behind all words

  

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The skreak and skritter of evening gone
And grackles gone and sorrows of the sun,
The sorrows of sun, too, gone ... the moon and moon,
The yellow moon of words about the nightingale
In measureless measures, not a bird for me
But the name of a bird and the name of a nameless air
I have never–shall never hear. And yet beneath

The stillness of everything gone, and being still,
Being and sitting still, something resides,
Some skreaking and skrittering residuum,
And grates these evasions of the nightingale
Though I have never–shall never hear that bird.
And the stillness is in the key, all of it is,
The stillness is all in the key of that desolate sound.


—Wallace Stevens

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Happy are those who know:
Behind all words, the Unsayable stands;
And from that source alone, the Infinite
Crosses over to gladness, and us 

Free of our bridges
Built with the stone of distinctions;
So that always, within each delight,
We gaze at what is purely single and joined.


—Rainer Maria Rilke

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The mind creates the abyss, the heart crosses it. —Nisargadatta Maharaj

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The appearance of water in a mirage persists after the fact that it is a mirage has dawned on us. So it is with the world. 

Though knowing it to be unreal, it continues to manifest - but we do not try to satisfy our thirst with the water of the mirage. 

As soon as one knows that it is a mirage, one gives it up as useless and does not run after it to get water.


—Ramana Maharshi

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A billion stars go spinning through the night, blazing high above your head. 

But in you is the presence that will be, when all the stars are dead.


—Rainer Maria Rilke

 

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listen: there’s a hell of a good universe next door; let’s go 

 ―E.E. Cummings

 

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divine magnetism and the peace of iron filings

     

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The Self is like a powerful magnet within us. It draws us gradually to itself, though we imagine we are going to It of our own accord: when we are near enough, It puts an end to our activities, makes us still, and then swallows up our personal current, thus killing our wrong personality. It overwhelms the intellect and over floods the whole being. 

We think we are meditating upon It and developing towards It, whereas the truth is that we are iron filings and It is the Atman-magnet that is pulling us towards Itself. Thus the process of finding the Self is a form of Divine magnetism.


—Sri Ramana Maharshi

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Everything can have an effect on us and all things affect us from a distance, the near as well as the remote things. Nothing touches us; everything reaches us across divisions. 

And just as the most remote stars cannot enter us, the ring on my hand cannot do so either: everything that reaches us can do so only the way a magnet summons and aligns the forces in some susceptible object; in this way, all things can effect a new alignment within us. And in view of this insight, do proximity and distance not simply vanish?


—Rainer Maria Rilke
Letters on Life

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The chooser's happiness lies in his congruence with the chosen, The peace of iron filings, obedient to the forces of the magnetic field.

Calm is the soul that is emptied of all self,
In the eternal moment of co-inherence.
A happiness within you - but not yours.


—Dag Hammarskjöld

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all things sing you

  

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The world is full of magic things, 

patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.

—W. B. Yeats

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You come and go. 
The doors swing closed ever more gently, almost without a shudder. 
Of all those who move through the quiet houses, 
you are the quietest. 

We become so accustomed to you, we no longer look up when 
your shadow falls over the book we are reading and makes it glow. 
For all things sing you: at times we hear them more clearly. 

Often when I imagine you your wholeness cascades into many shapes. 
You run like a herd of luminous deer and I am dark, 
I am forest. 

You are a wheel at which I stand, whose dark spokes sometimes 
catch me up, revolve me nearer to the center. 

Then all the work I put my hand to 
widens from turn to turn. 


—Rainer Maria Rilke

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A purpose of human life is to love whoever is around to be loved. —Kurt Vonnegut

 

Memorial to those lost at sea, Cardiff, Wales, UK

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Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world. This is an error of the intellect as inevitable as that error of the eye which lets us fancy that on the horizon heaven and earth meet. 

This explains many things, and among them the fact that everyone measures us with his own standard—generally about as long as a tailor’s tape, and we have to put up with it: as also that no one will allow us to be taller than himself—a supposition which is once for all taken for granted.


—Arthur Schopenhauer

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As our mother earth is a mere speck in the sunbeam in the illimitable universe, so man himself is but a tiny grain of protoplasm in the perishable framework of organic nature. 

Nothing seems to me better adapted than this magnificent cosmological perspective to give us the proper standard and the broad outlook which we need in the solution of the vast enigmas that surround us. 

It not only clearly indicates the true place of man in nature, but it dissipates the prevalent illusion of man's supreme importance, and the arrogance with which he sets himself apart from the illimitable universe, and exalts himself to the position of its most valuable element... 

Only when we have abandoned this untenable illusion, and taken up the correct cosmological perspective, can we hope to reach the solution of the riddles of the universe.

—Ernst Haeckel (1834 - 1919) 

The Riddle of the Universe

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I know that nothing has ever been real
without my beholding it.

All becoming has needed me.

My looking ripens things and they come
toward me, to meet and be met.


—Rainer Maria Rilke
Book of Hours, I-I

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that moment

  

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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

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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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All will come again into its strength:
the fields undivided, the waters undammed,
the trees towering and the walls built low.
And in the valleys, people as strong and varied as the land.

And no churches where God
is imprisoned and lamented
like a trapped and wounded animal.
The houses welcoming all who knock
and a sense of boundless offering
in all relations, and in you and me.

No yearning for an afterlife, no looking beyond,
no belittling of death, but only longing for what belongs to us and serving earth, lest we remain unused.
 

—Rainer Maria Rilke
Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God 

 

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you are stardust

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Everyone who terrifies you is sixty-five percent water. And everyone you love is made of stardust, and I know sometimes you cannot even breathe deeply, and the night sky is no home, and you have cried yourself to sleep enough times that you are down to your last two percent, but nothing is infinite, not even loss. 

You are made of the sea and the stars, and one day you are going to find yourself again.


—Finn Butler

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The cosmos is also within us. 

We are made of star-stuff. 

We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.

—Carl Sagan

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Believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.


—Rainer Maria Rilke

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what you are looking for is the thing that looks

  

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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, excerpts

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Look into yourself and you will become conscious of nothing but a vicious circle, for the very reason that the act of introspection is viciously circular: you cannot see what you are looking for, because what you are looking for is the thing that looks. 

Every self-conscious attempt to know oneself, to improve oneself, to save oneself, to unite oneself with God, must come to this exasperating and impossible conclusion.


—Alan Watts

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this is the drop of an instant

 

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The future is a concept, it does not exist.
There is no such thing as tomorrow.
There never will be, because time is always now.

That is one of the things we discover when we stop talking to ourselves and stop thinking.
We find that there is only present, with an eternal now.


—Alan Watts

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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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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, excerpts

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i am that

  

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I am, O Anxious One. Don't you hear my voice
surging forth with all my earthly feelings? 
They yearn so high, that they have sprouted wings
and whitely fly in circles round your face.

My soul, dressed in silence, rises up
and stands alone before you: can't you see?
don't you know that my prayer is growing ripe
upon your vision as upon a tree?

If you are the dreamer, I am what you dream.
But when you want to wake, I am your wish,
and I grow strong with all magnificence
and turn myself into a star's vast silence
above the strange and distant city, Time.


—Rainer Maria Rilke

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hallo

    

.

 

 

You look at the world and it may seem whole or it may seem broken, but then the world looks back and some sort of reciprocity that is not of any school of poetry or any single denomination happens, and in our absolute attention we feel attended to: for here there is no place that does not see you.


—Rainer Maria Rilke

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“Hallo, Rabbit,’ he said, ‘is that you?’

'Let's pretend it isn't,' said Rabbit, 'and see what happens.'”

—A. A. Milne

 

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the soul was the song itself

 

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I live my life in growing orbits which move out over this wondrous world, I am circling around God, around ancient towers and I have been circling for a thousand years. 

And I still don't know if I am an eagle or a storm or a great song.


―Rainer Maria Rilke

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People say that the soul, on hearing the song of creation, entered the body, but in reality the soul was the song itself.  


—Hafiz

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you where the heart begins

  

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Human feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the earth: it does not wait for beauty — it flows with resistless force and brings beauty with it.


—George Eliot

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You who let yourselves feel: enter the breathing
that is more than your own.
Let it brush your cheeks
as it divides and rejoins beside you.

Blessed ones, whole ones,
you where the heart begins:
You are the bow that shoots the arrows
and you are the target.

Fear not the pain. Let its weight fall back
into the earth;
for heavy are the mountains, heavy the seas.

The trees you planted in childhood have grown
too heavy. You cannot bring them along.
Give yourselves to the air, to what you cannot hold.


—Rainer Maria Rilke
Sonnets to Orpheus, Part One, IV 

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You must learn to stop being yourself. That's where it begins, and everything else follows from that. You must let yourself evaporate. Let your muscles go limp, breathe until you feel your soul pouring out of you, and then shut your eyes. That's how it's done. 

The emptiness inside your body grows lighter than the air around you. Little by little, you begin to weigh less than nothing. You shut your eyes; you spread your arms; you let yourself evaporate. And then, little by little, you lift yourself off the ground. 

Like so.


—Paul Auster
Mr. Vertigo

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O sweetest of songs

.

How shall I hold on to my soul, so that

it does not touch yours? How shall I gently

lift it up over you on to other things?

I would so very much like to tuck it away
among long lost objects in the dark,
in some quiet, unknown place, somewhere
which remains motionless when your depths resound.

And yet everything which touches us, you and me,
takes us together like a single bow,
drawing out from two strings but one voice.

On which instrument are we strung?
And which violinist holds us in his hand?
O sweetest of songs.


—Rainer Maria Rilke
O sweetest of songs

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place(ment

  

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The little space within the heart is 
as great as the vast universe. 

The heavens and the earth are there, 
and the sun and the moon and the stars. 

Fire and lightening and winds are there, 
and all that now is and all that is not.


—The Upanishads

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I am blind and do not see the things of this world;
but when the Light comes from above, it enlightens my Heart,
and I can see, for the Eye of my Heart sees everything.

The Heart is a sanctuary of the Center in which there is a little space
wherein the Great Spirit dwells, and this is the Eye. 

This is the Eye of Wakentaka by which he sees all things,
and through which we see Him.


—Black Elk

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there is no place at all

that is not looking at you.

—Rainer Maria Rilke

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two is not twice one

 

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According to String Theory, what appears to be empty space is actually a tumultuous ocean of strings vibrating at the precise frequencies that create the four dimensions you and I call height, width, depth and time.


—Roy H. Williams

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No experience has been too unimportant,
and the smallest event unfolds like a fate, 

and fate itself is like a wonderful, wide fabric in which every thread is guided by an infinitely tender hand 

and is laid alongside another thread
and is held and supported by a hundred others.


—Rainer Maria Rilke

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There are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematician that four is twice two. 

But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one.


—G.K. Chesterton 

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we are the imagination of our(selves

  

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I do not believe in spiritual paths. The purpose of spiritual paths is to enmesh you in the world of knowledge, while Reality resides prior to it. 

All spiritual paths lead to unreality.

Discard all paths.


—Nisargadatta Maharaj

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[...] matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration ... we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively ... there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. 


—Jed McKenna’s Notebook

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Understand, I’ll slip quietly away from the noisy crowd when I see the pale stars rising, blooming, over the oaks.

I’ll pursue solitary pathways through the pale twilit meadows, with only this one dream: You come too.


—Rainer Maria Rilke

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how to write the world

 

Fred Tomaselli

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All the eggs a woman will ever carry form in her ovaries while she is a four-month-old fetus in the womb of her mother. This means our cellular life as an egg begins in the womb of our grandmother. Each of us spent five months in our grandmother’s womb, and she in turn formed in the womb of her grandmother. 

We vibrate to the rhythm of our mother’s blood before she herself is born, and this pulse is the thread of blood that runs all the way back through the grandmothers to the first mother.

—Layne Redmond
When the Drummers Were Women

wait - what ?

 

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For the sake of a single verse, one must see many cities, men, and things. One must know the animals, one must feel how the birds fly and know the gesture with which the little flowers open in the morning.

One must be able to think back to roads in unknown regions, to unexpected meetings and to partings one had long seen coming; to days of childhood that are still unexplained, to parents whom one had to hurt when they brought one some joy and did not grasp it (it was a joy for someone else); to childhood illnesses that so strangely begin with such a number of profound and grave transformations, to days in rooms withdrawn and quiet and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along on high and flew with all the stars—and it is not yet enough if one may think of all this.

One must have memories of many nights of love, none of which was like the others, of the screams of women in labor, and of light, white, sleeping women in childbed, closing again. But one must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the fitful noises. And still it is not enough to have memories. One must be able to forget them when they are many, and one must have the great patience to wait until they come again. For it is not yet the memories themselves. 

Not till they have turned to blood within us, to glance, and gesture, nameless, and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves—not till then can it happen that in a most rare hour the first word of a verse arises in their midst and goes forth from them.


―Rainer Maria Rilke
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910)

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I bet octopuses think bones are horrific. I bet all their cosmic horror stories involve rigid-limbs and hinged joints.

To an octopus, a human is like a thinking being with blood-stained coral growing inside it.

I need to sit down and breathe into a bag for a while. 


—The Chryptonaturalis

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hold steady

  

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Sunrays touch the coastline
On the cutter shows the dust
Long nights are gone with the river
The water has been waiting long enough

We float on the river of time
Hold steady, hold steady
The sea comes 'cause the summer forced out the cold
The boat fought the change of the tides
Hold steady, hold steady
Storm for hours and rainy days

And all our lives we're told
the stream will take us home

Sunrays touch the coastline
Warm our feet, show the glare
We walk through the sand in the warm night
The water will take the weight from us

And all our lives we're told
the stream will take us home
And all our lives we're told
the stream will take us home

We sell our lives to the sea
The sky lights up from the beach


—HAEVN
Symphonic Tales 

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There is not a fragment in all of nature, for every relative fragment of one thing is a full harmonious unit in itself. 

This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. 

Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on seas and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.

—John Muir, 1867

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Bless the spirit that makes connections,

for truly we live in what we imagine.

Clocks move along side our real life

with steps that are ever the same.

Though we do not know our exact location,

we are held in place by what links us.

Across trackless distances

antennas sense each other.

Pure attention, the essence of the powers!

Distracted by each day's doing,

how can we hear the signals?

Even as the farmer labors

there where the seed turns into summer,

it is not his work. It is Earth who gives.

—Rainer Maria Rilke 

Sonnets to Orpheus, Part One, XII

Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy version

.

then can it happen

 

Jim Denevan makes temporary drawings on sand earth and ice
that are eventually erased by waves and weather

. 

For the sake of a single verse, one must see many cities, men, and things. One must know the animals, one must feel how the birds fly and know the gesture with which the little flowers open in the morning. One must be able to think back to roads in unknown regions, to unexpected meetings and to partings one had long seen coming; to days of childhood that are still unexplained, to parents whom one had to hurt when they brought one some joy and did not grasp it (it was a joy for someone else); to childhood illnesses that so strangely begin with such a number of profound and grave transformations, to days in rooms withdrawn and quiet and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along on high and flew with all the stars—and it is not yet enough if one may think of all this.  

One must have memories of many nights of love, none of which was like the others, of the screams of women in labor, and of light, white, sleeping women in childbed, closing again. 

But one must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the fitful noises. And still it is not enough to have memories. 

One must be able to forget them when they are many, and one must have the great patience to wait until they come again. For it is not yet the memories themselves. Not till they have turned to blood within us, to glance, and gesture, nameless, and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves—not till then can it happen that in a most rare hour the first word of a verse arises in their midst and goes forth from them.

―Rainer Maria Rilke

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910)

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