houses of the holy

"One of the saddest realities is most people never know when their lives have reached the summit. Only after it is over and we have some kind of perspective do we realize how good we had it a day, a month, five years ago. The walk together in the December snow, the phone call that changed everything, that lovely evening in the bar by the Aegean. Back then you thought "this is so nice." Only later did you realize it was the rarest bliss."
 - Jonathan Carroll



"The whole creation is one lunatic fringe. If creation had been left up to me, I'm sure I wouldn't have had the imagination or courage to do more than shape a single, reasonably sized atom, smooth as a snowball, and let it go at that."
 - Annie Dillard



"I sat at the foot of a huge tree, a statue of the night, and tried to make an inventory of all I had seen, heard, smelled, and felt: dizziness, horror, stupor, astonishment, joy, enthusiasm, nausea, inescapable attraction. What had attracted me? It was difficult to say: Human kind cannot bear much reality. Yes, the excess of reality had become an unreality, but that unreality had turned suddenly into a balcony from which I peered into - what? Into that which is beyond and still has no name . . . "
 - Octavio Paz
In Light of India



Electricity may start things,
but if they're to last
I've come to understand
a steady, low-voltage hum

        of affection
must be arrived at. How else to offset
the occasional slide
into neglect and ill temper?
I learned, in time, to let heaven
go its mythy way, to never again

        be a supplicant
of any single idea. For you and me
it's here and now from here on in.
 - Stephen Dunn
from Here And Now
for Barbara



"I remember the day I stood in front of a great, famous sculpture by a great, famous sculptor and didn't like it. Such a moment is a landmark in the life of any young artist. It begins in confusion and guilt and self-doubt and ends in a triumphant breakthrough: I see the world and I see that I am free before it, I am not at the mercy of historical opinion and what I want to turn away from, I turn away from, what I want to approach, I approach. Twenty-five years later I read an essay by John Berger on Rodin and in it Berger was able to articulate all that I felt on that afternoon, standing in front of a great Rodin. But by then I was old and vain and the pride of being vindicated was, I admit, just as exciting as Berger’s intellectual condemnation of Rodin's desire toward dominance.

I remember thinking my feelings implicated me with Rodin and though now I liked him less than ever, my repulsion was braided with a profound sympathy inseparable from my feelings for myself. And that is a landmark in the life of an old artist looking at art: the realization that none of us can ever be free from ourselves.

I remember the first time I realized the world we are born into is not the one we leave."
 -  Mary Ruefle
I Remember, I Remember



"You are here to learn something. Don't try to figure out what it is. This can be frustrating and unproductive."
 - Steven L. Peck
A Short Stay in Hell



Never give up
No matter what is going on
Never give up
Develop the heart
Too much energy in your country
Is spent developing the mind
Instead of the heart
Be compassionate
Not just to your friends
But to everyone
Be compassionate
Work for peace
In your heart and in the world
Work for peace
And I say again
Never give up
No matter what is going on around you
Never give up
 - Dalai Lama XIV



In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing.
About the dark times.
 - Bertolt Brecht



Pleasures
First look from morning's window
The rediscovered book
Fascinated faces
Snow, the change of the seasons
The newspaper
The dog
Dialectics
Showering, swimming
Old music
Comfortable shoes
Comprehension
New music
Writing, planting
Traveling
Singing
Being friendly
 - Bertolt Brecht



"If you can think of times in your life that you've treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern, just because they were valuable as human beings. The ability to do that with ourselves. To treat ourselves the way we would treat a really good, precious friend. Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely loved more than life itself. And I think it's probably possible to achieve that. I think part of the job we're here for is to learn how to do it. I know that sounds a little pious."
 - David Foster Wallace
Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace
David Lipsky


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"Choice begins with the thinking person, the person who has begun to make distinctions. For example, about half our bodily functions may be controlled by nature, but the other half is left to us to improve or impair. Whether we like it or not, the responsibility for that part of our being is up to us. Experience - often bitter experience - will teach us to cooperate with nature until we voluntarily choose to cooperate in all aspects of our lives.

As we develop our inner qualities, we come to a point where we first suspect the existence of a higher law; then we acknowledge that such a thing really exists. From this recognition come practical signs to which we become more and more receptive, telling us clearly and directly what is better. Acknowledging this higher law requires that we develop morally, so we can put our moral decisions into action.

Eventually the process of choosing between "good" and "bad" disappears, replaced by a better apprehension of the higher law and an increasing determination to carry out what it requires. After having made all those detailed intellectual choices and never truly knowing if we've made the right ones, there comes a point in our evolution where the higher law actually determines what we choose. The important choice - whether to go on in the old familiar way or rely on the spiritual law - has then been made.

Once we have chosen the higher law, our decisions are no longer determined by satisfaction of our personal needs, for we confer with the law within us that automatically opts for a universal solution for the benefit of the whole. In this way, ordinary choosing gradually changes into knowing how to make the right choice, and this resolves the paradox of feeling that our side of an issue is right while intuiting that the other side is also right: the two opposing sides, which we thought were mutually exclusive, have been united when we no longer ally ourselves with one side, but acknowledge both as aspects of one thing. Then, choosing in ignorance will be conquered - and knowing this can give us a new outlook on life."
 - Jules van Bergen



and
it's the damnedest
movie
you've ever
seen
because
you're
in it -

low budget
and
4 billion
critics

and the longest
run
you ever hope
for
is

one
day.
-  Charles Bukowski
(excerpt) from Show Biz



"The illusion at the end of the day. I mean that this will continue tomorrow. I mean that this will end today."
 - Mary Ruefle



Desire is never on the map
it's that unnamed lake you found
once, driving a gravel road,  not
where you thought you were going,
fast,  window down, hair
loose  to the dry wind,
bare foot pressing metal,
soft feathers  of cottonwood
drift through, maple seed
spinning in its wild gyre.
Bugs spatter on the windshield
in Rorschach  you want to
read like tea leaves, imagine
you might learn how you've
come to this road, which
left turn at midnight, which
wrong side of  town.

Then there it is before you,
glittering pure and cold and
suddenly you want
that stone-skipping ache
more than your life, even
knowing how the cold  water
makes each  hair stand on end
as you enter, one foot at a time
sand crumbling underfoot,
the delicious  submersion,
as you slip the laws of
surface tension, gravity . . .

and so it is you push off from shore,
not caring,  this lake, as you knew
the moment you saw it,
has no bottom.
 - Holly Hughes



"Going home does not come naturally to me. If my father's medium was silence, mine had tended to be escape. But there's no future in escape because the world is round. So the faster you run away, the faster you end up, right back where you started, face to face with whatever you were running from in the first place. Your worst fears, they're always the most patient. They'll wait up for you. That's what makes them the worst."
 - Holly Hughes



Compliments of the Season
Imagine viewing Christmas as an occasion to enjoy,
and not something that must be endured.
For that matter, imagine feeling that way
about the rest of the year.
 - John Tottenham



"I have enormous gratitude for no reason at all. I experience joy just for being alive. I love because I have no choice. If you are wondering why I write and talk so much about awakening, this is it."
 - Scott Kiloby



"Choose to be optimistic, it feels better."
  - Dalai Lama



"I was living in a villa in the suburbs, alone with a dog, a couple of cats and their kittens, all black. The mother cat could not feed them. One by one, all the kittens died. They filled the room with their filth. Every evening, when I arrived home, I would find one lying stiff, its gums laid bare. One evening, I found the last one, half eaten by the mother. It stank already. The stench of death mingled with the stench of urine. Then, with my hands in the filth and the stench of rotting flesh reeking in my nostrils, I sat down in the midst of all this misery and gazed for hour after hour at the demented glow in the cat's green eyes as it crouched motionless in the corner. Yes. And it is just like that this evening. When we are stripped down to a certain point, nothing leads anywhere anymore, hope and despair are equally groundless, and the whole of life can be summed up in an image."
 - Albert Camus
Between Yes and No



Walking North
No matter how I turn
the magnificent light follows.
Background to my sadness.
No matter how I lift my heart
my shadow creeps in wait behind.
Background to my joy.
No matter how fast I run
a stillness without thought is where I end.
No matter how long I sit
there is a river of motion I must rejoin.
And when I can't hold my head up
it always falls in the lap of one
who has just opened.
When I finally free myself of burden
there is always someones heavy head
landing in my arms.
The reasons of the heart
are leaves in wind.
Stand up tall and everything
will nest in you.
We all lose and we all gain.
Dark crowds the light.
Light fills the pain.
It is a conversation with no end
a dance with no steps
a song with no words
a reason too big for any mind.
No matter how I turn
the magnificence follows.
 - Mark Nepo

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"Indeterminacy means, literally: not fixed, not settled, uncertain, indefinite. It means that you don't know where you are. How can it be otherwise, say the Buddhist teachings, since you have no fixed or inherent identity and are ceaselessly in process? Life is filled with uncertainty  Chance events happen to all of us. Each of us must take responsibility and make decisions. None of us should be imposing our ego image on others.

There's another way to live. Accept indeterminacy as a principle, and you see your life in a new light, as a series of seemingly unrelated jewel-like stories within a dazzling setting of change and transformation. Recognize that you don't know where you stand, and you will begin to watch where you put your feet. That's when the path appears."
 - John Cage



"I don't think the world is the way we like to think it is. I don't think it's one solid world, but many, thousands upon thousands of them - as many as there are people - because each person perceives the world in his or her own way; each lives in his or her own world. Sometimes they connect, for a moment, or more rarely, for a lifetime, but mostly we are alone, each living in our own world, suffering our small deaths."
 - Charles de Lint



"All stories must end so, with the next tale winking out of the corners of the last pages, promising more, promising moonlight and dancing and revels, if only you will come back when spring comes again."
 - Catherynne M. Valente



Benedicto:
"May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you - beyond that next turning of the canyon walls."
 - Edward Abbey



Epitaph
Now I'm not the brightest
knife in the drawer, but
I know a couple things
about this life: poverty
silence, impermanence
discipline and mystery

The world is not illusory, we are

From crimson thread to toe tag

If you are not disturbed
there is something seriously wrong with you, I'm sorry

And I know who I am
I'll be a voice
coming from nowhere,

inside -

be glad for me.
 - Franz Wright



"Two tasks at the beginning of your life: to narrow your orbit more and more, and ever and again to check whether you are not in hiding somewhere outside your orbit."
 - Franz Kafka



"The ultimate nature of the experience of life is that toil and pleasure, sorrow and joy, are inseparably mixed in it. The very will to life that brought one to light, however, was a will to come even through pain into this world; else one never would have got here. And that is the notion underlying the oriental idea of reincarnation. Since you came to birth in this world at this time, in this place, and with this particular destiny, it was this indeed that you wanted and required for your own ultimate illumination. That was a great big wonderful thing that you thereupon brought to pass; not the "you", of course, that you now suppose yourself to be, but the "you" that was already there before you were born and which even now is keeping your heart beating and your lungs breathing and doing for you all those complicated things inside that are your life. You are not now to lose your nerve! Go on through with it and play your own game all the way!"
 - Joseph Campbell
Myths to Live By



Pardon all runners,
All speechless, alien winds,
All mad waters.

Pardon their impulses,
Their wild attitudes,
Their young flights, their reticence.

When a message has no clothes on
How can it be spoken.
 - Thomas Merton



"I do believe in an everyday sort of magic - the inexplicable connectedness we sometimes experience with places, people, works of art and the like; the eerie appropriateness of moments of synchronicity; the whispered voice, the hidden presence, when we think we're alone."
 - Charles de Lint



"All true poets are visionaries and experience oceanic instances of seamless mingling with the infinite in the face of everyday things (astronomical perceptions, as Blake and Lorca put it, in the contemplation of very small concrete things; or as Flannery O'Conner said, only in and through sense experiences does a writer approach a contemplative knowledge of the mysteries they embody); and of course poetry, of all arts, is the most moral if we keep Kant's definition of morality in mind, as that act for which no possibility of compensation really exists. There is nothing to be gained from writing poetry (and everything to lose, come to think of it) if it is truly taken seriously."
 - Franz Wright


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Passing Remark
In scenery I like flat country.
In life I don't like much to happen.

In personalities I like mild colorless people.
And in colors I prefer gray and brown.

My wife, a vivid girl from the mountains,
says, "Then why did you choose me?"

Mildly I lower my brown eyes -
there are so many things admirable people do not understand.
 - William Stafford



"The black sky was underpinned with long silver streaks that looked like scaffolding and depth on depth behind it were thousands of stars that all seemed to be moving very slowly as if they were about some vast construction work that involved the whole universe and would take all time to complete. No one was paying attention to the sky."
 - Flannery O'Connor



New Year's
Let other mornings honor the miraculous.
Eternity has festivals enough.
This is the feast of our mortality,
The most mundane and human holiday.

On other days we misinterpret time,
Pretending that we live the present moment.
But can this blur, this smudgy in-between,
This tiny fissure where the future drips

Into the past, this flyspeck we call now
Be our true habitat? The present is
The leaky palm of water that we skim
From the swift, silent river slipping by.

The new year always brings us what we want
Simply by bringing us along - to see
A calendar with every day uncrossed,
A field of snow without a single footprint.
 - Dana Gioia
Interrogations at Noon



"Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to was never there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place. Nothing outside you can give you any place. In yourself right now is all the place you've got.
You needn't look at the sky because it's not going to open up and show no place behind it. You needn't search for any hole in the ground to look through into somewhere else. You can't go neither forwards nor backwards into your daddy's time nor your children's if you have them. In yourself right now is all the place you've got. If there was any Fall, look there, if there was any Redemption, look there, and if you expect any Judgment, look there, because they all three will have to be in your time and your body and where in your time and your body can they be?"
 - Flannery O'Connor
Wise Blood



Animals
I think the death of domestic animals
mark the sea of changes in our lives.
Think how things were, when things were different.
There was an animal then, a dog or a cat,
not the one you have now, another one.
Think when things were different before that.
There was another one then. You had almost forgotten.
 - Miller Williams
Imperfect Love



"We chase after ghosts and spirits and are left holding only memories and dreams. It's not that we want what we can't have; it's that we've held all we could want and then had to watch it slip away."
 - Charles de Lint



A Valley Like This
Sometimes you look at an empty valley like this,
and suddenly the air is filled with snow.
That is the way the whole world happened -
there was nothing, and then . . .
But maybe some time you will look out and even
the mountains are gone, the world become nothing
again. What can a person do to help
bring back the world?
We have to watch it and then look at each other.
Together we hold it close and carefully
save it, like a bubble that can disappear
if we don't watch out.
Please think about this as you go on. Breathe on the world.
Hold out your hands to it. When mornings and evenings
roll along, watch how they open and close, how they
invite you to the long party that your life is.
 - William Stafford



"The truly still mind, with which you were born, is the mind that moves freely. Without ignoring anything, it reacts wholeheartedly to everything it encounters, to everything on which it reflects. And yet, for all that, it is the mind that is never seized by anything, but is always ready to react on the spot to whatever it encounters next. The mind that is still is the mind that never forfeits its freedom and is able to constantly keep rolling and rolling and rolling.
The word samadhi carries within itself two absolutely contrary meanings: "perfect reception" and "perfect non-reception." In order to "perfectly receive" each instant as it occurs, it is necessary to "perfectly not-receive" the previous instant and the future instant. No matter how accurately and in what detail a mirror may reflect what is before it in one instant, should it be turned to face a new direction, the previous reflection will disappear without a trace and the mirror will faithfully reflect what is newly before it.
The mind that neither ignores anything nor attaches to anything is not something that is obtained through training. It is the natural power with which you entered this world."
 - Soko Morinaga
Novice To Master



There is smoke and grease, there is
the wrist's exhaustion, there is laughter,
there is the letter seized in the clock
and the apple's tang, the river
sliding along its banks, darker
now than the sky descending
a last time to scatter its diamonds
into these black waters that contain
the day that passed, the night to come.
 - Philip Levine
excerpt from Salt and Oil
The Mercy



"Suffering builds character and impels you to penetrate life's secrets. It's the path of great artists, great religious leaders, great social reformers. The problem is not suffering per se, but rather our identification with our own ego: our divided, dualistic, cramped view of things. "We are too ego-centered," Suzuki tells Cage. "The ego-shell in which we live is the hardest thing to outgrow. We seem to carry it all the time from childhood up to the time we finally pass away."
 - Kay Larson
Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists


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"What is the relationship of thinking to reality? As careful attention shows, thought itself is in an actual process of movement. That is to say, one can feel a sense of flow in the stream of consciousness not dissimilar to the sense of flow in the movement of matter in general. May not thought itself thus be a part of reality as a whole? But then, what could it mean for one part of reality to 'know' another, and to what extent would this be possible?"
 - David Bohm



"Thought develops like a stream that happens to go one way here and another way there. Once it develops it produces real physical results that people are looking at, but they don't see where these results are coming from - that's one of the basic features of fragmentation. When they have produced these divisions they see that real things have happened, so they'll start with these real things as if they just suddenly got there by themselves, or evolved in nature by themselves. That's a mistake that thought makes. It produces a result, and then it says, I didn't do it; it's there by itself, and I must correct it. But if thought is constantly making this result and then saying, 'I've got to stop it', this is absurd. Because thought is caught up in this absurdity, it is producing all sorts of negative consequences, then treating them as independent and saying, I must stop them."
 - David Bohm & Mark Edwards
Changing Consciousness



Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter
It is a cold and snowy night. The main street is deserted.
The only things moving are swirls of snow.
As I lift the mailbox door, I feel its cold iron.
There is a privacy I love in this snowy night.
Driving around, I will waste more time.
 - Robert Bly



Winter Afternoon by the Lake
Black trunks, black branches, and white snow.
No one nearby, five o'clock, below zero,
Late January.  No birds.  No wind.
You look, and your life seems stopped.  Perhaps

You died suddenly earlier today.  But the thin
Moon says no.  The trees say, "It's been this way
Before, often.  It's cold, but it's quiet."  We've experienced
This before, among the messy Saxons putting back

The hide flap.  A voice says:  "It's old.  You'll never
See this again, the way it is now, because
Just today you sensed that someone gave you
Life and said, "Stay as long as you like."

The snow and the black trees, pause, to see if we're
Ready to re-enter that stillness.  "Not yet."
 - Robert Bly



"There are only two worlds - your world, which is the real world, and other worlds, the fantasy. Worlds like this are worlds of the human imagination: their reality, or lack of reality, is not important. What is important is that they are there. These worlds provide an alternative. Provide an escape. Provide a threat. Provide a dream, and power; provide refuge, and pain. They give your world meaning. They do not exist; and thus they are all that matters."
 - Neil Gaiman
The Books of Magic


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