love is a direction

     

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The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit’s one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself like a once-blind man unbound. 

The gaps are the clefts in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are the fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fords splitting the cliffs of mystery. 

Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock - more than a maple - a universe.


—Annie Dillard

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It is only necessary to know that love is a direction not a state of the soul. 

If one is unaware of this, one falls into despair at the first onslaught of affliction.

—Simone Weil

The Love of God and Affliction, Waiting for God

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So after weeks of rain
at night the winter stars
that much farther in heaven
without our having seen them
in far light are still forming
the heavy elements
that when the stars are gone
fly up as dust finer
by many times than a hair
and recognize each other
in the dark traveling
at great speed and becoming
our bodies in our time
looking up after rain
in the cold night together


—W.S. Merwin
January, The Pupil (2001)

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all the flowers are forms of water —W.S. Merwin

   

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The act of trying to find the way home is what convinces us we are lost. 

We are not lost, we are not alone, and we have never left home.

—Rumi

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Never during its pilgrimage is the human spirit completely adrift and alone. From start to finish its nucleus is the Atman, the god-within. 

Underlying its whirlpool of transient feelings, emotions and delusions is the self-luminous, abiding point of the transpersonal god.

 

—Huston Smith

 

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As the sun lights the world even when cloud-covered, the Immutable is never seen but is the Witness; 

it is never heard but is the Hearer; it is never thought but is the Thinker; it is never known but is the Knower. 

There is no other witness but This, no other knower but This.

—The Upanishads 

 

 

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travelling together

    

 

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Brahman, the single binding unity of all that exists, 

is indivisible and pure.

Realize Brahman and go beyond all change.

Realize that there are no separate minds.

Waking, sleeping, dreaming, the Self is one.

The One appears many, just as the moon 
appears many, reflected in water.

But there is only one Self, present in all beings.


from the Amritabindu Upanishad
Eknath Easwaren version

The Upanishads

  

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If we are separated I will 
try to wait for you 
on your side of things 

your side of the wall and the water 
and of the light moving at its own speed 
even on leaves that we have seen 
I will wait on one side 

while a side is there 


—W.S. Merwin

 

 

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part(iculars

    

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We have reversed the usual classical notion that the independent “elementary parts” of the world are the fundamental reality, and that the various systems are merely particular contingent forms and arrangements of these parts.

Rather, we say that inseparable quantum interconnectedness of the whole universe is the fundamental reality, and that relatively independent behaving parts are merely particular and contingent forms within this whole.

—David Bohm

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Stories come to us like new senses

a wave and an ash tree were sisters

they had been separated since they were children

but they went on believing in each other

though each was sure that the other must be lost

they cherished traits of themselves that they thought of

as family resemblances features they held in common

the sheen of the wave fluttered in remembrance

of the undersides of the leaves of the ash tree

in summer air and the limbs of the ash tree

recalled the wave as the breeze lifted it

and they wrote to each other every day

without knowing where to send the letters

some of which have come to light only now

revealing in their old but familiar language

a view of the world we could not have guessed at

but that we always wanted to believe

—W.S. Merwin
The Shadow of Sirius
Recognitions

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a sweet question

  

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Skill in living, awareness of belonging to the world, delight in being part of the world, always tends to involve knowing our kinship as animals with animals. […] 

Relationship among all things appears to be complex and reciprocal - always at least two-way, back and forth. It seems that nothing is single in this universe, and nothing goes one way.

In this view, we humans appear as particularly lively, intense, aware nodes of relation in an infinite network of connections, simple or complicated, direct or hidden, strong or delicate, temporary or very long-lasting. A web of connections, infinite but locally fragile, with and among everything - all beings - including what we generally class as things, objects.


—Ursula K. Le Guin
Deep in Admiration, excerpts
(Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet)

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The moon came to me last night
With a sweet question.

She said,
“The sun has been my faithful lover 
For millions of years.
Whenever I offer my body to him 
Brilliant light pours from his heart.
Thousands then notice my happiness 
And delight in pointing
toward my beauty.

Hafiz, 
Is it true that our destiny
Is to turn into Light
Itself?”

And I replied, 
"Dear moon, 
Now that your love is maturing,
We need to sit together
Close like this more often

So I might instruct you 
How to become
Who you
Are!"


—Hafiz

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These days I can see us clinging to each other 

as we are swept along by the current 

I am clinging to you to keep you from 

being swept away and you are clinging to me 

we see the shores blurring past as we hold 

each other in the rushing current 

the daylight rushes unheard far above us 

how long will we be swept along in the daylight 

how long will we cling together in the night 

and where will it carry us together


—W.S. Merwin
Here Together
Garden Time

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weird enough to be wise

    

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In old traditions those who acted as elders were considered to have one foot in daily life and the other foot in the otherworld. Elders acted as a bridge between the visible world and the unseen realms of spirit and soul. A person in touch with the otherworld stands out because something normally invisible can be seen through them. The old word for having a foot in each world is weird. The original sense of weird involved both fate and destiny. Becoming weird enough to be wise requires that a person learn to accommodate the strange way they are shaped within and aimed at the world.

An old idea suggests that those seeking for an elder should look for someone weird enough to be wise. For just as there can be no general wisdom, there are no “normal” elders. Normal bespeaks the “norms” that society uses to regulate people, whereas an awakened destiny always involves connections to the weird and the warp of life. In Norse mythology, as in Shakespeare, the Fates appear as the Weird Sisters who hold time and the timeless together.

Those who would become truly wise must become weird enough to be in touch with timeless things and abnormal enough to follow the guidance of the unseen. Elders are supposed to be weird, not simply “weirdos,” but strange and unusual in meaningful ways. Elders are supposed to be more in touch with the otherworld, but not out of touch with the struggles in this world. Elders have one foot firmly in the ground of survival and another in the realm of great imagination. This double-minded stance serves to help the living community and even helps the species survive.


—Michael Meade

About Elders

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Now it is clear to me that no leaves are mine
no roots are mine
that wherever I go I will be a spine of smoke in the forest
and the forest will know it
we will both know it

and that birds vanish because of something
that I remember
flying through me as though I were a great wind
as the stones settle into the ground
the trees into themselves
staring as though I were a great wind
which is what I pray for

it is clear to me that I cannot return
but that some of us will meet once more
even here
like our own statues
and some of us still later without names
and some of us will burn with the speed
of endless departures
and be found and lost no more


—W.S. Merwin
The Carrier of Ladders

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One old man keeps humming the same few notes
of some song he thought he had forgotten
back in the days when as he knows there was
no word for life in the language 
and if they wanted to say eyes or heart
they would hold up a leaf and he remembers
the big tree where it rose from the dry ground
and the way the birds carried water in their voices
they were all the color of their fear of the dark
and as he sits there humming he remembers
some of the words they come back to him now
he smiles hearing them come and go


—W. S. Merwin
Parts of a Tune

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utterance

   

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Sitting over words
very late I have heard a kind of whispered sighing
not far
like a night wind in pines or like the sea in the dark
the echo of everything that has ever
been spoken
still spinning its one syllable
between the earth and silence

—W.S. Merwin

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together in the whole night

 

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What is life?

It is the flash of a firefly in the night.

It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime.

It is the little shadow which runs across
the grass and loses itself in the sunset.


—Crowfoot 
Blackfoot warrior and orator 
1830 - 1890

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Today is the winter solstice. The planet tilts just so to its star, lists and holds circling in a fixed tension between veering and longing, and spins helpless, exalted, in and out of that fleet blazing touch.


—Annie Dillard

The Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

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They say the sun will come back
at midnight
after all
my one love

but we know how the minutes
fly out into
the dark trees
and vanish

like the great ʻōhiʻas and honey creepers
and we know how the weeks
walk into the
shadows at midday

at the thought of the months I reach for your hand
it is not something
one is supposed
to say

we watch the bright birds in the morning
we hope for the quiet
daytime together
the year turns into air

but we are together in the whole night
with the sun still going away
and the year
coming back


—W.S. Merwin
the solstice

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there is a way

 

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At the end of the year the stars go out
the air stops breathing and the Sibyl sings
first she sings of the darkness she can see
she sings on until she comes to the age
without time and the dark she cannot see 

no one hears then as she goes on singing
of all the white days that were brought to us one by one
that turned to colors around us 

a light coming from far out in the eye
where it begins before she can see it
burns through the words that no one has abelieved


—W.S. Merwin
The Pupil, 2001

.

There is a way between voice and presence where information flows.

In disciplined silence it opens.

With wandering talk it closes.


—Rumi

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inspir(ation

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In the morning as the storm begins to blow away
the clear sky appears for a moment and it seems to me
that there has been something simpler than I could ever
believe

simpler than I could have begun to find words for
not patient not even waiting no more hidden
than the air itself that became part of me for a while
with every breath and remained with me unnoticed

something that was here unnamed unknown in the days
and the nights not separate from them
not separate from them as they came and were gone
it must have been here neither early nor late then

by what name can I address it now holding out my thanks


—W.S. Merwin (treasure)
Just Now

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garden notes

  

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All day in the garden
and at night when I wake to it
at its moment I hear a sound
sometimes little more than a whisper
of something falling
arriving
fallen
a seed in its early age
or a great frond formed
of its high days and nights
looking at the sky
made of daybreak the morning sun
and the whole of daylight
the moon and the stars and the clouds
and of the rain descending out of itself
coming down to its own leaf
there is no trace of regret
in the sound or in the stillness
after the falling
no sound
of hesitation on the way
no question and no doubt

—W.S. Merwin

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merwinconservancy

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beginning (it is north everywhere)

  

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Long before spring

king of the black cranes

rises one day

from the black

needle’s eye

on the white plain

under the white sky

the crown turns

and the eye

drilled clear through his head

turns

it is north everywhere

come out he says

come out then

the light is not yet

divided

it is a long way 

to the first

anything

come even so

we will start

bring your nights with you

—W.S. Merwin

The Carriers of Ladders, 

Pulitzer Prize for poetry, 1971

 

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May the blessed sunlight shine on you like a great fire,
so that stranger and friend may come and warm himself at it.

And may light shine out of the two eyes of you,
like a candle set in the window of a house,
bidding the wanderer come in out of the storm.

And may the blessing of the rain be on you,
may it beat upon your Spirit and wash it fair and clean,
and leave there a shining pool where the blue of Heaven shines,
and sometimes a star.

And may the blessing of the earth be on you,
soft under your feet as you pass along the roads,
soft under you as you lie out on it, tired at the end of day;
and may it rest easy over you when, at last, you lie out under it.

May it rest so lightly over you that your soul may be out from under it quickly; up and off and on its way to God.

And now may the Lord bless you, and bless you kindly.

Amen

—Scottish blessing

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the cold before the moonrise

 

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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

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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

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bless

.

Let me imagine that we will come again 
when we want to and it will be spring 
we will be no older than we ever were 
the worn griefs will have eased like the early cloud 
through which the morning slowly comes to itself 
and the ancient defenses against the dead 
will be done with and left to the dead at last 
the light will be as it is now in the garden 
that we have made here these years together 
of our long evenings and astonishment

—W.S. Merwin
To Paula in Late Spring

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