not always so
"It's strange how the human mind swings back and forth, from one extreme to another. Does truth lie at some point of the pendulum's swing, at a point where it never rests, not in the dull perpendicular mean where it dangles in the end like a windless flag, but at an angle, nearer one extreme than another? If only a miracle could stop the pendulum at an angle of sixty degrees, one would believe the truth was there."
- Graham Greene
"If you don't look at things through your concepts, you'll never be bored. Every single thing is unique. Every sparrow is unlike every other sparrow despite the similarities. It's a great help to have similarities, so we can abstract, so that we can have a concept. It's a great help, from the point of view of communication, education, science. But it's also very misleading and a great hindrance to seeing this concrete individual. If all you experience is your concept, you're not experiencing reality, because reality is concrete. The concept is a help, to lead you to reality, but when you get there, you've got to intuit or experience it directly."
- Anthony de Mello
"By nature, we do not perceive ourselves or others accurately. We magnify the importance of ourselves and diminish that of others. In the beauty of a clear night, however, we look at the stars and feel ourselves small, unimportant, and at peace. On an objective scale, we sense our insignificance. Somehow the realization comforts us. The return of the illusion hurts us, takes our peace away, allows us to magnify slights, rejections, and humiliations as others challenge the illusion of our self-importance with theirs. It is in our human nature that this be so; it is our task to transcend it."
- Barry Grosskopf
Hidden in Plain Sight
"The inability to correctly perceive reality is often responsible for humans' insane behavior. And every time they substitute an all-purpose, sloppy slang word for words that would accurately describe an emotion or a situation, it lowers their reality orientations, pushes them farther from shore, out onto the foggy waters of alienation and confusion."
- Tom Robbins
"What you deny to others will be denied to you, for the plain reason that you are always legislating for yourself; all your words and actions define the world you want to live in."
- Thaddeus Golas
"But only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn't exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being."
- Rainer Maria Rilke
Letters to a Young Poet
"We have advantages. We have a cushion to fall back on. This is abundance. A luxury of place and time. Something rare and wonderful. It's almost historically unprecedented. We must do extraordinary things. We have to. It would be absurd not to."
- Dave Eggers
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
"I have become my own version of an optimist. If I can't make it through one door, I'll go through another door - or I'll make a door. Something terrific will come no matter how dark the present."
- Rabindranath Tagore
A Blessing of Angels
May the Angel of Awakening stir your heart
to come alive to the eternal within you,
to all the invitations that quietly surround you.
May the Angel of Healing turn your wounds
into sources of refreshment.
May the Angel of Imagination enable you
to stand on the true thresholds,
at ease with your ambivalence
and drawn in new directions
through the glow of your contradictions.
May the Angel of Compassion open your eyes
to the unseen suffering around you.
May the Angel of Wildness disturb the places
where your life is domesticated and safe,
take you to the territories of true otherness
where all that is awkward in you
can fall into its own rhythm.
May the Angel of Eros introduce you
to the beauty of your senses
to celebrate your inheritance
as a temple of the holy spirit.
May the Angel of Justice disturb you
to take the side of the poor and the wronged.
May the Angel of Encouragement confirm you
in worth and self-respect,
that you may live with the dignity
that presides in your soul.
May the Angel of Death arrive only
when your life is complete
and you have brought every given gift
to the threshold where its infinity can shine.
May all the Angels be your sheltering
and joyful guardians.
- John O'Donohue
"Waking up is unpleasant, you know. You are nice and comfortable in bed. It is irritating to be woken up. That's the reason the wise guru will not attempt to wake people up. I hope I'm going to be wise here and make no attempt whatsoever to wake you up if you are asleep. It is really none of my business, even though I say to you at times, "Wake up!" My business is to do my thing, to dance my dance. As the Arabs say, "The nature of rain is the same, but it makes thorns grow in the marshes and flowers in the gardens."
- Anthony de Mello
"An ordinary mirror is silvered at the back but the window of the night train has darkness behind the glass. My face and the faces of other travelers were now mirrored on this darkness in a succession of stillnesses. Consider this, said the darkness: any motion at any speed is a succession of stillnesses; any section through an action will show just such a plane of stillness as this dark window in which your seeking face is mirrored. And in each plane of stillness is the moment of clarity that makes you responsible for what you do."
- Russell Hoban
The Medusa Frequency
"Hell is a state of mind, and every state of mind, left to itself, every shutting up of the creature within the dungeon of its own mind - is, in the end, Hell. But Heaven is not a state of mind. Heaven is reality itself. All that is fully real is Heavenly. For all that can be shaken will be shaken and only the unshakable remains."
- C.S. Lewis
"The unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwelling on himself and start paying attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence. When you're unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. You get to take yourself oh so very seriously."
- Tom Robbins
"I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point: 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.'"
- Kurt Vonnegut
"We change. This is a truism so blatant we could laugh at it, if we really believed it. We know things change, both things as circumstances and things as objects. The meadow across from the house where I grew up, which seemed like it had been there forever, has been filled with houses for forty years. To the people living in those homes the meadow, the games and egg hunts were never there. Only their own memories are there. In our heart of hearts, however, most of us harbor a deep belief, so deep we accept it without thinking, that some part of us, an essential us, remains the same, regardless of events or even memories. It's an illusory belief. Is there nothing that holds? No. Nothing. Nobody. Nada. Nadie. Even if we hold what seem to be the same feelings and thoughts years later? Isn't there something essential in them that holds? No."
- Terrance Keenan
St Nadie In Winter
Thursday
I have had my dream - like others -
and it has come to nothing, so that
I remain now carelessly
with feet planted on the ground
and look up at the sky -
feeling my clothes about me,
the weight of my body in my shoes,
the rim of my hat, air passing in and out
at my nose - and decide to dream no more.
- William Carlos Williams
The Peace of Wild Things
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
- Wendell Berry
Zen teacher Issan Dorsey, who established the Maitri Hospice in San Francisco, was on his deathbed when one of his closest friends came to visit him.
"I'm going to miss you," the friend said.
"I'm going to miss you, too," responded Issan. He was silent for a moment.
Then he asked, "Are you going somewhere?"
- Sean Murphy
One Bird, One Stone
On the question of his own Enlightenment the Master always remained reticent, even though the disciples tried every means to get him to talk.
All the information they had on this subject was what the Master once said to his youngest son who wanted to know what his father felt when he became Enlightened.
The answer was: "A fool."
When the boy asked why, the Master had replied, "Well, son, it was like going to great pains to break into a house by climbing a ladder and smashing a window and then realizing later that the door of the house was open."
- Anthony de Mello
The swarm of words,
and little stories
are just to loosen you
from where you are stuck.
- Shitou Xiqian
Here, where nothing is worth anything,
I've set up a grass-thatched hut.
After eating,
I just stretch out for a nap.
As soon as it was built,
weeds were already growing back.
Now I've been here awhile
its covered in vines.
So the one in this hut just lives on,
unstuck,
not inside, out, in between.
The places where usual folk live,
I don't.
What they want,
I don't.
This tiny hut holds the total world,
an old man and
the radiance of forms and their nature,
all in ten feet square.
Bodhisattvas of the Vast Path
know about this but
the mediocre and marginal wonder,
"Isn't such a place too fragile to live in?"
Fragile or not,
the true master dwells here
where there is no
south or north, east or west.
Just sitting here,
it can't be surpassed:
below the green pines
a lit window.
Palaces and towers
of jade and vermilion
can't compare.
Just sitting,
my head covered,
all things rest.
So this mountain monk
has no understanding at all,
just lives on
without struggling to get loose.
Not going to
set out seats
and wait for guests.
Turning the light
to shine within,
turn it around again.
Vast,
unthinkable,
you can't face it
or turn away from it.
The root of it.
Meet the Awakened Ancestors,
become intimate with the teachings,
lash grass into thatch for a hut
and don't tire so easily.
Let it go,
release,
and your life of a hundred years
vanishes.
Open your hands.
Walk around.
Innocence.
The swarm of words,
and little stories
are just to loosen you
from where you are stuck.
If you want to know
the one in the hermitage
who never dies,
you can't avoid this skin-bag
right here.
- Shitou Xiqian
"O, how incomprehensible everything was, and actually sad, although it was also beautiful. One knew nothing. And sometimes it seemed that something never seen yet long desired was about to happen, that a veil would drop from it all; but then it passed, nothing happened, the riddle remained unsolved, the secret spell unbroken, and in the end one grew old and looked cunning . . . or wise . . . And still one knew nothing, perhaps, was still waiting and listening."
- Hermann Hesse
Narcissus and Goldmund
were walking in the rain,
he would say,
"Do not walk so fast,
the rain is everywhere."
- Shunryu Suzuki
"Within all of us is a varying amount of space lint and star dust, the residue from our creation. Most are too busy to notice it, and it is stronger in some than others. It is strongest in those of us who fly and is responsible for an unconscious, subtle desire to slip into some wings and try for the elusive boundaries of our origin."
- K. O. Eckland
Footprints on Clouds
This day, then, ends in rain
but almost everyone will live through it.
Tomorrow's thousands losing their loved ones
have not yet stepped into never being the same again.
Maybe the sun's first light will hit me
in those moments, but I'd gladly wake to feel it:
the dramatic opening of a day,
clean blood pumping from the heart.
- Michael Ryan
from Poem at Thirty
Self-Portrait
Between the computer, a pencil, and a typewriter
half my day passes. One day it will be half a century.
I live in strange cities and sometimes talk
with strangers about matters strange to me.
I listen to music a lot: Bach, Mahler, Chopin, Shostakovich.
I see three elements in music: weakness, power, and pain.
The fourth has no name.
I read poets, living and dead, who teach me
tenacity, faith, and pride. I try to understand
the great philosophers - but usually catch just
scraps of their precious thoughts.
I like to take long walks on Paris streets
and watch my fellow creatures, quickened by envy,
anger, desire; to trace a silver coin
passing from hand to hand as it slowly
loses its round shape (the emperor's profile is erased).
Beside me trees expressing nothing
but a green, indifferent perfection.
Black birds pace the fields,
waiting patiently like Spanish widows.
I'm no longer young, but someone else is always older.
I like deep sleep, when I cease to exist,
and fast bike rides on country roads when poplars and houses
dissolve like cumuli on sunny days.
Sometimes in museums the paintings speak to me
and irony suddenly vanishes.
I love gazing at my wife's face.
Every Sunday I call my father.
Every other week I meet with friends,
thus proving my fidelity.
My country freed itself from one evil. I wish
another liberation would follow.
Could I help in this? I don't know.
I'm truly not a child of the ocean,
as Antonio Machado wrote about himself,
but a child of air, mint and cello
and not all the ways of the high world
cross paths with the life that - so far -
belongs to me.
- Adam Zagajewski
translated by Clare Cavanagh
Remember
that just to have the eyes of an artist,
that can be enough,
the ear of a poet,
that can be enough.
The soul of a human
just pointed
in the direction of the divine,
that can be more than enough.
I tell you this to remind myself.
Every gesture is an act of creation.
Even empty spaces and silence
can be the wings and voices of angels.
- Michele Linfante
"Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and the pain of it no less than the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace."
- Frederick Buechner
"I am struck by how difficult it is to get back to something we knew to be true once we have been converted, forced by circumstances, or simply denied and turned away from it, to whatever lonely mess we have managed to make since. It is as though the experience of unhappiness is more valid than that of joy. We all know the experience of wanting something badly, only to have it disappear as we approach it. Rarely do we look at the wanting self. My shadowless shadow. We don't cope with much grace, neither the grace of civility, nor the grace of physical being, nor the grace of the spirit. There is at bottom no real distinction between them anyway. Perhaps I am too often absent from my own being."
- Terrance Keenan
A Day Comes
A day comes
when the mouth grows tired
of saying, "I."
Yet it is occupied
still by a self which must speak.
Which still desires,
is curious.
Which believes it has also a right.
What to do?
The tongue consults with the teeth
it knows will survive
both mouth and self,
which grin - it is their natural pose-
and say nothing.
- Jane Hirshfield
"The sane human being is satisfied that the best he/she can do at any given moment is the best he/she can do at any given moment.
Such sanity is, unfortunately, rare."
- David Bayles
Moment
A person wakes from sleep
and does not know for a time
who she is, who he is.
This happens in a lifetime
once or twice.
It has happened to you, no doubt.
Some in that moment
panic,
some sigh with pleasure.
How each kind later envies the other,
who must so love their lives.
- Jane Hirshfield
"We don't have to hate ourselves for our own vulnerability. We don't have to hate ourselves for what life has done to us. We don't have to hate ourselves because hurt or loss or longing has gotten to us. Our desires will always be with us in some form, keeping us firmly attached to a world that will hurt us. We must come to love ourselves, love our life, in its vulnerability, in its impermanence, not in spite of all its flaws, but because of them. Because the vulnerability, the changes, the flaws make us who we are."
- Barry Magid
"People mistakenly assume that their thinking is done by their head; it is actually done by the heart which first dictates the conclusion, then commands the head to provide the reasoning that will defend it."
- Anthony de Mello
"Samsara literally means "wandering-on." Many people think of it as the Buddhist name for the place where we currently live. But in the early Buddhist texts, it's the answer, not to the question, "Where are we?" but to the question, "What are we doing?" Instead of a place, it's a process: the tendency to keep creating worlds and then moving into them. As one world falls apart, you create another one and go there. At the same time, you bump into other people who are creating their own worlds, too.
The process can sometimes be enjoyable. In fact, it would be perfectly innocuous if it didn't entail so much suffering. The worlds we create keep caving in and killing us. Moving into a new world requires effort: not only the pains and risks of taking birth, but also the hard knocks - mental and physical - that come from going through childhood into adulthood, over and over again."
- Geoffrey DeGraff
"Aspire to be like Mt. Fuji, with such a broad and solid foundation that the strongest earthquake cannot move you, and so tall that the greatest enterprises of common men seem insignificant from your lofty perspective. With your mind as high as Mt. Fuji you can see all things clearly. And you can see all the forces that shape events; not just the things happening near to you."
- Miyamoto Musashi
A Remedy for Insomnia
Not sheep coming down the hills,
not cracks on the ceiling -
count the ones you loved,
the former tenants of dreams
who would keep you awake,
once meant the world to you,
rocked you in their arms,
those who loved you . . .
You will fall asleep, by dawn, in tears.
- Vera Pavlova
If There Is Something To Desire
Death is Smaller Than I Thought
My Mother and Father died some years ago
I loved them very much.
When they died my love for them
did not vanish or fade away.
It stayed just about the same,
only a sadder colour.
And I can feel their love for me,
same as it ever was.
Nowadays, in good times or bad,
I sometimes ask my Mother and Father
to walk beside me or to sit with me
so we can talk together
or be silent.
They always come to me.
I talk to them and listen to them
and think I hear them talk to me.
It's very simple -
nothing to do with spiritualism
or religion or mumbo jumbo.
It is imaginary. It is real. It is love.
- Adrian Mitchell
you are taken away by random thoughts twenty-four hours a day."
- Foyan
"The trouble lies in your not believing in yourselves enough. Because you don't believe in yourselves you are knocked here and there by all the conditions in which you find yourselves. Being enslaved and turned around by objective situations, you have no freedom whatever, you are not masters of yourselves."
- Lin-chi Yi-sen
"We must discover and express for ourselves the fundamental truth that this mind, this body, this moment is all that we have, is all that there is. We believe that our minds as they are, our bodies as they are, are the problem - but we can never exchange this mind for another one or substitute this body for someone else's."
- Barry Magid
It is not skill, knowledge, intellect,
good luck or bad, but choosing
to feel the strange notes
of our wildness,
for there is not nothingness
despite the easy magic
of despair.
- Terrance Keenan
Is Life The Incurable Disease?
Is life the incurable disease?
The infant is born howling
& we laugh,
the dead man smiles
& we cry,
resisting the passage,
always resisting the passage,
that turns life
into eternity.
Blake sang alleluias
on his deathbed.
My own grandmother,
hardly a poet at all,
smiled
as we'd never seen her smile
before.
Perhaps the dress of flesh
is no more than a familiar garment
that grows looser as one diets
on death, & perhaps we discard it
or give it to the poor in spirit,
who have not learned yet
what blessing it is
to go naked?
- Erica Jong
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