Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart. —William Wordsworth

 

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We are yet to become aware of the fact that we embrace our world within ourselves; and that all that exists as persons, places, and things live only within our own consciousness.


—Joel Goldsmith

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The world, conceived by the finite mind as a multiplicity and diversity of objects made out of dead, inert stuff called ‘matter’, comes into apparent existence when consciousness ignores the reality of itself, and it vanishes out of apparent existence when consciousness wakes up to or recognises itself.


—Rupert Spira
The Nature of Consciousness

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The idea of the unus mundus is founded on the assumption that the multiplicity of the empirical world rests on an underlying unity, which is to say that all of the different things in the world belong to one and the same field of potential. This very same underlying unity is what quantum theory is revealing to us.


—Paul Levy
Quantum Revelation

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everywhere the same

 

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At a certain point you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening. After a time you hear it: there is nothing there. 

There is nothing but those things only, those created objects, discrete, growing or holding, or swaying, being rained on or raining, held, flooding or ebbing, standing, or spread. You feel the world’s word as a tension, a hum, a single chorused note everywhere the same. 

This is it: this hum is the silence. 

Nature does not utter a peep - just this one. 

The birds and insects, the meadows and swamps and rivers and stones and mountains and clouds: they all do it; they all don’t do it. There is a vibrancy to the silence, a suppression, as if someone were gagging the world. But you wait, you give your life’s length to listening, and nothing happens. The ice rolls up, the ice rolls back, and still that single note obtains. The tension, or lack of it, is intolerable. 

The silence is not actually suppression; instead, it is all there is.


—Annie Dillard
Teaching a Stone to Talk, excerpt

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this, our life

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And this, our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything. 


—William Shakespeare

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Shatial Glyphs high up in Pakistan's Indus Valley cover boulders stretching for more than 100 kilometers. The writings and designs cover various languages, religions and the symbolism of peoples dating back 10,000 years.

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Reality is a very subjective affair. I can only define it as a kind of gradual accumulation of information; and as specialization. If we take a lily, for instance, or any other kind of natural object, a lily is more real to a naturalist than it is to an ordinary person. But it is still more real to a botanist. And yet another stage of reality is reached with that botanist who is a specialist in lilies. 

You can get nearer and nearer, so to speak, to reality; but you never get near enough because reality is an infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, false bottoms, and hence unquenchable, unattainable. You can know more and more about one thing but you can never know everything about one thing: it’s hopeless. So that we live surrounded by more or less ghostly objects. 


—Vladimir Nabokov

questions

 

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My soul itself may be straight and good;
ah, but my heart, my bent-over blood,
all the distortions that hurt me inside 
it buckles under these things.

[...]

And yet, though we strain
against the deadening grip
of daily necessity,
I sense there is this mystery:
All life is being lived.

Who is living it then?
Is it the things themselves,
or something waiting inside them,
like an unplayed melody in a flute?

Is it the winds blowing over the waters?
Is it the branches that signal to each other?

Is it flowers
interweaving their fragrances
or streets, as they wind through time?


—Rainer Maria Rilke
Book of Hours, excerpt

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this is the drop of an instant

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Time
is divided
into two rivers:
one flows backward, devouring
life already lived;
the other
moves forward with you
exposing
your life. 

For a single second
they may be joined.
Now.
This is that moment,
the drop of an instant
that washes away the past.
It is the present.
It is in your hands.
Racing, slipping,
tumbling like a waterfall.
It is yours.


—Pablo Neruda
ode to the past

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

  

Tim Ingersoll

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My vessel is launched on the boundless main and my sails are spread to the wind. In the whole of the world there is nothing that stays unchanged. All is in flux. Any shape that is formed is constantly shifting. Time itself flows steadily by in perpetual motion. 

Think of a river: no river can ever arrest its current, nor can the fleeting hour. But as water is forced downstream by the water behind it and presses no less on the water ahead, so time is in constant flight and pursuit, continually new. 

The present turns into the past and the future replaces the present; every moment that passes is new and eternally changing.


―Ovid
Metamorphoses, 8 CE

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By the time you are
by the time you come to be
by the time you read this
by the time you are written
by the time you forget
by the time you are water through fingers
by the time you are taken for granted
by the time it hurts 
by the time it goes on hurting
by the time there are no words for you
by the time you remember
but without names
by the time you are in the papers
and on the telephone
passing unnoticed there too

who is it 
to whom you come  
before whose very eyes 
you are disappearing 
without making yourself known


—W. S. Merwin
to the present tense

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assurance

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You will never be alone, you hear so deep
a sound when autumn comes. Yellow
pulls across the hills and thrums,
or in the silence after lightning before it says
its names — and then the clouds’ wide-mouthed apologies.

You were aimed from birth: you will never be alone.

Rain will come, a gutter filled, an Amazon,
long aisles — you never heard so deep a sound, moss on rock, and years. You turn your head —that’s what the silence meant: you’re not alone.

The whole wide world pours down.


—William Stafford

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darkness within darkness

 

.

1.


The tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.

The unnamable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin of all particular things.

Free from desire, you realize the mystery.
Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.

Yet mystery and manifestations
arise from the same source.
This source is called darkness.

Darkness within darkness.
The gateway to all understanding.


—Lao-tzu
Tao Te Ching
Stephen Mitchell version

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You darkness, that I come from,
I love you more than all the fires
that fence in the world,
for the fire makes
a circle of light for everyone,
and then no one outside learns of you.

But the darkness pulls in everything:
shapes and fires, animals and myself,
how easily it gathers them! —
powers and people —

and it is possible a great energy
is moving near me.

I have faith in nights.


—Rainier Maria Rilke
Robert Bly version

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as light pours like rain

.

Who gets up early to discover the moment light begins?

Who finds us here circling, bewitched, like atoms?

—Rumi

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you and i are earth

 

Tin-glazed earthenware plate found in a London sewer 

(England, 1661). Creator unknown.

.

Why should I wish to see God better than this day?

I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, 
and each moment then, 

In the faces of men and women I see God, 
and in my own face in the glass, 

I find letters from God dropped in the street — and everyone is sign’d by God’s name, 

And I leave them where they are, 
for I know that whereso'er I go 

Others will punctually come forever and ever.


—Walt Whitman
Song of Myself, Leaves of Grass

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And I, infinitesima­l being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
I felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke loose on the wind.


—Pablo Neruda

.

I and this mystery; here we stand.   

—Walt Whitman

.

not to worry

.

Let what comes come

Let what goes go

Find out what remains.


—Ramana Maharshi

.

 

Air is anything but empty. If you’re a bat, it holds the sound of the shape of a hillside.

.

Iron in the birds’ inner ears

helps them navigate using the Earth’s magnetic field.


In other words,

the birds carry within them a piece of the earth,

a talisman, which speaks to the Earth and whispers

its knowledge back to the birds.


—Jarod K. Anderson
PACT

.

Bats can hear shapes.

Plants can eat light.

Bees can dance maps.


We can hold all these ideas at once and feel

both heavy and weightless

with the absurd beauty of it all.


—Jarod K. Anderson

THE IMPOSSIBLE

.

teacup talk

  

Shiu Gun Wong 

.

Love wants to reach out and manhandle us,
Break all our teacup talk of God.

If you had the courage and
Could give the Beloved His choice, some nights,
He would just drag you around the room
By your hair,
Ripping from your grip all those toys in the world
That bring you no joy.

Love sometimes gets tired of speaking sweetly
And wants to rip to shreds
All your erroneous notions of truth
That make you fight within yourself, dear one,
And with others,
Causing the world to weep
On too many fine days.

God wants to manhandle us,
Lock us inside of a tiny room with Himself
And practice His dropkick.

The Beloved sometimes wants
To do us a great favor:
Hold us upside down
And shake all the nonsense out.

But when we hear
He is in such a “playful drunken mood”
Most everyone I know
Quickly packs their bags and hightails it
Out of town.


—Hafiz
Daniel Ladinsky version

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you know ...

.

Your effort is the bondage.

—Sri Ramana Maharshi

.

Urpflanze!

 

.

What Goethe means by the Urpflanze is the dynamic unity of the coming-into-being of all plants as the self-differencing of One plant, which is therefore intensively multiple but appears extensively as all the many different plants. 

What this means is that each plant is the Urpflanze being one possible mode of itself - the number of possibilities is indeterminate. Hence, paradoxically, it is everywhere visible and nowhere visible - although once we begin to think dynamically, this is no paradox at all. 

Instead of being separate from the many particular plants that we see, i.e., as 'the one over many', Goethe's Urpflanze is One which comes into concrete manifestation simultaneously with the many - with which it is identical because the many are now the self-differences of One. 

This is very different indeed from the two-world theory which separates the One from the many. There is no such dualism in Goethe's thinking, for which in his own words: 'The universal and the particular coincide: the particular is the universal, appearing under different conditions.'


—Henri Bortoft
Taking Appearance Seriously

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Something unknown is doing we don’t know what. —Arthur Eddington

 

. 

That which is above is like that which is below

and that which is below is like that which is above,

to achieve the wonders of the one thing.


—Hermes Trismegistus

.

Outwardly, I am one apple among many.

Inwardly, I am the Tree.


—Alan Watts

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needful things

.

Making a poem is making an object. 

I always thought of them more as drawings than as texts, but drawings that are also physically enterable through the fact of language. 

It was another way to think of a book, an object that is as visually real as it is textually real.


—Αnne Carson
at Montreal’s Blue Metropolis Festival, 2016

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When the world arises in me, 
It is just an illusion: 
Water shimmering in the sun, 
A vein of silver in mother-of-pearl, 
A serpent in a strand of rope. 

From me the world streams out 
And in me it dissolves, 
As a bracelet melts into gold,
A pot crumbles into clay,
A wave subsides into water.


—Ashtavakra Gita 2: 9-10

.

listen

 

.

 

The summer night glowed; 
in the field, fireflies were glinting. 

And for those who understood such things, 
the stars were sending messages.


—Louise Glück
midsummer
poems 1962-2012

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tighten to nothing

 

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All things
are too small
to hold me,
I am so vast 

In the Infinite
I reach
for the Uncreated
I have
touched it,
it undoes me
wider than wide 
Everything else
is too narrow
You know this well,
you who are also there

Tighten
to nothing
the circle
that is
the world's things 
Then the Naked 
circle
can grow wide,
enlarging,
embracing all


—Hadewijch, l or ll (13th Century), 
Jane Hirshfield version
Women in Praise of the Sacred

.

listen

 

.

I rarely let the word "No" escape 

From my mouth 

Because it is so plain to my soul 

That God has shouted, “Yes! Yes! Yes!” 

To every luminous movement in 

Existence


—Hafiz

.

like this

 

.

When someone quotes the old poetic image

about clouds gradually uncovering the moon,

slowly loosen knot by knot the strings of your robe.

Like this.

—Rumi

.

 

note to self

 

.

As you walk and eat and travel, be where you are.

Otherwise you will miss most of your life.


—Siddhartha Guatama

.

love is a verb

 

Captain January, 1924

.

love never exists 
as a fact 

it is a verb 
and you can do 
all things 
with or without it 

it is nature 
in action 
being true 
to itself 
without even 
a thought


—Benjamin Dean

.

It is earnestness that is indispensable, the crucial factor. 

Sadhana is only a vessel and it must be filled to the brim with earnestness, which is but love in action. 

For nothing can be done without love.


—Nisargadatta Maharaj

.

Te l’ai dit en janvier
Te le dirai en août.

I told you in January
I will tell you in August.


—Félix Leclerc

.

icon(ic

 

.

Some people fleeing some other people.
In some country under the sun
and some clouds.

They leave behind some of their everything,
sown fields, some chickens, dogs,
mirrors in which fire now sees itself reflected.

On their backs are pitchers and bundles,
the emptier, the heavier from one day to the next.

Taking place stealthily is somebody’s stopping,
and in the commotion, somebody’s bread somebody’s snatching
and a dead child somebody’s shaking.

In front of them some still not the right way,
nor the bridge that should be
over a river strangely rosy.
Around them, some gunfire, at times closer, at times farther off,
and, above, a plane circling somewhat.

Some invisibility would come in handy,
some grayish stoniness,
or even better, non-being
for a little or a long while.

Something else is yet to happen, only where and what?
Someone will head toward them, only when and who,
in how many shapes and with what intentions? 

Given a choice, maybe he will choose not to be the enemy and
leave them with some kind of life.


—Wislawa Szymborska
Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh version

.

listen

 

.

Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? 
It is that we have only known the back of the world. 
We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal. 

That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. 
That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. 
Cannot you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? 
If we could only get round in front—


—G. K. Chesterton, 1908
The Man Who Was Thursday

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