the window, the desolate
rooftops and the hurrying clouds.
The day goes out, the city
lights up, remote and near.
Weightless hour. I breathe
the moment, empty and eternal.


—Octavio Paz
interval
Eliot Weinberger version




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It is too simple to turn to the sound
Of frost stirring among its
Stars like an animal asleep
In the winter night
And say I was born far from home 

If there is a place where this is the language may
It be my country 


—W.S. Merwin



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Monday, November 6, 2023