a mystic in the garden of mistakes
The Midnight Club
The gifted have told us for years
that they want to be loved
For what they are, that they,
in whatever fullness is theirs,
Are perishable in twilight,
just like us. So they work all night
in rooms that are cold and
webbed with the moon's light;
Sometimes, during the day,
they lean on their cars,
And stare into the blistering
valley, glassy and golden,
But mainly they sit, hunched
in the dark, feet on the floor,
Hands on the table, shirts with a
bloodstain over the heart.
- Mark Strand
The Continuous Life
"There is nothing like reality," a friend tells me. Our poverty of knowing is so great we are afraid to admit to it, but would rather blather and rationalize our way away as though by pretending to know who we are we can leave our mark on the world. What then when the mark we leave is a wound?"
- Terrance Keenan
"The important thing about despair is never to give up, never wrap up and put away a sterile life, but somehow keep it open. Because you never can know what's coming; never. That's the great thing about life, the crucial thing to remember. You may beat your fists on a stone wall for years and years, and every consideration of common sense will say it's hopeless, forget it, spare yourself; and then one day your bleeding hand will go through as if the wall were theatrical gauze; you'll be in another realm where birds are singing and love is possible, and you'd have missed it if you'd given up, because it might be only that one day the wall was not stone."
- Allen Wheelis
"There is a deep hole in your being, like an abyss. You will never succeed in filling that hole, because your needs are inexhaustible. You have to work around it so that gradually the abyss closes.
Since the hole is so enormous and your anguish so deep, you will always be tempted to flee from it. There are two extremes to avoid: being completely absorbed in your pain and being distracted by so many things that you stay far away from the wound you want to heal."
- Henri Nouwen
The Inner Voice of Love
"Nevertheless, you have the right to remain miserable. Any joy you express will certainly be used against you. We don't want to know how you really feel, but we are sure it is bad. What have you got to smile about? Life's a bitch, then you die.
We may not cause, cure, or control someones misery, but we cannot ignore it either. We are each thing always, all the time. The universe is not a burden. A burden suggests there is something separate from ourselves to carry. There is not. We are the expression of the universe, the voice of the Dharma, and to ignore anything in it divides us from all of it."
- Terrance Keenan
"So strange, life is. Why people do not go around in a continual state of surprise is beyond me."
- William Maxwell
Life is mostly froth and bubble;
Two things stand like stone: -
Kindness in another's trouble,
Courage in our own.
- Adam Lindsay Gordon
For My Young Friends Who Are Afraid
There is a country to cross you will
find in the corner of your eye, in
the quick slip of your foot - air far
down, a snap that might have caught.
And maybe for you, for me, a high, passing
voice that finds its way by being
afraid. That country is there, for us,
carried as it is crossed. What you fear
will not go away: it will take you into
yourself and bless you and keep you.
That's the world, and we all live there.
- William Stafford
"People whom we love are a fire that feeds our lives . . . But to feel the affection that comes from those whom we do not know . . . That is something still greater and more beautiful because it widens out the boundaries of our being, and unites us with all living beings."
- Pablo Neruda
"You cannot depend upon anybody. There is no guide, no teacher, no authority. There is only you - your relationship with others and with the world - there is nothing else. When you realize this, it either brings great despair, from which comes cynicism and bitterness, or, in facing the fact that you and nobody else is responsible for the world and for yourself, for what you think, what you feel, how you act, all self-pity goes."
- Jiddu Krishnamurti
"Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience."
- David Foster Wallace
"The person who is really in revolt is the optimist, who generally lives and dies in a desperate and suicidal effort to persuade other people how good they are."
- G.K. Chesterton
Just Thinking
Got up on a cool morning. Leaned out a window.
No cloud, no wind. Air that flowers held
for awhile. Some dove somewhere.
Been on probation most of my life. And
the rest of my life been condemned. So these moments
count for a lot - peace, you know.
Let the bucket of memory down into the well,
bring it up. Cool, cool minutes. No one
stirring, no plans. Just being there.
This is what the whole thing is about.
- William Stafford
"Our existence is finite. The self that we have created through so many years of effort and suffering will die. And sustained though we may be by the idea, the hope, the certainty that some portion of us will eternally endure, we also must acknowledge that this "I" who breathes and loves and works and knows itself will be forever and ever and ever . . . obliterated.
So, whether or not we live with images of continuity - of immortality - we also will have to live with a sense of transience, aware that no matter how passionately we love whatever we love, we don't have the power to make either it, or us, stay."
- Judith Viorst
Necessary Losses
"There is a bitter aftertaste when one swallows the truth, sometimes. It may be years before it becomes apparent, so long that you've forgotten that first taste, but it does come. It comes when, having thought you swallowed truth whole, what you got was only a morsel. Further, the spreading bitterness derives from understanding that what you thought was true was, actually, true, but not in the way you thought or wanted it to be."
- Terrance Keenan
"We do not find our own center. It finds us. We do not think ourselves into new ways of living. We live ourselves into new ways of thinking."
- Richard Rohr
Everything Belongs
"We think life and death (or sickness and health) are separate phenomena. We never think of life and death as the same; that would be illogical. Only one problem . . . Reality is not logical. Truth is not rational; only our minds are. We are so egotistical, so arrogant, that we want to make reality into a concept, reduce life to a logical idea."
- Dennis Genpo Merzel
The Eye Never Sleeps
"I feel gratitude to the Buddha for pointing out that what we struggle against all our lives can be acknowledged as ordinary experience. Life does continually go up and down. People and situations are unpredictable and so is everything else. Everybody knows the pain of getting what we don't want: saints, sinners, winners, losers. I feel gratitude that someone saw the truth and pointed out that we don't suffer this kind of pain because of our personal inability to get things right."
- Pema Chodron
Waking at 3 a.m.
Even in the cave of the night when you
wake and are free and lonely,
neglected by others, discarded, loved only
by what doesn't matter - even in that
big room no one can see,
you push with your eyes till forever
comes in its twisted figure eight
and lies down in your head.
You think water in the river;
you think slower than the tide in
the grain of the wood; you become
a secret storehouse that saves the country,
so open and foolish and empty.
You look over all that the darkness
ripples across. More than has ever
been found comforts you. You open your
eyes in a vault that unlocks as fast
and as far as your thought can run.
A great snug wall goes around everything,
has always been there, will always
remain. It is a good world to be
lost in. It comforts you. It is
all right. And you sleep.
- William Stafford
"And if awakening is also already present, inescapably and everywhere present from the beginning, how can the emotions not be part of that singing life of grasses and fish and oil tankers and subways and cats in heat who wake us, furious and smiling, in the middle of the brief summer night."
- Jane Hirshfield
Recalling A Sung Dynasty Landscape
Palest wash of stone-rubbed ink
leaves open the moon: unpainted circle,
how does it raise so much light?
Below, the mountains
lose themselves in dreaming
a single, thatch-roofed hut.
Not that the hut lends meaning
to the mountains or the moon -
it is a place to rest the eye after much traveling, is all.
And the heart, unscrolled,
is comforted by such small things:
a cup of green tea rescues us, grows deep and large, a lake.
- Jane Hirshfield
Childhood is not from birth to a certain age and at a certain age
The child is grown, and puts away childish things.
Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies.
- Edna St. Vincent Millay
"For the time being the highest peak, for the time being the deepest ocean; for the time being a crazy mind, for the time being a Buddha body; for the time being a Zen Master, for the time being an ordinary person; for the time being earth and sky . . . Since there is nothing but this moment, 'for the time being' is all the time there is."
- Dogen
All Souls
Did someone say that there would be an end,
an end, Oh, an end to love and mourning?
What has been once so interwoven cannot be raveled,
not the gift ungiven.
Now the dead move through all of us still glowing.
Mother and child, lover and lover mated,
are wound and bound together and enflowing.
What has been plaited cannot be unplaited -
only the strands grow richer with each loss
and memory makes kings and queens of us.
Dark into light, light into darkness, spin.
When all the birds have flow to some real haven,
we who find shelter in the warmth within,
listen and feel new-cherished, new-forgiven,
as the lost human voices speak through us and blend our complex love,
our mourning without end.
- May Sarton
"Lightly, my darling, lightly. Even when it comes to dying. Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic. No rhetoric, no tremolos, no self-conscious persona putting on its celebrated imitation of Christ or Goethe or Little Nell. And, of course, no theology, no metaphysics. Just the fact of dying and the fact of Clear Light.
So throw away all your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That's why you must walk so lightly. Lightly, my darling . . . Completely unencumbered."
- Aldous Huxley
"Questions that tap into our mortality, our pain, our selfishness, our basic needs, questions that arise from the immeasurable darkness, light, or mystery of our lives, require more than Answerization. They require our suffering, steadfastness, silent yearning, and deepest faith."
- David James Duncan
How I Became a Ghost
It was all about objects, their objections
expressed through a certain solidity.
My house for example still moves
through me, moves me.
When I tried to reverse the process
I kept dropping things, kept finding myself
in the basement.
Windows became more than
usually problematic.
I wanted to break them
which didn't work, though for awhile
I had more success with the lake.
The phone worked for a long time
though when I answered
often nobody was there.
Bats crashed into me at night,
but then didn't anymore.
The rings vanished from my hand,
the pond.
I stopped feeling the wind.
One day the closets were empty.
Another day the mirrors were.
– Leslie Harrison
To See My Mother
It was like witnessing the earth being formed,
to see my mother die, like seeing
the dry lands be separated
from the oceans, and all the mists bear up
on one side, and all the solids
be borne down, on the other, until
the body was all there, all bronze and
petrified redwood opal, and the soul all
gone. If she hadn't looked so exalted, so
beast-exalted and refreshed and suddenly
hopeful, more than hopeful - beyond
hope, relieved - if she had not been suffering so
much, since I had met her, I do not
know how I would have stood it, without
fighting someone, though no one was there
to fight, death was not there except
as her, my task was to hold her tiny
crown in one cupped hand, and her near
birdbone shoulder. Lakes, clouds,
nests. Winds, stems, tongues.
Embryo, zygote, blastocele, atom,
my mother's dying was like an end
of life on earth, some end of water
and moisture salt and sweet, and vapor,
till only that still, ocher moon
shone, in the room, mouth open, no song.
- Sharon Olds
"To die is easy when we are in perfect health. On a fine spring morning, out of doors, on the downs, mind and body sound and exhilarated, it would be nothing to lie down on the turf and pass away."
- Mark Rutherford
"It is a mistake to suppose that birth turns into death. Birth is a phase that is an entire period of itself, with its own past and future." In other words, every moment of living is full and complete. It's not leading to something else. It's not in the process of turning into something else. It's absolutely complete in and of itself, and all of time is included in that one moment of experience. If we were able to live it truly enough, we would feel the weight of it."
- Norman Fischer
Birth and Death
A Zen master and his student were walking in the woods, when they noticed ducks flying overhead.
"What do you see?" the Zen master asked the student.
"Ducks," the monk answered.
"Where did they go?" asked the Zen master.
"They flew away," replied the monk.
The Zen master asked, "When have ducks ever flown away?"
The Thing Is
to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you've held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, how can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.
- Ellen Bass
"Because getting to know the world happens anyway, by living in it, as soon as you walk out the door you're confronted with the world directly. With the whole world. With up and down, back and front, ugliness and beauty, perfectly normal. There's no need to want this. It happens of its own accord. And if you never leave the house, the process is the same."
- Thomas Bernhard
- Wansong
She responded
The birds' favorite songs
You do not hear,
For their most flamboyant music takes place
When their wings are stretched
Above the trees
And they are smoking the opium
Of pure freedom.
It is healthy for the prisoner
To have faith
That one day he will again move about
Wherever he wants,
Feel the wondrous grit of life -
Less structured,
Find all wounds, debts stamped canceled,
Paid.
I once asked a bird,
"How is it that you fly in this gravity
Of darkness?"
She responded,
"Love lifts
Me."
- Hafiz
Let me keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,
which is mostly standing still and learning to be
astonished.
- Mary Oliver
Messenger
"Compassion is the ultimate attitude of wealth: an anti-poverty attitude, a war on want. It contains all sorts of heroic, juicy, positive, visionary, expansive qualities. And it implies larger scale thinking, a freer and more expansive way of relating to oneself and the world. It is the attitude that one has been born fundamentally rich rather than that one must become rich."
- Chogyam Trungpa
"Simplicity in conduct, in beliefs, and in environment brings an individual very close to the truth of reality. Individuals who practice simplicity cannot be used because they already have everything they need; they cannot be lied to because a lie merely reveals to them another aspect of reality. An attraction to simplicity is essentially an attraction to freedom - the highest expression of personal power. We are taught to think of freedom as something one has, but it is really the absence of things that brings freedom to the individual and meaning into life. To let go of things - unnecessary desires, superfluous possessions - is to have them. Lao Tzu believed that an individual life contains the whole universe, but when individuals develop fixations about certain parts of life they become narrow and shallow and uncentered. Fixations and desires create a crisis within the mind. As individuals let go of desires, feelings of freedom, security, independence, and power increase accordingly."
- R.L. Wing
The Tao of Power
"Between where you are now and where you'd like to be there's a sort of barrier, or a chasm, and sometimes it's a good idea to imagine that you're already at the other side of that chasm, so that you can start on the unknown side."
- David Bohm
The Uses of Sorrow
(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)
Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.
- Mary Oliver
Sometimes
It could be you move through a crowd and your arm
touches a new kingdom. Surrounded,
you shake off a self and become everything
else. It is moving that brings this bonus,
or something about your arm, how you raise it
and become a whole nation, more than a person
lost among others. A few times I've felt this.
You balance, you turn, and out there around you
loom parts of a life you can become.
Everyone is a dancer; your plod gathers in
the sunset and all the separate lights coming on
as you turn. There's a music. Someone has adjusted
what was only a noise. Some people say it
this way: "I'm born again."
- William Stafford
Loneliness is not cured by human company.
Loneliness is cured by contact with reality.
People don't really want to be cured.
What they want is relief; a cure is painful.
- Anthony de Mello
The Way It Is
There's a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn't change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can't get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time's unfolding.
You don't ever let go of the thread.
- William Stafford
"May your trails be crooked, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds, may your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you - beyond that next turning of the canyon walls."
- Edward Abbey
A Prayer for the Traveler
We'll never get there,
Time is always ahead of us,
running down the beach, urging
us on faster, faster, but sometimes
we take off our watches,
sometimes we lie in the hammock,
caught between the mesh
of rope and the net of stars,
suspended, tangled up
in love, running out of time.
- Barbara Crooker
In The Middle
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