desire itself is movement

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Words move, music moves

Only in time; but that which is only living

Can only die. Words, after speech, reach

Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,

Can words or music reach

The stillness, as a Chinese jar still

Moves perpetually in its stillness.

Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,

Not that only, but the co-existence,

Or say that the end precedes the beginning,

And the end and the beginning were always there

Before the beginning and after the end.

And all is always now. Words strain,

Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,

Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,

Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,

Will not stay still. Shrieking voices

Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,

Always assail them. The Word in the desert

Is most attacked by voices of temptation,

The crying shadow in the funeral dance,

The loud lament of the disconsolate chimera.

The detail of the pattern is movement,

As in the figure of the ten stairs.

Desire itself is movement

Not in itself desirable;

Love is itself unmoving,

Only the cause and end of movement,

Timeless, and undesiring

Except in the aspect of time

Caught in the form of limitation

Between un-being and being.

Sudden in a shaft of sunlight

Even while the dust moves

There rises the hidden laughter

Of children in the foliage

Quick now, here, now, always—

Ridiculous the waste sad time

Stretching before and after.

—T. S. Eliot

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time present

  

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Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable. 

What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present. 

Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind. 

But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?

Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,
Round the corner. Through the first gate,
Into our first world, shall we follow
The deception of the thrush? Into our first world.
There they were, dignified, invisible, 

Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves,
In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air,
And the bird called, in response to
The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery,
And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses
Had the look of flowers that are looked at. 

There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting.
So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern,
Along the empty alley, into the box circle,
To look down into the drained pool. 

Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotus rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.
Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.

Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality. 

Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.


—T. S. Eliot
No.1 of 'Four Quartets'

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the still point of the turning world

  

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The world's spiritual geniuses seem to discover universally that the mind's muddy river, this ceaseless flow  of trivia and trash, cannot be dammed, and that trying to dam it is a waste of effort that might lead to madness.  

Instead you must allow the muddy river to flow unheeded in the dim channels of consciousness; you raise your sights; you look along it, mildly, acknowledging its presence without interest and gazing beyond it into the realm of the real where subjects and objects act and rest purely, without utterance.


—Annie Dillard 
from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

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When you live your life at peace with every circumstance of your life, favorable or terrible, you situate yourself at the still point of the turning universe. Then you are the world of cause and effect itself, you become this. You become, with nothing between you and it, this precarious world. You are precariousness itself and so you are no longer subject to precariousness. When you live like this you are the master of precariousness, the master of cause and effect, and then everything is blessed, just as it is.

Interestingly, the root of the word precarious is "prayer,” or “imprecation.” When you fully enter precariousness, our ordinary human world of one mistake after another, you are “full of prayer,” open to connectedness. Then you can see how a life of human limitation is also a life of grace.


—Susan Murphy
Upside-Down Zen: Finding the Marvelous in the Ordinary

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At the still point of the turning world.

Neither flesh nor fleshless; 

Neither from nor towards; 

At the still point, there the dance is, 

But neither arrest nor movement.

And do not call it fixity.

Where past and future are gathered. 

Neither movement from nor towards, 

Neither ascent nor decline.

Except for the point, the still point, 

There would be no dance,

And there is only the dance.


—T. S. Eliot
from Burnt Norton
in The Four Quartets

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(Costing not less than everything) —T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding

    

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Reality is merely an illusion, although a very persistent one. 

—Albert Einstein

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We are like the spider. 

We weave our life and then move along in it. 

We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream. 

This is true for the entire universe.


—The Upanishads

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Start seeing everything as God,

But keep it a secret.

—Hafiz

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costing not less than every(thing

     

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We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Through the unknown, unremembered gate

When the last of earth left to discover

Is that which was the beginning;

At the source of the longest river

The voice of the hidden waterfall

And the children in the apple-tree

Not known, because not looked for

But heard, half-heard, in the stillness

Between two waves of the sea.

Quick now, here, now, always—

A condition of complete simplicity

(Costing not less than everything)

And all shall be well and

All manner of thing shall be well

When the tongues of flame are in-folded

Into the crowned knot of fire

And the fire and the rose are one. 

—T. S. Eliot
Little Gidding

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still and still moving

   

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Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered. 

There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter. 

Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.


—T. S. Eliot
East Coker V, Four Quartets, excerpt 

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