future ghosts

"The other thing that bothers us is that since we don't know who we are, we don't know how we came here. You don't know where we came from - oh, I know, you say 'the sperm and the egg.' Sperm and the egg! Where do babies come from? 'Sperm and the egg!' Idiot answer. It's not an answer at all, it's merely a description of a speck in a causal process that is a mystery. We don't know where babies come from. You get married, you're sitting at a table having breakfast - there are two of you - and a year later there's somebody else, sitting there. And if you're honest with yourself, you don't know where they came from. You've made contact with them at the hospital, but that was another step on the causal chain. They just came, literally, out of nowhere, and they keep growing in your environment. If you stop to think about it, which you don't, because it's annoying, it's upsetting, then it's a total mystery. And if a child said, 'Where did I come from?' you don't know. So you can't answer honestly."
- Ernest Becker
Growing Up Rugged



Visiting the Graveyard
When I think of death
it is a bright enough city,
and every year more faces there
are familiar

but not a single one
notices me,
though I long for it,
and when they talk together,

which they do
very quietly,
it's in an unknowable language -
I can catch the tone

but understand not a single word -
and when I open my eyes
there's the mysterious field, the beautiful trees.
There are the stones.
- Mary Oliver
Red bird



"Hakuin Zenji said, "If you want to know about life after death, ask the man who wants to know." Thus there is no other way than to ask yourself, for this problem does not belong to the category of knowledge. You yourself must solve it by practice. Buddha's practice after his enlightenment is not different from each individuals practice before enlightenment, if there is no idea of self. When you are engaged in selfless practice, you are free from the idea of past, present and future; from the idea of this world or another; from the idea of coming or going."
- Shunryu Suzuki
early Wind Bell lecture notes



"You come to a point, and then you say, "I need time." You say to yourself, "Tomorrow I will understand." This structure is born of time and functions in time, but does not come to an end through time. If you don't understand now, you are not going to understand tomorrow. What you are looking for does not exist. You would rather tread an enchanted ground with beatific visions of a radical transformation of that non-existent self of yours into a state of being which is conjured up by some bewitching phrases. That takes you away from your natural state - it is a movement away from yourself. To be yourself requires extraordinary intelligence. You are blessed with that intelligence; nobody need give it to you, nobody can take it away from you."
- U. G. Krishnamurti



The Light Beneath Sleep
Sometimes, underneath deep sleep
is a certain diffused glow,
as, in the rainforest, luminous toadstools
glow green among the leaf litter
and beetles crawl about with winking abdomens.
One night when I followed this glow
I came to an upturned tree
that was a kind of cathedral for glowworms
and the light beat against my face, my chest and my hands.
At the end of the corridor of sleep, a dream stands.
It may be that at the end of the corridor of death
there is the walking slightly uphill
through the green fields;
and then the light underneath sleep
is both in front and behind.
- John Tarrant



Delirium (joking at illness)
I don't want to come, yet suddenly I'm here;
I don't want to leave, yet suddenly I'm gone.
Don't know where I've come from, or gone from, either.
In this there is, of course, True News.
Since heaven can't speak, I'll have to pass it on.
Just wait for old Master Chaos to come back to life.
If I search for myself, I'll certainly find me.
- Yuan Mei



And we know the message
can be delivered from within.
The heart, no valentine,
decides to quit after lunch,
the power shut off like a switch,
or a tiny dark ship is unmoored
into the flow of the body's rivers,
the brain a monastery,
defenseless on the shore.
- Billy Collins
from Picnic, Lightning



"Expectations of goals and rewards, such as enlightenment, are last-ditch attempts by the ghostly self to subvert the process to its own ends. The more we become conscious of the mysterious unfolding of life, the clearer it becomes that its purpose is not to fulfill the expectations of our ego."
- Stephen Batchelor



"During the Ch'in Dynasty, there was a man in Wu-ling who caught fish for a living. One day he went up a stream, and soon didn't know how far he'd gone. Suddenly, he came upon a peach orchard in full bloom. For hundreds of feet, there was nothing but peach trees crowding in over the banks. And in the confusion of fallen petals, there were lovely, scented flowers. The fisherman was amazed. Wanting to see how far the orchard went, he continued on.
The trees ended at the foot of a mountain, where a spring fed the stream from a small cave. It seemed as if there might be a light inside, so the fisherman left his boat and stepped in. At first, the cave was so narrow he could barely squeeze through. But he kept going and, after a few dozen feet, it opened out into broad daylight. There, in a meadow stretching away, austere houses were graced with fine fields and lovely ponds. Dikes and paths crossed here and there among mulberries and bamboo. Roosters and dogs called back and forth. Coming and going in the midst of all this, there were men and women tending the fields, and whether they were old with white hair or children in pigtails, they were all happy and of themselves content.
When they saw the fisherman, they were terribly surprised and asked where he had come from. Once he had answered all their questions, they set out wine and killed chickens for dinner. When the others in the village heard about this man, they all came to ask about him.
They told him how, long ago, to escape those years of turmoil during the Ch'in Dynasty, the village ancestors gathered their wives and children, and with their neighbors came to this distant place, and they'd kept themselves cut-off from the outside ever since. So now they wondered what dynasty it was. They'd never head of the Han, let alone Wei or Chin. As the fisherman carefully told them everything he knew, they all sighed in sad amazement. Soon, each of the village families had invited him to their house, where they also served wine and food.
After staying for some days, the fisherman prepared to leave. As he was going, they said "There's no need to tell the people outside." He returned to the boat and started back, careful to remember each place along the way.
When he got back home, he went to tell the prefect what had happened, and the prefect sent some men to retrace the route with him. They tried to follow the landmarks he remembered, but they were soon lost and finally gave up the search.
Liu Tzu-chi, who lived in Nan-yang, was a recluse of great honor and esteem. When he heard about this place, he joyfully prepared to go there. But before he could, he got sick and passed away. Since then, no one has asked the Way."
- Tao Chien
Peach Blossom Spring



Thanks Prayer at the Cove
A year ago today
I was unable to speak
one syntactically coherent
thought let alone write it down: today
in this dear and absurdly allegorical place
by your grace
I am here
and now in that graveyard, its skyline
visible not from the November leaflessness
and I am here to say
it's 5 o'clock, too late to write more
(especially for the one whose eyes
are starting to get dark), the single
dispirited swan out on the windless brown
transparent floor floating
gradually backward
blackward
no this is what I still
can see, white
as a joint in a box of little cigars -
and where is mate
Lord, it is almost winter in the year
2000 and now I look up to find five
practically unseeable mallards at my feet
they have crossed
nearly standing on earth they're so close
looking up to me
for bread -
that's what my eyes of flesh see (barely)
but what I wished to say
is this, listen:
a year ago today
I found myself riding the subway psychotic
(I wasn't depressed, I wanted to rip my face off)
unable to write what I thought, which was nothing
though I tried though I finally stopped trying and looked up
at the face of the man directly across from me, and it began
to melt before my eyes
and in an instant it was young again
the face he must have had
once when he was five
and in an instant it happened again only this time
it changed to the face of his elderly
corpse and back in time
it changed
to his face at our present
moment of time's flowing and then
as if transparently
superimposed I saw them all at once
OK I was insane but how insane
can someone be I thought, I did not
know you then
I didn't know you were there, God
(that's what we call you, grunt grunt)
as you are at every moment
everywhere of what we call
the future and the past
And then I tried once more
experimentally
I focused on another's face, no need to describe it
there is only one
underneath
these scary and extremely
realistic rubber masks
and there is as I also know now
by your grace one
and only one person on earth
beneath a certain depth
the terror and the love
are one, like hunger, same
in everyone
and it happened again, das Unglück geschah
you might say nur mir allein it happened
no matter who I looked at
for maybe five minutes long enough
long enough
this hidden trinity
I saw, the others
will say I am making it up
as if that mattered
Lord,
I make up nothing
not one word.
- Franz Wright


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"We're here, there, not here, not there, swirling like specks of dust, claiming for ourselves the rights of the universe. Being important, being nothing, being caught in lives of our own making that we never wanted. Breaking out, trying again, wondering why the past comes with us, wondering how to talk about the past at all."
- Jeanette Winterson



To Waiting
You spend so much of your time
expecting to become
someone else
always someone
who will be different
someone to whom a moment
whatever moment it may be
at last has come
and who has been
met and transformed
into no longer being you
and so has forgotten you

meanwhile in your life
you hardly notice
the world around you
lights changing
sirens dying along the buildings
your eyes intent
on a sight you do not see yet
not yet there
as long as you
are only yourself

with whom as you
recall you were
never happy
to be left alone for long
- W. S. Merwin
Present Company



"The level of ego is an elevated and encompassing level of consciousness — quite an achievement for our evolving and beloved species. Certainly, hosannas can be shouted for what we have achieved in our identity projects with the use of our faculties and talents. We have become capable, technological selves, acting upon the world in ways that further our own evolution. We have quintessentially lifted ourselves by our bootstraps."
- Kathleen D. Singh
The Grace in Dying: How We Are Transformed Spiritually as We Die



Incantation
Human reason is beautiful and invincible.
No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books,
no sentence of banishment can prevail against it.
It establishes the universal ideas in language,
and guides our hand so we write Truth and Justice
with capital letters, lie and oppression with small.
It puts what should be above things as they are,
is an enemy of despair and a friend of hope.
It does not know Jew from Greek or slave from master,
giving us the estate of the world to manage.
It saves austere and transparent phrases
from the filthy discord of tortured words.
It says that everything is new under the sun,
opens the congealed fist of the past.
Beautiful and very young are Philo-Sophia
and poetry, her ally in the service of the good.
As late as yesterday Nature celebrated their birth,
the news was brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo.
Their friendship will be glorious, their time has no limit.
Their enemies have delivered themselves to destruction.
- Czeslaw Milosz



"Justice. To be ever ready to admit that another person is something quite different from what we read when he is there (or when we think about him). Or rather, to read in him that he is certainly something different, perhaps something completely different from what we read in him.
Every being cries out silently to be read differently."
- Simone Weil



"Of course you are perfect - from the beginning. But it is not necessary for you to say that you are perfect. You are perfect even though you don't realize you are perfect."
- Shunryu Suzuki
Not Always So



Account
The history of my stupidity would fill many volumes.

Some would be devoted to acting against consciousness,
Like the flight of a moth which, had it known,
Would have tended nevertheless toward the candle's flame.

Others would deal with ways to silence anxiety,
The little whisper which, though it is a warning, is ignored.

I would deal separately with satisfaction and pride,
The time when I was among their adherents
Who strut victoriously, unsuspecting.

But all of them would have one subject, desire,
If only my own - but no, not at all; alas,
I was driven because I wanted to be like others.
I was afraid of what was wild and indecent in me.

The history of my stupidity will not be written.
For one thing, it's late. And the truth is laborious.
- Czeslaw Milosz
translated by Robert Hass and Robert Pinsky



Don't try and don't quit,
that's the best I can say.
People who love you
and people who need you
and people you love
and those you hate
come to the same thing.
No matter how you turn,
you can never turn fast
or far enough.
There is no escaping
the ten directions
or ten thousand things,
even when you die.
- Peter Levitt
Within Within



"I see human beings as a self-regulating system that wants us to discover our own nature. Our imagination, our deep mind, so to speak, wants to help us to do this. In part, that's why it gives us the thoughts and feelings and associations it does. That's why we dream what we dream and 'think up' the imagery that comes to us. When we take all of this seriously, when we use it, that is, and are willing to risk releasing our tight grip on ourselves by writing what we don't yet know, to paraphrase Paul Klee, we demonstrate to our own imagination that we can be trusted with its gifts. Of course, our imagination likes this. It says, "Hey. She's serious. Let's give her more."
But when we turn our back on this powerful inclination toward completion, we risk losing contact with the gift-giving nature of the imagination. We risk damaging the relationship we've developed. Think of it as a relationship to "the muse," if you will. As the poet Stuart Perkoff wrote in regard to abusing the gifts of the muse, "Be careful. It's hers. She'll take it back."
- Peter Levitt
ZinkZine, Fall 2003



"It is important to have a secret, a premonition of things unknown. It fills life with something impersonal, a numinosum. A man who has never experienced that has missed something important. He must sense that he lives in a world which in some respects is mysterious; that things happen and can be experienced which remain inexplicable; that not everything which happens can be anticipated. The unexpected and the incredible belong in this world. Only then is life whole. For me the world has from the beginning been infinite and ungraspable."
- Carl Jung


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When you wake to the dream of now
from night and its other dream,
you carry day out of dark
like a flame.
- Kim Stafford



"The task of genius, and man is nothing if not genius, is to keep the miracle alive, to live always in the miracle, to make the miracle more and more miraculous, to swear allegiance to nothing, but live only miraculously, think only miraculously, die miraculously."
- Henry Miller



"Wonder begins with the element of surprise. The now almost obsolete word 'wonderstruck' suggests that wonder breaks into consciousness with a dramatic suddenness that produces amazement or astonishment. Because of the suddenness with which it appears, wonder reduces us momentarily to silence. We associate gaping, breathlessness, bewilderment, and even stupor with wonder, because it jolts us out of the world of common sense in which our language is at home. The language and categories we customarily use to deal with experience are inadequate to the encounter, and hence we are initially immobilized and dumbfounded. We are silent before some new dimension of meaning which is being revealed."
- Sam Keen



Snow
It began to snow at midnight. And certainly
the kitchen is the best place to sit,
even the kitchen of the sleepless.
It's warm there, you cook yourself something, drink wine
and look out of the window at your friend eternity.
Why care whether birth and death are merely points
when life is not a straight line.
Why torment yourself eyeing the calendar
and wondering what is at stake.
Why confess you don't have the money
to buy Saskia shoes?
And why brag
that you suffer more than others.
If there were no silence here
the snow would have dreamed it up.
You are alone.
Spare the gestures. Nothing for show.
- Vladimir Holub
translated by Ian & Jarmila Milner



"You are standing in the sky. When we think of the sky, we tend to look up, but the sky actually begins at the earth. We walk through it, yell into it, rake leaves, wash the dog, and drive cars in it. We breathe it deep within us. With every breath, we inhale millions of molecules of sky, heat them briefly, and then exhale them back into the world."
- Diane Ackerman



This is the Dream
This is the dream we carry through the world
that something fantastic will happen
that it has to happen
that time will open by itself
that doors shall open by themselves
that the heart will find itself open
that mountain springs will jump up
that the dream will open by itself
that we one early morning
will slip into a harbor
that we have never known.
- Olav H. Hauge
translated by Robert Bly and Robert Hedin
The Dream We Carry: Selected and Last Poems



"Love is an impulse which springs from the most profound depths of our beings, and upon reaching the visible surface of life carries with it an alluvium of shells and seaweed from the inner abyss. A skilled naturalist, by filing these materials, can reconstruct the oceanic depths from which they have been uprooted."
- José Ortega y Gasset



"Love lays siege to each being and seeks to discover an opening, a path leading into the heart, by means of which love can permeate everywhere. The difference between the sinner and the saint is that the sinner closes his heart to love while the saint opens himself to this same love. In both cases the love is the same and the pressure is the same."
- Lev Gillet
The Burning Bush



Late Gazing
1.
The window's dark. Roll back the curtain's waves.
What's to be done about sunsets?
Climb up and stand in some high place,
lusting for a little more twilight.
- Yuan Mei



"Anyone can see that if grasping and aversion were with us all day and night without ceasing, who could ever stand them? Under that condition, living things would either die or become insane. Instead, we survive because there are natural periods of coolness, of wholeness, and ease. In fact, they last longer than the fires of our grasping and fear. It is this that sustains us. We have periods of rest making us refreshed, alive, well. Why don't we feel thankful for this everyday Nirvana?

We already know how to let go - we do it every night when we go to sleep, and that letting go, like a good night's sleep, is delicious. Opening in this way, we can live in the reality of our wholeness. A little letting go brings us a little peace, a greater letting go brings us a greater peace. Entering the gateless gate, we begin to treasure the moments of wholeness. We begin to trust the natural rhythm of the world, just as we trust our own sleep and how our own breath breathes itself."
- Jack Kornfield


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"The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one's own, or real life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one's real life - the life God is sending one day by day; what one calls one's real life is a phantom of one's own imagination. This at least is what I see at moments of insight: but it's hard to remember it all the time."
- C. S. Lewis



"The wonder of a moment in which there is nothing but an upwelling of simple happiness is utterly awesome. Gratitude is so close to the bone of life, pure and true, that it instantly stops the rational mind, and all its planning and plotting. That kind of let go is fiercely threatening. I mean, where might such gratitude end?"
- Regina Sara Ryan
Praying Dangerously



For Equilibrium, a Blessing
Like the joy of the sea coming home to shore,
May the relief of laughter rinse through your soul.

As the wind loves to call things to dance,
May your gravity be lightened by grace.

Like the freedom of the monastery bell,
May clarity of mind make your eyes smile.

As water takes whatever shape it is in,
So free may you be about who you become.

As silence smiles on the other side of what's said,
May your sense of irony bring perspective.

As time remains free of all that it frames,
May your mind stay clear of all it names.

May your prayer of listening deepen enough
to hear in the depths the laughter of God.
- John O'Donohue
To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Invocations and Blessings



"True dharma practice is a revolutionary activity, and you can't do it in a comfortable way. You really have to challenge the whole identity of your life. But the strength that's asked for is not necessarily the strength of eliminating the impurities of body and mind, or fighting against the defilements of greed, hatred, and delusion, the inner corruptions, though this language is very common in Theravadin, Tibetan, and Zen Buddhism. The strength that's needed is the courage of heart to remain undefended and open, a willingness to touch the ten-thousand joys and the ten-thousand sorrows from our compassion, the deepest place of our being. This is a different kind of fearlessness, which requires as much or more passion and fire."
- Jack Kornfield



Climbing the Mountain
I burned incense, swept the earth, and waited
for a poem to come . . .

Then I laughed, and climbed the mountain,
leaning on my staff.

How I'd love to be a master
of the blue sky's art:

see how many sprigs of snow-white cloud
he's brushed in so far today.
- Yuan Mei



"This is my living faith, an active faith, a faith of verbs: to question, explore, experiment, experience, walk, run, dance, play, eat, love, learn, dare, taste, touch, smell, listen, argue, speak, write, read, draw, provoke, emote, scream, sin, repent, cry, kneel, pray, bow, rise, stand, look, laugh, cajole, create, confront, confound, walk back, walk forward, circle, hide, and seek. To seek: to embrace the questions, be wary of answers."
- Terry Tempest Williams



Hemingway Never Did This
I read that he lost a suitcase full of manuscripts on a
train and that they never were recovered.
I can't match the agony of this
but the other night I wrote a 3-page poem
upon this computer
and through my lack of diligence and

practice
and by playing around with commands
on the menu
I somehow managed to erase the poem
forever.
believe me, such a thing is difficult to do
even for a novice
but I somehow managed to do
it.

now I don't think this 3-pager was immortal
but there were some crazy wild lines,
now gone forever.
it bothers more than a touch, it's some-
thing like knocking over a good bottle of
wine.

and writing about it hardly makes a good
poem.
still, I thought somehow you'd like to
know?

if not, at least you've read this far
and there could be better work
down the line.

let's hope so, for your sake
and
mine.
- Charles Bukowski


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