once there was, and once there wasn’t

  

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'once upon a time' in other languages: 

 

korean: “back when tigers used to smoke” (호랑이 담배 피우던 시절에) [x]

czech: “beyond seven mountain ranges, beyond seven rivers” (za sedmero horami a sedmero řekami)

georgian: “there was, and there was not, there was…” (იყო და არა იყო რა, იყო…)

hausa: “a story, a story. let it go, let it come.” [x]

romanian: “there once was, (as never before)… because if there wasn’t, it wouldn’t have been told” (A fost odată, ca niciodată că dacă n-ar fi fost, nu s-ar mai povesti…)

lithuanian: “beyond nine seas, beyond nine lagoons: (už devynių jūrų, už devynių marių)

catalan: “see it here that in that time in which beasts spoke and people were silent…” (vet aquí que en aquell temps que les bèsties parlaven i les persones callaven…) [x]

turkish: “Once there was, and once there wasn’t. In the long-distant days of yore, when haystacks winnowed sieves, when genies played jereed in the old bathhouse, [when] fleas were barbers, [when] camels were town criers, [and when] I softly rocked my baby grandmother to sleep in her creaking cradle, there was/lived, in an exotic land, far, far away, a/an…* (Bir varmış, bir yokmuş. Evvel zaman içinde, kalbur saman içinde, cinler cirit oynar iken eski hamam içinde, pireler berber [iken], develer tellal [iken], ben ninemin beşiğini tıngır mıngır sallar iken, uzak diyarların birinde…)

.

The language of birds is very ancient, and like other ancient modes of speech, very elliptical; little is said, but much is meant and understood. 


—Gilbert White
Letter XLIII, Selborne, 

9 September 1778

 

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(all) creatures have territories ...

for some birds, their song is a fence.

—Wendell Berry 

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pray without ceasing

.

What I wear is pants.

What I do is live.

How I pray is breathe.

—Thomas Merton 

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Rejoice evermore.
Pray without ceasing.
In everything give thanks.

I am not all the way capable of so much, but those are the right instructions.


—Wendell Berry

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treat the life force as God... no other God exists —Sri Nisargadatta

  

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A man may go into the field and say his prayer and be aware of God, or, he may be in Church and be aware of God; but, if he is more aware of Him because he is in a quiet place, that is his own deficiency and not due to God, Who is alike present in all things and places, and is willing to give Himself everywhere so far as lies in Him.

He knows God rightly who knows Him everywhere.


—Meister Eckhart

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Sit and be still

until in the time

of no rain you hear

beneath the dry wind's

commotion in the trees

the sound of flowing

water among the rocks,

a stream unheard before,

and you are where 

breathing is prayer.


—Wendell Berry

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notes to self

 

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The real world is in a much darker and deeper place than this, and most of it is occupied by jellyfish and things. We just happen to forget all that. Don’t you agree? Two-thirds of earth’s surface is ocean, and all we can see with the naked eye is the surface: the skin.

―Haruki Murakami

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

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Even now, after centuries of reductionist propaganda, the world is still intricate and vast, as dark as it is light, a place of mystery, where we cannot do one thing without doing many things, or put two things together without putting many things together.
 

—Wendell Berry

In Distrust of Movements

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Love is not consolation. It is light. —Friedrich Nietzsche

  

.

  

All that passes descends,
and ascends again unseen
into the light: the river
coming down from sky
to hills, from hills to sea,
and carving as it moves,
to rise invisible,
gathered to light, to return
again. "The river's injury
is its shape." I've learned no more.

We are what we are given
and what is taken away;
blessed be the name
of the giver and taker.

For everything that comes
is a gift, the meaning always
carried out of sight
to renew our whereabouts,
always a starting place.
And every gift is perfect 
in its beginning, for it
is "from above, and cometh down
from the Father of lights."
Gravity is grace.


—Wendell Berry 
The Gift of Gravity, excerpt

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each by all the others held

 

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Within the circles of our lives
we dance the circles of the years,
the circles of the seasons
within the circles of the years,
the cycles of the moon
within the circles of the seasons,
the circles of our reasons
within the cycles of the moon.

Again, again we come and go,
changed, changing. Hands
join, unjoin in love and fear,
grief and joy. The circles turn,
each giving into each, into all. 

Only music keeps us here,
each by all the others held.
In the hold of hands and eyes
we turn in pairs, that joining
joining each to all again.

And then we turn aside, alone,
out of the sunlight gone
into the darker circles of return.


—Wendell Berry
Closing the Circle

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And if I forget how many times I have been here, and in how many shapes, this forgetting is the necessary interval of darkness between every pulsation of light.

—Alan Watts

On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

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Out of a great need
we are all holding hands
and climbing.

Not loving is a letting go.

Listen,

the terrain around here
is
far too
dangerous
for
that.


—Hafiz
  

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just so the world

The stones of Stenness, Orkney, Scotland, 1906

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...light from Andromeda, the galaxy closest to our own, takes 2.4 million years to reach us. When we see it, the light has been rushing towards us a 186,000 miles a second for 2.4 million years. And beyond our galactic neighborhood lie an estimated 80 billion more galaxies, unimaginably far away. 

We know outer space is vast and mostly empty, but we usually consider our familiar world as more solid. Yet the atoms that make up our own bodies are actually 99.99 percent empty space. The distance between atoms, and the space within atoms, compared with their mass makes us as spacious internally as the universe we live in. 

I was struck by the reality that inner space is a microcosmic version of outer space.

—Tara Brach

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I would like you to show me, if you can, where the line can be drawn between an organism and it’s environment.

The environment is in you. It’s passing through you. You’re breathing it in and out. You and every other creature.


—Wendell Berry
Wendell Berry & Gary Snyder: Distant Neighbours
wait - what ?

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you and i are earth

     

Tin-glazed earthenware plate found in a London sewer 

(England, 1661). Creator unknown.

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Until we understand what the land is, we are at odds with everything we touch. And to come to that understanding it is necessary, even now, to leave the regions of our conquest—the cleared fields, the towns and cities, the highways—and re-enter the woods. For only there can a man encounter the silence and the darkness of his own absence. Only in this silence and darkness can he recover the sense of the world’s longevity, of its ability to thrive without him, of his inferiority to it and his dependence on it. 

Perhaps then, having heard that silence and seen that darkness, he will grow humble before the place and begin to take it in—to learn from it what it is. As its sounds come into his hearing, and its lights and colors come into his vision, and its odors come into his nostrils, then he may come into its presence as he never has before, and he will arrive in his place and will want to remain. 

His life will grow out of the ground like the other lives of the place, and take its place among them. He will be with them—neither ignorant of them, nor indifferent to them, nor against them—and so at last he will grow to be native-born. That is, he must reenter the silence and the darkness, and be born again.


—Wendell Berry
A Native Hill

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The river is of the earth
And it is free. It is rigorously
Embanked and bound,
And yet is free. “To hell
With restraint,” it says.
“I have got to be going.”

It will grind out its dams.
It will go over or around them.
They will become pieces.


—Wendell Berry

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this road is the heart opening —Mirabai

    

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To go in the dark with a light is to know the light. 

To know the dark, go dark. 

Go without sight, and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings, and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.


—Wendell Berry

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The window is the absence of the wall, and it gives air and light because it is empty. Be empty of all mental content, of all imagination and effort, and the very absence of obstacles will cause reality to rush in.

All you need is to understand that you are the source of reality, that you give reality instead of getting it, that you need no support and no confirmation. 

Things are as they are because you accept them as they are. Stop accepting them and they will dissolve.


—Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

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the lives our lives prepare

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A sign installed in the largest wildfire burn I’ve ever seen, along the BC/YK border. Borrowing the aesthetics of BC Recreation Site signs, once again pointing to the overlaps of outdoor recreation, resource extraction, and the consequences of the climate crisis. Most recreation sites in BC exist along previously built logging and mining roads.

“Forced into a great and difficult transformation” was a line I heard in a lecture on Buddhist philosophy I was listening to on my drive up north. But it became another mantra I thought about while living in a place that’s been utterly transformed by resource extraction over the past century, and as I thought about the burnt landscapes I drove through.

—Liz Toohey-Wiese, 2024

More here.

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If we will have the wisdom to survive,
to stand like slow-growing trees
on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it,
if we will make our seasons welcome here,
asking not too much of earth or heaven,
then a long time after we are dead
the lives our lives prepare will live
here, their houses strongly placed
upon the valley sides, fields and gardens
rich in the windows. The river will run
clear, as we never know it,
and over it, birdsong like a canopy.
On the levels of the hills will be
green meadows, stock bells in noon shade.
On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down
the old forest, an old forest will stand,
its rich leaf-fall drifting on its roots.
The veins of forgotten springs will have opened.
Families will be singing in the fields.
In their voices they will hear a music
risen out of the ground. They will take
nothing from the ground they will not return,
whatever the grief at parting. Memory,
native to this valley, will spread over it
like a grove, and memory will grow
into legend, legend into song, song
into sacrament. The abundance of this place,
the songs of its people and its birds,
will be health and wisdom and indwelling
light. This is no paradisal dream.
Its hardship is its possibility.

—Wendell Berry

A Vision

wait - what ?

.

never less than one, or more

    

this cloud is learning, Jean Marc Caimi

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The body
is a single creature, whole,
its life is one, never less than one, or more,
so is its world, and so 
are two bodies in their love for one another. 
In ignorance of this
we talk ourselves to death.


—Wendell Berry
Sabbaths, XIV

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A man and a woman sit near each other, and they do not long at this moment to be older, or younger, nor born in any other nation, or time, or place.

They are content to be where they are, talking or not talking. Their breaths together feed someone whom we do not know.

The man sees the way his fingers move; he sees her hands close around a book she hands to him.

They obey a third body they have in common.
They have made a promise to love that body.

Age may come, parting may come, death will come.

A man and woman sit near each other; as they breathe they feed someone we do not know, someone we know of, whom we have never seen.


—Robert Bly

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Every breath taken in
by the man who loves,
and the woman who loves,
goes to fill the water tank
where the spirit horses drink.


—Robert Bly

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the days are round

 

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Days begin and end in the dead of night. They are not shaped long, in the manner of things which lead to ends - arrow, road, a person’s life on earth. They are shaped round, in the manner of things eternal and stable - sun, world, God.

Civilization tries to persuade us we are going towards something, a distant goal. We have forgotten that our only goal is to live, to live each and every day, and that if we live each and every day, our true goal is achieved.

All civilized people see the day beginning at dawn or a little after or a long time after or whatever time their work begins; this they lengthen according to their work, during what they call 'all day long'; and end it when they close their eyes. It is they who say the days are long. On the contrary, the days are round.


—Jean Giono
Rondeur Des Jours

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How long does it take to make the woods?
As long as it takes to make the world.
The woods is present as the world is, the presence
of all its past and of all its time to come.
It is always finished, it is always being made, the act
of its making forever greater than the act of its destruction.
It is a part of eternity for its end and beginning
belong to the end and beginning of all things,
the beginning lost in the end, the end in the beginning.

What is the way to the woods, how do you go there?
By climbing up through the six days’ field,
kept in all the body’s years, the body’s
sorrow, weariness, and joy. By passing through
the narrow gate on the far side of that field
where the pasture grass of the body’s life gives way
to the high, original standing of the trees.
By coming into the shadow, the shadow
of the grace of the strait way’s ending,
the shadow of the mercy of light.

Why must the gate be narrow?
Because you cannot pass beyond it burdened.
To come into the woods you must leave behind
the six days’ world, all of it, all of its plans and hopes.
You must come without weapon or tool, alone,
expecting nothing, remembering nothing,
into the ease of sight, the brotherhood of eye and leaf.


—Wendell Berry

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Now in the blessed days of more and less
when the news about time is that each day
there is less of it I know none of that
as I walk out through the early garden
only the day and I are here with no
before or after and the dew looks up
without a number or a present age


—W. S. Merwin
dew light 
from the moon before morning 

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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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deep order

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I would like you to show me, if you can, where the line can be drawn between an organism and its environment. 

The environment is in you.

It is passing through you. 

You are breathing it in and out.

You and every other creature.


—Wendell Berry

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If biologists have ignored self-organization, it is not because self-ordering is not pervasive and profound. 

It is because we biologists have yet to understand how to think about systems governed simultaneously by two sources of order.

Yet who seeing the snowflake, who seeing simple lipid molecules cast adrift in water forming themselves into cell-like hollow lipid vesicles, who seeing the potential for the crystallization of life in swarms of reacting molecules, who seeing the stunning order for free in networks linking tens upon tens of thousands of variables, can fail to entertain a central thought: if ever we are to attain a final theory in biology, we will surely, surely have to understand the commingling of self-organization and selection.

We will have to see that we are the natural expressions of a deeper order. Ultimately, we will discover in our creation myth that we are expected after all.


—Stuart Kauffman

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I and this mystery; here we stand. —Walt Whitman

.

The sensibility in perceiving all things as a sign of the Mystery 

is the tranquil truth of the human being.

—Fr. Giussani

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We clasp the hands of those who go before us,
and the hands of those who come after us;
we enter the little circle of each other's arms,
and the larger circle of lovers
whose hands are joined in a dance,
and the larger circle of all creatures,
passing in and out of life,
who move also in a dance,
to a music so subtle and vast
that no one hears it except in fragments.


—Wendell Berry

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an embarrassment

   

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“Do you want to ask the blessing?”

“No. If you do, go ahead.”

He went ahead: his prayer dressed up

in Sunday clothes rose a few feet

and dropped with a soft thump.

If a lonely soul did ever cry out

in company its true outcry to God,

it would be as though at a sedate party

a man suddenly removed his clothes

and took his wife passionately into his arms.


—Wendell Berry

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blessings be

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My writing, when it hasn't been in defense of precious things,

has been a giving of thanks for precious things.

.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.

Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years. 

Listen to carrion -- put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts. 

So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth? 

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.

As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn't go.

Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.


—Wendell Berry
Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

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Learn by little the desire for all things 
which perhaps is not desire at all 

but undying love which perhaps 
is not love at all but gratitude 

for the being of things which perhaps
is not gratitude at all

but the maker’s joy in what is made, 
the joy in which we come to rest.


—Wendell Berry
Leavings

.

blessings be

  .

.

Thanks and blessings be
to the Sun and the Earth
for this bread and this wine,
this fruit, this meat, this salt,
this food;
thanks be and blessing to them
who prepare it, and who serve it;
thanks and blessings to them
who share it
(and also the absent and the dead).

Thanks and Blessing to them who bring it
(may they not want),
and to them who plant and tend it,
harvest and gather it
(may they not want);
thanks and blessing to them who work
and blessing to them who cannot;
may they not want - for their hunger
sours the wine and robs
the taste from the salt.

Thanks be for the sustenance and strength
for our dance and work of justice, and of peace.


—Rafael Jesus Gonzalez
In Praise of Fertile Land

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Rejoice evermore.
Pray without ceasing.
In everything give thanks.

I am not all the way capable of so much, but those are the right instructions.


—Wendell Berry

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