inner arhitecture

  

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Every thought reorders the universe.

—William Stafford

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A person's life consists of a collection of events, the last of which could also change the meaning of the whole, not because it counts more than the previous ones but because once they are included in a life, events are arranged in an order that is not chronological but, rather, corresponds to an inner architecture.


—Italo Calvino

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We all behave like Maxwell’s demon. Organisms organize. 

In everyday experience lies the reason sober physicists across two centuries kept this cartoon fantasy alive. We sort the mail, build sand castles, solve jigsaw puzzles, separate wheat from chaff, rearrange chess pieces, collect stamps, alphabetize books, create symmetry, compose sonnets and sonatas, and put our rooms in order, and all this we do requires no great energy, as long as we can apply intelligence. We propagate structure (not just we humans but we who are alive). 

We disturb the tendency toward equilibrium.

It would be absurd to attempt a thermodynamic accounting for such processes, but it is not absurd to say we are reducing entropy, piece by piece. Bit by bit. The original demon, discerning one molecule at a time, distinguishing fast from slow, and operating his little gateway, is sometimes described as “superintelligent,” but compared to a real organism it is an idiot savant.

Not only do living things lessen the disorder in their environments; they are in themselves, their skeletons and their flesh, vesicles and membranes, shells and carapaces, leaves and blossoms, circulatory systems and metabolic pathways - miracles of pattern and structure. It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in the universe.


—James Gleick 
The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

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You must be ready to accept the possibility that there is a limitless range of awareness for which we now have no words; that awareness can expand beyond range of your ego, your self, your familiar identity, beyond everything you have learned, beyond your notions of space and time, beyond the differences which usually separate people from each other and from the world around them.


—Walter Evans-Wentz
The Tibetan Book of The Dead

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beauty is all where

 

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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

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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 

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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

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Know yourself to be the changeless witness of the changeful mind. That is enough. —Nisargadatta

Nik Wallenda nears the middle of his tightrope walk, 

1,800 feet across the mist-fogged brink of roaring Niagara Falls

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There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.


—William Stafford, treasure
26 days before death
The Way it Is, 1998

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On foot
I had to walk through the solar system
before I found the first thread of my red dress.
Already, I sense myself. 

Somewhere in space hangs my heart,
sparks fly from it, shaking the air, 
to other reckless hearts. 


—Edith Södergran (1892-1923)
Stina Katchadourian version

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i give you the end of a golden string, just wind it into a ball ... William Blake

 

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When you discover
your new work travels the ground you had traversed
decades ago, you wonder, panicked,
‘Have I outlived my vocation ? Said already
all that was mine too say ?’

There’s a remedy –
only one – for the paralysis seizing your throat to mute you,
numbing your hands: Remember the great ones, remember
Cezanne
doggedly sur le motif, his mountain
a tireless noonday angel he grappled like Jacob,
demanding reluctant blessing. Remember James rehearsing
over and over his theme, the loss
of innocence and the attainment
(not by separate note sounding its tone
until by accretion a chord resounds) of somber
understanding. Each life in art
goes forth to meet dragons that rise from their bloody scales
in cyclic rhythm: Know and forget, know and forget.
It’s not only
the passion for getting it right (though it’s that , too)
it’s the way
radiant epiphanies recur, recur,
consuming, pristine, unrecognized –
and remembrance dismays you. And then, look,
some reflection of light, some wing of shadow
is other, unvoiced. You can, you must
proceed.


—Denise Levertov
For Those Whom the Gods Love Less

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Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart. —William Wordsworth

 

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Everything that happens is the message:
you read an event and be one and wait,
like breasting a wave, all the while knowing
by living, though not knowing how to live.

Or workers built an antenna -- a dish
aimed at stars -- and they themselves are its message,
crawling in and out, being worlds that loom,
dot-dash, and sirens, and sustaining beams.

And sometimes no one is calling but we turn up
eye and ear -- suddenly we fall into
sound before it begins, the breathing
so still it waits there under the breath --

And then the green of leaves calls out, hills
where they wait or turn, clouds in their frenzied
stillness unfolding their careful words:
"Everything counts. The message is the world."


—William Stafford
A Message from Space
from The Worth of Local Things

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The idea of the unus mundus is founded on the assumption that the multiplicity of the empirical world rests on an underlying unity, which is to say that all of the different things in the world belong to one and the same field of potential. This very same underlying unity is what quantum theory is revealing to us.


—Paul Levy
Quantum Revelation

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Morning and afternoon are clasped together 

And North and South are an intrinsic couple 

And sun and rain a plural, like two lovers 

That walk away as one in the greenest body.


—Wallace Stevens
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction

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Dreams do not lack reality–they are real patterns of information. —Richard Doyle

    

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The idea of the unus mundus is founded on the assumption that the multiplicity of the empirical world rests on an underlying unity, which is to say that all of the different things in the world belong to one and the same field of potential. This very same underlying unity is what quantum theory is revealing to us.


—Paul Levy
Quantum Revelation

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The language we’ve inherited confuses (this). We say “my” body and “your” body and “his” body and “her” body, but it isn’t that way. 

[...] This Cartesian “Me,” this autonomous little homunculus who sits behind our eyeballs looking out through them in order to pass judgment on the affairs of the world, is just completely ridiculous. 

This self-appointed little editor of reality is just an impossible fiction that collapses the moment one examines it.
 

—Robert M. Pirsig
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, exerpts

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Everything that happens is the message:
you read an event and be one and wait,
like breasting a wave, all the while knowing
by living, though not knowing how to live.

Or workers built an antenna -- a dish
aimed at stars -- and they themselves are its message,
crawling in and out, being worlds that loom,
dot-dash, and sirens, and sustaining beams.

And sometimes no one is calling but we turn up
eye and ear -- suddenly we fall into
sound before it begins, the breathing
so still it waits there under the breath --

And then the green of leaves calls out, hills
where they wait or turn, clouds in their frenzied
stillness unfolding their careful words:
"Everything counts. The message is the world."


—William Stafford
A Message from Space
from The Worth of Local Things

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all things swim and glitter

 

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Where do we find ourselves? In a series of which we do not know the extremes, and believe that it has none. We wake and find ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight. But the Genius which, according to the old belief, stands at the door by which we enter, and gives us the lethe to drink, that we may tell no tales, mixed the cup too strongly, and we cannot shake off the lethargy now at noonday. 

Sleep lingers all our lifetime about our eyes, as night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir-tree. All things swim and glitter. Our life is not so much threatened as our perception. Ghostlike we glide through nature, and should not know our place again.

Did our birth fall in some fit of indigence and frugality in nature, that she was so sparing of her fire and so liberal of her earth, that it appears to us that we lack the affirmative principle, and though we have health and reason, yet we have no superfluity of spirit for new creation? We have enough to live and bring the year about, but not an ounce to impart or to invest. 

Ah that our Genius were a little more of a genius!


—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Essays: Second Series

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I glanced at her and took my glasses
off—they were still singing. They buzzed
like a locust on the coffee table and then
ceased. Her voice belled forth, and the
sunlight bent. I felt the ceiling arch, and
knew that nails up there took a new grip
on whatever they touched. "I am your own
way of looking at things," she said. "When
you allow me to live with you, every
glance at the world around you will be
a sort of salvation." And I took her hand.


—William Stafford
when i met my muse

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this everything dance

  

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Without stirring abroad,
one can know the whole world; 

Without looking out of the window
one can see the way of heaven. 

The further one goes the less one knows.


—Lao Tzu

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I like to live in the sound of water,
in the feel of mountain air. A sharp
reminder hits me: this world is still alive,
it stretches out there shivering toward its own
creation, and I'm part of it. Even my breathing

enters into this elaborate give-and-take,
this bowing to sun and moon, day or night,
winter, summer, storm, still - this tranquil
chaos that seems to be going somewhere.
This wilderness with a great peacefulness in it.
This motionless turmoil, this everything dance.


—William Stafford
Even in Quiet Places

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

    

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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

 

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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

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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

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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

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A Ritual To Read To Each Other

  

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If you don't know the kind of person I am 
and I don't know the kind of person you are 
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world 
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star. 

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind, 
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break 
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood 
storming out to play through the broken dyke. 

And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail, 
but if one wanders the circus won't find the park, 
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty 
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact. 

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy, 
a remote important region in all who talk: 
though we could fool each other, we should consider-- 
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark. 

For it is important that awake people be awake, 
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give--yes, no, or maybe-- should be clear: 
the darkness around us is deep.


—William Stafford

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the most courageous work

  

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Open the letter of the body’s life.

Inside the words, this body, your life, is a letter
to the king of the universe.

Go to a private place and open it and read to see if
the words are right. If they

are not, start another! And do not think it is easy to open
the body and read the secret

message. This is the most courageous work, not something
for children playing with knucklebones
in the dirt. Open to

the title page. Is what it says there the same as what you
have said it says? If

you are carrying a heavy sack, empty out the stones! Bring
only what should be given.


—Rumi

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Think in ways you've never thought before.
If the phone rings, think of it as carrying a message
Larger than anything you've ever heard,
Vaster than a hundred lines of Yeats.

Think that someone may bring a bear to your door,
Maybe wounded and deranged; or think that a moose
Has risen out of the lake, and he's carrying on his antlers
A child of your own whom you've never seen.

When someone knocks on the door,
Think that he's about
To give you something large: tell you you're forgiven,
Or that it's not necessary to work all the time,
Or that it's been decided that if you lie down no one will die.


—Robert Bly
Morning Poems

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Over these writings I bent my head.

Now you are considering them. If you

turn away I will look up: a bridge

that was there will be gone.

For the rest of your life I will stand here,

reaching across.

If these writings can bring a turn
or an echo that touches you - maybe
a face, a slant, a tune - you will stop
too and bend over them. When you
look up, your thought will reach
wherever I am.

I know it is strange. and there is no measure
for this. The only connection we make
is like a twinge when sometimes they change
the beat in music, and we sprawl with it
and hear another world for a minute
that is almost there.

—William Stafford
Sending These Messages

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on being a person here

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Be a person here. Stand by the river, invoke
the owls. Invoke winter, then spring.
Let any season that wants to come here make its own
call. After that sound goes away, wait.

A slow bubble rises through the earth
and begins to include sky, stars, all space,
even the outracing, expanding thought.
Come back and hear the little sound again.

Suddenly this dream you are having matches
everyone’s dream, and the result is the world.
If a different call came there wouldn’t be any
world, or you, or the river, or the owls calling.

How you stand here is important. How you listen for the next things to happen. How you breathe.


—William Stafford
Being a Person

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earth dweller

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It was all the clods at once become
precious; it was the barn, and the shed,
and the windmill, my hands, the crack
Arlie made in the ax handle: oh, let me stay
here humbly, forgotten, to rejoice in it all;
let the sun casually rise and set.

If I have not found the right place,
teach me; for, somewhere inside, the clods are
vaulted mansions, lines through the barn sing
for the saints forever, the shed and windmill
rear so glorious the sun shudders like a gong.

Now I know why people worship, carry around
magic emblems, wake up talking dreams
they teach to their children: the world speaks.
The world speaks everything to us.
It is our only friend.


—William Stafford

 

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All that lives is spirit and all that dies is matter; 

and all that dies in spirit is matter and all that lives in matter is spirit.

—Hazrat Inayat Khan

The Mysticism of Sound and Music

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yes

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It could happen any time, tornado,
earthquake, Armageddon. It could happen.
Or sunshine, love, salvation.

It could, you know. That's why we wake
and look out -- no guarantees
in this life.

But some bonuses, like morning,
like right now, like noon,
like evening.


—William Stafford

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if you live well

hero

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1. India

In India in their lives they happen
again and again, being people or
animals. And if you live well
your next time could be even better.

That's why they often look into your eyes
and you know some far-off story
with them and you in it, and some
animal waiting over at the side.

Who would want to happen just once?
It's too abrupt that way, and
when you're wrong, it's too late
to go back - you've done it forever.

And you can't have that soft look when you
pass, the way they do it in India.

2. Having It Be Tomorrow

Day, holding its lantern before it,
moves over the whole earth slowly
to brighten that edge and push it westward.
Shepherds on upland pastures begin fires
for breakfast, beads of light that extend
miles of horizon. Then it's noon and
coasting toward a new tomorrow.

If you're in on that secret, a new land
will come every time the sun goes
climbing over it, and the welcome of children
will remain every day new in your heart.
Those around you don't have it new,
and they shake their heads turning grey every
morning when the sun comes up. And you laugh.

3. Being Nice And Old

After their jobs are done old people
cackle together. They look back and shiver,
all of that was so dizzying when it happened;
and now if there is any light at all it
knows how to rest on the faces of friends.
And any people you don't like, you just turn
the page a little more and wait while they
find out what time is and begin to bend
lower; or you can turn away
and let them drop off the edge of the world.

4. Good Ways To Live

At night outside it all moves or
almost moves - trees, grass,
touches of wind. The room you have
in the world is ready to change.
Clouds parade by, and stars in their
configurations. Birds from far
touch the fabric around them - you can
feel their wings move. Somewhere under
the earth it waits, that emanation
of all things. It breathes. It pulls you
slowly out through doors or windows
and you spread in the thin halo of night mist.

—William Stafford
ways to live
written just over a month before William Stafford's death in August, 1993
hero

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everything that happens is the message

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Everything that happens is the message:
you read an event and be one and wait,
like breasting a wave, all the while knowing
by living, though not knowing how to live.

Or workers built an antenna -- a dish
aimed at stars -- and they themselves are its message,
crawling in and out, being worlds that loom,
dot-dash, and sirens, and sustaining beams.

And sometimes no one is calling but we turn up
eye and ear -- suddenly we fall into
sound before it begins, the breathing
so still it waits there under the breath --

And then the green of leaves calls out, hills
where they wait or turn, clouds in their frenzied
stillness unfolding their careful words:
"Everything counts. The message is the world."


—William Stafford
A Message from Space
from The Worth of Local Things

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assurance

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You will never be alone, you hear so deep
a sound when autumn comes. Yellow
pulls across the hills and thrums,
or in the silence after lightning before it says
its names — and then the clouds’ wide-mouthed apologies.

You were aimed from birth: you will never be alone.

Rain will come, a gutter filled, an Amazon,
long aisles — you never heard so deep a sound, moss on rock, and years. You turn your head —that’s what the silence meant: you’re not alone.

The whole wide world pours down.


—William Stafford

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starting with little things

  

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Start with little things.

Love the earth like a mole, 
fur-near. Nearsighted,
hold close the clods,
their fine-print headlines.
Pat them with soft hands --

Like spades, but pink and loving; they
break rock, nudge giants aside,
affable plow.

Fields are to touch;
each day nuzzle your way.

Tomorrow the world.


—William Stafford 
The Way It Is

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you and i

  

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Some time when the river is ice

ask me mistakes I have made.

Ask me whether what I have done is my life.

Others have come

in their slow way

into my thought,

and some have tried to help or to hurt:

ask me what difference

their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say.

You and I can turn and look 

at the silent river and wait.

We know the current is there, hidden;

and there are comings and goings from miles 

away

that hold the stillness exactly before us.

What the river says, that is what I say.

—William Stafford
ask me 

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ask me

 

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Hold me, don't hold me down
Carry me, but keep my feet on the ground

That storm is comin' down hard
I'm your shelter every time it starts
But if you leave me, I'll be movin' on
You'll have a hard time dryin' when the fire is gone

I'll hold ya, I won't hold you down, yeah, yeah
I'll carry ya, but keep your feet on the ground

You're the storm and I'm the Murray-Darling
You keep me goin' every time I'm dry
But if you leave me, I'll be movin' on (I'll live on)
But have a hard time runnin' when the weather is gone

Hold me, don't hold me down
Carry me, but keep my feet on the ground, yeah
I'll hold ya, I won't hold you down
I'll carry ya, but keep your feet on the ground

In so many ways
I just keep pulling
But you're pushing
Me away, me away

Hold me, don't hold me down
Carry me, but keep my feet on the ground
I'll hold ya, I won't hold you down
Carry ya, but keep your feet on the ground, yeah
Oh, hold me, don't hold me down
Love me, but don't let me drown

 

—The Teskey Brothers