the health of self-forgetfulness,
looking out at the sky through
a notch in the valley side,
the black woods wintry on
the hills, small clouds at sunset
passing across. And I know
that this is one of the thresholds
between Earth and Heaven,
from which even I may step
forth from my self and be free.
Wendell Berry
Work in the Invisible
The prophets have wondered to themselves, "How long
should we keep pounding
this cold iron? How long do we have to whisper into an
empty cage? Every motion
of created beings comes from the creator. The first soul
pushes, and your second
soul responds, beginning, so don't stay timid. Load the ship
and set out. No one knows
for certain whether the vessel will sink or reach the harbor.
Cautious people say, "I'll
do nothing until I can be sure." Merchants know better.
If you do nothing, you lose.
Don't be one of those merchants who won't risk the ocean!
This is much more important
than losing or making money. This is your connection to god!
You must set fire to have
Light. Trust means you're ready to risk what you currently
have. Think of your fear and
hope about your livelihood. They make you go to work
diligently every day. Now
consider what the prophets have done. Abraham wore fire
for an anklet. Moses spoke
to the sea. David molded iron. Solomon rode the wind.
Work in the invisible world
at least as hard as you do in the visible. Be companions
with the prophets even though
no one here will know that you are not even the helpers of
the quth, the abdals. You
can't imagine what profit will come! When one of those
generous ones invites you
into his fire, go quickly! Don't say, "But will it burn
me? Will it hurt?"
Rumi, (trans. By Coleman Barks)
Quth: a spiritual being, or function that can reside in a human or several humans, or in a moment. Abdals are helpers of the quth.
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridge to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water looking out
in different directions
back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you
in a culture up to its chin in shame
living in the stench it has chosen we are saying thank you
over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the back door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks that use us we are saying thank you
with the crooks in office with the rich and fashionable
unchanged we go on saying thank you thank you
with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us like the earth
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is
- W.S. MERWIN -
Some trees look down when
they walk, certain willows
you know, all the way from
Lousiana to Alaska without
looking up. They studied
centuries of buffalo grass
toward Dakota. I have
traveled among foreign
trees. Some of them kneel
when they approach mountains.
Like them I have learned quite
A bit about the ground.
William Stafford
This afternoon, let me
Be a sad person. Am I not
Permitted (like other men)
To be sick of myself?
Am I not allowed to be hollow,
Or fall in the hole
Or break my bones (within me)
In the trap set by my own
Lie to myself? O my friend,
I too must sin and sin.
I too must hurt other people and
(Since I am no exception)
I must be hated by them.
Do not forbid me, therefore,
To taste the same bitter poison,
And drink the gall that love
(Love most of all) so easily becomes.
Do not forbid me (once again) to be
Angry, bitter, disillusioned,
Wishing I could die.
While life and death
Are killing one another in my flesh
Leave me in peace. I can enjoy,
Even as other men, this agony.
Only (whoever you may be)
Pray for my soul. Speak my name
To Him, for in my bitterness
I hardly speak to Him: and He
While He is busy killing me
Refuses to listen.
Thomas Merton
It is at last any morning
not answering to a name
I wake before there is light
hearing once more that same
music without repetition
or beginning playing
away into itself
in silence like a wave
a unison in its own
key that I seem
to have heard before I
was listening but by the time
I hear it now it is gone
as when on a morning
alive with sunlight
almost at the year's end
a feathered breath a bird
flies in at the open window
then vanishes leaving me
believing what I do not see
W. S. Merwin
The heart's reasons
seen clearly,
even the hardest
will carry
its whip-marks and sadness
and must be forgiven.
As the drought-starved
eland forgives
the drought-starved lion
who finally takes her,
enters willingly then
the life she cannot refuse,
and is lion, is fed,
and does not remember the other.
So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance.
The world asks of us
only the strength we have and we give it.
Then it asks more, and we give it.
Jane Hirshfield
Don't wait to start living. Live now! Your life should be real in this very moment…You can live every moment of every day deeply, in touch with the wonders of life. Then you will learn to live, and, at the same time, learn to die. A person who does not know how to die does not know how to live, and vice versa. You should learn to die—to die immediately.
Thich Nhat Hanh, Vietnamese Zen master, scholar, author, poet, and peace activist, b. 1926
When you were living
and it was later than we knew
there was an old orchard
far up on the hill behind the house
dark apple trees wrapped in moss
standing deep in thorn bushes and wild grape
cobwebs breathing between the branches
memory lingering in silence
the spring earth fragrant with other seasons
crows conferred in those boughs and sailed on
chickadees talked of the place as their own
there were still kinglets and bluebirds
and the nuthatch following the folded bark
the churr of one wren a dark shooting star
with all that each of them knew then
but whoever had planted those trees
straightening now and again over the spade
to stand looking out across the curled
gleaming valley to the far grey ridges
one autumn after the leaves had fallen
while the morning frost still slept in the hollows
had been buried somewhere far from there
and those who had known him and his family
were completely forgotten you told me
and you said you had never been up there
though it was a place where you
loved to watch the daylight changing
and we looked up and watched the daylight there
W. S. Merwin
So we're dust. In the meantime, my wife and I
make the bed. Holding opposite edges of the sheet,
we raise it billowing, then pull it tight,
measuring by eye as it falls into alignment
between us. We tug, fold, tuck. And if I'm lucky
she'll remember a recent dream and tell me.
One day we'll lie down and not get up.
One day, all we guard will be surrendered.
Until then, we'll go on learning to recognize
what we love and what it takes
to tend what isn't for our having.
So often, fear has led me
to abandon what I know I must relinquish
in time. But for the moment,
I'll listen to her dream,
and she to mine, our mutual hearing calling
more and more detail into the light
of a joint and fragile keeping.
Li-Young Lee
I climb these hills as if walking on air
body too light to fall
bamboo staff resting against a great stone
torn cloak snapping in the wind
a lone bird soars the azure depths
far distant springs reflected in its eye
carefree, singing a timeless song
gone—on a journey without end
Shih – Shu (trans. By James H. Sanford)
Relaxing with the present moment, relaxing with hopelessness, relaxing with death, not resisting the fact that things end, that things pass, that things have no lasting substance, that everything is changing all the time – that is the basic message.
Pema Chodron
The Mower
The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
Killed. It had been in the long grass.
I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
Unmendably. Burial was no help:
Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful
Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.
Philip Larkin
Long before daybreak
none of the birds yet awake
rain comes down with the sound
of a huge wind rushing
through the valley trees
it comes down around us
all at the same time
and beyond it there is nothing
it falls without hearing itself
without knowing
there is anyone here
without seeing where it is
or where it is going
like a moment of great
happiness of our own
that we cannot remember
coasting with the lights off
W. S. Merwin
WE ARE FIELDS BEFORE EACH OTHER
How is it they live for eons in such harmony -
the billions of stars -
when most men can barely go a minute
without declaring war in their mind against someone they know.
There are wars where no one marches with a flag,
though that does not keep casualties
from mounting.
Our hearts irrigate this earth.
We are fields before
each other.
How can we live in harmony?
First we need to
know
we are all madly in love
with the same
God.
~ St. Thomas Aquinas ~
(Love Poems From God: Twelve Sacred Voices from the East and West by Daniel Ladinsky)
Just think of the tragedy of teaching children not to doubt.
-Clarence Darrow, lawyer and author (1857-1938)
All day the stars watch from long ago
my mother said I am going now
when you are alone you will be all right
whether or not you know you will know
look at the old house in the dawn rain
all the flowers are forms of water
the sun reminds them through a white cloud
touches the patchwork spread on the hill
the washed colors of the afterlife
that lived there long before you were born
see how they wake without a question
even thought the whole world is burning
W. S. Merwin
the river, appearing above the trees
on one side, disappearing beyond
the trees on the other side. The flock
undulates in passage beneath the opening
of white sky that seems no wider
than the river. It is mid-August.
The year is changing. The summer's young
are grown and strong in flight. Soon now
it will be fall. The frost will come.
To one who has watched here many years,
all of this is familiar. And yet
none of it has ever happened
before as it is happening now.
Wendell Berry
We are reformers in spring and summer; in autumn and winter we stand by the old -- reformers in the morning, conservatives at night. Reform is affirmative, conservatism is negative; conservatism goes for comfort, reform for truth.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer and philosopher (1803-1882)
The Water in the Water
I should like my life
To fall into death
Like this tall stream of lovely water,
In the supine water of the morning,
Rippling brilliant, sensual, joyful,
With all of the world dissolved in it
In gay and shining grace.
Juan Ramon Jiminez (trans. by H. R. Hayes)
The alphabet of
the trees
is fading in the
song of the leaves
the crossing
bars of thin
letters that spelled
Winter
and the cold
have been illumined
with
pointed green
by the rain and sun—
The strict simple
principle of
straight branches
are being modified
by pinched-out
ifs of color, devout
conditions
the smiles of love—
. . . . . .
until the stript
sentences
move as a woman's
limbs under cloth
and praise from secrecy
quick with desire
love's ascendency
in summer—
In summer the song
sings itself
above the muffled words—
William Carlos Williams
Let go of emptiness and come back to the brambly forest.
Riding backward on the ox, drunken and singing;
Who could dislike the misty rain pattering on your bamboo raincoat and
hat?
In empty space you cannot stick a needle.
Hongzhi Zhengjue (1091-1157)
(Trans. By Taigen Dan Leighton and Yi Wu)
"Why hello, say, can I buy you another glass of beer?"
"Well thanks a lot, that's kind of you, it's nice to know you care.
These days there's so much going on,
No one seems to want to know.
I may be just an old soldier to some
But I know how it feels to grow old.
Yeah, that's right, you can see me here most every night.
You'll always see me staring at the walls and at the lights.
Funny, I remember, oh it's years ago, I'd say,
I'd stand at that bar with my friends who've passed away
And drink three times the beer that I can drink today.
Yes I know how it feels to grow old.
I know what they're saying, son,
There goes old mad Joe again.
Well, I may be mad at that. I've seen enough
To make a man go out his brains.
Well, do they know what it's like
To have a graveyard as a friend?
`Cause that's where they are boy, all of them.
Don't seem likely I'll get friends like that again."
"Well, it's time I moved off,
But it's been great just listening to you,
And I might even see you next time I'm passing through.
You're right, there's so much going on
No one seems to want to know.
So keep well, keep well old friend
And have another drink on me.
Just ignore all the others. You got your memories.
You got your memories."
Bernie Taupin
Thus Spake the Mockingbird
The mockingbird says, Hallelujah, coreopsis, I make the day
bright, I wake the night-booming jasmine. I am
the duodecimo of desperate love, the hocus-pocus passion
flower of delirious retribution. You never saw such a bird,
such a triage of blood and feathers, tongue and bone. O the world
is a sad address, bitterness melting the tongues of babies,
breasts full of accidental milk, but I can teach the flowers to grow,
take their tight buds, unfurl them like flags in the morning heat,
fat banners of scent, flat platters of riot on the emerald scene.
I am the green god of pine trees, conducting the music
of rustling needle through a harp of wind. I am the heart of men,
the wild bird that drives their sex, forges their engines,
jimmies their shattered locks in the dark flare where midnight slinks.
I am the careless minx in the skirts of women, the bright moon
caressing their hair, the sharp words pouring from their beautiful mouths
in board rooms, on bar stools, in big city laundrettes. I am
Lester Young's sidewinding sax, sending that Pony Express
message out west in the Marconi tube hidden in every torso
tied tight in the corset of do and don't, high and low, yes and no. I am
the radio, first god of the twentieth century, broadcasting
the news, the blues, the death counts, the mothers wailing
when everyone's gone home. I am sweeping
through the Eustachian tube of the great plains, transmitting
through every ear of corn, shimmying down the spine
of every Bible-thumping banker and bureaucrat, relaying the anointed
word of the shimmering world. Every dirty foot that walks
the broken streets moves on my wings. I speak from the golden
screens. Hear the roar of my discord murdering the trees,
screaming its furious rag, the fuselage of my revival-tent brag. Open
your windows, slip on your castanets. I am the flamenco
in the heel of desire. I am the dancer. I am the choir. Hear my wild
throat crowd the exploding sky. O I can make a noise.
Barbara Hamby
He sings in his father's arms, sings his father
to sleep, all the while seeing how on that face
grown suddenly strange, wasting to shadow,
time moves. Stern time. Sweet time. Because his father
asked, he sings; because they are wholly lost.
How else, in immaculate noon, will each find
each, who are so close now? So close and lost.
His voice stands at windows, runs everywhere.
Was death giant? O, how will he find his
father? They are so close. Was death a guest?
By which door did it come? All the day's doors
Are closed. He must go out of those hours, that house,
The enfolding limbs, go burdened to learn;
You must sing to be found; when found, you must sing.
Li-Young Lee
There is no need for temples, no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.
-Dalai Lama
On branch tips the hibiscus bloom.
The mountains sho off red calices.
Nobody. a silent cottage in the valley.
One by one flowers open, then fall.
Wang Wei (trans. by Tony and Willis Barnstone and Xu Haixin)
Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and
he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it.
-Henry David Thoreau, naturalist and author (1817-1862)
My shoulder is against yours.
You will not find me in stupas, not in Indian shrine
rooms nor in synagogues, nor in cathedrals:
not in masses, nor kirtans, not in legs winding
around your own neck, nor in eating nothing but
vegetables.
When you really look for me you will see me
instantly—
you will find me in the tiniest house of time.
Kabir says: Student tell me, what is God?
He is the breath inside the breath.
Kabir: version by Robert Bly (The Kabir Book)
in our own lives that drives us
half insane and more than half.
To destroy that which we were given
in trust: how will we bear it?
It is our own bodies that we give
to be broken, our bodies
existing before and after us
in clod and cloud, worm and tree,
that we, driving or driven, despise
in our greed to live, our haste
to die. To have lost wantonly
the ancient forests, the vast grasslands
is our madness, the presence
in our very bodies of our grief.
Wendell Berry
Myth: we have to save the earth. Frankly, the earth doesn't need to be saved. Nature doesn't give a hoot if human beings are here or not. The planet has survived cataclysmic and catastrophic changes for millions upon millions of years. Over that time, it is widely believed, 99 percent of all species have come and gone while the planet has remained. Saving the environment is really about saving our environment - making it safe for ourselves, our children, and the world as we know it. If more people saw the issue as one of saving themselves, we would probably see increased motivation and commitment to actually do so.
-Robert M. Lilienfeld, management consultant and author (b. 1953) and William L. Rathje, archaeologist and author (b. 1945)
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
Fair daffodils, we weep to see
You haste away so soon;
As yet the early-rising sun
Has not attained his noon.
Stay, stay
Until the hasting day
Has run
But to the evensong;
And, having prayed together, we
Will go with you along.
We have short time to stay as you,
We have as short a spring;
As quick a growth to meet decay,
As you, or anything.
We die
As your hours do, and dry
Away
Like to the summer's rain;
Or as the pearls of morning's dew,
Ne'er to be found again.
Robert Herrick
The earth says have a place, be what that place
requires; hear the sound the birds imply
and see as deep as ridges go behind
each other. (Some people call their scenery flat,
their only picture framed by what they know:
I think around them rise a riches and a loss
too equal for their chart – but absolutely tall.)
The earth says every summer have a ranch
that's minimum: one tree, one well, a landscape
that proclaims a universe – sermon
of the hills, hallelujah mountain,
highway guided by the way the world is tilted,
reduplication of mirage, flat evening:
a kind of ritual for the wavering.
The earth says where you live wear the kind
of color that your life is (gray shirt for me)
and by listening with the same bowed head that sings
draw all songs into one song, join
the sparrow on the lawn, and row that easy
way, the rage without met by the wings
within that guide you anywhere the wind blows.
Listening, I think that's what the earth says.
William Stafford
This week a poem from one in our group:
Credo
What is greatness
if not the shedding
of lesser stuff,
if not the daring
to be alone
Content simply
to play,
fool around
with divine mischief?
A burst here
a sigh there
scribbleing
slow and fast
and lingering
long enough
for all
to join the fun,
the wonder
Nancy Knowles
from Syzygy (2005)
Some People
Some people
ascend out of our life, some people
enter our life,
uninvited and sit down,
some people
calmly walk by, some people
give you a rose,
or buy you a new car,
some people
stand so close to you, some people,
you've entirely forgotten
some people, some people
are actually you,
some people
you've never seen at all, some people
eat asparagus, some people
are children,
some people climb up on the roof,
sit down at table,
lie around in hammocks, take walks with their red
umbrella,
some people look at you,
some people have never noticed you at all, some people
want to take your hand, some people
die during the night,
some people are other people, some people are you, some people
don't exist,
some people do.
It is early morning and death has forgotten us for
A while. Darkness owns the house but I am alive.
I am ready to praise all the great musicians.
Whatever happens to me will also happen to you.
Surely you must have realized this from hearing
The way the strings cry out no matter who hits them.
From the great oak trees in the yard in October
Leaves fall for hours each day. Every night
A thousand wrinkled faces look up at the stars.
Still we know that at any second the soul can stand
Up and start across the desert, as when Rabia ended up
Riding on a resurrected donkey toward the Meeting.
It is this reaching toward the Kaaba that keeps us glad.
It is this way of hiding inside a drop of water
That lets the hidden face become visible to everyone.
Gautama said that when the Great Ferris Wheel
Stops turning you will still be way up
There swinging in your seat and laughing.
Robert Bly
Cowardice asks the question, 'Is it safe?' Expediency asks the question, 'Is it politic?' Vanity asks the question, 'Is it popular?' But, conscience asks the question, 'Is it right?' And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular but one must take it because one's conscience tells one that it is right.
-Martin Luther King, Jr.
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 ~
Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?
-Abraham Lincoln, 16th US president (1809-1865)
Love Poem with Toast
Some of what we do, we do
to make things happen,
the alarm to wake us up, the coffee to perc,
the car to start.
The rest of what we do, we do
trying to keep something from doing something
the skin from aging, the hoe from rusting,
the truth from getting out.
With yes and no like the poles of a battery
powering our passage through the days,
we move, as we call it, forward,
wanting to be wanted,
wanting not to lose the rain forest,
wanting the water to boil,
wanting not to have cancer,
wanting to be home by dark,
wanting not to run out of gas,
as each of us wants the other
watching at the end,
as both want not to leave the other alone,
as wanting to love beyond this meat and bone,
we gaze across breakfast and pretend.
Miller Williams
Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws.
-Amschel Mayer Rothschild, banker (1743-1812)
The price we pay for money is paid in liberty.
-Robert Louis Stevenson, novelist, essayist, and poet (1850-1894)
We're still in Babylon but
We do not weep
Why should we weep?
We have forgotten
How to weep
We've sold our harps
And bought ourselves machines
That do our singing for us
And who remembers now
The songs we sang in Zion?
We have got used to exile
We hardly notice
Our captivity
For some of us
There are such comforts here
Such luxuries
Even a guard
To keep the beggars
From annoying us
Jerusalem
We have forgotten you.
Anne Porter
We're still in Babylon but
We do not weep
Why should we weep?
We have forgotten
How to weep
We've sold our harps
And bought ourselves machines
That do our singing for us
And who remembers now
The songs we sang in Zion?
We have got used to exile
We hardly notice
Our captivity
For some of us
There are such comforts here
Such luxuries
Even a guard
To keep the beggars
From annoying us
Jerusalem
We have forgotten you.
Anne Porter
No one can earn a million dollars honestly.
William Jennings Bryan
In the dark of the moon, in flying snow, in the dead of winter,
war spreading, families dying, the world in danger,
I walk the rocky hillside sowing clover.
Wendell Berry
Carl Jung
Give Us Our Peace
Give us a peace equal to the war
Or else our souls will be unsatisfied,
And we will wonder what we have fought for
And why the many died.
Give us a peace accepting every challenge—
The challenge of the poor, the black, of all denied,
The challenge of the vast colonial world
That long has had so little justice by its side.
Give us a peace that dares us to be wise.
Give us a peace that dares us to be strong.
Give us a peace that dares us to still uphold
Throughout the peace our battle against wrong.
Give us a peace that is not cheaply used,
A peace that is no clever scheme,
A people's peace for which men can enthuse,
A peace that brings reality to our dream.
Give us a peace that will produce great schools—
As the war produced great armament,
A peace that will wipe out our slums—
As war wiped out our foes on evil bent.
Give us a peace that will enlist
A mighty army serving human kind,
Not just an army geared to kill,
But trained to help the living mind
An army trained to shape our common good
And bring about a world of brotherhood.
Langton Hughes
We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.
- Martin Luther King Jr., "Remaining Awake Through A Great Revolution", 3.31.68
Speech from a Play
The reason you cannot say anything is you were not there.
No one knows. No one was there...
I heard his voice while they were taking him away.
And after he was gone, I could remember it.
The people around me now will never hear it.
There is nothing anyone can do against the voice.
It is the person with you in a room. All with you.
No one knows how much.
Arrest me-- I hear it now...
William Stafford
War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today. John F. Kennedy, 35th US president (1917-1963)
Beannacht
("Blessing")
On the day when
the weight deadens
on your shoulders
and you stumble,
may the clay dance
to balance you.
And when your eyes
freeze behind
the grey window
and the ghost of loss
gets in to you,
may a flock of colours,
indigo, red, green,
and azure blue
come to awaken in you
a meadow of delight.
When the canvas frays
in the currach of thought
and a stain of ocean
blackens beneath you,
may there come across the waters
a path of yellow moonlight
to bring you safely home.
May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
may the clarity of light be yours,
may the fluency of the ocean be yours,
may the protection of the ancestors be yours.
And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mind your life.
~ John O'Donohue ~
