the dailiness of life

I saw old Autumn in the misty morn
Stand shadowless like silence,
Listening
to silence.
- Thomas Hood



"There is a language older by far and deeper than words. It is the language of bodies, of body on body, wind on snow, rain on trees, wave on stone. It is the language of dream, gesture, symbol, memory. We have forgotten this language. We do not even remember that it exists.

In order for us to maintain our way of living, we must, in a broad sense, tell lies to each other, and especially to ourselves. It is not necessary that the lies be particularly believable. The lies act as barriers to truth. These barriers to truth are necessary because without them many deplorable acts would become impossibilities. Truth must at all costs be avoided. When we do allow self-evident truths to percolate past our defenses and into our consciousness, they are treated like so many hand grenades rolling across the dance floor of an improbably macabre party. We try to stay out of harm's way, afraid they will go off, shatter our delusions, and leave us exposed to what we have done to the world and to ourselves, exposed as the hollow people we have become."
- Derrick Jensen



"A basic part of the whole truth is to perceive the falsity of every operative idea that is really false. This is extraordinarily difficult, as our motivations are confused and twisted in a very complicated way. Many of our false ideas operate subliminally, or even subconsciously. The problem is far more difficult to understand, than, for example, the theory of relativity, so that it requires a sustained and serious effort. Yet many people expect to understand truth in five minutes."
- David Bohm



"What we see before us is just one tiny part of the world. We get into the habit of thinking, this is the world, but that's not true at all. The real world is a much darker and deeper place than this, and much of it is occupied by jellyfish and things."
- Haruki Murakami



Assurance
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



"The point here is to take life in all its rich variety just as it is, with its ten thousand opposites, and to go along with whatever circumstances require, embracing things after their own inclination or according to chance, letting things be rather than getting in their way, and thus allowing each and every thing, each and every appearance, to pursue a meaning and purpose distinct from my own."
- Kato Totsudo



"This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community, and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no 'brief candle' to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment; and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations."
- George Bernard Shaw



"There's a bit of Faust in us all, believing as we do that the more we learn about something the closer we are to it. Not so. Any event, fully attended, uproots all our knowing at the source and carries inexhaustible surprises.

True attention is rare and totally sacrificial. It demands that we throw away everything we have been or hope to be, to face each moment naked of identity, open to whatever comes and bereft of human guidance.

Nor is the potential for pain to be underestimated. Now we come face to face with the radical fact that there is nothing, however dear, that cannot be taken from us from one moment to the next; nothing, however sinister or horrifying, from which we will be permitted to recoil or separate ourselves. All the dreadful, mute suffering from which inattention shielded us will now be seen and heard."
- Flora Courtois
The door to infinity
Parabola



Ode I. 11
Leucon, no one's allowed to know his fate,
not you, not me: don't ask, don't hunt for answers
in tea leaves or palms. Be patient with whatever comes.
This could be our last winter, it could be many
more, pounding the Tuscan Sea on these rocks:
Do what you must, be wise, cut your vines
and forget about hope. Time goes running, even
as we talk. Take the present, the future's no one's affair.
- Horace



"So, the tendency of our childish nature is to take small things too seriously and get easily offended, whereas when we are confronted with situations which have long-term consequences, we tend to take things less seriously."
- Tenzin Gyatso

><((((º>


"Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves."
- Milan Kundera
The Unbearable Lightness of Being



We live unsettled lives
and stay in a place
only long enough to find
we don't belong.
Even the clouds, forming
noiselessly overhead,
are cloudy without
resembling us, and, storming
the vacant air,
don't take into account
our present loneliness.
And yet, why should we care?
Already we are walking off
as if to say,
we are not here,
we've always been away.
- Mark Strand



"I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. I possess tremendous power to make life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration, I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis is escalated or de-escalated, and a person is humanized or de-humanized."
- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe



The Gift
Time wants to show you a different country. It's the one
that your life conceals, the one waiting outside
when curtains are drawn, the one Grandmother hinted at
in her crochet design, the one almost found
over at the edge of the music, after the sermon.

It's the way life is, and you have it, a few years given.
You get killed now and then, violated
in various ways. (And sometimes it's turn about.)
You get tired of that. Long-suffering, you wait
and pray, and maybe good things come - maybe
the hurt slackens and you hardly feel it any more.
You have a breath without pain. It is called happiness.

It's a balance, the taking and passing along,
the composting of where you've been and how people
and weather treated you. It's a country where
you already are, bringing where you have been.
Time offers this gift in its millions of ways,
turning the world, moving the air, calling,
every morning, "Here, take it, it's yours."
- William Stafford



"Whatever way you put it, I am here only because my world is here. When I took my first breath, my world was born with me. When I die, my world dies with me. In other words, I wasn't born into a world that was already here before me, nor do I live simply as one individual among millions of other individuals, nor do I leave everything behind to live on after me. People live thinking of themselves as members of a group or society. However, this isn't really true. Actually, I bring my own world into existence, live it out, and take it with me when I die."
- Kosho Uchiyama
Opening the Hand of Thought



I think of the past twenty years,
when I used to walk home quietly
from the Kuo-ch'ing,
All the people in the Kuo-ch'ing monastery -
They say, "Han Shan is an idiot."
"Am I really an idiot:" I reflect.
But my reflections fail to solve the question:
for I myself do not know who the self is,
And how can others know who I am?
- Han Shan



"Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn't get in, and walk through it, step by step. There's no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That's the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine.

And you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You'll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others.

And once the storm is over you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about."
- Haruki Murakami
Kafka On The Shore



"We all enter this world in the same way: naked, screaming, and soaked in blood. But if you live your life right, that kind of thing doesn't have to stop there."
- Dana Gould



"After yesterday's storm I had expected to find the landscape a desert of sodden heathery bogs and swollen reedy lochans; and so it mostly was, but over all its vast extent the light was so radiant that I felt I could see not just for great distances but into time itself. The ruins of crofts, a mile away, seemed so close in that enchanted air that I saw not only the nettles of ragwort round the doors, but the people coming out for the last time: I could even see the grief on their faces. No wonder, I thought, this was the land of second sight. If I stayed here I would be a seer as well as a poet."
- Robin Jenkins
Fergus Lamont



Echoing Light
When I was beginning to read I imagined
that bridges had something to do with birds
and with what seemed to be cages but I knew
that they were not cages it must have been autumn
with the dusty light flashing from the streetcar wires
and those orange places on fire in the pictures
and now indeed it is autumn the clear
days not far from the sea with a small wind nosing
over dry grass that yesterday was green
the empty corn standing trembling and a down
of ghost flowers veiling the ignored fields
and everywhere the colors I cannot take
my eyes from all of them red even the wide streams
red it is the season of migrants
flying at night feeling the turning earth
beneath them and I woke in the city hearing
the call notes of the plover then again and
again before I slept and here far downriver
flocking together echoing close to the shore
the longest bridges have opened their slender wings
- W. S. Merwin


<°))))><


"The cardinal can sing; the wind can move the ironwood trees delicately; a child can ask a wise question - and where is your center? How can you respond?"
- Robert Aitken
Encouraging Words



You can live for years next door
to a big pine tree, honored to have
so venerable a neighbor, even
when it sheds needles all over your flowers
or wakes you, dropping big cones
onto your deck at still of night.
Only when, before dawn one year
at the vernal equinox, the wind
rises and rises, raising images
of cockleshell boats tossed among huge
advancing walls of waves,
do you become aware that always,
under respect, under your faith
in the pine tree's beauty, there lies
the fear it will crash someday
down on your house, on you in your bed,
on the fragility of the safe
dailiness you have almost
grown used to.
- Denise Levertov



"To conquer illusion and hope, without being overcome by terror: this has been the whole endeavor of my life these past twenty years; to look straight into the abyss without bursting into tears, without begging or threatening, calmly, serenely preserving the dignity of man; to see the abyss and work as though I were immortal."
- Nikos Kazantzakis



The Continuous Life
What of the neighborhood homes awash
in a silver light, of children hunched in the bushes,
watching the grown-ups for signs of surrender,
signs that the irregular pleasures of moving
from day to day, of being adrift on the swell of duty,
have run their course? O parents, confess
to your little ones the night is a long way off
and your taste for the mundane grows; tell them
your worship of household chores has barely begun;
describe the beauty of shovels and rakes, brooms and mops;
say there will always be cooking and cleaning to do,
that one thing leads to another, which leads to another;
explain that you live between two great darks, the first
with an ending, the second without one, that the luckiest
thing is having been born, that you live in a blur
of hours and days, months and years, and believe
it has meaning, despite the occasional fear
you are slipping away with nothing completed, nothing
to prove you existed. Tell the children to come inside,
that your search goes on for something you lost - a name,
a family album that fell from its own small matter
into another, a piece of the dark that might have been yours,
you don't really know. Say that each of you tries
to keep busy, learning to lean down close and hear
the careless breathing of earth and feel its available
languor come over you, wave after wave, sending
small tremors of love through your brief,
undeniable selves, into your days, and beyond.
- Mark Strand



"The end of suffering is best construed neither as an escape nor as an attainment of unbreached control, but as the creative incorporation of what originally arises in our experience as a disruption of the order or timing of our life-narrative. A talented jazz musician will take an accidental or mistaken chord or note and improvise with and around it, creating in the process an entirely novel passage within the context of a perhaps quite familiarly ordered piece of music. And, in much the same way, the interruptions of suffering afford us the opportunity of conducting ourselves in an unprecedented and manifestly liberating fashion."
- Peter Hershock
Liberating Intimacy



"I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens its eyes on the world once and sees amazing things it will never know any names for and then has to close it's eyes again. I know this is all mere apparition compared to what awaits us, but it is only lovelier for that. There is a human beauty in it. And I can't believe that, when we have all been changed and put on incorruptibility, we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality, and impermanence, the great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us. In eternity this will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets. Because I don't imagine any reality putting this one in the shade entirely, and I think piety forbids me to try."
- Marilynne Robinson
Gilead



"Time weighs down on you like an old, ambiguous dream. You keep on moving, trying to slip through it. But even if you go to the ends of the earth, you won't be able to escape it. Still, you have to go there - to the edge of the world. There's something you can't do unless you get there."
- Haruki Murakami
Kafka on the Shore



"The main door to all Buddhist work is this one of impermanence or emptiness. That doesn't mean - as we sometimes think - that things aren't here, but that they aren't here in the way we imagine they are. We ourselves are not solid in that way; we create notions of who we are out of memory and various ideals, then exhaust ourselves trying to maintain that image. When the time finally comes that we can let go of that, it is a tremendous relief. And we have abundant energy for other things."
- Larry Rosenberg



A Note
Life is the only way
to get covered in leaves,
catch your breath on the sand,
rise on wings;

to be a dog
or stroke its warm fur;

to tell pain
from everything it's not;

to squeeze inside events,
dawdle in views,
to seek the least of all possible
mistakes.

An extraordinary chance
to remember for a moment
a conversation held
with the lamp switched off;

and if only once
to stumble upon a stone,
end up soaked in one downpour
or another,

mislay your keys in the grass;
and to follow a spark on the wind
with your eyes;
and to keep on not knowing
something important.
- Wislawa Szymborska



"I have learned to be happy where I am. I have learned that locked within the moments of each day are all the joys, the peace, the fibers of the cloth we call life. The meaning is in the moment. There is no other way to find it. You feel what you allow yourself to feel, each and every moment of the day."
- Russ Berrie


><((((º>


"The moment when you first wake up in the morning is the most wonderful of the twenty-four hours. No matter how weary or dreary you may feel, you possess the certainty that, during the day that lies before you, absolutely anything may happen. And the fact that it practically always doesn't, matters not a jot. The possibility is always there."
- Monica Baldwin



I'll tell you what love of this life is.
It's looking up
through trees newly bare of leaves
and seeing there the oldest road,
a broken line of white stars
stretching out across the sky.

It's thinking,
this could be enough.
- Susan Elbe
Light Made From Nothing



"The universe is constantly talking to you and showing you things. When something happens, stop, watch, and remember. Ask yourself, "What does this mean?" The fact that you are coincidentally there at that precise moment in eternity to witness what's happening means that it's yours. It's the external world talking to you. It is showing you things about yourself.
The seeming external world is, in fact, internal - and it's talking to you. It loves you in its detached way."
- Stuart Wilde



"The great and true teaching of Zen that I noticed myself slipping into another notch more completely lately is the incredibly simple, profound, and deeply helpful fact that this is it. This is it. This is my personality, this is my body, this is my life. Just this life is it. It's hard to describe the feeling of accepting this a little more deeply. It's a feeling of settling in a little more, or settling down, or opening up, or ceasing to fight against what is."
- Tim Burnett
Just Being Yourself



Finally I am coming to the conclusion
that my highest ambition is to be what I already am.
That I will never fulfill my obligation
to surpass myself
unless I first accept myself,
and if I accept myself fully in the right way,
I will already have surpassed myself.
- Thomas Merton



"We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep. It's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out windows, or drown themselves, or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us are slowly devoured by some disease, or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself. There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) know these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning, we hope, more than anything for more. Heaven only knows why we love it so."
- Michael Cunningham
The Hours



"There are mornings when, from the first ray of light seized upon by the eye, and the first simple sounds that get inside the head, the heart is convinced that it is existing in rhythm to a kind of unheard music, familiar but forgotten because long ago it was interrupted and only now has suddenly resumed playing. The silent melodies pass through the fabric of the consciousness like the wind through the meshes of a net, without moving it, but at the same time unmistakably there, all around it. For one who has never lived such a morning its advent can be a paralyzing experience."
- Paul Bowles
The Spider's House



Oshidori
There once was a hunter named Sonjo, who lived in the province of Mutsu. One day he went out hunting, and could not find any game. On his way home, at a place called Akanuma, he saw a pair of oshidori (mandarin ducks), swimming together in a river that he was about to cross. To kill oshidori is a bad omen, but Sonjo happened to be very hungry, and he shot at the pair. His arrow pierced the male, but the female escaped into the rushes on the further shore, and disappeared. Sonjo took the dead bird home, and cooked it.

That night he had a dream that a beautiful woman came into his room, and stood by his pillow, and began to weep. So bitterly did she weep that Sonjo felt as if his heart were being torn out while he listened. And the woman cried to him: "Why, oh! why did you kill him? Of what wrong was he guilty? At Akanuma we were so happy together, and you killed him! What harm did he ever do you? Do you even know what you have done? Oh! Do you know what a cruel, what a wicked thing you have done? Me, too, you have killed, for I will not live without him! Only to tell you this I came." Again she wept so loudly, so bitterly that the voice of her crying pierced into the marrow of his bones.

Then she exclaimed: "You do not know, you cannot know what you have done! But tomorrow, when you go to Akanuma, you will see, you will see." and weeping piteously, she went away.

When Sonjo awoke in the morning, this dream remained so vivid in his mind that he was greatly troubled. He remembered the words: "But tomorrow, when you go to Akanuma, you will see, you will see." And he resolved to go there at once, that he might learn whether his dream was anything more than a dream.

When he got to Akanuma, and came to the riverbank, he saw the female oshidori swimming alone. At the same moment the bird saw Sonjo; but, instead of trying to escape, she swam straight towards him, looking straight at him in a strange fixed way. Then, with her beak, she suddenly tore open her own body, and died right before his eyes.

Sonjo shaved his head, and became a monk.
- Lafcadio Hearn
Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things



"It is a bright afternoon: what am I going to do? I am going to work with my mind and with my pen, while the sky is clear and while the soft white clouds are small and sharply defined in it. I am not going to bury myself in books and note taking. I am not going to lose myself in this jungle and come out drunk and bewildered, feeling that bewilderment is a sign that I have done something. I am not going to write as one driven by compulsions but freely, because I am a writer, because for me to write is to think and to live and also in some degree even to pray."
- Thomas Merton
The Search for Solitude



Shinto
When sorrow lays us low
for a second we are saved
by humble windfalls
of the mindfulness or memory:
the taste of a fruit, the taste of water,
that face given back to us by a dream,
the first jasmine of November,
the endless yearning of the compass,
a book we thought was lost,
the throb of a hexameter,
the slight key that opens a house to us,
the smell of a library, or of sandalwood,
the former name of a street,
the colors of a map,
an unforeseen etymology,
the smoothness of a filed fingernail,
the date we were looking for,
the twelve dark bell-strokes, tolling as we count,
a sudden physical pain.

Eight million Shinto deities
travel secretly throughout the earth.
Those modest gods touch us -
touch us and move on.
- Jorge Luis Borges


<°))))><


"I don't want to persuade the reader that it's a real thing; I want to show it as it is. In a sense, I'm telling those readers that it's just a story: it's fake. But when you experience the fake as real, it can be real. It's not easy to explain . . .
I'm not pretending it's the real thing. We are living in a fake world; we are watching fake evening news. We are fighting a fake war. Our government is fake. But we find reality in this fake world. So our stories are the same: we are walking through fake scenes, but ourselves, as we walk through these scenes, are real. The situation is real, in the sense that it's a commitment; it's a true relationship. That's what I want to write about."
- Haruki Murakami



"Naked I came into the world, but brush strokes cover me, language raises me, music rhythms me. Art is my rod and staff, my resting place and shield, and not mine only, for art leaves nobody out. Even those from whom art has been stolen away by tyranny, by poverty, begin to make it again. If the arts did not exist, at every moment, someone would begin to create them, in song, out of dust and mud, and although the artifacts might be destroyed, the energy that creates them is not destroyed."
- Jeanette Winterson



Chorus
The wet bamboo clacking in the night rain
crying in the darkness whimpering softly
as the hollow columns touch and slide
along each other swaying with the empty
air these are sounds from before there were voices
gestures older than grief from before there was
pain as we know it the impossibly tall
stems are reaching out groping and waving
before longing as we think of it or loss
as we are acquainted with it or feelings
able to recognize the syllables
that might be their own calling out to them
like names in the dark telling them nothing
about loss or about longing nothing
ever about all that has yet to answer
- W. S. Merwin



"Of all the pitfalls in our paths and the tremendous delays and wanderings off the track I want to say that they are not what they seem to be. I want to say that all that seems like fantastic mistakes are not mistakes, all that seems like error is not error; and it all has to be done. That which seems like a false step is the next step."
- Agnes Martin



"Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Can't you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front."
- G.K. Chesterton