the magic monastery
if self-containing means: to transform the world outside
and the wind and the rain and the patience of spring
and guilt and restlessness and muffled fate
and even the changing and flying and fleeing of the clouds
and the vague influence of the distant stars
into a handful of inwardness.
- Rilke
from his poem A Bowl of Roses
Would it be better to sit in silence?
To think everything, to feel everything, to say nothing?
This is the way of the orange gourd.
This is the habit of the rock in the river, over which the water pours
Words are the thunders of the mind.
Words are the refinement of the flesh.
Words are the responses to the thousand curvaceous moments -
sweet and electric, words flow from the brain
and out the gate of the mouth.
- Mary Oliver
from her poem Work
Six Apologies, Lord
I Have Loved My Horrible Self, Lord
I Rose, Lord, and I Rose, Lord, And I
Dropt. Your Requirements, Lord. 'Spite Your Requirements, Lord,
I Have Loved The Low Voltage Of The Moon, Lord,
Until There Was No Moon Intensity Left, Lord, No Moon Intensity Left
For You, Lord. I Have Loved The Frivolous, The Fleeting, The Frightful
Clouds. Lord, I Have Loved Clouds! Do Not Forgive Me, Do Not
Forgive Me LordandLover, HarborandMaster, GuardianandBread, Do Not.
Hold Me, Lord, O, Hold Me
Accountable, Lord. I Am
Accountable. Lord.
Lord It Over Me,
Lord It Over Me, Lord. Feed Me
Hope, Lord. Feed Me
Hope, Lord, Or Break My Teeth.
Break My Teeth, Sir,
In This My Mouth.
- Olena Kalytiak Davis
"In a dream I am walking joyfully up the mountain. Something breaks and falls away, and all is light. Nothing has changed, yet all is amazing, luminescent, free. Released at last, I rise into the sky . . . This dream comes often. Sometimes I run, then lift up like a kite, high above earth, and always I sail transcendent for a time before awaking. I choose to awake, for fear of falling, yet such dreams tell me that I am a part of things, if only I would let go, and keep on going. "Do not be heavy," Soen Roshi says. "Be light, light, light - full of light!"
- Peter Matthiessen
"The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth. He saw a world that was practically unchanged - the same house, the same people - and then realized that he did not exist there at all and that nobody mourned his absence. He caught a glimpse of his mother waving from an upstairs window, and that unfamiliar gesture disturbed him, as if it were some mysterious farewell. But what particularly frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby carriage standing there on the porch, with the smug, encroaching air of a coffin; even that was empty, as if, in the reverse course of events, his very bones had disintegrated."
- Vladimir Nabokov
One climbs and one sees; one descends and one sees no longer, but one
has seen. There is an art of conducting oneself . . .
by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one no longer
sees, one can at least still know."
- Rene Daumal
Crow Is Walking
Crow is walking
to see things at ground level,
the landscape as new under his feet
as the air is old under his wings.
He leaves the dead rabbit waiting -
it's a given; it'll always be there -
and walks on down the dirt road,
admires the pebbles,
how they sparkle in the sun;
checks out his reflection
in a puddle full of sky
which reminds him
of where he's supposed to be,
but he's beginning to like
the way the muscles move in his legs
and the way his wings feel so comfortable
folded back and resting.
He thinks he might be beautiful,
the sun lighting his back
with purple and green.
Faint voices from somewhere far ahead
roll like dust down the road towards him.
He hurries a little.
His tongue moves in his mouth;
legends of language move in his mind.
His beak opens.
He tries a word.
- Grace Butcher
The Infirmament
An end is always punishment for a beginning.
If you're Catholic, sadness is punishment
for happiness, you become the bug you squash
if you're Hindu, a flinty space opens
in your head after a long night of laughter
and wine. For waking there are dreams,
for French poetry, English poetry,
for light, fire although sometimes
fire must be punished by light
which is why psychotherapy had to be invented.
A father may say nothing to a son for years.
A wife may keep something small folded deep
in her underwear drawer. Clouds come in
resembling the terrible things we believe
about ourselves, a rock comes loose
from a ledge, the baby cries
and cries. Doll in a chair,
windshield wipers, staring off
into the city lights. For years
you may be unable to hear the word monkey
without a stab in the heart because
she called you that the summer she thought
she loved you and you thought you loved
someone else and everyone loved
your salad dressing. And the daffodils
come up in the spring and the snow covers
the road in winter and the water covers
the deep trenches in the sea where all the time
the inner stuff of this earth surges up
which is how the continents are made
and broken.
- Dean Young
The Improvement
Is that where it happens?
Only yesterday when I came back, I had this
diaphanous disaffection for this room, for spaces,
for the whole sky and whatever lies beyond.
I felt the eggplant, then the rhubarb.
Nothing seems strong enough for
this life to manage, that sees beyond
into particles forming some kind of entity -
so we get dressed kindly, crazy at the moment.
A life of afterwards begins.
We never live long enough in our lives
to know what today is like.
Shards, smiling beaches,
abandon us somehow even as we converse with them.
And the leopard is transparent, like iced tea.
I wake up, my face pressed
in the dewy mess of a dream. It mattered,
because of the dream, and because dreams are by nature sad
even when there's a lot of exclaiming and beating
as there was in this one. I want the openness
of the dream turned inside out, exploded
into pieces of meaning by its own unasked questions,
beyond the calculations of heaven. Then the larkspur
would don its own disproportionate weight,
and trees return to the starting gate.
See, our lips bend.
- John Ashbery
Scars
They tell how it was, and how time
came along, and how it happened
again and again. They tell
the slant life takes when it turns
and slashes your face as a friend.
Any wound is real. In church
a woman lets the sun find
her cheek, and we see the lesson:
there are years in that book; there are sorrows
a choir can't reach when they sing.
Rows of children lift their faces of promise,
places where the scars will be.
- William Stafford
each of us already has
a chattering skull
- John Stevenson
Love After Love
The time will come
When, with elation,
You will greet yourself arriving
At your own door, in your own mirror,
And each will smile at the other's welcome,
And say, sit here, Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
To itself, to the stranger who has loved you
All your life, whom you ignored
For another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
The photographs, the desperate notes,
Peel your image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
- Derek Walcott
to this haunted animal that wastes most of a long and ghostly life
wandering the future and the past on its hind legs,
looking for meanings,
only to see in the eyes of others of its kind that it must die."
- Peter Matthiessen
The Snow Leopard
"The fact that many a man who goes his own way ends in ruin means nothing . . . He must obey his own law, as if it were a dæmon whispering to him of new and wonderful paths . . . There are not a few who are called awake by the summons of the voice, whereupon they are at once set apart from the others, feeling themselves confronted with a problem about which the others know nothing. In most cases it is impossible to explain to the others what has happened, for any understanding is walled off by impenetrable prejudices. "You are no different from anybody else," they will chorus, or "there's no such thing," and even if there is such a thing, it is immediately branded as "morbid" . . . He is at once set apart and isolated, as he has resolved to obey the law that commands him from within. "His own law!" everybody will cry. But he knows better: it is the law . . . The only meaningful life is a life that strives for the individual realization - absolute and unconditional - of its own particular law . . . To the extent that a man is untrue to the law of his being . . . he has failed to realize his life's meaning.
The undiscovered vein within us is a living part of the psyche; classical Chinese philosophy names this interior way "Tao", and likens it to a flow of water that moves irresistibly towards its goal. To rest in Tao means fulfillment, wholeness, one's destination reached, one's mission done; the beginning, end, and perfect realization of the meaning of existence innate in all things."
- C.G. Jung
Collected Works
- Peter Hershock
"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
"It must be immense, this silence, in which sounds and movements have room, and if one thinks that along with all this the presence of the distant sea also resounds, perhaps as the innermost note in this prehistoric harmony, then one can only wish that you are trustingly and patiently letting the magnificent solitude work upon you, this solitude which can no longer be erased from your life; which, in everything that is in store for you to experience and to do, will act as an anonymous influence, continuously and gently decisive, rather as the blood of our ancestors incessantly moves in us and combines with our own to form the unique, unrepeatable being that we are at every turning of our life."
- Rainer Maria Rilke
Letters To A Young Poet
Samurai Song
When I had no roof I made
Audacity my roof. When I had
No supper my eyes dined.
When I had no eyes I listened.
When I had no ears I thought.
When I had no thought I waited.
When I had no father I made
Care my father. When I had no
Mother I embraced order.
When I had no friends I made
Quiet my friend. When I had no
Enemy I opposed my body.
When I had no temple I made
My voice my temple. I have
No priest, my tongue is my choir.
When I have no means fortune
Is my means. When I have
Nothing, death will be my fortune.
Need is my tactic, detachment
Is my strategy. When I had
No lover I courted my sleep.
- Robert Pinsky
"Silence is never-ending speech. Vocal speech obstructs the other speech of silence. In silence one is in intimate contact with the surroundings. Language is only a medium for communicating one’s thoughts to another. Silence is ever speaking."
- Sri Ramana Maharshi
"I knew there were many interesting sights, but I didn't want any more of the little answers, I wanted the big answer. So I asked the guestmaster to show me directly to the House of God.
I sat myself down, quite willing to wait for the big answer. I remained silent all day, far into the night. I looked Him in the eye. I guess He was looking me in the eye. Late, late at night I seemed to hear a voice: "What are you leaving out?" I looked around. I heard it again. "What are you leaving out?" Was it my imagination? Soon it was all around me, whispering, roaring, "What are you leaving out? What are you leaving out?"
Was I cracking up? I managed to get to my feet and head for the door. I wanted the comfort of a human face or a human voice. Nearby was the corridor where some of the monks live. I knocked on one cell.
"What do you want?" came a sleepy voice.
"What am I leaving out?"
"Me," he answered.
I went to the next door.
"What do you want?"
"What am I leaving out?"
"Me."
A third cell, a fourth, all the same.
I thought, "They're all stuck on themselves." I left the building in disgust. Just then the sun was coming up. I had never spoken to the sun before, but I heard myself pleading, "What am I leaving out?"
The sun too answered, "Me." That finished me.
I threw myself on the ground. And the earth said, "Me too."
[a story told by Father Theophane, an old Trappist monk, about the Magic Monastery, where the true gifts of spiritual life can be found]
- Jack Kornfield
"Even though the bewildered mind is untrained, it is already meditating whether we know it or not. Meditation is the natural process of becoming familiar with an object by repeatedly placing our minds upon it. Whatever we're doing, we always have a view; we're always placing our mind on one object or another. For example, when we get up in the morning and we're anxious about something, anxiety becomes our view for the day: “What about me? When will I get what I want?” The object of our
meditation is "me."
- Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche
Ego
"Well," you ask.
"How do I get rid of it?"
And my answer to that is:
That's the wrong question.
How does one get rid of what?
You can't get rid of your hallucination of being an ego by an activity of the ego.
Sorry, but it can't be done . . .
If you try to get rid of your ego with your ego you will just end up in a vicious circle.
You'd be like somebody who worries because they worry because they worry."
- Alan Watts
"Individuality and a strong ego are different. Coming back to one's own originality is very important; you and I are not the same. You are only you. You must find your own you."
- Yasuo Deshimaru
"Kill the ego is a phrase that is easily misinterpreted. Who is identifying ego? Who is killing whom? Who is seeing whom as the problem? Who is right and who is wrong? Who is making these decisions?"
- Cheri Huber
"I am like a room with innumerable fantastic mirrors that distort into false reflections a unique previous reality; which isn't in any and is in all of them."
- Fernando Pessoa
"To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large - this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone."
- Aldous Huxley
"Every object has two aspects,
the common aspect,
which is the one we generally see
and the one which is seen by everyone,
and
the ghostly and metaphysical aspect,
which only rare individuals see
at moments of clairvoyance
and metaphysical meditation."
- de Chirico
I was supposed to be
this morning -
whatever it was I said
I would be doing -
I was standing
at the edge of the field -
I was hurrying
through my own soul,
opening its dark doors -
I was leaning out;
I was listening.
- Mary Oliver
from her poem Mockingbirds
"Leafing through my old notebooks, it can happen that I don't understand what I wanted to tell myself, because the notes are more like messages sent by him who I was at a precise moment, to him who he would later be."
- Roland Topor
Enthusiasm
Disillusionment
Panic
Search for the Guilty
Punishment of the Innocent
Praise for the Non-Participants
"Technique ignores the factor of magic: craftsmanship presupposes it. A journeyman, after seven years as apprentice, will get the feel of his materials and learn what quiet miracles can be done with them. A small part of this knowledge is verbally communicable; the rest is incommunicable, except to fellow craftsman who already possess it. The technician's disregard of this inexplicable element, magic, in painting, sculpture, medicine, music, and poetry - on the ground that it cannot be demonstrated under laboratory conditions - accounts for the present dismal decline in all arts."
- Robert Graves
speaking at Oxford in 1962
In spirati on
"How can one recount the undefined feelings one goes through when an instrumental composition without a definite subject is being written? It's a purely lyric process. It's the musical confession of a soul in which many things have welled up and which by its very nature is poured out in the form of sounds, similar to the way in which a lyric poet says what he has to say in verse. The difference is just that music has incomparably more powerful resources and a more subtle language at its disposal for expressing a thousand different nuances of inner feeling. Usually the "seed" of a future work suddenly appears, and quite unexpectedly. If the soil is fertile, i.e. if there is the disposition for work, this seed germinates with unbelievable strength and rapidity, peeps out above ground, pushes up a stem, then leaves and branches, and, finally, flowers. There is no other way I can define the creative process than by means of this analogy. The difficult part consists in ensuring that the germ does appear and find favourable conditions. All the rest happens of its own accord. There would be no point in my trying to express to you in words all the immeasurable bliss of the feeling that seizes me when the principal idea has manifested itself and begins to burgeon into definite shapes. Everything is forgotten, you become almost demented, everything within you trembles and pulsates, you can scarcely draft the sketches in time as one idea chases another. Sometimes during this magical process some jolt from outside will suddenly wake you from this trance. Somebody rings at the door, or a servant comes in, a clock strikes and reminds you that you have an appointment . . . Interruptions like this are hard, inexpressibly hard to bear. Sometimes the inspiration flies away for a while; you have to go and search for it, sometimes in vain. Very often the completely cold, rational, technical process has to be summoned to your aid. Perhaps this is why even in the greatest masters you can trace moments where there's a lack of organic cohesion, where a seam shows, parts of the whole are stuck together artificially. If the state of the artist's soul that is called "inspiration," and which I have just been attempting to describe to you, were to continue uninterrupted, it would be impossible to survive a single day. The strings would snap and the instrument would be smashed to smithereens! Just one thing is indispensable: that the principal idea and the general outline of all the separate parts should come not by means of "searching" but of their own accord, as a result of that supernatural, inscrutable, and inexplicable power that is called inspiration."
- Tchaikovsky
"Almost any turn of the kaleidoscope of nature may set up in the artist a detached and esthetic vision, and, as he contemplates the particular field of vision, the (esthetically) chaotic and accidental contemplation of forms and colours begins to crystallize into a harmony; and as this harmony becomes clear to the artist, his actual vision becomes distorted by the emphasis of the rhythm that is set up within him. Certain relations of line become for him full of meaning; he apprehends them no longer curiously but passionately, and these lines begin to be so stressed and stand out so clearly from the rest that he sees them more distinctly than he did at first. Similarly, colours which in nature have almost always a certain vagueness and elusiveness, become so definite and clear to him, owing to their now so necessary relation to other colours, that, if he chooses to paint his vision, he can state it positively and definitely. In such a creative vision, the objects as such tend to disappear, to lose their separate unities and to take their place as so many bits in the whole mosaic of vision."
- Roger Fry quoted by John Dewey in Art as Experience
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