in the midst of too much
How Much Happens in a Day
In the course of a day we shall meet one another.
But, in one day, things spring to life -
they sell grapes in the street,
tomatoes change their skin,
the young girl you wanted
never came back to the office.
They changed the postman suddenly.
The letters now are not the same.
A few golden leaves and it's different;
this tree is now well off.
Who would have said that the earth
with its ancient skin would change so much?
It has more volcanoes than yesterday,
the sky has brand-new clouds,
the rivers are flowing differently.
Besides, so much has come into being!
I have inaugurated hundreds
of highways and buildings,
delicate, clean bridges
like ships or violins.
And so, when I greet you
and kiss your flowering mouth,
our kisses are other kisses,
our mouths are other mouths.
Joy, my love, joy in all things,
in what falls and what flourishes.
Joy in today and yesterday,
the day before and tomorrow.
Joy in bread and stone,
joy in fire and rain.
In what changes, is born, grows,
consumes itself, and becomes a kiss again.
Joy in the air we have,
and in what we have of earth.
When our life dries up,
only the roots remain to us,
and the wind is cold like hate.
Then let us change our skin,
our nails, our blood, our gazing;
and you kiss me and I go out
to sell light on the roads.
Joy in the night and the day,
and the four stations of the soul.
- Pablo Neruda
"We now know that human transformation does not happen through didacticism or through excessive certitude, but through the playful entertainment of another scripting of reality that may subvert the old given text and its interpretation and lead to the embrace of an alternative text and its redescription of reality."
- Walter Brueggemann
Cadences of Home
"The power in freedom is that it allows the mind to be capable. The curious mind is engaged by change, not overwhelmed. The free mind is powerful because it is energetic and confident that it can solve whatever problem it encounters. A mind full of wonder does not seek to make others struggle because it does not struggle. It does not seek to enslave others because it has no use for enslavement. It strives instead to instill hope and a spirit of exploration in others. The only order the curious mind can tolerate is a world where we are all our own masters, doing what we love to do."
- Za Rinpoche and Ashley Nebelsieck
The Backdoor to Enlightenment
"Whether success or failure: the truth of a life really has little to do with its quality. The quality of life is in proportion, always, to the capacity for delight. The capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention."
- May Sarton
- Marian Wright Edelman
Life goes on grinding up
glass, wearing out clothes
making fragments
breaking down
forms
and what lasts through time
is like an island on a ship in the sea,
perishable
surrounded by dangerous fragility
by merciless waters and threats.
- Pablo Neruda
Ode To Broken Things
"The capacity for fear and for happiness are the same, the unrestricted openness to experience amounting to self-abandonment in which the vanquished rediscovers himself."
- Theodor W. Adorno
"Learn how to meditate on paper. Drawing and writing are forms of meditation. Learn how to contemplate works of art. Learn how to pray in the streets or in the country. Know how to meditate not only when you have a book in your hand but when you are waiting for a bus or riding in a train."
- Thomas Merton
Zero Hour
It was the hour of simply nothing,
not a single desire in my western heart,
no ancient system
of breathing and postures,
no big idea justifying what I felt.
There was even an absence of despair.
"Anything goes," I said to myself.
All the clocks were high. Above them,
hundreds of stars flickering if, if, if.
Everywhere in the universe, it seemed,
some next thing was gathering itself.
I started to feel something,
but it was nothing more than a moment
passing into another, or was it less
eloquent than that, purely muscular,
some meaningless twitch?
I'd let someone else make it rhyme.
- Stephen Dunn
Different Hours
Not knowing the way
to the temple,
I enter several miles
into cloudy peaks.
Ancient trees,
a deserted path -
deep in the mountains,
somewhere a bell.
The sound of a spring
choked by towering rocks,
the color of sunlight
chilled by green pines.
Near evening,
at the corner of an empty pool,
calm zen subdues
poison dragons.
- Wang Wei
But how does one feel?
One grows used to the weather,
The landscape and that;
And the sublime comes down
To the spirit itself,
The spirit and space,
The empty spirit
In vacant space.
What wine does one drink?
What bread does one eat?
- Wallace Stevens
excerpt from The American Sublime
Why then, have to be human?
Oh not because happiness exists,
Not out of curiosity . . .
But because being here means so much;
because everything here,
vanishing so quickly, seems to need us,
and strangely keeps calling to us . . . To have been
here, once, completely, even if only once,
to have been at one with the earth -
this is beyond undoing.
- Rainer Maria Rilke
"I live on Earth at present, and I don't know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing - a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process - an integral function of the universe."
- R. Buckminster Fuller
"Keep asking "What idea of self have I dreamed up today?"
- Zenkei Blanche Hartman
"It is always uncomfortable to know that you have to live with other people's delusions about you, of one kind or another."
- Thomas Merton
Some days, you and I go mad.
Our bellies get stuffed full,
Hearts break, minds snap.
We can't go on the old way so
We change. Our lives pivot,
Forming a mysterious geometry.
- Deng Ming-Dao
Gazing at the Cascade on Lu Mountain
Where crowns a purple haze
A shimmer in sunlight rays
The hill called Incense-Burner Peak,
from far
To see, hung over the torrent's wall,
That waterfall
Vault sheer three thousand feet, you'd say
The Milky Way
was tumbling from the heavens, star on star.
- Li Po
"Stuff your eyes with wonder . . . Live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories."
- Ray Bradbury
"You think your mind is in your head, but where is it? No one knows. So our practice is to be with everything. When you include everything, that is the real self."
- Shunryu Suzuki
In the morning I mused
It won't return, the magic of life
it won't return
Suddenly in my house the sun
became alive for me
and the table with bread on it
gold
and the flower on the table
and the glasses
gold
And what happened to the sadness
In the sadness too, radiance.
- Zelda Schneurson Mishkovsky
The Spectacular Difference
"We have to be on our guard for these silent questions, asked outside the usual contexts of meaning. We are alone with them, wrestling with them in our nakedness, the way the ancient Greeks practiced the sport. No wonder we feel so uneasy when they arise.
No wonder we seek an array of distractions to keep them at bay most of the time. No wonder that for some people they are simply too big to admit of meaningful answers."
- Mark Kingwell
"My teacher, Kishizawa Roshi, was a great scholar, and his study started after he gave up everything. He continued his study and practice just to meet ancient teachers who had devoted themselves to the teaching.
Whenever he met a student or scholar, he would ask for any written teachings they might have. Whatever it was, he was very much interested in reading it. He was always seeking for his friend, seeking for his teacher. Only when you give up everything can you see the true teacher."
- Shunryu Suzuki
"Man tries to make for himself in the fashion that suits him best a simplified and intelligible picture of the world; he then tries to some extent to substitute this cosmos of his for the world of experience, and thus to overcome it. This is what the painter, the poet, the speculative philosopher, and the natural scientists do, each in his own fashion. Each makes this cosmos and its construction the pivot of his emotional life, in order to find in this way peace and security which he can not find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience."
- Albert Einstein
Generations
Our stories lie down in the orchard,
their time is not now, but something is
coming, something is going away. They
rise to the stars, and wait to be told.
There are listeners who know how little
we know, how much we are feeling.
We had to go our own way, a little off course,
always, no matter how specific the directions
seemed at the time. In this universe if we're lucky,
we will live in our children's stories,
their tales that will turn us to legend,
some absurd truth that has nothing to do
with our plans, our meticulous records.
No matter what stories we discard or keep,
they will give us a life we cannot imagine.
- Jeanne Lohmann
The Light of Invisible Bodies
Summer grasses:
all that remains of great soldiers'
imperial dreams
- Basho
"Something overheard from the dissonant street - a screech, a bang - taken in and arranged. A subjective correlative. Sequences, resolutions, deliberate unfulfillments. The sublimity of large and small moments surrendering to the whole. What feeling feels like over time. An attempt to screw up what feeling feels like over time. Heartbreak and a high C. The twang the nervous system wants when it's in revolt. The often welcome melodic lie. Ululation and a stomp of heels, scat-sense, voice and ear living together in brilliant sin. The soul's undersong. The orchestration of randomness, a flirtation with the boundaries of silence and space. When Bun-Ching played last night - a reminder that the self wants to disappear, be taken away from itself and returned."
- Stephen Dunn
Music
Riffs & Reciprocities
"I believe in the in-between moments now. I look forward to certain sorts of loneliness . . . I play catch with myself late at night when everyone else is asleep, throwing pop-ups into the darkness, not knowing whether they'll land in my glove or on my head. I dance with myself before and after every shower. Slowly, I am overcoming all my embarrassments."
- William Van Wert
"How can we speak of the action of the mind under any divisions, as of its knowledge, of its ethics, of its works, and so forth, since it melts will into perception, knowledge into act? Each becomes the other. Itself alone is. Its vision is not like the vision of the eye, but is union with the things known."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The technology of silence
The rituals, etiquette
the blurring of terms
silence not absence
of words or music or even
raw sounds
Silence can be a plan
rigorously executed
the blueprint of a life
It is a presence
it has a history a form
Do not confuse it
with any kind of absence
- Adrienne Rich
3.
Cartographies of Silence
"Concerning realization, through the body, of going beyond Buddha, I would like to talk a little." Dongshan said.
"What is this talk?" a monk asked.
Dongshan said, "When I talk, you don't hear it."
"Can you hear it, Master?" the monk asked.
Dongshan replied, "Wait until I don't talk, then you will hear it."
When It Comes
Any time. Now. The next minute.
Years from today. You lean forward
and wait. You relax, but you don't forget.
Someone plans an elaborate party
with a banquet, dancing, even fireworks
when feasting is over. You look at them:
All those years when you searched the world
like a ferret, these never happened - your marriage,
your family, prayers, curses. Only dreams.
A vacuum has opened everywhere. Cities,
armies, those chairs ranked in the great
hall for the audience – there isn't anyone.
Like a shutter the sky opens and closes
and the show is over. The next act
will deny that anything ever happened.
Your hand falls open. It is empty. It never
held a knife, a flower, gold,
or love, or now. Lean closer –
Listen to me: there isn't any hand.
- William Stafford
The Answers Are Inside the Mountains
"The meaning of life changes when we confront loss. Our search for meaning and purpose leaves us wandering and bewildered. What was ordinary yesterday becomes precious today, and what was precious yesterday seems dull and lusterless. What we liked becomes uninteresting, but what we love becomes everything."
- Stephen Levine
Distant ridges, far away clouds
All events come from a distance.
With a high vantage point,
Foretelling the future is elementary.
- Deng Ming-Dao
"To know someone is to sense that person's flavor - what you feel from that person. Each one has his or her own flavor, a particular personality from which many feelings appear. To fully appreciate this personality or flavor is to have a good relationship; to fully appreciate them."
- Shunryu Suzuki
As Much As You Can
And if you cannot make your life as you want it,
at least try this
as much as you can: do not disgrace it
in the crowding contact with the world,
in the many movements and all the talk.
Do not disgrace it by taking it,
dragging it around often and exposing it
to the daily folly
of relationships and associations,
till it becomes like an alien burdensome life.
- C.P. Cavafy
Self Portrait
It doesn't interest me if there is one God
or many gods.
I want to know if you belong or feel
abandoned.
If you know despair or can see it in others.
I want to know
if you are prepared to live in the world
with its harsh need
to change you. If you can look back
with firm eyes
saying this is where I stand. I want to know
if you know
how to melt into that fierce heat of living
falling toward
the center of your longing. I want to know
if you are willing
to live, day by day, with the consequence of love
and the bitter
unwanted passion of your sure defeat.
I have heard, in that fierce embrace, even
the gods speak of God.
- David Whyte
Fire in the Earth
"The world of the arts is by no means always comfortable, but neither is it likely ever to be boring. It is full of surprises, humor, traps for the unwary, and challenges to smugness. It is a world of moods as well as of revelation, of beliefs and fears, of unpleasant truth as well as of delicious fantasy. Perhaps it is arrogant to say that anyone who does not venture into this world is only half-interested in life. I say it, nonetheless."
- Russell Lynes
The Fine Edge of Awareness
"The point is that all phenomena, all dharmas, whether seen or heard or felt or whatever and whether pleasurable or painful, it matters not, all without exception, open us to reality if we give ourselves to them. "How can we know the dancer from the dance?" wrote William Butler Yeats. Zen says the whole universe is art and we are the artists."
- Flora Courtois
The Door to Infinity
Recipe for an Ocean in the Absence of the Sea
You have the ingredients on hand,
Get to the edge of something,
yourself best of all, and take
yourself in hand. Take, I mean, your hand,
trace out the blue menaces
released and lapsing there,
watch closely around the wrist: they will
remind you what you must do,
They are what you must do. Be
them, until there is nothing but them,
then you are ready. Now take
time, all there is in the house -
it does not have to be yours. Take time
and never for a moment
losing track of what changes
back into yourself, bitter enough
so that you will need almost
no salt, mix well and then leap
over the edge. Wait there. When you can
wait no longer, it is done.
Serve at once. It does not keep.
- Richard Howard
Choosing to Think of It
Today, ten thousand people will die
and their small replacements will bring joy
and this will make sense to someone
removed from any sense of loss.
I, too, will die a little and carry on,
doing some paperwork, driving myself
home. The sky is simply overcast,
nothing is any less than it was
yesterday or the day before. In short,
there's no reason or every reason
why I'm choosing to think of this now.
The short-lived holiness
true lovers know, making them unaccountable
except to spirit and themselves - suddenly
I want to be that insufferable and selfish,
that sharpened and tuned.
I'm going to think of what it means
to be an animal crossing a highway,
to be a human without a useful prayer
setting off on one of those journeys
we humans take. I don't expect anything
to change. I just want to be filled up
a little more with what exists,
tipped toward the laughter which understands
I'm nothing and all there is.
By evening, the promised storm
will arrive. A few in small boats
will be taken by surprise.
There will be survivors, and even they will die.
- Stephen Dunn
Some Last Questions
What is the head
A. Ash
What are the eyes
A. The wells have fallen in and have
Inhabitants
What are the feet
A. Thumbs left after the auction
No what are the feet
A. Under them the impossible road is moving
Down which the broken necked mice push
Balls of blood with their noses
What is the tongue
A. The black coat that fell off the wall
With sleeves trying to say something
What are the hands
A. Paid
No what are the hands
A. Climbing back down the museum wall
To their ancestors the extinct shrews that will
Have left a message
What is the silence
A. As though it had a right to move
Who are the compatriots
A. They make the stars of bone
- W. S. Merwin
"In the presence of some people we inevitably depart from ourselves: we are inaccurate, we say things we do not feel, and talk nonsense. When we get home we are conscious that we have made fools of ourselves. Never go near these people".
- Mark Rutherford
<< Home