all mirrors
Beginning Again
"If I could stop talking, completely
cease talking for a year, I might begin
to get well," he muttered.
Off alone again performing
brain surgery on himself
in a small badly lit
room with no mirror. A room
whose floor ceiling and walls
are all mirrors, what a mess
oh my God -
And still
it stands,
the question
not how begin
again, but rather
Why?
So we sit there
together
the mountain
and me, Li Po
said, until only the mountain
remains.
- Franz Wright
Prescience
We speak of Heaven who have not yet accomplished
even this, the holiness of things
precisely as they are, and never will!
Before death was I saw the shining wind.
To disappear, today’s as good a time as any.
To surrender at last
to the vast current -
And look, even now there’s still time.
Time for the glacial, cloud-paced
soundless music to unfold once more.
Time, inexhaustible wound, for
your unwitnessed and destitute coronation.
- Franz Wright
"You're searching, Joe, for things that don't exist; I mean beginnings. Ends and beginnings - there are no such things. There are only middles."
- Robert Frost
"When you consider something like death, after which (there being no news flash to the contrary) we may well go out like a candle flame, then it probably doesn't matter if we try too hard, are awkward sometimes, care for one another too deeply, are excessively curious about nature, are too open to experience, enjoy a nonstop expense of the senses in an effort to know life intimately and lovingly. It probably doesn't matter if, while trying to be modest and eager watchers of life's many spectacles, we sometimes look clumsy or get dirty or ask stupid questions or reveal our ignorance or say the wrong thing or light up with wonder like the children we all are. It probably doesn't matter if a neighbor, fetching her mail, sees us standing in the cold with our own letters in one hand and a seismically red autumn leaf in the other, its color hitting our senses like a blow from a stun gun, as we stand with a huge grin, too paralyzed by the intricately veined gaudiness of the leaf to move."
- Diane Ackerman
A Natural History of the Senses
"Are we not complete in ourselves and each in himself? Life as it is lived suffices. It is only when the disquieting intellect steps in and tries to murder it that we stop to live and imagine ourselves to be short of or in something. Let the intellect alone, it has its usefulness in its proper sphere, but let it not interfere with the life-stream. If you are at all tempted to look into it, do so while letting it flow. The fact of flowing must under no circumstances be arrested or meddled with, for the moment your hands are dipped into it, its transparency is disturbed, it ceases to reflect your image which you have had from the very beginning and will continue to have to the end of time."
- D.T. Suzuki
"People commonly feel that because I am considered a living Buddha I must experience only serenity, perpetual happiness, and have no worries. Unfortunately this is not so. As a high lama and incarnation of enlightenment I know better."
- Kanju Khutush Tulku Rinpoche
It isn't a painting,
it is image, which flicks flame
in the invisible, in the twist,
it isn't a painting, it is game
metamorphosis.
It isn't a painting,
it is photography.
O, let me have her
though on the rock's rapidity
I scatter.
It isn't a painting,
it is game and nothing,
which burns in bright scatter-shifts
and then, backwards, falling
is heard, dies and drifts.
- Jaroslav Seifert
Obraz ve Vode
"You may intend to do something today, only for pressing business to come up unexpectedly and take up all of your attention the rest of the day. Or a person you have been expecting is prevented from coming, or someone you hadn't expected comes calling. The thing you have counted on goes amiss, and the thing you had no hopes for is the only one to succeed. A matter which promised to be a nuisance passes off smoothly, and a matter which should have been easy proves a great hardship. Our daily experiences bear no resemblance to what we had anticipated. This is true throughout the year, and equally true for our entire lives. But if we decide that everything is bound to go contrary to our anticipations, we discover that naturally there are also some things which do not contradict expectations. This makes it all the harder to be definite about anything. The one thing you can be certain of is the truth that all is uncertainty."
- Yoshida Kenko
Essays in Idleness
The Tsurezuregusa Of Kenko
translated by Donald Keene
"Never underestimate the potential of ego to lead one astray, no matter how hard you train or what your point on the path. The rush of learning a new skill, the flattery that accompanies a touch of success - these things can overinflate any person's ego. Too much praise can do damage just like too much criticism. Measure a compliment the same as you measure a critique. If you think you've arrived somewhere, you've got that much farther to go. One can lose the Way in an instant."
- P.T. Sudo
"It's similar to the process one undergoes when learning to play a musical instrument. We sit down, take a few lessons, and are given certain exercises. We begin to practice, and at first the fingers don't move very easily; they hit a lot of wrong notes and it sounds terrible. But every day we practice, and gradually the fingers start to move more easily, the music starts to sound more beautiful. After a certain period of time, a proficiency develops so that the playing becomes effortless. At that time there is no difference between playing and practice; the playing itself is the practice.
In just the same way, as we practice awareness, we start out very slowly, aware of the movement of each step, "lifting," "moving," "placing," aware of the breath, "rising, falling," or "in, out." In the beginning great effort is required. There are many gaps in the mindfulness. There are a lot of struggles and hindrances. But as the mind becomes trained in being aware, in being mindful, it becomes increasingly natural. There is a certain point in the practice when the momentum of mindfulness is so strong that it starts working by itself, and we begin to do things with an ease and simplicity and naturalness which is born out of this effortless awareness."
- Joseph Goldstein
The Experience of Insight
"If you can sit quietly after difficult news, if in financial downturns you remain perfectly calm, if you can see your neighbors travel to fantastic places without a twinge of jealousy, if you can happily eat whatever is put on your plate and fall asleep after a day of running around without a drink or a pill, if you can always find contentment just where you are, you are probably a dog."
- Jack Kornfield
(or perhaps what he said, was . . . )
"Learn the rules; and then forget them."
- Basho
Landscape Mode
"In ancient Chinese paintings we see more sky than
earth, so when clouds hurry by in silver-gray
inkbursts of rolling readiness right along the river,
ripe with rain, rushing the road of time along,
pushing back light, belittling the black and white clarity
of Hollywood in its prime, the eye climbs down to greet
with shining gusto trees along the shore, Orpyland
beyond the frame, the blue horizon hidden in a sea
of possibilities. And beyond this there's jazz: Jimmy Giuffre's
Train on the River stretched out strong like a pet cat
- and that's that. But not quite. This poem paints
poorly what sketchers and colorists do best. The rest
should come out empty, allowing you to fill in your own
basic emptiness, your openness, your self-portrait
forged and cataloged; on quiet exhibit, on temporary loan.
Descended from clouds immensely more ancient than China,
you never quit becoming the background, the field in a sky
whose subtle earthiness sails over our heads altogether."
- Al Young
Every day, every day I hear
enough to fill
a year of nights with wondering.
- Denise Levertov
Mindful
Every day
I see or hear
something
that more or less
kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle
in the haystack
of light.
It was what I was born for -
to look, to listen,
to lose myself
inside this soft world -
to instruct myself
over and over
in joy,
and acclamation.
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional,
the fearful, the dreadful,
the very extravagant -
but of the ordinary,
the common, the very drab,
the daily presentations.
Oh, good scholar,
I say to myself,
how can you help
but grow wise
with such teachings
as these -
the untrimmable light
of the world,
the ocean's shine,
the prayers that are made
out of grass?
- Mary Oliver
"The truth is that we live out our lives putting off all that can be put off; perhaps we all know deep down that we are immortal and that sooner or later all men will do and know all things."
- Jorge Luis Borges
"The unique character of each moment of the present, its creative upsurge and its novelty continually escape us.
There is a key of fundamental importance which allows us to open the inner door which gives access to the plenitude of the Present, the heavy door which we have ourselves constructed. We can even say that it is ourselves. Its existence is due to our habitual inattention, to our constant negligence.
The most fundamental distractions are not without; they are within us; they result from the potent magic of words and symbols inseparably connected with all our thoughts."
- Robert Linssen
Living Zen
"Moments of vision, provided that we are watchful for and unforgetful of them, coming and going as they do, like a breath of air, enable us to go beyond the transitoriness, the emptiness, the unreality of things, - into what? Our going is to nowhere, our going is staying here. It is the timeless and spaceless that cannot exist except in time and space. What happiness to have so many of these moments, for them to run in a stream through our lives! Nietzsche, Mozart, Spinoza, Marcus Aurelius, Basho, - this is what these names mean to us, the painful-happiness of these moments of seeing within."
- R. H. Blyth
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight."
- T S Eliot
"We generally give to our ideas about the unknown the color of our notions about what we do know: If we call death a sleep it's because it has the appearance of sleep; if we call death a new life, it's because it seems different from life. We build our beliefs and hopes out of these small misunderstandings with reality and live off husks of bread we call cakes, the way poor children play at being happy.
But that's how all life is; at least that's how the particular way of life generally known as civilization is. Civilization consists in giving an inappropriate name to something and then dreaming what results from that. And in fact the false name and the true dream do create a new reality. The object really does become other, because we have made it so. We manufacture realities. We use the raw materials we always used but the form lent it by art effectively prevents it from remaining the same. A table made out of pinewood is a pine tree but it is also a table. We sit down at the table not at the pine tree."
- Fernando Pessoa
The Book of Disquiet
bills in the mail
- George Swede
"A work of art which inspires us comes from no quibbling or uncertain man. It is the manifest of a very positive nature in great enjoyment, and at the very moment the work was done.
It is not enough to have thought great things before doing the work. The brush stroke at the moment of contact carries inevitably the exact state of being of the artist at that exact moment into the work, and there it is, to be seen and read by those who can read such signs, and to be read later by the artist himself, with perhaps some surprise, as a revelation of himself.
For an artist to be interesting to us he must have been interesting to himself. He must have been capable of intense feeling, and capable of profound contemplation.
He who has contemplated has met with himself, is in a state to see into the realities beyond the surface of his subject nature reveals to him, and, seeing and feeling intensely, he paints, and whether he wills it or not each brush stroke is an exact record of such as he was at the exact moment the stroke was made."
- Robert Henri
The Art Spirit
- Kurt Vonnegut
he knocks himself bloody against his own forehead."
- Kafka
"I have been reading your Descartes.
Very interesting.
I think therefore I am.
He forgot to mention the other part. I’m sure he knew, he just forgot.
I don’t think, therefore I am not."
- Dainin Katagiri
"There is a transmission from poet to poet of the spirit of poetry deeply similar to that of Zen from monk to monk. A poet knows another poet by indubitable yet invisible signs; the same is true of the artist and the musician. But the poet especially (in the wide and profound sense of the word) feels and transmits unwittingly that attitude towards life that is the real poetry of the world."
- R. H. Blyth
Zen and Zen Classics
Volume One
"Real poetry is to lead a beautiful life. To live poetry is better than to write it."
- Basho
just eat when we eat; could a Zen master be just angry in the same way?"
Suzuki Roshi replied, "You mean to just get angry like
a thunderstorm and be done when it passes? Ahh, I wish I could do that."
"If you never want to see the face of hell, when you come home from work every night, dance with your kitchen towel, and if you’re worried about waking up your family, take off your shoes."
- Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav
Jack Kornfield’s After the Ecstasy, the Laundry
Science says: The body is a machine.
Advertising says: The body is a business.
The body says: I am a fiesta."
- Eduardo Galeano
- R. H. Blyth
"In today’s world of modern conveniences, of cell phones and pagers, stealth fighters, nuclear submarines, electron microscopes and radio telescopes, it is sometimes easy to forget that the ability to pursue science unimpeded, to let imagination wander where inquiry leads, to investigate and reach beyond ourselves, is not an entitlement but a right that was fought for, as were other rights fought for, sometimes to the death. This struggle has shaped our history and our souls. In it are the seeds that define us as a species. It was curiosity, not Eve, that tempted Adam."
- Lawrence & Nancy Goldstone
The Friar and the Cipher
"The really precious things are thought and sight, not pace. It does a bullet no good to go fast; and a man, if he be truly a man, no harm to go slow; for his glory is not at all in going, but in being."
- John Ruskin
The Elements of Perspective
"After looking at a mountain, if we shut our lids and dwell on the scene internally, we are led to seize upon its important details. The mass of visual information is interpreted and the mountain’s salient features identified: its granite peaks, its glacial indentations, the mist hovering above the tree line - details that we would previously have seen but not for that matter noticed."
- Alain de Botton
How Proust Can Save Your Life
"We are as forlorn as children lost in the wood. When you stand in front of me and look at me, what do you know of the grief’s that are in me and what do I know of yours. And if I were to cast myself down before you and tell you, what more would you know about me that you know about Hell when someone tells you it is hot and dreadful? For that reason alone we human beings ought to stand before one another as reverently, as reflectively, as lovingly, as we would before the entrance to Hell."
- Franz Kafka
All the Hemispheres
Leave the familiar for a while.
Let your senses and bodies stretch out
Like a welcomed season
Onto the meadows and shores and hills.
Open up to the Roof.
Make a new water-mark on your excitement
And love.
Like a blooming night flower,
Bestow your vital fragrance of happiness
And giving
Upon our intimate assembly.
Change rooms in your mind for a day.
All the hemispheres in existence
Lie beside an equator
In your heart.
Greet Yourself
In your thousand other forms
As you mount the hidden tide and travel
Back home.
All the hemispheres in heaven
Are sitting around a fire
Chatting
While stitching themselves together
Into the Great Circle inside of
You.
- Hafiz
The Subject Tonight is Love
translated by Daniel Ladinsky
"That which occurs however obscurely at the depths of consciousness, before being realized in a work, before bringing it out into the open it is necessary to make it traverse an intermediary region between our subconscious and our exterior, our intelligence, but how to lead it there, how to apprehend it. One may spend hours trying to bring back the first impression, the ungraspable sign that gave that impression and which said: "fathom my depths", without summoning it back, without forcing its return to us. And that is what all art is, it is the only art. The only thing worth expressing is that which has become visible in the depths and usually, except for when illuminated by light, or in moments of exceptional clarity and animation, these depths are obscure. This depth, this inaccessibility to us is the only token of their value - at the same time as a certain joy. It matters little what it is about. A church steeple that is imperceptible during the day has more value than a complete theory of the world."
- Marcel Proust
Carnets
extracts from notebooks, c. 1908
A Last Look Back
Things change behind my back.
The starting snow I was just watching
has escaped into the past.
Well, not the past, but the part of the world
that surrounds the moment at hand.
That’s why, whenever I see
animal tracks in a light snow like this,
I think of footnotes.
So strange, to inhabit a space
and then leave it vacant, standing open.
Each change in me is a stone step
beneath the blur of snow.
In spring the sharp edges cut through.
When I look back, I see my former selves,
numerous as the trees.
- Chase Twichell
The Snow Watcher
"A miss is as good as a mile. The slightest thought of self, that is, by self, and the Great Way is irretrievably lost. A drop of ink, and a glass of clear water is all clouded. Once we think, This flower is blooming for me; this insect is a hateful nuisance and nothing else; that man is a useful rascal; that woman is a good mother, and she must therefore be a good wife, - when such thoughts arise in our minds, all the cohesion between things disappear; they rattle about in a meaningless and irritating way. Instead of being united into a whole by virtue of their own interpenetrated suchness, they are pulled hither and thither by our arbitrary and ever-changing preferences, our whims and prejudices. We suppose this particular man to be a Buddha, ourselves to be ordinary people, this action to be charming, that to be odious, and fail to see how "All things work for good" (Romans VIII, 28). In actual fact, Heaven and Earth cannot be separated; one cannot exist without the other. Together they are the Great Way."
- R. H. Blyth
Zen and Zen Classics
"The basic premise that the highest truth, or first principle, or Tao, is not expressible in words or conceivable through logical thought is common to both Taoism and Zen. Both hold, moreover, that an intuitive understanding of the first principle is possible, and this is called enlightenment. The enlightened Taoist sage is considered to have gained some special knowledge, coupled with arcane skills, and thus becomes somehow removed from the world, but the Zen Master gains nothing other than the realization that there is nothing to gain, and is thus more than ever in the world."
- Fredric Lieberman
"As I told Miss Okamoto, when you go to the kitchen to prepare dinner, be born in the kitchen. When you finish there, die. Then be born at the dining table as you eat your dinner and, when you finish eating, die there. Be born in the garden, and sweep with your broom. When you get into bed at night, die there. And when daylight comes, and you awaken in your bed, be born anew. If you have cancer, be born with cancer."
- Soko Morinaga
Novice to Master
An Ongoing Lesson In the Extent of My Own Stupidity
Love tells me I am everything.
And between the two my life flows."
- Nisargadatta Maharaj
"Reality is all-inclusive, there is nothing that can be outside of it. Because it is all inclusive, it is the fullness of things, not a content free abstraction, as the intellect is too frequently apt to make it. It is not a mere aggregate of individual objects, nor is it something other than the objects. It is not something that is imposed upon things stringing them together and holding them together from the outside. It is the principle of integration residing inside things and identical with them."
- D.T. Suzuki
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