wabi sabi

"However smart we may be, however rich and clever or loving or charitable or spiritual or impeccable, it doesn't help us at all. The real power comes in to us from the beyond. Life enters us from behind, where we are sightless, and from below, where we do not understand. And unless we yield to the beyond, and take our power and might and honor and glory from the unseen, from the unknown, we shall continue empty."
- D. H. Lawrence



Adrift
Let my dreams while I'm wide-awake
loose. Let me be drowned, bap­tized,
in the light given me. Day comes around,
night, fall, win­ter, spring,
sum­mer. Leaves over­head, under­foot.
Waves arrive, buf­fets from friends
offended, ene­mies. Let it all come:
this is my way, this is the canoe I'm in.
- William Stafford



"To be simple means to make a choice about what's important, and let go of all the rest. When we are able to do this, our vision expands, our heads clear, and we can better see the details of our lives in all their incredible wonder and beauty."
- John Daido Loori



"And we: spectators, always, everywhere, looking at everything, and never from! Who's turned us around like this, so that whatever we do, we always have the look of someone going away? Just as a person on the last hill showing him or her the whole valley one last time, turns, and stops, and lingers - so we live, and are forever leaving."
- Rainer Maria Rilke



In moments of blindness
when you meet someone you know well,
they seem hardly recognizable,
and one seems even a stranger to oneself.
These experiences of the mind
are too quickly passed over and forgotten,
although startling moments of awareness are never forgotten.
- Agnes Martin



5. Next
If you can orbit the planet, why can't you see
what makes the human heart happy?
Is it art or is it sex?
Or is it, as I suspect, just keeping going

from next thing to next thing
to next thing to next thing
to next to next to next to next
pulsating stupidly to outlast time?
- Dan Chiasson
from Satellites
Where's the moon, there's the moon



"I know that my birth is fortuitous, a laughable accident, and yet, as soon as I forget myself, I behave as if it were a capital event, indispensable to the progress and equilibrium of the world."
- E. M. Cioran
The Trouble With Being Born



"Meditation is the silence of the mind, but in that silence, in that intensity, in that total alertness, the mind is no longer the seat of thought, because thought is time, thought is memory, thought is knowledge. And when it is completely quiet and highly sensitive, the mind can take a voyage which is timeless, limitless."
- J. Krishnamurti



"Meditation is one of the greatest arts in life - perhaps the greatest, and one cannot possibly learn it from anybody, that is the beauty of it. It has no technique and therefore no authority."
- J. Krishnamurti



"You have to return to the stillness often to balance yourself out and to keep from becoming as extreme as the jumpy little symbols that pulse through your mind. Return again and again until you come to see that you are really there all the time anyway. Until you listen to the sound of your own voice as if it were small and far away, and the sound gives you no real pleasure anymore, but the listening does, the listening contains all the richness that you used to seek.
Return over and over until you watch the movements of your mind and find that your thoughts have lost their cleverness somewhere down the line. They still ring, but ring hollow. You're no longer so easily convinced as before, and the brilliance is now in the watching. The brilliance that you sought has remained hidden behind each movement of your mind, hidden in the twisted branches of the continual seeking."
- G. Bluestone
Journeys on Mind Mountain

><((((º>


"But I think it is very useful, and indeed more accurate, to call it "the mind" instead of "my mind."

Imagine if for the next twenty-four hours you had to wear a cap that amplified your thoughts so that everyone within a hundred yards of you could hear every thought that passed through your head. Imagine if the mind were broadcast so that all about you could overhear your thoughts and fantasies, your dreams and fears. How embarrassed or fearful would you be to go outside? How long would you let your fear of the mind continue to isolate you from the hearts of others? And though this experiment sounds like one which few might care to participate in, imagine how freeing it would be at last to have nothing to hide. And how miraculous it would be to see that all others' minds too were filled with the same confusion and fantasies, the same insecurity and doubt. How long would it take the judgmental mind to begin to release its grasp, to see through the illusion of separateness, to recognize with some humor the craziness of all beings' minds, the craziness of mind itself?"
- Stephen and Ondrea Levine
Who Dies?



"In the Hasidic tradition - a somewhat mystical branch of Orthodox Judaism - there is a teaching that has to do with being ready for whatever the moment might offer. It is believed that you are born for a specific event that will occur at some point in your life. But you never know when. You have to always be on your toes, so that when the test comes you will be prepared. It means an opening to a kind of not-knowing, to just being. There is nothing you can do to elude any moment but cultivate an openness to the unknown so that whatever occurs you will be fully present for it.
In that kind of not-knowing, we are always present. Because when you allow that you don't know, you become very awake."
- Stephen and Ondrea Levine
Who Dies?



Your Miscellaneous Way
Occupying your own skin with joy,
I watch you
listen to yourself living,
discovering each day
how much less of everything
steadies you into being.
- Terrance Keenan



"You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing, and dance, and write poems, and suffer, and understand, for all that is life."
- Jiddu Krishnamurti



"There is a meditation master in Thailand by the name of Achaan Chaa, who in his early years became a monk because his priority was to try, more than anything else, to understand what it is that sits here, who it is that exists. To understand as he puts it, "just this much," just this moment of being as it unfolds. After practicing for a few years, he heard rumors about a meditation master in the northern part of Thailand who was reputed to have no anger. No anger is quite an accomplishment; think of what that means. It means a mind that clings nowhere. It means the being has turned into their original nature to such an extent that they see no object in mind, even anger, as who they really are.
When he heard of this great teacher, he left the monastery where he had been practicing and went to ask the teacher if he might become his student. He spent about a year and a half with this teacher, and the fellow never seemed angry. Very impressive. Then one day, out of sight of the teacher, in an L-shaped kitchen where they were both working, he looked over as a dog came into the room and jumped up on the counter to grab some tasty morsel. The meditation master looked both ways and then kicked the dog. Achaan Chaa got the teaching! Imagine the painfulness, the incredible mercilessness to pretend for any reason at all that what is present in the mind isn't there. Yet we all perpetrate this same execution on ourselves, pretending to be something we aren't, partially born, partially alive, wondering so at the heaviness of life."
- Stephen and Ondrea Levine



"You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present."
- John Green



"Are we immersed in our busy lives, not really knowing who or where we are, or do we have our full composure? And is there really a difference? When we plunge wholeheartedly into our life all our acts are endless questions, infinite answers. What else could there be beyond this?"
- Norman Fischer



"I went to Yosemite National Park, and I saw some huge waterfalls. The highest one there is 1,340 feet high, and from it the water comes down like a curtain thrown from the top of the mountain. It does not seem to come down swiftly, as you might expect; it seems to come down very slowly because of the distance. And the water does not come down as one stream, but is separated into many tiny streams. From a distance it looks like a curtain. And I thought it must be a very difficult experience for each drop of water to come down from the top of such a high mountain. It takes time, you know, a long time, for the water finally to reach the bottom of the waterfall. And it seems to me that our human life may be like this. We have many difficult experiences in our life. But at the same time, I thought, the water was not originally separated, but was one whole river. Only when it is separated does it have some difficulty in falling. It is as if the water does not have any feeling of being separate when it is one whole river. Only when divided into many drops can it begin to have or express some separate feeling.
Before we were born we had no such feeling; we were one with the universe. This is called 'mind-only,' or 'essence of mind,' or 'big mind.' After we are separated by birth from this oneness, as the water falling from the waterfall is separated by the wind and rocks, then we have such feelings. And you have difficulty because of such feelings. You attach to the feeling you have without knowing just how this kind of feeling is created. When you do not realize that you are one with the river, or one with the universe, you have fear. Whether it is separated into drops or not, water is water. Our life and death are the same thing. When we realize this fact, we have no fear of death anymore and we have no actual difficulty in our life."
- Shunryu Suzuki



"Look . . . Reality is greater than the sum of its parts, also a damn sight holier. And the lives of such stuff as dreams are made of may be rounded with a sleep but they are not tied neatly with a red bow. Truth doesn't run on time like a commuter train, though time may run on truth. And the Scenes Gone By and the Scenes to Come flow blending together in the sea-green deep while Now spreads in circles on the surface. So don't sweat it. For focus simply move a few inches back or forward. And once more . . . Look."
- Ken Kesey



"There's a great deal to say about how we tend to see, and hear, only what has been pointed out to us . . . We are given words for those things that are pointed out to us. What about everything else? What are we missing?"
- Pattiann Rogers


<°))))><


"For all my skepticism, some trace of irrational superstition did survive in me, the strange conviction, for example, that everything in life that happens to me also has a sense, that it means something, that life speaks to us about itself through its story, that it gradually reveals a secret, that it takes the form of a rebus whose message must be deciphered, that the stories we live compromise the mythology of our lives and in that mythology lies the key to truth and mystery. Is it an illusion? Possibly, even probably, but I can't rid myself of the need continually to decipher my own life."
- Milan Kundera



"It is my mind, with its store of images, that gives the world color and sound; and that supremely real and rational certainty which I can "experience" is, in its most simple form, an exceedingly complicated structure of mental images. Thus there is, in a certain sense, nothing that is directly experienced except the mind itself. Everything is mediated through the mind, translated, filtered, allegorized, twisted, even falsified by it. We are enveloped in a cloud of changing and endlessly shifting images."
- Carl Jung



Any Morning
Just lying on the couch and being happy.
Only humming a little, the quiet sound in the head.
Trouble is busy elsewhere at the moment, it has
so much to do in the world.

People who might judge are mostly asleep; they can't
monitor you all the time, and sometimes they forget.
When dawn flows over the hedge you can
get up and act busy.

Little corners like this, pieces of Heaven
left lying around, can be picked up and saved.
People won't even see that you have them,
they are so light and easy to hide.

Later in the day you can act like the others.
You can shake your head. You can frown.
- William Stafford



Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect that you carry
wherever you go right now? Are you waiting
for time to show you some better thoughts?
- William Stafford
from You Reading This, Be Ready



"Anyone who has probed the inner life, who has sat in silence long enough to experience the stillness of the mind behind its apparent noise, is faced with a mystery. Apart from all the outer attractions of life in the world, there exists at the center of human consciousness something quite satisfying and beautiful in itself, a beauty without features. The mystery is not so much that these two dimensions exist - an outer world and the mystery of the inner world - but that we are suspended between them, as a space in which both worlds meet . . . as if the human being is the meeting point, the threshold between two worlds."
- Kabir Helminski
The Knowing Heart



"All my life I have been contemplating a question of Heidegger's that has always struck me as strangely profound: why is there something, why not rather nothing?

Have you ever thought about that? We take our life, we take life, we take existence, for granted. We take it as a given, and then we complain that it isn't working out as we wanted it to. But why should we be here in the first place? Why should we exist at all? Why should anything exist at all? Really there's no reason for it. Why not nothing rather than something? Nothing would be simpler.

Our recent appearance in this universe, although connected absolutely to all of it, the necessary causal fruition of it all, is literally gratuitous. It seems to me that gratitude then isn't so much an emotion or a feeling as an actual fact, maybe even the primary fact, of our being at all. If we are, in other words, we belong, radically belong, are possessed by, embraced by, all that is, and gratitude is literally what we are when we are most attuned to what we are, when we plunge deeply into our nature, and stop complaining."
- Norman Fischer



"Wherever you are, you are one with the clouds and one with the sun and the stars you see. You are one with everything. That is more true than I can say, and more true than you can hear."
- Shunryu Suzuki



"Almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of Pssst that you usually can't even hear because you're in such a rush to or from something important you've tried to engineer."
- David Foster Wallace



"Have you watched your thinking? I watched that car go by, it was a blue car. Can I watch my thought in the same way, as it moves from one thing to another? And if it does, find out if it can end; instead of it being a long thread, break it, see what happens. Can you break a thought and say, "Well, that's enough, enough is enough" and just end that thought and see what happens before the next thought is waiting. Before it springs on you, watch it. In that space, in that interval, what happens?"
- Jiddu Krishnamurti



"The trick is to be attuned to your condition all the time. To know that you are tired when you are tired and energetic when you are energetic. And to release yourself to your condition rather than resist it. Not knowing your condition as it really is, or knowing it and resisting it: That is what's difficult. This is where the pressure builds up. But when you know your condition and release yourself to it, then there's no problem. You can negotiate yourself through your day that way and not have to worry.
There's an old saying in Zen: "Every day is a good day." This doesn't mean every day's a thrilling day or a pleasant day. There are plenty of unpleasant days, challenging days. But if you know your condition and release yourself to it, even an unpleasant day's a good day."
- Norman Fischer


><((((º>


"The inhibitions that obscure our buddha nature develop because we use external points of reference to define and confirm our own self-identity. The problem with this is that reference points continually change. As we try to keep up with these varying references, inhibitions build upon themselves and multiply. Our self-consciousness increases, and we experience fear and vulnerability. Reference points are the cause of our hope, fear and inhibitions, and they take us farther and farther from our buddha nature. So you might as well cut inhibitions and go back to what is true - your own basic goodness, your buddha nature."
- Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse



Directions
First you'll come to the end of the freeway.
Then it's not so much north on Woodland Avenue
as it is a feeling that the pines are taller and weigh more,
and the road, you'll notice,
is older with faded lines and unmown shoulders.
You'll see a cemetery on your right
and another later on your left.
Sobered, drive on.
. . . . . . . . . .Drive on for miles
if the fields are full of hawkweed and daisies.
Sometimes a spotted horse
will gallop along the fence. Sometimes you'll see
a hawk circling, sometimes a vulture.
You'll cross the river many times
over smaller and smaller bridges.
You'll know when you're close;
people always say they have a sudden sensation
that the horizon, which was always far ahead,
is now directly behind them.
At this point you may want to park
and proceed on foot, or even
on your knees.
- Connie Wanek



"Things will go where they're supposed to go if you just let them take their natural course. Despite your best efforts, people are going to be hurt when it's time for them to be hurt. Life is like that. I know I sound like I'm preaching from a podium, but it's about time for you to learn to live like this. You try too hard to make life fit your way of doing things. If you don't want to spend time in an insane asylum, you have to open up a little more and let yourself go with life's natural flow."
- Haruki Murakami
Norwegian Wood



But the mind always
wants more than it has -
one more bright day of sun,
one more clear night in bed
with the moon; one more hour
to get the words right; one
more chance for the heart in hiding
to emerge from its thicket
in dried grasses - as if this quiet day
with its tentative light weren't enough,
as if joy weren't strewn all around.
- Holly Hughes
from Mind Wanting More



"At first, it appears that nothing could be easier than seeing. We just point our eyes where we want to go, and gather in whatever there is to see. Nothing could be less in need of explanation. The world is flooded with light, and everything is available to be seen. We can see people, pictures, landscapes, and whatever else we need to see, and with the help of science we can see galaxies, viruses, and the insides of our own bodies. Seeing does not interfere with the world or take anything from it, and it does not hurt or damage anything. Seeing is detached and efficient and rational. Unlike the stomach or the heart, eyes are our own to command: they obey every desire and thought.
Each one of those ideas is completely wrong. The truth is more difficult: seeing is irrational, inconsistent, and undependable. It is immensely troubled, cousin to blindness and sexuality, and caught up in the threads of the unconscious. Our eyes are not ours to command; they roam where they will and then tell us they have only been where we have sent them. No matter how hard we look, we see very little of what we look at. If we imagine the eyes as navigational devices, we do so in order not to come to terms with what seeing really is. Seeing is like hunting and like dreaming, and even like falling in love. It is entangled in passions - jealousy, violence, possessiveness; and it is soaked in an affect - in pleasure and displeasure, and in pain. Ultimately, seeing alters the thing that is seen and transforms the seer. Seeing is metamorphosis not mechanism."
- James Elkins
The Object Stares Back



"Many of the most important impressions and thoughts in a person's life are ones that flash through your head so fast that fast isn't even the right word, they seem totally different from or outside of the regular sequential clock time we all live by, and they have so little relation to the sort of linear, one-word-after-another English we all communicate with each other with that it could easily take a whole lifetime just to spell out the contents of one split-second's flash of thoughts and connections - and yet we all seem to go around trying to use English (or whatever language our native country happens to use, it goes without saying) to try to convey to other people what we're thinking and to find out what they're thinking, when in fact deep down everybody knows it's a charade and they're just going through the motions. What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny part of it at any given instant."
- David Foster Wallace



"The answer is never the answer. What's really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you'll always be seeking. I've never seen anybody really find the answer - they think they have, so they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer."
- Ken Kesey



Concerning the Atoms of the Soul
Someone explained once how the pieces of what we are
fall downwards at the same rate
as the Universe.
The atoms of us, falling towards the centre

of whatever everything is. And we don't see it.
We only sense their slight drag in the lifting hand.
That's what weight is, that communal process of falling.
Furthermore, these atoms carry hooks, like burrs,

hooks catching like hooks, like clinging to like,
that's what keeps us from becoming something else,
and why in early love, we sometimes
feel the tug of the heart snagging on anothers heart.

Only the atoms of the soul are perfect spheres
with no means of holding on to the world
or perhaps no need for holding on,
and so they fall through our lives catching

against nothing, like perfect rain,
and in the end, he wrote, mix in that common well of light
at the centre of whatever the suspected
centre is, or might have been.
- John Glenday



"The only thing more important than being good is being real. Authenticity is kinder than resignation without conviction. Truth leads to good faster than good leads to truth. Ultimately truth is good, but you have to live it from the inside out."
- Alan Cohen



"We are the bright new stars born of a screaming black hole, the nascent suns burst from the darkness, from the grasping void of space that folds and swallows - a darkness that would devour anyone not as strong as we. We are oddities, sideshows, talk show subjects. We capture everyone's imagination."
- Dave Eggers


<°))))><


"It would seem that emotions are the curse, not death - emotions that appear to have developed upon a few freaks as a special curse from Malevolence. All right then. It is our emotions that are amiss. We are freaks, the world is fine, and let us all go have lobotomies to restore us to a natural state. We can leave the library then, go back to the creek lobotomized, and live on its banks as untroubled as any muskrat or reed. You first."
- Annie Dillard



I remember being made
to stand in the corner for punishment
because it would be dull and empty
and I would be sorry.
But instead it was a museum of small wonders,
a place of three walls
with a weather my breath influenced,
an archaeology of layers, of painted molding,
a meadow as we called them then
of repeatable pale roses,
an eight-eyed spider in a tear of wallpaper
turning my corner.
The texture. The soft echo if I talked,
if I said I am not bad if this is the world.
- Allan Peterson
from Private Lives



Cutting Loose
Sometimes from sorrow, for no reason,
you sing. For no reason, you accept
the way of being lost, cutting loose
from all else and electing a world
where you go where you want to.

Arbitrary, a sound comes, a reminder
that a steady center is holding
all else. If you listen, that sound
will tell you where it is and you
can slide your way past trouble.

Certain twisted monsters
always bar the path - but that's when
you get going best, glad to be lost,
learning how real it is
here on earth, again and again.
- William Stafford



Japan
Today, I pass the time reading
a favorite haiku,
saying the words over and over.

It feels like eating
the same small, perfect grape
again and again.

I walk through the house reciting it
and leave its letters falling
through the air of every room.

I stand by the big silence of the piano and say it.
I say it in front of the painting of the sea.
I tap out its rhythm on an empty shelf.

I listen to myself saying it,
then I say it without listening,
then I hear it without saying it.

And when the dog looks up at me,
I kneel down on the floor
and whisper it into each of his long white ears.

It's the one about the one-ton
temple bell
with the moth sleeping on its surface,

and every time I say it, I feel the excruciating
pressure of the moth
on the surface of the iron bell.

When I say it at the window,
the bell is the world
and I am the moth resting there.

When I say it into the mirror,
I am the heavy bell
and the moth is life with its papery wings.

And later, when I say it to you in the dark,
you are the bell,
and I am the tongue of the bell, ringing you,

and the moth has flown
from its line
and moves like a hinge in the air above our bed.
- Billy Collins
Sailing Alone Around the Room



"The mind is malleable. Our life can be greatly transformed by even a minimal change in how we manage our thoughts and perceive and interpret the world. Happiness is a skill. It requires effort and time."
- Matthieu Ricard



The Next Time
Perfection is out of the question for people like us,
so why plug away at the same old self when the landscape

has opened its arms and given us marvelous shrines
to flock towards? The great motels to the west are waiting,

in somebody's yard a pristine dog is hoping that we'll drive by,
and on the rubber surface of a lake people bobbing up and down

will wave. The highway comes right to the door, so let's
take off before the world out there burns up. Life should be more

than the body's weight working itself from room to room.
A turn through the forest will do us good, so will a spin

among the farms. Just think of the chickens strutting,
the cows swinging their udders, and flicking their tails at flies.

And one can imagine prisms of summer light breaking against
the silent, haze-filled sleep of the farmer and his wife.
- Mark Strand