beauty is all where

 

.

For intervals, then, throughout our lives we savor a concurrence, the great blending of our chance selves with what sustains all chance. 

We ride the wave and are the wave.

And with renewed belief inner and outer we find our talk turned to prayer, our prayer into truth: for an interval, early, we become at home in the world.


—William Stafford

.

Under a lonely sky a lonely tree
Is beautiful. All that is loneliness
Is beautiful. A feather lost at sea;
A staring owl; a moth; a yellow tress
Of seaweed on a rock, is beautiful.

The night-lit moon, wide-wandering in sky;
A blue-bright spark, where ne'er a cloud is up;
A wing, where no wing is, it is so high;
A bee in winter, or a buttercup,
Late-blown, are lonely, and are beautiful.

The eye that watched you from a cottage door;
The first leaf, and the last; the break of day;
The mouse, the cuckoo, and the cloud, are beautiful.

For all that is, is lonely; all that may
Will be as lonely as is that you see;
The lonely heart sings on a lonely spray,
The lonely soul swings lonely in the sea,
And all that loneliness is beautiful.

All, all alone, and all without a part
Is beautiful, for beauty is all where;
Where is an eye is beauty, where a heart
Is beauty, brooding out, on empty air,
All that is lonely and is beautiful.


—James Stephens
on a lonely spray 

.

Take me to the other side of this night,

where I am you, we are us,

the kingdom where pronouns are intertwined

… and the sea sang with the murmur of light.


—Octavio Paz

.

language without words

  

Lara Carlson

.

Sick of those who come with words, words but no language,
I make my way to the snow-covered island. 

Wilderness has no words. The unwritten pages
stretch out in all directions. 

I come across this line of deer-slots in the snow: a language,
language without words. 


—Tomas Tranströmer
March 1979, excerpt
Robin Robertson translation 

.

 

Words, even if they come from
the soul, hide the soul, as fog

rising off the sea covers the sea,
the coast, the fish, the pearls.

It's noble work to build coherent
philosophical discourses, but

they block out the sun of truth.
See God's qualities as an ocean,

this world as foam on the purity
of that. Brush away and look

through the alphabet to essence,
as you do the hair covering your

beloved's eyes. Here's the mystery:
this intricate, astonishing world

is proof of God's presence even as
it covers the beauty. One flake

from the wall of a gold mine does
not give much idea what it's like

when the sun shines in and turns
the air and the workers golden.


—Rumi

.

I am where I was:

I walk behind the murmur,

footsteps within me, heard with my eyes,

the murmur is in the mind, I am my footsteps,

I hear the voices that I think,

the voices that think me as as I think them.

I am the shadow my words cast.


—Octavio Paz
closing lines to A Draft of Shadows
Eliot Weinberger translation 

.

glimpsey

.

The ancient Druids are said to have taken a special interest in in-between things like mistletoe, which is neither quite a plant nor quite a tree, and mist, which is neither quite a rain nor quite air, and dreams, which are neither quite waking nor quite sleep. 

They believed that in such things as those they were able to glimpse the mystery of the two worlds at once.

—Frederick Buechner
Whistling in the Dark

.

Love means to learn to look at yourself
The way one looks at distant things
For you are only one thing among many.

And whoever sees that way heals his heart,
Without knowing it, from various ills.

A bird and a tree say to him: Friend.
Then he wants to use himself and things
So that they stand in the glow of ripeness.

It doesn't matter whether he knows what he serves:
Who serves best doesn't always understand.


—Czesław Miłosz
The Way One Looks At Distant Things
Robert Haas version

.

the invisible walls,

the rotten masks that divide one man

from another, one man from himself,

they crumble for one enormous moment and we glimpse the unity that we lost, the desolation of being man, and all its glories,

sharing bread and sun and death,

the forgotten astonishment of being alive

—Octavio Paz

Sunstone (Piedra de Sol) excerpt

.

the stars write

. 

I clean the channel between me and the Creator by clearing past baggage and unpleasant memories so I can talk to the Creator and plug into that creative power.

Then I am ready to be a channel, a ‘hollow bone’, for the power to come through. I can then direct it into healing, or creative inspiration, or personal revelation of the Truth.

When we become hollow bones there is no limit to what the Higher Powers can do in and through us in spiritual things.


—Frank Fools Crow

.

 

I am a man: little do I last
and the night is enormous.
But I look up:
the stars write.

Unknowing I understand:
I too am written,
and at this very moment
someone spells me out.


—Octavio Paz

.

I regard consciousness as fundamental, matter as derivative from consciousness. —Max Planck

    

.

The brief span of an individual life is misleading. 

Each one of us is as old as the entire biological kingdom, and our bloodstreams are tributaries of the great sea of its total memory. 

The uterine odyssey of the growing foetus recapitulates the entire evolutionary past, and its central nervous system is a coded time scale, each nexus of neurones and each spinal level marking a symbolic station, a unit of neuronic time. 


—J.G Ballard
The Drowned World

 

.

Your mind is the knife that cuts the continuum of space and time into neat slices of linear experience.

At this moment, you are seamlessly flowing with the cosmos. There is no difference between your breathing and the breathing of the rain forest, between your bloodstream and the world’s rivers, between your bones and the chalk cliffs of Dover.


—Deepak Chopra

.

For intervals, then, throughout our lives we savor a concurrence, the great blending of our chance selves with what sustains all chance. 

We ride the wave and are the wave.

And with renewed belief inner and outer we find our talk turned to prayer, our prayer into truth: for an interval, early, we become at home in the world.


—William Stafford

.

When the blood of your veins returns to the sea and the dust of your bones returns to the ground, maybe then will you remember that this earth does not belong to you, you belong to this earth.

—Sweetgrass

Native American Prophet

.

door of be(ing

  

 

.

door of being, dawn and wake me,
allow me to see the face of this day,
allow me to see the face of this night,
all communicates, all is transformed,
arch of blood, bridge of pulse,
take me to the other side of this night,
where I am you, we are us,
the kingdom where pronouns are intertwined,

door of being: open your being
and wake ....


—Octavio Paz
Sandstone, excerpt

.

there is nothing less real than this body that I touch

  

.

The body provides something for the spirit to look after and use.

—Alan Turing

.

It is the best joke there is, that we are here, and fools—that we are sown into time like so much corn, that we are souls sprinkled at random like salt into time and dissolved here, spread into matter, connected by cells right down to our feet, and those feet likely to fell us over a tree root or jam us on a stone. 

The joke part is that we forget it. 

Give the mind two seconds alone and it thinks it’s Pythagoras. 

We wake up a hundred times a day and laugh.


―Annie Dillard
Holy the Firm

.

Creation, invention: there is nothing more real than this body that I imagine; there is nothing less real than this body that I touch that turns into a heap of salt or vanishes into a column of smoke. 

With that smoke my desire will invent another body. 


—Octavio Paz
An Erotic Beyond: Sade
Elliot Weinburger version

.

Discover yourself.

There is in the body a current of energy, affection and intelligence, which guides, maintains and energizes the body.

Discover that current and stay with it.


—Nisargadatta Maharaj

.

between i am and you are

    

  

.

By itself nothing has existence. 

Everything needs its own absence. 

To be is to be distinguishable, to be here and not there,

to be now and not then, to be thus and not otherwise. 

Like water is shaped by the container, so is everything 

determined by conditions (gunas).

—Nisargadatta Maharaj

.

Between now and now

between I am and you are

the word bridge

Entering it

you enter yourself;

the world connects and closes like a ring.

From one bank to another

there is always a body stretched:

a rainbow.

I'll sleep between its arches.

—Octavio Paz

.

bless, Kevin

.

questions

  

.

We are all made of bits moving in complicated quantum motions, but when we look closely at those bits, we find that they are located out at the farthest boundaries of space. I don’t know anything less intuitive about the world than this.

Getting our collective head around the Holographic Principle is probably the biggest challenge that we physicists have had since the discovery of Quantum Mechanics.


—Leonard Susskind
The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics

.

I suppose therefore that all things I see are illusions; I believe that nothing has ever existed of everything my lying memory tells me. 

I think I have no senses. I believe that body, shape, extension, motion, location are functions. 

What is there then that can be taken as true? 

Perhaps only this one thing, that nothing at all is certain. 


—René Descartes (1596 - 1650)

.

Listen to me as one listens to the rain,
not attentive, not distracted,
light steps, soft drizzle,
water that is air, air that is time,
the day is just leaving,
the night yet to arrive,
figurations of mist
are just around the corner,
figurations of time
at the turn of this pause,
listen to me as one listens to the rain,
without listening, hear what I say
with eyes open inward,
asleep with all five senses awake,
rain, light steps, a murmuring of syllables,
air and water, words without weight:
what we were and are,
the days and years, this moment,
weightless time, great grief,
listen to me as one listens to the rain,
the wet asphalt sparkles,
the steam rises and walks,
the night unfolds and beholds me,
you are you and your waist of fog,
you and your face of night,
you and your hair, slow lightning,
you cross the street and come in through my forehead,
footsteps of water upon both my eyelids,
listen to me as one listens to the rain,
the asphalt sparkles, you cross the street,
the fog wandering in the night,
it is the night, asleep in your bed,
it is the wave of your breath,
your fingers of water dampen my forehead,
your fingers of flame burn both of my eyes,
your fingers of air open eyelids of time,
a welling up of visions and resurrections,
listen to me as one listens to the rain,
years go by, moments return,
do you hear the footsteps in the other room?
neither here nor there: you hear them
in another time that is also this time,
listen to the footsteps of time,
inventor of places with no weight or location,
listen to the rain running over the terrace,
the night is now more night in the garden,
lightning has nested there among the leaves,
a restless garden lazily drifting
— come in, your shadow covers this page.


—Octavio Paz
As One Listens To The Rain
Paul Weinfeld version

.

you are that

.

Last night, as I was sleeping,
I dreamt — marvelous error!—
that a spring was breaking
out in my heart.
I said: Along which secret aqueduct,
Oh water, are you coming to me,
water of a new life
that I have never drunk? 

Last night, as I was sleeping,
I dreamt — marvelous error!—
that I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures.

Last night, as I was sleeping,
I dreamt — marvelous error!—
that a fiery sun was giving
light inside my heart.
It was fiery because I felt
warmth as from a hearth,
and sun because it gave light
and brought tears to my eyes.

Last night, as I slept,
I dreamt — marvelous error!—
that it was God I had
here inside my heart.


—Antonio Machado (1875 - 1939)
presented by Robert Bly (treasure

.

The world is nothing but the picture of your own "I” consciousness. As if you had received a phone call telling you that you are, and immediately the world appears. 

When you are in deep sleep and you feel that you are awake, the dream world appears simultaneously. 

With the (knowledge) “I Am,” the world appears in the waking and dream states.

—Nisargadatta Maharaj

.

door of being, dawn and wake me,
allow me to see the face of this day,
allow me to see the face of this night,
all communicates, all is transformed,
arch of blood, bridge of the pulse,
take me to the other side of this night,
where I am you, we are us,
the kingdom where pronouns are intertwined, 

door of being: open your being
and wake ....

—Octavio Paz
Sandstone, excerpt

.

I do not believe in miracles. I rely on them. —Yogi Bhajan

.

alright so we're all
gonna die but now is the
time to sing & see, to be
humble, sacrificed, late,
crazy, talkative, foolish,
proud, indispensable, early
sane, silent, serious


—Jack Kerouac 
Book of Sketches

.

Remember, Kid, the ease, the grace, the glory, the greatness of your art; remember it, never forget. Remember passion. 

Do not forget, do not forsake, do not forget.

It is there, the order and the purpose; there is chaos, but not in you, not way down deep in your heart, no chaos, only ease, grace, beauty, love, greatness …


—Jack Kerouac
Atop An Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writings

.

 

The year's doors open
like those of language,
toward the unknown. 

Last night you told me: tomorrow
we shall have to think up signs,
sketch a landscape, fabricate a plan
on the double page
of day and paper. 

Tomorrow, we shall have to invent,
once more,
the reality of this world.

—Octavio Paz

January First
Elizabeth Bishop version

.

a visitor

 

.

The day i turned eight (July 13, 1968) a car from a far-away place drove into our street, gleaming in the fiery glow of morning. It drew up in front of the house, and out stepped the sole occupant. He closed the door without a sound and moved ever so gently toward me— who had just spent the night in tears because the previous day I had learned that my dog’s life expectancy was only 14 years. 

”Good morning, I am God,” he said to me quite simply, albeit in a seraphic tone. “Would you allow me to sit for a moment?” Then he sat down beside me on the old bench, and after a brief silence he started to ramble about everything and nothing. I sensed that he was not there to express his thoughts clearly per se, but rather to suggest something, as in the poems of Stéphane Mallarmé or André Breton, which I would sometimes read. I did not dare point it out, but for goodness sake, I thought, if I were God, I would engage people in prodigiously deep and intelligent conversations abounding with meticulous wonder and meditative precision. 

Anyhow, we conversed in this manner for a while, him going on with his still somewhat vague words, as if he didn’t really know what to say, and me with mine, secular and grieving. After a half an hour or so he rose, bid me a very polite farewell, returned to his car, started the engine, did a U-turn, and disappeared around the street corner. I never saw him again. 

All my life I’ve reflected on that brief encounter. Today I think that, deep down inside, he must have realized some time beforehand that he had made a mistake by granting dogs such a short life expectancy, and wanted to apologize in person for such an outrageous error in planning.

—Jean-François Beauchemin

Archives of Joy

(treasure)

.

I thought that the world was a vast system of signs, a conversation between giant beings. 

My actions, the cricket's saw, the star's blink, were nothing but pauses and syllables, scattered phrases from that dialogue. 

What word could it be, of which I was only a syllable? 

Who speaks the word? 

To whom is it spoken?


—Octavio Paz 
The Blue Bouquet, excerpt 
Eliot Weinberger version

 

.

 

your mind is the knife

 

.

With only simple tools at their disposal, Ladakhis spend a long time accomplishing each task. Producing wool for clothes involves the time-consuming work of looking after the sheep while they graze, shearing them with hand tools, and working the wool from beginning to end—cleaning, spinning, and finally weaving it. Yet I found that the Ladakhis had an abundance of time. They worked at a gentle pace and had a surprising amount of leisure.

Time is measured loosely; there is never a need to count minutes. "I'll come to see you toward midday, toward evening," they will say, giving themselves several hours' leeway. Ladakhi has many lovely words to depict time, all broad and generous. Gongrot means "from after dark till bedtime"; nyitse means literally "sun on the mountain peaks"; and chips-chirrit, "bird song," describes that time of the morning before the sun has risen, when the birds sing.

Even during the harvest season, when the work lasts long hours, it is done at a relaxed pace that allows an eighty-year-old as well as a young child to join in and help. People work hard, but at their own rate, accompanied by laughter and song. The distinction between word and play is not rigidly defined.

—Helena Elena Norberg Hodge

Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh

.

 Your mind is the knife that cuts the continuum of 

space and time into neat slices of linear experience.  

 

—Deepak Chopra

.

Take me to the other side of this night, 

where I am you, we are us, 

the kingdom where pronouns are intertwined 

and the sea sang with the murmur of light.

 

—Octavio Paz 

.

 

all my relations

  

.

I thought that the world was a vast system of signs,
a conversation between giant beings. 

My actions, the cricket's saw, the star's blink, were nothing but pauses and syllables, scattered phrases from that dialogue.  

What word could it be, of which I was only a syllable?  

Who speaks the word?  

To whom is it spoken?


—Octavio Paz
The Blue Bouquet, excerpt 
Eliot Weinberger version

.

Listen to the air. You can hear it, feel it, smell it, taste it.

Woniya wakan—the holy air—which renews all by its breath. Woniya, woniya wakan—spirit, life, breath, renewal—it means all that.

Woniya—we sit together, don’t touch, but something is there; we feel it between us, as a presence.

A good way to start thinking about nature, talk about it.

Rather talk to it, talk to the rivers, to the lakes, to the winds as to our relatives.


―John (Fire) Lame Deer
Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions

.

the cold before the moonrise

 

.

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

.

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

.

one is the other and is neither

.

The water hollowed the stone,
the wind dispersed the water,
the stone stopped the wind.
Water and wind and stone.

The wind sculpted the stone,
the stone is a cup of water,
The water runs off and is wind.
Stone and wind and water.

The wind sings in its turnings,
the water murmurs as it goes,
the motionless stone is quiet.
Wind and water and stone.

One is the other and is neither:
among their empty names
they pass and disappear,
water and stone and wind.


—Octavio Paz 

 .