timelessness and nowhere
- Stanley Kubrick
"Most people have (with the help of conventions) turned their solutions toward what is easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must trust in what is difficult; everything alive trusts in it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself any way it can and is spontaneously itself, tries to be itself at all costs and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must trust in what is difficult is a certainty that will never abandon us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be one more reason for us to do it."
- Rainer Maria Rilke
Letters To a Young Poet
We Live In Bodies
That we do means everything to me now
as I try to sort you out try to imagine
sticking you in the ground veins
drained or bones burned to dust try
to imagine what will be left here
in my lap empty hands mind's eye
my cup of having to go on
We live in bodies clumsy and disobedient
and we love them even as we punish
with too much or too little
we think we're bigger than they are
and then we sit dumbly surprised
how easily that tiny jot of spirit can get lost
so many folds of yellow and pink tissue
There are those who have looked back looked down
from ceilings of hospital rooms and returned to us
we see their lips full and red again but their words
hover fleshless in vowels and consonants
our heads nod yes our bones say no because living
in bodies means blood in all its horror and beauty
means making each other hum and ooze making
baby bodies means we can lay our hands on their
bodies where and when we must not
as we age our bodies pale with the knowing
The fact of sagging flesh and bodily regrets
the fact of slowly applied pain the hand somewhere
applying it while in this latitude her small mouth
tugs and closes over my nipple
the power of a shriek the solace of singing
winding our twisted sinewy streets
bodies are the doomed and wonderful cities where we live
- Ellen Dore Watson
To Say Farewell
Pain was only the other side of love; and she did not regret it.
My heart has rooms that sigh with dust
And ashes in the hearth.
They must be cleaned and blown away
By daylight's breath.
But I cannot essay the task,
For even dust to me is dear;
For dust and ashes still recall,
My love was here
I know not how to say Farewell,
When Farewell is the word
That stays alone for me to say
Or will be heard.
But I cannot speak out that word
Or ever let my loved one go
How can I bear it that these rooms
Are empty so?
I sit among the dust and hope
That dust will cover me.
I stir the ashes in the hearth,
Though cold they be.
I cannot bear to close the door,
To seal my loneliness away
While dust and ashes yet remain
Of my love's day.
- Stephen R. Donaldson
The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever
"Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength; loving someone deeply gives you courage."
- Lao Tzu
"Home again. But what was home? The fish has vast ocean for home. And man has timelessness and nowhere. "I won't delude myself with the fallacy of home," he said to himself. "The four walls are a blanket I wrap around in, in timelessness and nowhere, to go to sleep."
- D.H. Lawrence
Kangaroo
And the floor of plains and seas,
I have never felt at home,
Never wholly been at ease.
- Basho
"The artist's world is limitless. It can be found anywhere, far from where he lives or a few feet away. It is always on his doorstep."
– Paul Strand
The Dead
At night the dead come down to the river to drink.
They unburden themselves of their fears,
their worries for us. They take out the old photographs.
They pat the lines in our hands and tell our futures,
which are cracked and yellow.
Some dead find their way to our houses.
They go up to the attics.
They read the letters they sent us, insatiable
for signs of their love.
They tell each other stories.
They make so much noise
they wake us
as they did when we were children and they stayed up
drinking all night in the kitchen.
- Susan Mitchell
The Water Inside the Water
Erase again, and then
A poppy blooms.
- Hokushi
"That we find a crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less alone, that we are more deeply inserted into existence than the course of a single life would lead us to believe."
- John Berger
The Moon
After writing poems all day,
I go off to see the moon in the pines.
Far in the woods I sit down against a pine.
The moon has her porches turned to face the light,
But the deep part of her house is in the darkness.
- Robert Bly
"If we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling around with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased."
- C.S. Lewis
"Not only is there no guarantee of the temporal immortality of the human soul, that is to say of its eternal survival after death; but, in any case, this assumption completely fails to accomplish the purpose for which it has always been intended. Or is some riddle solved by my surviving for ever? Is not this eternal life itself as much of a riddle as our present life? The solution of the riddle of life in space and time lies outside space and time."
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
- Dogen
Back into you. If you can't go somewhere,
Move in the passageways of the self.
They are like shafts of light,
Always changing, and you change
When you explore them."
- Rumi
"Joshu was the great teacher of Tang dynasty China, and what he said was so wonderful that light was said to sparkle from his mouth when he spoke. He lived on a mountain that had a stone bridge known all over China for its beauty.
Once, a cocky young monk came to visit him and called out, "I came to see the stone bridge of Joshu but all I see here is a wooden bridge."
Joshu looked at him steadily and said, "You only see a wooden bridge? Well, it lets horses cross. It lets asses cross. Come on over."
- Sensei Pat Enkyo O'Hara
Village Zendo, New York City
"Nothing we look at is ever seen without some shift and flicker - that constant flaking of vision which we take as imperfections of the eye or simply the instability of attention itself; and we ignore this illusory screen for the solid reality behind it. But the solid reality is the illusion; the shift and flicker is all there is."
- Samuel R. Delany
In the jungles of flaming ego,
May there be cool iceberg of bodhicitta.
On the racetrack of bureaucracy,
May there be the walk of the elephant.
May the sumptuous castle of arrogance
Be destroyed by vajra confidence.
In the garden of gentle sanity,
May you be bombarded by coconuts of wakefulness.
- Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche
First Thought Best Thought
Walls
With no consideration, no pity, no shame,
they have built walls around me, thick and high.
And now I sit here feeling hopeless.
I can't think of anything else: this fate gnaws my mind -
because I had so much to do outside.
When they were building the walls, how could I not have noticed!
But I never heard the builders, not a sound.
Imperceptibly they have closed me off from the outside world.
- Constantine P. Cavafy
Escape
When we get out of the glass bottles of our ego,
And we escape like squirrels turning in the cages of our personality
and get into the forests again,
we shall shiver with cold and fright
but things will happen to us
so that we don't know ourselves.
Cool, unlying life will rush in,
and passion will make our bodies taut with power,
we shall stamp our feet with new power
and old things will fall down,
we shall laugh, and institutions will curl up like burnt paper.
- D. H. Lawrence
you will not be satisfied with minor achievements in whatever you do."
- Etan
"The zen master Sosan and his student Samyong were taking a walk through the mountains, and Sosan was slightly ahead. Samyong took an appraising look at his teacher, a short, frail man of ungainly appearance. Samyong, by contrast, was a giant of a man - handsome, with a powerful presence. Struck by the contrast, Samyong could not help speculating why this physically unimpressive man should be his teacher. Soon they came to a waterfall. To his utter amazement, Samyong saw that the water of the fall was flowing upwards rather than coming down. He cried out to Sosan, "Look, this waterfall is upside down! So unnatural!"
Sosan replied, "Yes, just like your mind."
Samyong instantly understood that Sosan had been cognizant all along of what was going through his mind and had used his magical powers to teach him. He bowed to Sosan and apologized profusely to his teacher. Sosan released the waterfall and the water began to come down naturally."
- Mu Soeng
Thousand Peaks
"The foolish reject what they see, not what they think;
the wise reject what they think, not what they see."
- Huang Po
"Nothing influences our ability to cope with the difficulties of existence so much as the context in which we view them; the more contexts we can choose between, the less do the difficulties appear to be inevitable and insurmountable . . . the more complexities, the more crevices there are through which we can crawl."
- Theodore Zeldin
There was once a monk who spent twenty-five years up in a mountain cave meditating. A yogi came to visit this monk and asked him, "What are you practicing?"
The monk replied, "I am practicing the perfection of patience."
The yogi replied, "Wonderful!" and proceeded to throw things around the cave, eat the monk's food, and make a general nuisance of himself. The monk was getting upset, and the yogi cranked up the volume by tearing up the monk's books and messing up his shrine. Finally, the monk got up and started screaming at the yogi, and the yogi said, "Ah, and now where is your perfection of patience?"
"The moment you place your happiness in the fulfillment of any want or wish that is outside yourself, outside the Way, in anything but the thing as it is, as it is becoming, at that moment your balance is lost and you fall straight from Heaven to Hell."
- R. H. Blyth
"Knowledge is the reward of action . . . For it is by doing things that one becomes transformed. Executing a symbolical gesture, actually living through, to the very limit, a particular role, one comes to realize the truth inherent in the role. Suffering its consequences, one fathoms and exhausts its contents."
- Heinrich Zimmer
Please Bring Strange Things
Please bring strange things.
Please come bringing new things.
Let very old things come into your hands.
Let what you do not know come into your eyes.
Let desert sand harden your feet.
Let the arch of your feet be the mountains.
Let the paths of your fingertips be your maps
And the ways you go be the lines of your palms.
Let there be deep snow in your inbreathing
And your outbreath be the shining of ice.
May your mouth contain the shapes of strange words.
May you smell food cooking you have not eaten.
May the spring of a foreign river be your navel.
May your soul be at home where there are no houses.
Walk carefully, well-loved one,
Walk mindfully, well-loved one,
Walk fearlessly, well-loved one.
Return with us, return to us,
Be always coming home.
- Ursula K. Leguin
Onset
I forget what today is.
I forget to pick up my letters.
I forget I'm on the third floor.
I forget to put tea in the pot.
I forget to ring the damp people.
I forget to put blankets over all the mirrors.
I forget there's a door into the basement.
I forget my father is dead.
I dream all the trees in the wood are his thoughts.
I forget all my dreams.
I forget there's a bridge over the gorge.
I forget I can’t walk in the sky.
I forget to order some more memory.
I dream there are no floors in the house and I can see right through to the ground.
I forget dreams are lessons.
I forget this has all happened many times before.
I forget this body is a dreaming machine.
I forget I can wake up whenever I want.
I forget all these swaying colours are about to explode.
I forget the only way out is to want a way out.
I forget how to want.
I forget what a day is.
- Stephen Parr
The School of Monsters
"So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconsciousness continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead: one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come as though from the air: the situations that seemed blocked in a hopeless impasse move forward: the work has been done while one slept or shopped or talked with friends."
- Graham Greene
Maurice Bendrix, The End of the Affair
Nothing doing
the sun and moon endure their rush
and don't grow old
sail backwards?
paddle against the flow?
to hell with that
you'd better be known
as being
quiet.
- Yun-K'an Tzu
A dog barks
amid the sound of water;
Peach blossoms tinged by dew
take on a deeper tone.
In the dense woods
at times I see deer;
By the brook I hear no bells at noon.
Wild bamboos
divide the blue haze;
Tumbling waterfalls
hang from the green cliff.
No one can tell me where you are,
Saddened,
I lean against the pines.
- Li Po
At the break of day I come to an old temple,
As the first rays of the sun glow on the treetops.
A path in the bamboo grove leads to a quiet retreat -
A meditation hall hidden behind flowering boughs.
Here, mountain scenery delights the birds,
And the reflections in the pond empty a man's mind.
All murmurings are stilled in this presence,
But for the echoes of chimes and bells.
- Ch'ang Chien
"One afternoon, a man named Harry went mountain climbing. All in all, things were going very well. Then suddenly, the path he was walking on gave way, taking Harry with it. With flailing arms, Harry managed to grab a small branch on the side of the mountain. Holding on for dear life, he screamed, "Help! Help! Is anybody up there?"
Miraculously, the clouds parted, and a beam of light illuminated Harry as he hung tenuously from the branch. A voice - clearly the voice of God - spoke directly to Harry and said: "Harry, I will save you. Let go, Harry; I will save you. Let go."
Harry thought hard about this. Then, with a sudden burst of conviction, he looked up the mountain and shouted, "Is anybody ELSE up there?"
- Benjamin Shield
surprising,
then you are fine
the way you are.
- Robin Heerens Lysne
The Artist's Duty
So it is the duty of the artist to discourage all traces of shame
To extend all boundaries
To fog them in right over the plate
To kill only what is ridiculous
To establish problem
To ignore solutions
To listen to no one
To omit nothing
To contradict everything
To generate the free brain
To bear no cross
To take part in no crucifixion
To tinkle a warning when mankind strays
To explode upon all parties
To wound deeper than the soldier
To heal this poor obstinate monkey once and for all
To verify the irrational
To exaggerate all things
To inhibit everyone
To lubricate each proportion
To experience only experience
To set a flame in the high air
To exclaim at the commonplace alone
To cause the unseen eyes to open
To admire only the absurd
To be concerned with every profession save his own
To raise a fortuitous stink on the boulevards of truth and beauty
To desire an electrifiable intercourse with a female alligator
To lift the flesh above the suffering
To forgive the beautiful its disconsolate deceit
To flash his vengeful badge at every abyss
To HAPPEN
It is the artist’s duty to be alive
To drag people into glittering occupations
To blush perpetually in gaping innocence
To drift happily through the ruined race-intelligence
To burrow beneath the subconscious
To defend the unreal at the cost of his reason
To obey each outrageous impulse
To commit his company to all enchantments.
- Kenneth Patchen
"This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on seas and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls."
- John Muir
"Judging from picture books, apparently heaven is a partly cloudy place."
- Rilo Kiley
"Having been invited to a tea ceremony, I entered a room in a nearby temple, where I noticed a hanging scroll in the alcove. The scroll, a painting of a drinking gourd, carried the following inscription by the modern Zen master Rosen Takashina : "If it sloshes, there isn't enough." What wit lies behind that remark.
A gourd filled to the brim with wine makes no sound when shaken. If there is only a little wine left in the bottom of a gourd, it sloshes. People are like gourds. Human beings who are truly self-aware remain calm and unruffled no matter what happens. When people rush around busily, complaining and making excuses, they prove their lack of wisdom."
- Shundo Aoyama
Zen Seeds
An Afternoon In The Stacks
Closing the book, I find I have left my head
inside. It is dark in here, but the chapters open
their beautiful spaces and give a rustling sound,
words adjusting themselves to their meaning.
Long passages open at successive pages. An echo,
continuous from the title onward, hums
behind me. From in here, the world looms,
a jungle redeemed by these linked sentences
carved out when an author traveled and a reader
kept the way open. When this book ends
I will pull it inside-out like a sock
and throw it back in the library. But the rumor
of it will haunt all that follows in my life.
A candleflame in Tibet leans when I move.
- Mary Oliver
It isn't fame or failure
just so many books to read
so many words to write
and the backyard garden is
Paradise. I could spend
all day naming things and all night
breaking promises
- David Meltzer
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