some(times

 

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We find ourselves in a world structured by matter and energy in space and time, and in that world each of us inhabits a body, one among many. At least, that is how we interpret our experiences. 

But when we analyze our conviction of the reality of the material world, we find that it is all based on experiences, nothing else, nothing more real than that.


—Piet Hut
The Nature of Reality: Matter, Experience, Appearance, Presence 

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... late in this century and on a Wednesday morning,
bearing the mark of one who’s experienced
neither heaven nor hell,

my birthplace vanished, my citizenship earned,
in league with stones of the earth, I
enter, without retreat or help from history,
the days of no day, my earth
of no earth, I re-enter

the city in which I love you.
And I never believed that the multitude
of dreams and many words were vain.


—Li-Young Lee

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the sea is also a breviary, it speaks of God. —Jean-Paul Sartre

Tanakit Suwanyangyaun

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And a poet said, Speak to us of Beauty.
And he answered:

Where shall you seek beauty, and how
shall you find her unless she herself be your
way and your guide?

And how shall you speak of her except
she be the weaver of your speech?

The aggrieved and injured say,
"Beauty is kind and gentle."

The tired and weary say,
"Beauty is of soft whisperings
She speaks in our spirit."

In winter say the snow-bound,
"She shall come with the spring leaping upon the hills."

All these things have you said of beauty,
Yet in truth you spoke not of her but of needs unsatisfied,
And beauty is not a need but an ecstasy.

It is not a mouth thirsting nor an empty hand stretched forth,
But rather a heart enflamed and a soul enchanted.

It is not the image you would see nor the song you would hear,
But rather an image you see, though you
close your eyes and a song you hear, though
you shut your ears.

People of Orphalese,
beauty is life when life unveils her holy face.
But you are life and you are the veil.
Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.
But you are eternity and you are the mirror.


—Kahlil Gibran
from The Prophet

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I said to the almond tree, ‘Sister, speak to me of God.’

And the almond tree blossomed.

—Nikos Kazantzakis 

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the first sky is inside you, friend

   

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What birds plunge through is not the intimate space,
in which you see all Forms intensified.
(In the Open, denied, you would lose yourself,
would disappear into that vastness.)

Space reaches from us and translates Things:
to become the very essence of a tree,
throw inner space around it, from that space
that lives in you. 

Encircle it with restraint.
It has no limits. For the first time, shaped
in your renouncing, it becomes fully tree.


—Rainer Maria Rilke
Gabriel Caffrey version

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Ah, not to be cut off,
not through the slightest partition
shut out from the law of the stars.

The inner -- what is it?
if not the intensified sky,
hurled through with birds and deep
with the winds of homecoming.


—Rainer Maria Rilke
Stephen Mitchell version

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Look at the birds. Even flying
is born 

out of nothing. The first sky
is inside you, Friend, open 

at either end of day.
The work of wings 
was always freedom, fastening
one heart to every falling thing.


—Li-Young Lee 
Book of My Nights, One Heart

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I keep turning you over in my mind. I keep turning you over in my heart. —Li-Young Lee

   

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From so much loving and journeying, books emerge.
And if they don’t contain kisses or landscapes,
if they don’t contain a man with his hands full,
if they don’t contain a woman in every drop,

hunger, desire, anger, roads,
they are no use as a shield or a bell:
they have no eyes, and won’t be able to open them,
they have the dead sound of precepts.

I loved the entangling of flesh,
and out of blood and love I carved my poems.
In hard earth I brought a rose to flower,
fought over by fire and dew.

That’s how I could keep on singing.


—Pablo Neruda
Ars Magnetica

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So he lent her books. After all, one of life’s best pleasures is reading a book of perfect beauty; more pleasurable still is rereading that book; most pleasurable of all is lending it to the person one loves: Now she is reading or has just read the scene with the mirrors; she who is so lovely is drinking in that loveliness I’ve drunk.

—William T. Vollmann

Europe Central 

 

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... late in this century and on a Wednesday morning,
bearing the mark of one who’s experienced
neither heaven nor hell,

my birthplace vanished, my citizenship earned,
in league with stones of the earth, I
enter, without retreat or help from history,
the days of no day, my earth
of no earth, I re-enter

the city in which I love you.
And I never believed that the multitude
of dreams and many words were vain.


—Li-Young Lee

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revolving the vital breath

  

 

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Do you see the space between our bodies? 
Barely a hand, hardly a breath,
it is the space mountains and rivers are made of. 

It is the beginning of oceans, the space
between either and or, both and neither,
the happiness of forgetting
our names and the happiness of hearing them
for the first time.


—Li-Young Lee
Trading for Heaven

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When you enlarge your mind and let go of it,

When you relax your [qi 氣] vital breath and expand it,
When your body is calm and unmoving:
And you can maintain the One and discard the myriad disturbances.

You will see profit and not be enticed by it,
You will see harm and not be frightened by it.

Relaxed and unwound, yet acutely sensitive,
In solitude you delight in your own person.
This is called “revolving the vital breath”:
Your thoughts and deeds seem heavenly.

—管子, Guanzi

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questions

  

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A forest is what exists between its trees, between its dense undergrowth and its clearings, between all its life cycles and their different timescales

[...] A forest is also a meeting place between those who enter it and something unnameable and attendant, waiting behind a tree or in the undergrowth. Something intangible and within touching distance. Neither silent nor audible.

—John Berger
Into the Woods

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After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it?

This is how I answer when I am asked – as I am surprisingly often – why I bother to get up in the mornings. To put it the other way round, isn’t it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be a part of it?


—Richard Dawkins

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I've no idea what my child is thinking.
Between two unknowns, I live my life.
Between my mother's hopes, older than I am by coming before me, and my child's wishes, older than I am by outliving me.  

And what's it like?
Is it a door, and good-bye on either side?
A window, and eternity on either side?
Yes, and a little singing between two great rests.


—Li-Young Lee
The Hammock, excerpt
Book of My Nights

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My Clothes Lie Folded for the Journey

    

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Dreamed some rain so I could sleep.
Dreamed the wind left-handed
so I could part its mane and enter
the dance that carries the living, the dead, and the unborn
in one momentum through the trillion gate.

Dreamed a man and woman
in different attitudes of meeting and parting
so I could tell the time,
the periods of the sun,
and which face my heart showed,
and which is displayed to a hidden fold.

Dreamed the world an open book of traces
anyone could read who knew the language of traces.
Dreamed the world is a book. And any page
you pause at finds you
where you breathe now,
and you can read the open
secret of who you are. As you read,

and other pages go on turning, falling
through the page before you, the sound of them the waves
of the waters you walk beside
in your other dreams of the world
as story, world as song, world
you dreamed you were not dreaming.

Dreamed my father reading out loud to me,
my mother sewing beside me, singing
a counting song,
so I wouldn't be afraid to turn
from known lights toward the ancestor of light.


—Li-Young Lee 

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The world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long, but only by a spiritual journey, a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our feet, and learn to be at home.

It is a journey we can make only by the acceptance of mystery and of mystification – by yielding to the condition that what we have expected is not there.

—Wendell Berry

The Unforeseen Wilderness, excerpt

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If there were a spiritual journey, it would be no more than a quarter of an inch long, though many miles deep.   

—John O'Donohue

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the beautiful truth

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Your lamp has a triple wick: Remembering, questioning, and sheltering made of your heart’s and mind’s agreement. 

With it, you navigate the two seas: Day with everything inside it; night and all that’s missing.
 

—Li-Young Lee

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We all begin with love for ourselves, and the unfair claims of the little self make love even selfish. At last, however, comes the full blaze of light, in which this little self is seen to have become one with the Infinite. 

Man himself is transfigured in the presence of this Light of Love, and he realizes at last the beautiful and inspiring truth that Love, the Lover, and the Beloved are One.

—Swami Vivekananda

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take nothing

  

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The birds don't alter space.
They reveal it. The sky
never fills with any
leftover flying. They leave
nothing to trace. It is our own
astonishment collects
in chill air. Be glad.

They equal their due
moment never begging,
and enter ours
without parting day. See
how three birds in a winter tree
make the tree barer.

Two fly away, and new rooms
open in December.
Give up what you guessed
about a whirring heart, the little
beaks and claws, their constant hunger.
We are the nervous ones.

If even one of our violent number
could be gentle
long enough that one of them
found it safe inside
our finally untroubled and untroubling gaze,
who wouldn't hear
what singing completes us?


—Li-Young Lee
praise them
Book of My Nights

 

 

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In my room, the world is beyond my understanding;

But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four 

hills and a cloud.


—Wallace Stevens

Of the Surface of Things, excerpt

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