wise and otherwise
We find comfort only in
another beauty, in others'
music, in the poetry of others.
Salvation lies with others,
though solitude may taste like
opium. Other people aren't hell
if you glimpse them at dawn, when
their brows are clean, rinsed by dreams.
- Adam Zagajewski
"Once Huangbo and another monk were on pilgrimage. They came to a wide stream, almost a river, and planted their staffs, standing on the bank silently, watching the water go by. Finally the monk hiked up the skirts of his robe and walked across, gliding on top of the water like a sailboat.
Huangbo muttered in disgust, "If I'd have known you were like this I'd have never agreed to go with you!" and he turned around and went on his own way."
- Norman Fischer
"Be patient, do nothing, cease striving. We find this advice disheartening and therefore unfeasible because we forget it is our own inflexible activity that is structuring the reality. We think that if we do not hustle, nothing will happen and we will pine away. But the reality is probably in motion and after a while we might take part in that motion. But one can't know."
- Paul Goodman
Five Years: Thoughts During a Useless Time
Day One
Good morning class. Today
we're going to be discussing
the deplorable adventures
of Franz Wright and his gory flute.
Just kidding. The topic this morning
is an unparaphrasable logic constructed
from parallelisms and images
and held together, on
occasion, by nothing
but the magical non sequitur -
but the hell with that.
We should really examine
your life, the one you bought,
and what happened when you got home
and attempted to assemble it:
that disfiguring explosion
no one witnessed, no one heard,
which you yourself cannot recall,
and by whose unimaginable light you seek
to write the name of beauty.
- Franz Wright
Wheeling Motel
"More and more I find that life is a series of disappearances followed usually but not always by reappearances; you disappear from your morning self and reappear as your afternoon self; you disappear from feeling good and reappear feeling bad. And people, even face to face and clasped in each other's arms, disappear from each other."
- Russell Hoban
Fremder
"Loneliness is like sitting in an empty room and being aware of the space around you. It is a condition of separateness. Solitude is becoming one with the space around you. It is a condition of union. Loneliness is small, solitude is large. Loneliness closes in around you; solitude expands toward the infinite. Loneliness has its roots in words, in an internal conversation that nobody answers; solitude has its roots in the great silence of eternity."
- Kent Nerburn
"Amazingly, the same neurons fire whether we do something or watch someone else do the same thing, and both summon similar feelings. Learning from our own mishaps isn't as safe as learning from someone else's, which helps us decipher the world of intentions, making our social world possible. The brain evolved clever ways to spy or eavesdrop on risk, to fathom anothers joy or pain quickly, as detailed sensations, without resorting to words. We feel what we see, we experience others as self."
- Diane Ackerman
"If you are too intellectual, you will antagonize others. If you are too emotional, you will lose yourself. If you push too much your own way, you will feel uncomfortable. How difficult it is to live in this world of people. Yet, there is no place where we can escape."
- Soseki Natsume
"We, each of us, have a ticket to ride, and if the trip be interesting (if it's dull, we have only ourselves to blame), then we relish the landscape (how quickly it whizzes by!), interact with our fellow travelers, pay frequent visits to the washrooms and concession stands, and hardly ever hold up the ticket to the light where we can read its plainly stated destination: The Abyss."
- Tom Robbins
Jitterbug Perfume
Try to praise the mutilated world
Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June's long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You've seen the refugees heading nowhere,
you've heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth's scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the grey feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.
- Adam Zagajewski
translated by Clare Cavanagh
This moment, mortal as you or I,
was full of boundless, senseless,
silly joy, as if it knew
something we didn't.
- Adam Zagajewski
Moment
"When the self and the other get intermingled, it challenges our sense that our identity is fixed, and when we get hurt it makes the illusion of the self very visible."
- Mark Epstein
"We fall into a story about enlightenment - about life, in fact - and we can get trapped in it for many lifetimes. I wonder more and more how well any life really fits a story. What if our life is not this, then that, in a flat and sensible way, but is equally round like a globe, like the earth itself? Maybe our life never did lie flat on the page and read from left to right, from the fifteenth to the sixteenth of the month."
- Susan Murphy
"You are flawed, you are stuck in old patterns, you become carried away with yourself. Indeed you are quite impossible in many ways. And still, you are beautiful beyond measure."
- John Welwood
"The more you sense the rareness and value of your own life, the more you realize that how you use it, how you manifest it, is all your responsibility. We face such a big task so, naturally, such a person sits down for a while. It's not an intended action, it's a natural action."
- Kobun Chino
"Have you been to the source of a river? It's a very mystic place. You get dizzy when you stay for a while. An especially big river has several sources, and the real source, the farthest point which turns to the major stream, is moist and misty, with some kind of ancient smell, and you feel cold. You feel, "This isn't the place to go in." There is no springing water, so you don't know where the source is. Actually, such a place exists in everyone; the center of us is like that. From such a place, the ancient call appears, "Why don't you know me? Living so many years with me, why can't you call my real name?”
The more your understanding of life becomes clearer and more exact and painfully joyful, the more you feel, "I'm so bad." The one that appears and says, "No, you are not bad at all," that is the way to go, that is your teacher.
Don't misunderstand, this teacher is not always a person. It can embrace you like morning dew in a field, and you get a strange feeling, "Oh, this is it, my teacher is this field."
- Kobun Chino
"Saved? There is nothing to save, my friend. You cannot cast yourself into the Unknowable in the hope that gesture will buy you salvation – you have to jump for the hell of it. In a nirvanic universe there can be no salvation because we are never really lost – or found. The choice is simply between nirvana and ignorance. That is the adult truth the Buddha urges upon us. We are the sum of our burning. No burning, no being."
- John Burdett
Bangkok Haunts
After a reading Roshi Bernie Glassman gave during a book tour, a woman stood up and asked him, "What does it take to live in the Now?"
Glassman answered, "Would anyone who is not living in the Now please stand up?"
- Sean Murphy
One Bird, One Stone
"Every human being is a koan, that is to say, an impossibility. There is no formula for getting along with a human being. I am impossible to get along with; so is each one of you; all our friends are impossible; the members of our families are impossible. How then shall we get along with them?
If you are seeking a real encounter, then you must confront the koan represented by the other person. The koan is an invitation to enter into reality."
- Bernard Phillips
"Don't look for perfection in me. I want to acknowledge my own imperfection, I want to understand that this is part of the endlessness of my growth. It's absolutely useless at this stage in your life, with all of the shit piled up in your closet, to walk around and try to kid yourself about your perfection. Out of the raw material you break down, you grow and absorb the energy. You work yourself from inside out, tearing out, destroying, and finding a sense of nothingness. But this somethingness - ego and prejudices and limitations - is your raw material. If you process and refine it all, you can open up consciously. Otherwise, you will never come to anything that represents yourself.
The only thing that can create a oneness inside you is the ability to see more of yourself as you work everyday to open up deeper and say, fine, 'I'm short tempered,' or 'Fine, I'm aggressive,' or, 'Fine, I love to make money,' or, 'I have no feeling for anybody else.' Once you recognize you're all of these things, you'll finally be able to take a breath and allow these things to open up."
- Albert Rudolph
"If there is one thing I've learned in thirty years as a psychotherapist, it is this: If you can let your experience happen, it will release its knots and unfold, leading to a deeper, more grounded experience of yourself. No matter how painful or scary your feelings appear to be, your willingness to engage with them draws forth your essential strength."
- John Welwood
A Word on Statistics
Out of every hundred people,
. . . those who always know better:
fifty-two.
. . . Unsure of every step:
almost all the rest.
. . . Ready to help,
if it doesn't take long:
forty-nine.
. . . Always good,
because they cannot be otherwise:
four - well, maybe five.
. . . Able to admire without envy:
eighteen.
. . . Led to error
by youth (which passes):
sixty, plus or minus.
. . . Those not to be messed with:
four-and-forty.
. . . Living in constant fear
of someone or something:
seventy-seven.
. . . Capable of happiness:
twenty-some-odd at most.
. . . Harmless alone,
turning savage in crowds:
more than half, for sure.
. . . Cruel
when forced by circumstances:
it's better not to know,
not even approximately.
. . . Wise in hindsight:
not many more
than wise in foresight.
. . . Getting nothing out of life except things:
thirty
(though I would like to be wrong).
. . . Balled up in pain
and without a flashlight in the dark:
eighty-three, sooner or later.
. . . Those who are just:
quite a few, thirty-five.
. . . But if it takes effort to understand:
three.
. . . Worthy of empathy:
ninety-nine.
. . . Mortal:
one hundred out of one hundred -
a figure that has never varied yet.
- Wislawa Szymborska
"Our lives are not as limited as we think they are; the world is a wonderfully weird place; consensual reality is significantly flawed; no institution can be trusted, but love does work; all things are possible; and we all could be happy and fulfilled if we only had the guts to be truly free and the wisdom to shrink our egos and quit taking ourselves so damn seriously."
- Tom Robbins
"A master of Zen archery, Kobun Chino was asked to teach a course at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. The target was set up on a beautiful grassy area on the edge of a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Kobun took his bow, notched the arrow, took careful aim, and shot. The arrow sailed high over the target, went past the railing, beyond the cliff, only to plunge into the ocean far below. Kobun looked happily at the shocked students and shouted, "Bull's eye!!"
- Joan Halifax
"It's very important to experience the complete negation of yourself which brings you to the other side of nothing. You go to the other side of nothing and you are held by the hand of the absolute. You see yourself as the absolute so you have no more insistence of self. You can speak of the self as no self when you sit in the absolute. Your sitting still is like a person who just shot an arrow. A moment later the result is there. What you know, the only thing you know is the sense that the arrow is moving all right. It has left your realm but you sense it is running well. The stillness in sitting is like that. You flip to the other side of nothing, where you discover everyone is waiting for you already."
- Kobun Chino
One Hundred and Eighty Degrees
Have you considered the possibility
that everything you believe is wrong,
not merely off a bit, but totally wrong,
nothing like things as they really are?
If you've done this, you know how durably fragile
those phantoms we hold in our heads are,
those wisps of thought that people die and kill for,
betray lovers for, give up lifelong friendships for.
If you've not done this, you probably don't understand this poem,
or think it's not even a poem, but a bit of opaque nonsense,
occupying too much of your day's time,
so you probably should stop reading it here, now.
But if you've arrived at this line,
maybe, just maybe, you're open to that possibility,
the possibility of being absolutely completely wrong,
about everything that matters.
How different the world seems then:
everyone who was your enemy is your friend,
everything you hated, you now love,
and everything you love slips through your fingers like sand.
- Federico Moramarco
"We are all failures; at least, the best of us are."
- J.M. Barrie
"So you think that you're a failure, do you? Well, you probably are. What's wrong with that? In the first place, if you've any sense at all you must have learned by now that we pay just as dearly for our triumphs as we do for our defeats. Go ahead and fail. But fail with wit, fail with grace, fail with style. A mediocre failure is as insufferable as a mediocre success. Embrace failure! Seek it out. Learn to love it. That may be the only way any of us will ever be free."
- Tom Robbins
A Way to Look at Things
We have not yet made shoes that fit like sand
Nor clothes that fit like water
Nor thoughts that fit like air.
There is much to be done -
Works of nature are abstract.
They do not lean on other things for meanings.
The sea-gull is not like the sea
Nor the sun like the moon.
The sun draws water from the sea.
The clouds are not like either one -
They do not keep one form forever.
That the mountainside looks like a face is accidental.
- Arthur Dove
Finally you were this thing
you couldn't make go away -
a thing with a certain weight
that hung over your thin frame.
It was a thinking being -
you stepped and it stepped also.
- Dan Machlin
"To see myself and my life as they truly are is joy. After all the struggle and avoiding and denying and going the other way, it is deeply satisfying for a second to be there with life as it is. The satisfaction is the very core of ourselves. Who we are is beyond words - just that open power of life, manifesting constantly in all sorts of interesting things, even in our own misery and struggles. The hassle is both horrendous and wholesome."
- Charlotte Joko Beck
"Sleepers like me need at some point to rise and take their turn on morning watch for the sake of the planet, but also for their own sake, for the enrichment of their lives."
- Diane Ackerman
"The wrong is not that engines are too much admired, but that they are not admired enough. The sin is not that engines are mechanical, but that men are mechanical."
- G.K. Chesterton
"Man is a machine which reacts blindly to external forces and, this being so, he has no will, and very little control of himself, if any at all. What we have to study, therefore, is not psychology - for that applies only to a developed man - but mechanics. Man is not only a machine but a machine which works very much below the standard it would be capable of maintaining if it were working properly.
Man is a machine, but a very peculiar machine. He is a machine which, in right circumstances, and with right treatment, can know that he is a machine, and having fully realized this, he may find the ways to cease to be a machine.
First of all, what man must know is that he is not one; he is many. He has not one permanent and unchangeable "I" or Ego. He is always different. One moment he is one, another moment he is another, the third moment he is a third, and so on, almost without end."
- P.D. Ouspensky
"Just where we might have feared that the inexpressibility of being human would be reduced to mere mechanics, or mere fancy, instead we find our attentions rewarded with a wealth of a spirited self-revelation, an extension rather than an abridging of the mysteries ( mysteries which lie at the very heart - or maybe synapses - of our happening at all, in time and space ). Revealed right there in graphic terms, both in the flesh and past it, are the matters that must matter most: blood's embrace, and nerve's release . . . For what's beyond us is within us: look at the fact and the art, the mark and the remarking. There you'll have it: loving's fabric, and the evidence of spirit."
- Heather McHugh
"People write letters
to me from heaven, but I'm not listening.
The hermit said: "Because the world is mad,
the only way through the world is to learn
the arts and double the madness. Are you listening?"
- Robert Bly
Listening
"There's a space at the bottom of an exhale, a little hitch between taking in and letting out that's a perfect zero you can go into. There's a rest point between the heart's muscle's close and open - an instant of keenest living when you're momentarily dead. You can rest there."
- Mary Karr
"The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit's one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself like a once-blind man unbound. The gaps are the clefts in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are the fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fords splitting the cliffs of mystery. Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock - more than a maple - a universe."
- Annie Dillard
"Heaven and Earth give themselves. Air, water, plants, animals, and humans give themselves to each other. It is in this giving-themselves-to-each-other that we actually live. Whether you appreciate it or not, it is true."
- Kodo Sawaki
"To begin to understand the gorgeous fever that is consciousness, we must try to understand the senses and what they can tell us about the ravishing world we have the privilege to inhabit."
- Diane Ackerman
"The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing - to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from - my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back."
- C.S. Lewis
Hiding in a Drop of Water
It is early morning, and death has forgotten us for
a while. Darkness owns the house, but I am alive.
I am ready to praise all the great musicians.
Whatever happens to me will also happen to you.
Surely you must have realized this from hearing
the way the strings cry out no matter who hits them.
From the great oak trees in the yard in October,
leaves fall for hours each day. Every night
a thousand wrinkled faces look up at the stars.
Still we know that at any second the soul can stand
up and start across the desert, as when Rabia ended up
riding on a resurrected donkey toward the Meeting.
It is this reaching toward the Kaaba that keeps us glad.
It is this way of hiding inside a drop of water
that lets the hidden face become visible to everyone.
Gautama said that when the Great Ferris Wheel
stops turning, you will still be way up
there, swinging in your seat and laughing.
- Robert Bly
My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy: Poems
Rain Light
All day the stars watch from long ago
my mother said I am going now
when you are alone you will be all right
whether or not you know you will know
look at the old house in the dawn rain
all the flowers are forms of water
the sun reminds them through a white cloud
touches the patchwork spread on the hill
the washed colors of the afterlife
that lived there long before you were born
see how they wake without a question
even though the whole world is burning
- W. S. Merwin
Zen Master: "So then, according to you, when you die your soul will be in heaven?"
Preacher: "Yes."
Zen Master: "And your body will be in the grave?"
Preacher: "Yes."
Zen Master: "And where, may I ask, will you be?"
- Anthony de Mello
"I do not know if it has ever been noted before that one of the main characteristics of life is discreteness. Unless a film of flesh envelopes us, we die. Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a space-traveler's helmet. Stay inside or you perish. Death is divestment, death is communion. It may be wonderful to mix with the landscape, but to do so is the end of the tender ego."
- Vladimir Nabokov
The Dead
The dead are always looking down on us, they say.
while we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich,
they are looking down through the glass bottom boats of heaven
as they row themselves slowly through eternity.
They watch the tops of our heads moving below on earth,
and when we lie down in a field or on a couch,
drugged perhaps by the hum of a long afternoon,
they think we are looking back at them,
which makes them lift their oars and fall silent
and wait, like parents, for us to close our eyes.
- Billy Collins
"It is a serious thing to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree helping each other to one or the other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors."
- C.S. Lewis
"I often dream about falling. Such dreams are commonplace to the ambitious or those who climb mountains. Lately I dreamed I was clutching at the face of a rock, but it would not hold. Gravel gave way, I grasped for a shrub, but it pulled loose, and in cold terror I fell into the abyss. Suddenly I realized that my fall was relative; there was no bottom and no end. A feeling of pleasure overcame me. I realized that what I embody, the principle of life, cannot be destroyed. It is written into the cosmic code, the order of the universe. As I continued to fall in the dark void, embraced by the vault of the heavens, I sang to the beauty of the stars and made peace with the darkness."
- Heinz Pagels
"When we let go of our egocentric hold on things, we find that something wonderful is there, something that has always been there; we have never been without it."
- Maurine Stuart
"Letting go does not mean not caring about things.
It means caring about them in a flexible and wise way."
- Jack Kornfield
"We find by losing. We hold fast by letting go. We become something new by ceasing to be something old. This seems to be close to the heart of that mystery. I know no more now than I ever did about the far side of death as the last letting-go of all, but now I know that I do not need to know, and that I do not need to be afraid of not knowing."
- Frederick Buechner
The breeze in the courtyard departs and returns.
Life is like that, so why not relax?
Who can keep us from celebrating?
- Lu-Yu
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