The Simple Purification
Student, do the simple purification.
You know that the seed is inside the horse-chestnut tree,
and inside the seed there are the horse-chestnut blossoms, and
the chestnuts, and the shade.
So inside the human body there is the seed, and inside the seed
there is the human body again.
Fire, air, earth, water, and space - if you don't want the
secret
one,
you can't have these either.
Thinkers, listen, tell me what you know of that is not
inside
the soul?
Take a pitcher full of water and set it down on the water -
now it has water inside and water outside.
We mustn't give it a name, lest silly people start talking
again about the body and the soul.
If you want the truth, I'll tell you the truth:
Listen to the secret sound, the real sound, which is inside you.
The one no one talks of speaks the secret sound to himself,
and he's the one who has made it all.
--Kabir, version by Robert Bly, from News of the Universe,
poems of twofold consciousness
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The Holy Relationship
Those who have joined their brothers
have detached themselves from their belief
that their identity lies in the ego.
A holy relationship is one in which you join
with what is a part of you in truth.
An unholy relationship is based on differences,
where each one thinks
the other has what he has not...
A holy relationship starts from a different premise.
Each one has looked within and seen no lack.
Accepting his completion, he would extend it
by joining with another, whole as himself.
He sees no difference between these selves,
for differences are only of the body.
You cannot know your own perfection
until you have honored
all those who were created like you.
When you have become willing to hide nothing,
you will not only be willing to enter into communion,
but will also understand peace and joy.
When you accepted truth
as the goal for your relationship,
you became a giver of peace.
No illusion can disturb the peace
of a relationship that has become the means of peace.
In your relationship is the world's light.
Alone we can do nothing,
but together our minds fuse into something
whose power is far beyond
the power of its separate parts.
-- Accept This Gift, Selections from A Course in
Miracles, edited by Frances Vaughan, Ph.D., and Roger Walsh, M.D., Ph.D.
-------
From the Prophet
And then a scholar said, Speak of Talking.
And he answered, saying
You talk when you cease to be at peace
with your thoughts;
And when you can no longer dwell in the
solitude of your heart you live in your lips,
and sound is a diversion and a pastime.
And in much of your talking, thinking
is half murdered.
For thought is a bird of space, that in a
cage of words may indeed unfold its wings
but cannot fly.
There are those among you who seek the
talkative through fear of being alone.
The silence of aloneness reveals to their
eyes their naked selves and they would escape.
And there are those who talk, and without
knowledge or forethought reveal a truth
which they themselves do not understand.
And there are those who have the truth
within them, but they tell it not in words.
In the bosom of such as these the spirit
dwells in rhythmic silence.
When you meet your friend on the roadside
or in the market place, let the spirit in
you move your lips and direct your tongue.
Let the voice within your voice speak to
the ear of his ear;
For his soul will keep the truth of your
heart as the taste of the wine is remembered
When the colour is forgotten and the
vessel is no more.
--Kahlil Gibran
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Waking up this morning, I smile,
Twenty four brand new hours are before me.
I vow to live fully in each moment
and to look at all beings with eyes of compassion.
--Thich Nhat Hanh
-------
The sunbeams stream forward, dawn boys,
with shimmering shoes of yellow.
--Mescalero Apache Song
-------
The breezes at dawn have secrets to tell you.
Don't go back to sleep!
You must ask for what you really want.
Don't go back to sleep!
People are going back and forth
Across the doorsill where the two worlds touch,
The door is round and open.
Don't go back to sleep!
--Rumi
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You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
--Mary Oliver
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At night make me one with darkness
In the morning make me one with the light.
--Wendell Berry
-------
What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone,
in the forest, at night, cherished by this
wonderful, unintelligible, perfectly innocent speech,
the most comforting speech in the world,
the talk that rain makes by itself all over the ridges,
and the talk of the watercourses everywhere in the hollows!
Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it.
It will talk as long as it wants, this rain.
As long as it talks I am going to listen.
--Thomas Merton
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The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools,
but the gentle touches of air and
water working at their leisure
with a liberal allowance of time.
--Henry David Thoreau
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Magic
From indescribable transformational flash
such creations--: Feel! and trust!
We suffer it often: flames become ash;
yet, in art: flames come from dust.
Here is magic. In the realm of a spell
the common word seems lifted up above...
and yet is really like the call of the male
who calls for the invisible female dove.
-- August, 1924
We are not to know why
this and that masters us;
real life makes no reply,
only that it enraptures us
makes us familiar with it.
-- May, 1924
Life and death: they are one, at core entwined.
Who understands himself from his own strain
presses himself into a drop of wine
and throws himself into the purest flame.
-- Christmas, 1922
Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke on Love and Other
Difficulties
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Seeing You Carry Plants In
How much I love you. The night is moist.
The air is still, as when I love you.
It is not every evening that I love you.
I come back like the stars, sometimes out of clouds.
The night is moist, and nourishing as your mind
that lets everything around you live.
I saw you carry the plants inside tonight
over the grass, to save them from the cold.
Sometimes I slip behind a door, so that
I will not be called on, or walk
hunched on sandbars below earth, not sure
if anyone in my family can love.
Your voice is water open beneath stars,
collected from abundant rain, gone to low places.
The night is moist, the ground wet,
air still, trees silent, and tonight I love you.
-- Robert Bly, Loving a Woman in Two Worlds
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Why should we two ever want to part?
Just as the leaf of the water rhubarb lives floating on
the water,
we live as the great one and little one.
As the owl opens his eyes all night to the moon,
we live as the great one and little one.
This love between us goes back to the first humans;
it cannot be annihilated.
Here is Kabir's idea: as the river gives itself into the
ocean,
what is inside me moves inside you.
~~~~~
Don't go outside your house to see flowers.
My friend, don't bother with that excursion.
Inside your body there are flowers.
One flower has a thousand petals.
That will do for a place to sit.
Sitting there you will have a glimpse of beauty
inside the body and out of it,
before gardens and after gardens.
--Kabir, The Kabir Book, Versions by Robert Bly
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the mississippi river enters into the
gulf
and the gulf enters the sea and so
forth,
none of them emptying anything,
all of them carrying yesterday
forever on their white tipped backs,
all of them dragging forward tomorrow.
it is the great circulation
of the earth's body, like the blood
of the gods, this river in which the past
is always flowing, every water
is the same water coming round.
everyday someone is standing on the edge
of this river staring into time,
whispering mistakenly:
only here, only now.
--Lucille Clifton
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Birdsong brings relief
to my longing.
I am just as ecstatic as they are,
but with nothing to say!
Please, universal soul, practice
some song, or something, through me!
~~~
The way of love is not
a subtle argument.
The door there
is devastation.
Birds make great sky-circles
of their freedom.
How do they learn it?
They fall, and falling,
they're given wings.
~~~
Stars burn clear
all night till dawn.
Do that yourself, and a spring
will rise in the dark with water
your deepest thirst is for.
- Rumi, Birdsong, translated by Coleman Barks
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When the Ripe Fruit Falls
When the ripe fruit falls
its sweetness distils and trickles away into the veins of the
earth.
When fulfilled people die
the essential oil of their experience enters
the veins of living space, and adds a glisten
to the atom, to the body of immortal chaos.
For space is alive
and it stirs like a swan
whose feathers glisten
silky with oil of distilled experience.
-- D.H. Lawrence
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The Marriage
May these vows and this marriage be
blessed.
May it be sweet milk,
this marriage, like wine and halvah.
May this marriage offer fruit and shade
like the date palm.
May this marriage be full of laughter,
our every day a day in paradise.
May this marriage be a sign of compassion,
a seal of happiness here and hereafter.
May this marriage have a fair face and a good name,
an omen as welcome
as the moon in a clear blue sky.
I am out of words to descibe
how spirit mingles in this marriage.
-- Rumi
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If you want to shrink something,
You must first allow it to expand.
If you want to get rid of something,
You must first allow it to flourish.
If you want to take something,
You must first allow it to be given.
This is called the subtle perception
of the way things are.
-- from the Tao Te Ching, translated by Stephen Mitchell
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The Peace of Wild Things
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
-- Wendell Berry
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As a newborn babe I crawl from my mother's womb
And stand on wobbly legs in the new world,
Wash the new body that has just been
So tenderly born from a lifetime labor,
And walk to stand before the fire.
I raise my face to your infinite sky
And feel your touch of grace:
Your gentle raindrops kissing my skin,
Your singing wind that moves the trees,
The hot breath of your dancing fire.
Your wet, rich earth beneath my feet.
O Spirit, I recognize you now:
My father, my mother, my unseen lover--
You've been here always in all things;
In all things has your spirit lived for me,
From all things has your spirit loved me.
Through all things has your spirit touched me.
And never was I left alone, nor could I be
In this truer world of holy people
And living stone.
-- Rochelle Wallace, Earth Prayers
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The Snow Storm
Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,
Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields,
Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air
Hides hills and woods, the river, and the heaven,
And veils the farmhouse at the garden's end.
The sled and traveler stopped, the courier's feet
Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit
Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed
In a tumultuous privacy of storm.
Come see the north wind's masonry.
Out of an unseen quarry evermore
Furnished with tile, the fierce artificer
Curves his white bastions with projected roof
Round every windward stake, or tree, or door.
Speeding, the myriad-handed, his wild work
So fanciful, so savage, nought cares he
For number or proportion. Mockingly,
On coup or kennel hangs Parian wreaths;
A swan-like form invests the hidden throne;
Fills up the farmer's lane from wall to wall,
Maugre the farmer's sighs; and at the gate
A tapering turret overtops the work.
And when his hours are numbered, and the world
Is all his own, retiring, as he were not,
Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art
To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone,
Built in an age, the made wind's night-work,
The frolic architecture of the snow.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
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You shall be free indeed
not when your days are
without a care nor your nights
without a want and a grief,
but rather when these things
girdle your life and
yet you rise above them
naked and unbound.
--Kahlil Gibran
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Let's Not Waste Time
If the sea is infinite and has nets,
if its music comes from the wave,
if the dawn is red and the sunset green,
if the forest is lust and the moon a caress,
if the rose opens and perfumes the house,
if the girl laughs and perfumes life,
if love comes and kisses me and leaves me trembling,
What does it matter,
while in my neighborhood there's a table without legs,
a child with no shoes or a bookkeeper coughing,
a banquet of potato peels,
a concert of dogs,
an opera of scabs.....
We need to become worried enough to cure the seeds,
bandage the hearts and write the poem
that will infect everyone.
And create the sentence which will embrace the whole world,
poets must smash swords,
must invent more colors and write Paternosters.
Letting laughter stay in the mouths of the tunnel,
not tell what's intimate, but sing in a choir,
not sing to the moon, not sing to the bride,
not write poems with ten-line stanzas, not fabricate sonnets,
Because we know how, we must yell at the mighty,
shout what I'm saying, that there are enough who live
howling under tin roofs with only what they have on their backs,
and mothers who don't comb their children's hair every day,
and fathers who wake up early and don't go to the theatre.
To clothe the humble placing our poems on their shoulders,
it's right to sing to the one who has no song and help him.
To kill usurers and with a rare patience convince them without
disgust,
To thresh in the fields, go down into a mine,
to be a diver for a week, visiting nursing homes,
jails, ruins, play with tiny children,
dance in the leprosaria.
Poets, let's not waste time, let's work,
because very little blood is reaching the heart.
--Gloria Fuertes from Anthology and Poems of the Slum,
1954
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RUMI
Thorn Witness
Apparent shapes and meanings change.
Creature hunts down creature. Bales
get unloaded and weighed to determine
price. None of any of this pertains
to the unseen fire we call the Beloved.
That presence has no form, and cannot
be understood or measured. Take
your hands away from your face. If
a wall of dust moves across the plain,
there's usually an army advancing
under it. When you look for the Friend,
the Friend is looking for you. Carried
by a strong current, you and the others
with you seem to be making decisions,
but you're not. I weave coarse wool.
I decide to talk less. But my actions
cause nothing. A thorn grows next to
the rose as its witness. I am that
thorn for whom simply to be is an act
of praise. Near the rose, no shame.
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PABLO NERUDA
If You Forget Me
I want you to know
one thing.
You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash or the wrinkled body of the log,
evertyhing carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.
Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.
If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.
If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.
But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on you love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.
~~~
I do not love you - - - except because I love you;
I go from loving to not loving you,
from waiting to not waiting for you
my heart moves from the cold into
the fire. I love you only because it's you
I love; I hate you no end, and hating you
bend to you, and the measure of my changing love for you
is that I do not see you but love you.
blindly. Maybe the January light will consume
my heart with its cruel
ray, stealing my key to true
calm. In this part of the story I am the one who
dies, the only one, and I will die of love because I love you,
because I love you, Love, in fire and in blood.
-------
e.e. cummings
being to timelessness as it's to time,
love did no more begin than love will end:
where nothing is to breathe to stroll to swim
love is the air the ocean and the land
(do lovers suffer?all divinities
proudly descending put on deathful flesh:
are lovers glad?only their smallest joy's
a universe emerging from a wish)
love is the voice under all silences,
the hope which has no opposite in fear:
the strength so strong mere force is feebleness:
the truth more first than sun more last than star
- -do lovers love?why then to heaven with hell.
whatever sages say and fools,all's well
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NANCY WOOD
Solitude
Do not be afraid to embrace the arms
of loneliness.
Do not be concerned with the thorns
of solitude.
Why worry that you will miss something?
Learn to be at home with yourself
without a hand to hold.
Learn to endure isolation
with only the stars for friends.
Happiness,
comes from understanding unity,
Love
arrives on the footprints of your fear.
Beauty
arises from the ashes of despair.
Solitude
brings the clarity of still waters.
Wisdom
completes the circle of your dreams.
~~~
Dream Ravens
Ravens of my dreams,
Cure the anger in my heart.
Ravens of my indecision,
Make straight the path before me.
Ravens of my memory,
Let your song come unto me.
As my brothers fly above the earth
So must I leave my importance behind,
As my sisters sing the songs of rejoicing
So must I find a courageous voice.
Ravens, let there be peace among us.
May we fly as one idea.
Ravens, give memory to my dreams
So that I may hear the voices
Of my ancestors telling me
That all the world is changing
And my fears will turn to leaves.
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There is something
that contains everything.
Before heaven and earth
it is.
Oh, it is still, unbodied,
all on its own, unchanging.
all-pervading,
ever-moving.
Sot it can act as the mother
of all things.
not knowing its real name,
we only call it the Way.
If it must be named
let its name be Great.
Greatness means going on,
going on means going far,
and going far means turning back.
So they say: "The Way is great,
heaven is great,
earth is great,
and humankind is great;
four greatnesses in the world,
and humanity is one of the."
People follow the earth,
earth follows heaven,
heaven follows the Way,
the Way follows what is.
-- from LAO TZU TAO TE CHING
-------
ROBERT FROST
T
he Road Not
Taken
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I --
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
~~~
Fire and Ice
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
-------
D. H. LAWRENCE
Search for Love
Those that go searching for love
only make manifest their own lovelessness,
and the loveless never find love,
only the loving find love,
and they never have to seek for it.
~~~
We Are Transmitters
As we live, we are transmitters of life.
And when we fail to transmit life, life fails to flow through us.
That is part of the mystery of sex, it is a flow onwards.
Sexless people transmit nothing.
And if, as we work, we can transmit life into our work,
life, still more life, rushes in to compensate, to be ready
and we ripple with life through the days.
Even if it is a woman making an apple dumpling, or a man a
stool,
if life goes into the pudding, good is the pudding,
good is the stool,
content is the woman, with fresh life rippling in to her,
content is the man.
Give, and it shall be given unto you
is still the truth about life.
But giving life is not so easy.
It doesn't mean handing it out to some mean fool, or letting the living dead eat you
up.
It means kindling the life-quality where it was not,
even if it's only the whiteness of a washed pocket handkerchief.
~~~
The Deepest Sensuality
The profoundest of all sensualities
is the sense of truth
and the next deepest sensual experience
is the sense of justice.
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