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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things will happen

 

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When we get out of the glass bottles of our ego, and when we escape like squirrels turning in the cages of our personality and get into the forests again, we shall shiver with cold and fright but things will happen to us so that we don't know ourselves.

Cool, unlying life will rush in, and passion will make our bodies taut with power, we shall stamp our feet with new power and old things will fall down, we shall laugh, and institutions will curl up like burnt paper.


—D. H. Lawrence

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I want to let go -
so I don't give a damn about fine writing,
I'm rolling my sleeves up.
The dough's rising...
Oh what a shame
I can't bake cathedrals...
that sublimity of style
I've always yearned for...
Child of our time -
haven't you found the right shell for your soul?

Before I die I 
shall
bake a cathedral. 


—Edith Södergran

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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

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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question

 

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You ask me how to pray to someone who is not.
All I know is that prayer constructs a velvet bridge
And walking it we are aloft, as on a springboard,
Above landscapes the color of ripe gold
Transformed by a magic stopping of the sun.

That bridge leads to the shore of Reversal
Where everything is just the opposite and the word 'is'
Unveils a meaning we hardly envisioned.

Notice: I say we; there, every one, separately,
Feels compassion for others entangled in the flesh
And knows that if there is no other shore.
We will walk that aerial bridge all the same.


—Czesław Miłosz
Robert Hass version

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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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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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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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directions

  

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Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked,

which you can walk with love and reverence.


—Henry David Thoreau

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Make your own Bible.

Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet. 

[…] 

Cultivate the habit of being grateful for every good thing that comes to you, and to give thanks continuously. 

And because all things have contributed to your advancement, you should include all things in your gratitude.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

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an embarrassment

  

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“Do you want to ask the blessing?”

“No. If you do, go ahead.”

He went ahead: his prayer dressed up

in Sunday clothes rose a few feet

and dropped with a soft thump.

If a lonely soul did ever cry out

in company its true outcry to God,

it would be as though at a sedate party

a man suddenly removed his clothes

and took his wife passionately into his arms.


—Wendell Berry

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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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bless

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May God bless and keep you always
May your wishes all come true
May you always do for others
And let others do for you
May you build a ladder to the stars
And climb on every rung
May you stay forever young

May you grow up to be righteous
May you grow up to be true
May you always know the truth
And see the lights surrounding you
May you always be courageous
Stand upright and be strong
May you stay forever young

May your hands always be busy
May your feet always be swift
May you have a strong foundation
When the winds of changes shift
May your heart always be joyful
May your song always be sung
May you stay forever young.


—Bob Dylan 

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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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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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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

:)

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

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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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the idea of the good it(self

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… the multiplicity of the perceptual world [unfolds]

as a seed bursts into a tree. 

—Eknath Easwaren

The Upanishads

(treasure)

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bless

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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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