priests and poets
"I don't deny that there should be priests to remind men that they will one day die. I only say that at certain strange epochs it is necessary to have another kind of priests, called poets, actually to remind men that they are not dead yet."
- G.K. Chesterton
Manalive
"And here we are in the great mix of things. You and I as separate beings, each of us caught up in the great play of cause and effect. We're the product of so much and everything we say and do continues the play of cause and effect. And here is the truth we're called upon to acknowledge at this moment. So much of that doing, of that saying, has caused suffering, for ourselves, and for others.
This is the why of it. The way is intimate. As we continue on it turns out we really are not alone. This is the most important point. This is not an abstract or philosophical truth. In some fundamental sense, in some real sense we can actually know in our bodies, we are not alone. The separation that we experience is strictly functional. As the old line goes, time exists so everything doesn't happen at once. We exist as one and as separate."
- James Ishmael Ford
"One time, Suzuki Roshi and I were in the anteroom at Sokoji and I asked, "What is the meaning of the chant that we do in the morning right after zazen?" Suzuki Roshi hesitated and Katagiri Sensei started looking through the drawers to see if he could come up with a translation. Suzuki Roshi stopped him and pointed to his heart and said, "Love." This is how he used to teach. He didn't like to explain things literally, but he didn't miss an opportunity to go right to the essence."
- Sojun Mel Weitsman
At Blackwater Pond
At Blackwater Pond the tossed waters have
settled
after a night of rain.
I dip my cupped hands. I drink
a long time. It tastes
like stone, leaves, fire. It falls cold
into my body, waking the bones. I hear them
deep inside me, whispering
oh what is that beautiful thing
that just happened?
- Mary Oliver
"In the tea ceremony, the expression "once in a lifetime, this one encounter" is often used. The usual way this is interpreted is "a one-and-only encounter." In Zen, though, we interpret this expression in the following way: In the course of our lifetime, there is one person we must meet. No matter through which grasslands we may walk or which mountains we may climb, we must meet this person. This person is in this world. Who is this person? It is the true self. You must meet the true self. As long as you don't, it will not be possible to be truly satisfied in the depths of your heart. You will never lose the sense that something is lacking. Nor will you be able to clarify the way things are.
This is the objective of life as well as of the teaching of Buddhism - to meet yourself."
- Sekkei Harada
"We have been raised to fear the yes in ourselves."
- Audre Lorde
"In a country well governed poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed wealth is something to be ashamed of."
- Confucius
"There are thresholds which thought alone, left to itself, can never permit us to cross. An experience is required - an experience of poverty, of sickness."
- Gabriel Marcel
Les Pauvres de Yahvk
Our cups of coffee. Birds green trees
In the blue shade, the sun gambols from one wall
To another like a gazelle
The water in the clouds has the unlimited shape of what is left to us
Of the sky. And other things of suspended memories
Reveal that this morning is powerful and splendid,
And that we are the guests of eternity.
ﮏ
A little of this absolute and blue infinity
Would be enough
To lighten the burden of these times
And to cleanse the mire of this place.
- Mahmoud Darwish
from Under Siege
"One of the most severe of all problems of evidence interpretation is that of trying to interpret all the confusing signals from the outside as to who one is. The potential for intralevel and interlevel conflict is tremendous. The psychic mechanisms have to deal simultaneously with the individual's internal need for self-esteem and the constant flow of evidence from the outside affecting the self-image. The result is that information flows in a complex swirl between different levels of the personality; as it goes round and round, parts of it get magnified, reduced, negated, or otherwise distorted, and then those parts in turn get further subjected to the same sort of swirl, over and over again – all of this in an attempt to reconcile what is, with what we wish were.
The upshot is that the total picture of "who I am" is integrated in some enormously complex way inside the entire mental structure, and contains in each one of us a large number of unresolved, possibly unresolvable, inconsistencies. These undoubtedly provide much of the dynamic tension which is so much a part of being human. Out of this tension between the inside and outside notions of who we are come the drives towards various goals that make each of us unique. Thus, ironically, something which we all have in common – the fact of being self-reflecting conscious beings – leads to the rich diversity in the ways we have of internalizing evidence about all sorts of things, and in the end winds up being one of the major forces in creating distinct individuals."
- Douglas R. Hofstadter
Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid
I Means Me?
I
means me?
No, that's wrong.
I am is right.
For I am not the I, but the all.
When eyes open it should be like sunrise.
It's not just I
light touches
but all
eyes.
- Suzanne Saporito
"Nothing can hold you back - not your childhood, not the history of a lifetime, not even the very last moment before now. In a moment you can abandon your past. And once abandoned, you can redefine it.
If the past was a ring of futility, let it become a wheel of yearning that drives you forward. If the past was a brick wall, let it become a dam to unleash your power.
The very first step of change is so powerful, the boundaries of time fall aside. In one bittersweet moment, the sting of the past is dissolved and its honey salvaged."
- Tzvi Freeman
"If you found a contradiction in your own thoughts, it's very unlikely that your whole mentality would break down. Instead, you would probably begin to question the beliefs or modes of reasoning which you felt had led to the contradictory thoughts. In other words, to the extent you could, you would step out of the systems inside you which you felt were responsible for the contradiction, and try to repair them. One of the least likely things for you to do would be to throw up your arms and cry, "Well, I guess that shows that I believe everything now!"
- Douglas R. Hofstadter
"It is precisely when the ground is pulled away and we plummet that we may suddenly sense a truth outside our normal way of seeing, and realize that the fixed values that used to be the whole story and formerly defined our own position are simply the objective correlative of a subjective stance that our own finite understanding has determined, and that has therefore cut us off from something that can never be determined."
- Karlfried Durckheim
"It is hard to let old beliefs go. They are familiar. We are comfortable with them and have spent years building systems and developing habits that depend on them. Like a man who has worn eyeglasses so long that he forgets he has them on, we forget that the world looks to us the way it does because we have become used to seeing it that way through a particular set of lenses. Today, however, we need new lenses. And we need to throw the old ones away."
- Kenich Ohmae
"Fixed beliefs are typically very dangerous, if for no other reason than their fixedness. Consciously or otherwise, you have stopped seeking or receiving and processing new information. You're treating the belief as fact, and will no longer subject it to debate or modification. In this condition, you will not only miss new information, you will overlook important changes in yourself or other people that would negate the fixed belief."
- Phillip McGraw
Withered vines, gnarled trees, twilight crows,
river flowing beneath the little bridge,
past someone's home.
The wind blows from the west
where the sun sets, it blows
across the ancient road,
across the bony horse,
across the despairing man
who stands at heaven's edge.
- Ma Chih-Yuan
Meditation in Autumn
Empire of Dreams
On the first page of my dreambook
It's always evening
In an occupied country.
Hours before the curfew.
A small provincial city.
The houses all dark.
The store-fronts gutted.
I am on a street corner
Where I shouldn't be.
Alone and coatless
I have gone out to look
For a black dog who answers to my whistle.
I have a kind of halloween mask
Which I am afraid to put on.
- Charles Simic
Around and around the house
the leaves fall thick,
but never fast,
for they come circling down
with a dead lightness
that is sombre and slow.
- Charles Dickens
><((((º>
From The Long Sad Party
Someone was saying
something about shadows covering the field, about
how things pass, how one sleeps towards morning
and the morning goes.
Someone was saying
how the wind dies down but comes back,
how shells are the coffins of wind
but the weather continues.
It was a long night
and someone said something about the moon shedding its
white
on the cold field, that there was nothing ahead
but more of the same.
Someone mentioned
a city she had been in before the war, a room with two
candles
against a wall, someone dancing, someone watching.
We begin to believe
the night would not end.
Someone was saying the music was over and no one had
noticed.
Then someone said something about the planets, about the
stars,
how small they were, how far away.
- Mark Strand
"Then away out in the woods I heard that kind of a sound that a ghost makes when it wants to tell about something that's on its mind and can't make itself understood, and so can't rest easy in its grave, and has to go about that way every night grieving."
- Mark Twain
Horai
"Blue vision of depth lost in height, sea and sky interblending through luminous haze. Only sky and sea, one azure enormity. In the fore, ripples are catching a silvery light, and threads of foam are swirling. But a little further off no motion is visible, nor anything save color: dim warm blue of water widening away to melt into blue of air. Horizon there is none: only distance soaring into space, infinite concavity hollowing before you, and hugely arching above you, the color deepening with the height. But far in the midway-blue there hangs a faint, faint vision of palace towers, with high roofs horned and curved like moons, some shadowing of splendor strange and old, illumined by a sunshine soft as memory.
The sunshine in Horai is whiter than any other sunshine, a milky light that never dazzles, astonishingly clear, but very soft. This atmosphere is not of our human period: it is enormously old, so old that I feel afraid when I try to think how old it is; and it is not a mixture of nitrogen and oxygen. It is not made of air at all, but of ghost, the substance of quintillions of quintillions of generations of souls blended into one immense translucency, souls of people who thought in ways never resembling our ways. Whatever mortal man inhales that atmosphere, he takes into his blood the thrilling of these spirits; and they change the sense within him, reshaping his notions of Space and Time, so that he can see only as they used to see, and feel only as they used to feel, and think only as they used to think.
Because in Horai there is no knowledge of great evil, the hearts of the people never grow old. And, by reason of being always young in heart, the people of Horai smile from birth until death - except when the Gods send sorrow among them; and faces then are veiled until the sorrow goes away. In Horai, people love and trust each other, as if all were members of a single household; and the speech of the women is like birdsong, because the hearts of them are light as the souls of birds; and the swaying of the sleeves of the maidens at play seems a flutter of wide, soft wings. In Horai nothing is hidden but grief, because there is no reason for shame; and nothing is locked away, because there could not be any theft; and by night as well as by day all doors remain unbarred, because there is no reason for fear. Much of this seeming would be due to the inhalation of that ghostly atmosphere - but not all. For the spell wrought by the dead is only the charm of an Ideal, the glamour of an ancient hope; and something of that hope has found fulfillment in many hearts, in the simple beauty of unselfish lives.
Evil winds from the West are blowing over Horai; and the magical atmosphere, alas! is shrinking away before them. It lingers now in patches only, and bands, like those long bright bands of cloud that train across the landscapes of Japanese painters. Under these shreds of the elfish vapor you still can find Horai - but not everywhere. Remember that Horai signifies Mirage, the Vision of the Intangible. And the Vision is fading, never again to appear save in pictures and poems and dreams."
- Lafcadio Hearn
Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things
"There is no journey forward without ghosts; there is no telling without fear."
- Gerry Turcotte
All Hallow's Eve
In the great silence of my favorite month,
October (the red of maples, the bronze of oaks,
A clear-yellow leaf here and there on birches),
I celebrated the standstill of time.
The vast country of the dead had its beginning everywhere:
At the turn of a tree-lined alley, across park lawns.
But I did not have to enter, I was not called yet.
Motorboats pulled up on the river bank, paths in pine needles.
It was getting dark early, no lights on the other side.
I was going to attend the ball of ghosts and witches.
A delegation would appear there in masks and wigs,
And dance, unrecognized, in the chorus of the living.
- Czeslaw Milosz
Enough. These few words are enough.
If not these words, this breath.
If not this breath, this sitting here.
This opening to the life
we have refused
again and again
until now.
Until now.
- David Whyte
The poem,
a consolation, an attribute
of the wind, southern or northern.
Do not describe what the camera can see
of your wounds. And scream that you may hear yourself,
and scream that you may know you're still alive,
and alive, and that life on this earth is
possible. Invent a hope for speech,
invent a direction, a mirage to extend hope.
And sing, for the aesthetic is freedom.
- Edward Said
A Piece Of The Storm
From the shadow of domes in the city of domes,
A snowflake, a blizzard of one, weightless, entered your room
And made its way to the arm of the chair where you, looking up
From your book, saw it the moment it landed.
That's all There was to it. No more than a solemn waking
To brevity, to the lifting and falling away of attention, swiftly,
A time between times, a flowerless funeral. No more than that
Except for the feeling that this piece of the storm,
Which turned into nothing before your eyes, would come back,
That someone years hence, sitting as you are now, might say:
"It's time. The air is ready. The sky has an opening."
- Mark Strand
As if we're going to win this.....O because
If you have a sister I am not she
nor your mother nor you my daughter
nor are we lovers or any kind of couple
except in the intensive care
of poetry and
death's master plan.....architecture-in-progress
draft elevations of a black-and-white mosaic dome
the master left on your doorstep
with a white card in black calligraphy:
Make what you will of this
As if leaving purple roses
If (how many conditionals must we suffer?)
I tell you a letter from the master
is lying on my own doorstep
glued there with leaves and rain
and I haven't bent to it yet
if I tell you I surmise
he writes differently to me:
Do as you will, you have had your life
many have not
signing it in his olden script:
Meister aus Deutschland
- Adrienne Rich
from her poem Victory
"When victory is achieved, that feeling can be overwhelming. Keep your common sense about you, and be gracious. Silence is often the best tactic after a win. If you must talk, praise your opponent, and praise your teammates. Never praise yourself."
- John Madden
<°))))><
I sometimes wonder if that is what Krishna meant -
Among other things - or one way of putting the same
.....thing:
That the future is a faded song, a Royal rose or a lavender
.....spray
Of wistful regret for those who are not yet here to regret,
Pressed between yellow leaves of a book that has never been
.....opened.
And the way up is the way down, the way forward is the
.....way back.
- T. S. Eliot
"There is never a sudden revelation, a complete and tidy explanation for why it happened, or why it ends, or why or who you are. You want one and I want one, but there isn't one. It comes in bits and pieces, and you stitch them together wherever they fit, and when you are done you hold yourself up, and still there are holes and you are a rag doll, invented, imperfect. And yet you are all that you have, so you must be enough. There is no other way."
- Marya Hornbacher
Have you ever noticed a tree standing naked against the sky,
How beautiful it is?
All its branches are outlined, and in its nakedness
There is a poem, there is a song.
Every leaf is gone and it is waiting for the spring.
When the spring comes, it again fills the tree with
The music of many leaves,
Which in due season fall and are blown away.
And this is the way of life.
- Krishnamurti
"To live in the presence of great truths and eternal laws, to be led by permanent ideals - that is what keeps a man patient when the world ignores him, and calm and unspoiled when the world praises him."
- Honore De Balzac
Stone
Go inside a stone
That would be my way.
Let somebody else become a dove
Or gnash his teeth inside a tiger.
I am happy with a stone.
From the outside the stone is a riddle;
No one knows how to answer it.
Yet within, it must be cool and quiet
Even though a cow steps on it full weight,
Even though a child throws it in a river;
The stone sinks, slow, unperturbed
To the river-bottom
Where the fishes come to knock on it
And listen with eyes of dead roosters.
I have seen sparks fly out
When two stones are rubbed.
So perhaps, it is not dark inside after all.
Perhaps, there is a moon shining
From somewhere, as behind a hill;
Just enough light to make out
The strange writings, the star-charts
On the inner walls.
- Charles Simic
Next Day
Moving from Cheer to Joy, from Joy to All,
I take a box
And add it to my wild rice, my Cornish game hens.
The slacked or shorted, basketed, identical
Food-gathering flocks
Are selves I overlook. Wisdom, said William James,
Is learning what to overlook. And I am wise
If that is wisdom.
Yet somehow, as I buy All from these shelves
And the boy takes it to my station wagon,
What I've become
Troubles me even if I shut my eyes.
When I was young and miserable and pretty
And poor, I'd wish
What all girls wish: to have a husband,
A house and children. Now that I'm old, my wish
Is womanish:
That the boy putting groceries in my car
See me. It bewilders me he doesn't see me.
For so many years
I was good enough to eat: the world looked at me
And its mouth watered. How often they have undressed me,
The eyes of strangers!
And, holding their flesh within my flesh, their vile
Imaginings within my imagining,
I too have taken
The chance of life. Now the boy pats my dog
And we start home. Now I am good.
The last mistaken,
Ecstatic, accidental bliss, the blind
Happiness that, bursting, leaves upon the palm
Some soap and water -
It was so long ago, back in some Gay
Twenties, Nineties, I don't know . . . Today I miss
My lovely daughter
Away at school, my sons away at school,
My husband away at work - I wish for them.
The dog, the maid,
And I go through the sure unvarying days
At home in them. As I look at my life,
I am afraid
Only that it will change, as I am changing:
I am afraid, this morning, of my face.
It looks at me
From the rear-view mirror, with the eyes I hate,
The smile I hate. Its plain, lined look
Of gray discovery
Repeats to me: "You're old." That's all, I'm old.
And yet I'm afraid, as I was at the funeral
I went to yesterday.
My friend's cold made-up face, granite among its flowers,
Her undressed, operated-on, dressed body
Were my face and body.
As I think of her I hear her telling me
How young I seem; I am exceptional;
I think of all I have.
But really no one is exceptional,
No one has anything, I'm anybody,
I stand beside my grave
Confused with my life, that is commonplace and solitary.
- Randall Jarrell
"Difficult, after a while, to love one's own - its inconsistencies, the classic diminutions, the terror of having only one. But if bodies had epitaphs, I'd want mine to read: It rattled its cage. It wouldn't be appeased."
- Stephen Dunn
Bodies
Riffs & Reciprocities
" . . . for we're only passing through, we're already ghosts."
- Thomas Pynchon
"The meditative experience is, to my mind, the practice of dying, the practice of letting go. The more you practice letting go, the more you begin to understand the journey of your soul or your spirit as it detaches from the material nature of existence. There is a river, and as soon as you unmoor the boat and you start to enter that river, you end up on a journey. Not all of us have gone to the mouth of that river, but I think we are all aware, in the meditative process, that the journey exists. As you go deeply inside your psyche you're aware of the similarity of this journey to the journey of the soul after death."
- Bruce Rubin
"Immersion in the life of the world, a willingness to be inhabited by and to speak for others, including those beyond the realm of the human, these are the practices not just of the bodhisattva but of the writer."
- Jane Hirshfield
><((((º>
"Zen may be words. All living, poetical words are Zen. Zen is not, however, the meaning of the words. It is the words themselves, with their meaning not perceived separately from the words.
Zen is also not something which can be given or received. Love is the same. We can't give love to God; God can't give it to us. God is love. When we really know, with our body-mind, that there is nothing we can get or bestow, borrow or lend, hold or lose, that we can't forgive or be forgiven, save or be saved, we know Zen, but we don't know what it is, because it isn't a what."
- R. H. Blyth
"When you work hard all day with your head and know you must work again the next day, what else can change your ideas and make them run on a different plane like whiskey?"
- Ernest Hemingway
It's always evening
In an occupied country.
Hours before the curfew.
A small provincial city.
The houses all dark.
The store-fronts gutted.
I am on a street corner
Where I shouldn't be.
Alone and coatless
I have gone out to look
For a black dog who answers to my whistle.
I have a kind of halloween mask
Which I am afraid to put on.
- Charles Simic
Around and around the house
the leaves fall thick,
but never fast,
for they come circling down
with a dead lightness
that is sombre and slow.
- Charles Dickens
From The Long Sad Party
Someone was saying
something about shadows covering the field, about
how things pass, how one sleeps towards morning
and the morning goes.
Someone was saying
how the wind dies down but comes back,
how shells are the coffins of wind
but the weather continues.
It was a long night
and someone said something about the moon shedding its
white
on the cold field, that there was nothing ahead
but more of the same.
Someone mentioned
a city she had been in before the war, a room with two
candles
against a wall, someone dancing, someone watching.
We begin to believe
the night would not end.
Someone was saying the music was over and no one had
noticed.
Then someone said something about the planets, about the
stars,
how small they were, how far away.
- Mark Strand
"Then away out in the woods I heard that kind of a sound that a ghost makes when it wants to tell about something that's on its mind and can't make itself understood, and so can't rest easy in its grave, and has to go about that way every night grieving."
- Mark Twain
Horai
"Blue vision of depth lost in height, sea and sky interblending through luminous haze. Only sky and sea, one azure enormity. In the fore, ripples are catching a silvery light, and threads of foam are swirling. But a little further off no motion is visible, nor anything save color: dim warm blue of water widening away to melt into blue of air. Horizon there is none: only distance soaring into space, infinite concavity hollowing before you, and hugely arching above you, the color deepening with the height. But far in the midway-blue there hangs a faint, faint vision of palace towers, with high roofs horned and curved like moons, some shadowing of splendor strange and old, illumined by a sunshine soft as memory.
The sunshine in Horai is whiter than any other sunshine, a milky light that never dazzles, astonishingly clear, but very soft. This atmosphere is not of our human period: it is enormously old, so old that I feel afraid when I try to think how old it is; and it is not a mixture of nitrogen and oxygen. It is not made of air at all, but of ghost, the substance of quintillions of quintillions of generations of souls blended into one immense translucency, souls of people who thought in ways never resembling our ways. Whatever mortal man inhales that atmosphere, he takes into his blood the thrilling of these spirits; and they change the sense within him, reshaping his notions of Space and Time, so that he can see only as they used to see, and feel only as they used to feel, and think only as they used to think.
Because in Horai there is no knowledge of great evil, the hearts of the people never grow old. And, by reason of being always young in heart, the people of Horai smile from birth until death - except when the Gods send sorrow among them; and faces then are veiled until the sorrow goes away. In Horai, people love and trust each other, as if all were members of a single household; and the speech of the women is like birdsong, because the hearts of them are light as the souls of birds; and the swaying of the sleeves of the maidens at play seems a flutter of wide, soft wings. In Horai nothing is hidden but grief, because there is no reason for shame; and nothing is locked away, because there could not be any theft; and by night as well as by day all doors remain unbarred, because there is no reason for fear. Much of this seeming would be due to the inhalation of that ghostly atmosphere - but not all. For the spell wrought by the dead is only the charm of an Ideal, the glamour of an ancient hope; and something of that hope has found fulfillment in many hearts, in the simple beauty of unselfish lives.
Evil winds from the West are blowing over Horai; and the magical atmosphere, alas! is shrinking away before them. It lingers now in patches only, and bands, like those long bright bands of cloud that train across the landscapes of Japanese painters. Under these shreds of the elfish vapor you still can find Horai - but not everywhere. Remember that Horai signifies Mirage, the Vision of the Intangible. And the Vision is fading, never again to appear save in pictures and poems and dreams."
- Lafcadio Hearn
Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things
"There is no journey forward without ghosts; there is no telling without fear."
- Gerry Turcotte
All Hallow's Eve
In the great silence of my favorite month,
October (the red of maples, the bronze of oaks,
A clear-yellow leaf here and there on birches),
I celebrated the standstill of time.
The vast country of the dead had its beginning everywhere:
At the turn of a tree-lined alley, across park lawns.
But I did not have to enter, I was not called yet.
Motorboats pulled up on the river bank, paths in pine needles.
It was getting dark early, no lights on the other side.
I was going to attend the ball of ghosts and witches.
A delegation would appear there in masks and wigs,
And dance, unrecognized, in the chorus of the living.
- Czeslaw Milosz
Enough. These few words are enough.
If not these words, this breath.
If not this breath, this sitting here.
This opening to the life
we have refused
again and again
until now.
Until now.
- David Whyte
The poem,
a consolation, an attribute
of the wind, southern or northern.
Do not describe what the camera can see
of your wounds. And scream that you may hear yourself,
and scream that you may know you're still alive,
and alive, and that life on this earth is
possible. Invent a hope for speech,
invent a direction, a mirage to extend hope.
And sing, for the aesthetic is freedom.
- Edward Said
A Piece Of The Storm
From the shadow of domes in the city of domes,
A snowflake, a blizzard of one, weightless, entered your room
And made its way to the arm of the chair where you, looking up
From your book, saw it the moment it landed.
That's all There was to it. No more than a solemn waking
To brevity, to the lifting and falling away of attention, swiftly,
A time between times, a flowerless funeral. No more than that
Except for the feeling that this piece of the storm,
Which turned into nothing before your eyes, would come back,
That someone years hence, sitting as you are now, might say:
"It's time. The air is ready. The sky has an opening."
- Mark Strand
As if we're going to win this.....O because
If you have a sister I am not she
nor your mother nor you my daughter
nor are we lovers or any kind of couple
except in the intensive care
of poetry and
death's master plan.....architecture-in-progress
draft elevations of a black-and-white mosaic dome
the master left on your doorstep
with a white card in black calligraphy:
Make what you will of this
As if leaving purple roses
If (how many conditionals must we suffer?)
I tell you a letter from the master
is lying on my own doorstep
glued there with leaves and rain
and I haven't bent to it yet
if I tell you I surmise
he writes differently to me:
Do as you will, you have had your life
many have not
signing it in his olden script:
Meister aus Deutschland
- Adrienne Rich
from her poem Victory
"When victory is achieved, that feeling can be overwhelming. Keep your common sense about you, and be gracious. Silence is often the best tactic after a win. If you must talk, praise your opponent, and praise your teammates. Never praise yourself."
- John Madden
I sometimes wonder if that is what Krishna meant -
Among other things - or one way of putting the same
.....thing:
That the future is a faded song, a Royal rose or a lavender
.....spray
Of wistful regret for those who are not yet here to regret,
Pressed between yellow leaves of a book that has never been
.....opened.
And the way up is the way down, the way forward is the
.....way back.
- T. S. Eliot
"There is never a sudden revelation, a complete and tidy explanation for why it happened, or why it ends, or why or who you are. You want one and I want one, but there isn't one. It comes in bits and pieces, and you stitch them together wherever they fit, and when you are done you hold yourself up, and still there are holes and you are a rag doll, invented, imperfect. And yet you are all that you have, so you must be enough. There is no other way."
- Marya Hornbacher
Have you ever noticed a tree standing naked against the sky,
How beautiful it is?
All its branches are outlined, and in its nakedness
There is a poem, there is a song.
Every leaf is gone and it is waiting for the spring.
When the spring comes, it again fills the tree with
The music of many leaves,
Which in due season fall and are blown away.
And this is the way of life.
- Krishnamurti
"To live in the presence of great truths and eternal laws, to be led by permanent ideals - that is what keeps a man patient when the world ignores him, and calm and unspoiled when the world praises him."
- Honore De Balzac
Stone
Go inside a stone
That would be my way.
Let somebody else become a dove
Or gnash his teeth inside a tiger.
I am happy with a stone.
From the outside the stone is a riddle;
No one knows how to answer it.
Yet within, it must be cool and quiet
Even though a cow steps on it full weight,
Even though a child throws it in a river;
The stone sinks, slow, unperturbed
To the river-bottom
Where the fishes come to knock on it
And listen with eyes of dead roosters.
I have seen sparks fly out
When two stones are rubbed.
So perhaps, it is not dark inside after all.
Perhaps, there is a moon shining
From somewhere, as behind a hill;
Just enough light to make out
The strange writings, the star-charts
On the inner walls.
- Charles Simic
Next Day
Moving from Cheer to Joy, from Joy to All,
I take a box
And add it to my wild rice, my Cornish game hens.
The slacked or shorted, basketed, identical
Food-gathering flocks
Are selves I overlook. Wisdom, said William James,
Is learning what to overlook. And I am wise
If that is wisdom.
Yet somehow, as I buy All from these shelves
And the boy takes it to my station wagon,
What I've become
Troubles me even if I shut my eyes.
When I was young and miserable and pretty
And poor, I'd wish
What all girls wish: to have a husband,
A house and children. Now that I'm old, my wish
Is womanish:
That the boy putting groceries in my car
See me. It bewilders me he doesn't see me.
For so many years
I was good enough to eat: the world looked at me
And its mouth watered. How often they have undressed me,
The eyes of strangers!
And, holding their flesh within my flesh, their vile
Imaginings within my imagining,
I too have taken
The chance of life. Now the boy pats my dog
And we start home. Now I am good.
The last mistaken,
Ecstatic, accidental bliss, the blind
Happiness that, bursting, leaves upon the palm
Some soap and water -
It was so long ago, back in some Gay
Twenties, Nineties, I don't know . . . Today I miss
My lovely daughter
Away at school, my sons away at school,
My husband away at work - I wish for them.
The dog, the maid,
And I go through the sure unvarying days
At home in them. As I look at my life,
I am afraid
Only that it will change, as I am changing:
I am afraid, this morning, of my face.
It looks at me
From the rear-view mirror, with the eyes I hate,
The smile I hate. Its plain, lined look
Of gray discovery
Repeats to me: "You're old." That's all, I'm old.
And yet I'm afraid, as I was at the funeral
I went to yesterday.
My friend's cold made-up face, granite among its flowers,
Her undressed, operated-on, dressed body
Were my face and body.
As I think of her I hear her telling me
How young I seem; I am exceptional;
I think of all I have.
But really no one is exceptional,
No one has anything, I'm anybody,
I stand beside my grave
Confused with my life, that is commonplace and solitary.
- Randall Jarrell
"Difficult, after a while, to love one's own - its inconsistencies, the classic diminutions, the terror of having only one. But if bodies had epitaphs, I'd want mine to read: It rattled its cage. It wouldn't be appeased."
- Stephen Dunn
Bodies
Riffs & Reciprocities
" . . . for we're only passing through, we're already ghosts."
- Thomas Pynchon
"The meditative experience is, to my mind, the practice of dying, the practice of letting go. The more you practice letting go, the more you begin to understand the journey of your soul or your spirit as it detaches from the material nature of existence. There is a river, and as soon as you unmoor the boat and you start to enter that river, you end up on a journey. Not all of us have gone to the mouth of that river, but I think we are all aware, in the meditative process, that the journey exists. As you go deeply inside your psyche you're aware of the similarity of this journey to the journey of the soul after death."
- Bruce Rubin
"Immersion in the life of the world, a willingness to be inhabited by and to speak for others, including those beyond the realm of the human, these are the practices not just of the bodhisattva but of the writer."
- Jane Hirshfield
"Zen may be words. All living, poetical words are Zen. Zen is not, however, the meaning of the words. It is the words themselves, with their meaning not perceived separately from the words.
Zen is also not something which can be given or received. Love is the same. We can't give love to God; God can't give it to us. God is love. When we really know, with our body-mind, that there is nothing we can get or bestow, borrow or lend, hold or lose, that we can't forgive or be forgiven, save or be saved, we know Zen, but we don't know what it is, because it isn't a what."
- R. H. Blyth
"When you work hard all day with your head and know you must work again the next day, what else can change your ideas and make them run on a different plane like whiskey?"
- Ernest Hemingway
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