first do no harm

"There are stories that are true, in which each individuals tale is unique and tragic, and the worst of the tragedy is that we have heard it before, and we cannot allow ourselves to feel it too deeply. We build a shell around it like an oyster dealing with a painful particle of grit, coating it with smooth pearl layers in order to cope. This is how we walk and talk and function, day in, day out, immune to others' pain and loss. If it were to touch us it would cripple us or make saints of us; but, for the most part, it does not touch us. We cannot allow it to."
 - Neil Gaiman



"The earth, in Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights, when the panels are closed, can been seen floating like a disk in a vitreous bell jar: that space: yes. And too, when the panels are open, hell: all the gaping mouths choking on coins; all the blue-faced, human-stuffed gourds; anus-prisons with captives inside; hollowed geese rowed by monkeys; bodies cooking three-deep in cauldrons or pickled in spacious, rough-looking barrels; owls on eyeballs pecking them blind; cavernous pods spewing venom reserves; and yes, eggshell boats on flaming water; eggshell garths, spiky and airless, empty eggs with human faces and jawbone runners; eggs in which devils and bones with eyes strum tendony, dripping lyres. The most salient quality of Bosch's hell? Relentlessness contained. Emptiness filled with ferocious obsessions. Stages on which scenes play out - and play and play and play unending."
 - Lia Purpura
On Looking



Things I Want Decided
Which shouldn't exist
in this world,
the one who forgets
or the one
who is forgotten?

Which is better,
to love
one who has died
or not to see
each other when you are alive?

Which is better,
the distant lover
you long for
or the one you see daily
without desire?

Which is the least unreliable
among fickle things -
the swift rapids,
a flowing river,
or this human world?
 - Izumi Shikibu
translated by Jane Hirshfield
The Ink Dark Moon



"If you dare to take up the banner of enlightenment, you will be attacked from all sides. From the inside you will be attacked by your own mind and from the outside you will be attacked by everyone else's mind. Anyone who dares to succeed automatically presents a huge threat. If true freedom is going to survive within you, you have to be willing to fight for it. You have to have a sword in each hand at all times. One sword is for your own mind and the other sword is for everyone else's mind. You must be ready to use them. Anyone who wants to be truly free must be willing to stand alone in the truth."
 - Andrew Cohen



"The sword, the spiritual exercise and the unfettered mind, with effort and patience, should become one. We are to practice, practice with whatever we may have at hand, until the enemies of our own anger, hesitation and greed are cut down with the celerity and decisiveness of the stroke of the sword."
 - Takuan Soho
The Unfettered Mind



"So when people I like do something terrible," I said, "I just flense them and forgive them."
"Flense?" he said. "What's flense?"
"It's what whalers used to do to whale carcasses when they got them on board," I said. "They would strip off the skin and blubber and meat right down to the skeleton. I do that in my head to people - get rid of all the meat so I can see nothing but their souls. Then I forgive them."
 - Kurt Vonnegut
Bluebeard



"A world in which there are monsters, and ghosts, and things that want to steal your heart is a world in which there are angels, and dreams and a world in which there is hope."
 - Neil Gaiman



Eyes-Shut Facing Eyes-Rolling-Around
Pay close attention to your mean thoughts.
That sourness may be a blessing,
as an overcast day brings rain for the roses
and relief to dry soil.
Don't look so sourly on your sourness!
It may be it's carrying what you most deeply need
and want. What seems to be keeping you from joy
may be what leads you to joy.
Don't call it a dead branch.
Call it the live, moist root.
Don't always be waiting to see
what's behind it. That wait and see
poisons your Spirit.
Reach for it.
Hold your meanness to your chest
as a healing root,
and be through with waiting.
 - Jelaluddin Rumi
translated by Coleman Barks
Delicious Laughter: Rambunctious Teaching Stories from the Mathnawi



"When you blame, you open up a world of excuses, because as long as you're looking outside, you miss the opportunity to look inside, and you continue to suffer."
 - Donna Quesada
Buddha in the Classroom: Zen Wisdom to Inspire Teachers



"Each person who ever was or is or will be has a song. It isn't a song that anybody else wrote. It has its own melody, it has its own words. Very few people get to sing their song. Most of us fear that we cannot do it justice with our voices, or that our words are too foolish or too honest, or too odd. So people live their song instead."
 - Neil Gaiman


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"We each appear to hold within ourselves a range of divergent views as to our native qualities. Amid such uncertainty, we typically turn to the wider world to settle the question of our significance. We seem beholden to the affections of others to endure ourselves."
 - Alain de Botton



"Every life is inexplicable, I kept telling myself. No matter how many facts are told, no matter how many details are given, the essential thing resists telling. To say that so and so was born here and went there, that he did this and did that, that he married this woman and had these children, that he lived, that he died, that he left behind these books or this battle or that bridge - none of that tells us very much."
 - Paul Auster



The Storm
Now through the white orchard my little dog
romps, breaking the new snow
with wild feet.
Running here running there, excited,
hardly able to stop, he leaps, he spins
until the white snow is written upon
in large, exuberant letters,
a long sentence, expressing
the pleasures of the body in this world.
Oh, I could not have said it better.
 - Mary Oliver
Winter Hours



"When you've lived as long as I have, you tend to think you've heard everything, that there's nothing left that can shock you anymore. You grow a little complacent about your so-called knowledge of the world, and then, every once in a while, something comes along that jolts you out of your smug cocoon of superiority, that reminds you all over again that you don't understand the first thing about life."
 - Paul Auster



It's not the lover that we love, but love
itself, love as in nothing, as in O;
love is the lover's coin, a coin of no country,
hence: the ring; hence: the moon -
no wonder that empty circle so often figures
in our intimate dark, our skin-trade,
that commerce so furious we often think
love's something we share; but we're always wrong.
 - Don Paterson
from My Love



I basked in you;
I loved you, helplessly, with a boundless tongue-tied love.
And death doesn't prevent me from loving you.
Besides,
in my opinion you aren't dead.
(I know dead people, and you are not dead.)
 - Franz Wright



"And let me ask you this: the dead,
where aren't they?"
 - Franz Wright



We are rich: we have nothing to lose.
We are old: we have nowhere to rush.
We shall fluff the pillows of the past,
poke the embers of the days to come,
talk about what means the most,
as the indolent daylight fades.
We shall lay to rest our undying dead:
I shall bury you, you will bury me.
 - Vera Pavlova
 translated by Steven Seymour



If we have no compassion,
we will suffer alone, we will suffer
alone the destruction of ourselves.
 - Wendell Berry
Sabbaths 2005
Leavings: Poems



"We end up stumbling our way through the forest, never seeing all the unexpected and wonderful possibilities and potentials because we're looking for the idea of a tree, instead of appreciating the actual trees in front of us."
 - Charles de Lint


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Tree
All day I waited to be blown;
then someone cut me down.

I have, instead of thoughts,
uses; uses instead of feelings.

One day I'll feel the wind again.
A moment later I'll be gone.
 - Dan Chiasson



"Deep down, I don't believe it takes any special talent for a person to lift himself off the ground and hover in the air. We all have it in us - every man, woman, and child - and with enough hard work and concentration, every human being is capable of the feat. You must learn to stop being yourself. That's where it begins, and everything else follows from that. You must let yourself evaporate. Let your muscles go limp, breathe until you feel your soul pouring out of you, and then shut your eyes. That's how it's done. The emptiness inside your body grows lighter than the air around you. Little by little, you begin to weigh less than nothing. You shut your eyes; you spread your arms; you let yourself evaporate. And then, little by little, you lift yourself off the ground.
Like so."
 - Paul Auster



"I write about what I love. I love writing even more than what I write about. And what do I do it for? To love myself, if only for a brief while."
 - Vera Pavlova
Heaven Is Not Verbose: A Notebook
translated by Steven Seymour



"Mullah Nasrudin was standing on the bank of a river, and watched as a dog came to drink. The dog saw its reflection in the water and immediately began barking at it. It barked until it was foaming at the mouth, and exhausted, fell into the river - whereupon it quenched its thirst, climbed out, and happily walked away. Nasrudin said, "Thus I realized all my life I have been barking at my own reflection."
 - Sufi teaching story



The Afterlife
While you are preparing for sleep, brushing your teeth,
or riffling through a magazine in bed,
the dead of the day are setting out on their journey.

They're moving off in all imaginable directions,
each according to his own private belief,
and this is the secret that silent Lazarus would not reveal:
that everyone is right, as it turns out.
you go to the place you always thought you would go,
the place you kept lit in an alcove in your head.

Some are being shot into a funnel of flashing colors
into a zone of light, white as a January sun.
Others are standing naked before a forbidding judge who sits
with a golden ladder on one side, a coal chute on the other.

Some have already joined the celestial choir
and are singing as if they have been doing this forever,
while the less inventive find themselves stuck
in a big air conditioned room full of food and chorus girls.

Some are approaching the apartment of the female God,
a woman in her forties with short wiry hair
and glasses hanging from her neck by a string.
With one eye she regards the dead through a hole in her door.

There are those who are squeezing into the bodies
of animals - eagles and leopards - and one trying on
the skin of a monkey like a tight suit,
ready to begin another life in a more simple key,

while others float off into some benign vagueness,
little units of energy heading for the ultimate elsewhere.

There are even a few classicists being led to an underworld
by a mythological creature with a beard and hooves.
He will bring them to the mouth of the furious cave
guarded over by Edith Hamilton and her three-headed dog.

The rest just lie on their backs in their coffins
wishing they could return so they could learn Italian
or see the pyramids, or play some golf in a light rain.
They wish they could wake in the morning like you
and stand at a window examining the winter trees,
every branch traced with the ghost writing of snow.
 - Billy Collins



"Living is all clumsy delights. Sitting here in this room, for example, listening to you turn pages, overhearing you breathe."
 - Seon Joon



"Without a story, the fragments won't settle.

Possibilities crowd in and distract.

Without the stability of a tale-handed-down, one rushes to make things, rushes the blankness as if it were naked, suddenly stripped - indecent, embarrassed. In need.

Conclusions assert.

Stances take root."
 - Lia Purpura



"It's a weird thing, writing.

Sometimes you can look out across what you're writing, and it's like looking out over a landscape on a glorious, clear summer's day. You can see every leaf on every tree, and hear the birdsong, and you know where you'll be going on your walk.

And that's wonderful.

Sometimes it's like driving through fog. You can't really see where you're going. You have just enough of the road in front of you to know that you're probably still on the road, and if you drive slowly and keep your headlamps lowered you'll still get where you were going.

And that's hard while you're doing it, but satisfying at the end of a day like that, where you look down and you got 1500 words that didn't exist in that order down on paper, half of what you'd get on a good day, and you drove slowly, but you drove.

And sometimes you come out of the fog into clarity, and you can see just what you're doing and where you're going, and you couldn't see or know any of that five minutes before.

And that's magic."
 - Neil Gaiman



February
Winter. Time to eat fat
and watch hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat,
a black fur sausage with yellow
Houdini eyes, jumps up on the bed and tries
to get onto my head. It's his
way of telling whether or not I'm dead.
If I'm not, he wants to be scratched; if I am
He'll think of something. He settles
on my chest, breathing his breath
of burped-up meat and musty sofas,
purring like a washboard. Some other tomcat,
not yet a capon, has been spraying our front door,
declaring war. It's all about sex and territory,
which are what will finish us off
in the long run. Some cat owners around here
should snip a few testicles. If we wise
hominids were sensible, we'd do that too,
or eat our young, like sharks.
But it's love that does us in. Over and over
again, He shoots, he scores! and famine
crouches in the bedsheets, ambushing the pulsing
eiderdown, and the windchill factor hits
thirty below, and pollution pours
out of our chimneys to keep us warm.
February, month of despair,
with a skewered heart in the centre.
I think dire thoughts, and lust for French fries
with a splash of vinegar.
Cat, enough of your greedy whining
and your small pink bumhole.
Off my face! You're the life principle,
more or less, so get going
on a little optimism around here.
Get rid of death. Celebrate increase. Make it be spring.
- Margaret Atwood
Morning in the Burned House



"In general, lives seem to veer abruptly from one thing to another, to jostle and bump, to squirm. A person heads in one direction, turns sharply in mid-course, stalls, drifts, starts up again. Nothing is ever known, and inevitably we come to a place quite different from the one we set out for."
 - Paul Auster


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After a Death
Once there was a shock
that left behind a long, shimmering comet tail.
It keeps us inside. It makes the TV pictures snowy.
It settles in cold drops on the telephone wires.

One can still go slowly on skis in the winter sun
through brush where a few leaves hang on.
They resemble pages torn from old telephone directories.
Names swallowed by the cold.

It is still beautiful to hear the heart beat
but often the shadow seems more real than the body.
The samurai looks insignificant
beside his armor of black dragon scales.
 - Tomas Tranströmer   
translated by Robert Bly



I have been astonished that men could die
martyrs for their religion -
I have shuddered at it,
I shudder no more.
I could be martyred for my religion.
Love is my religion
and I could die for that.
I could die for you.
 - John Keats



"Happiness is accepting and choosing life, not just submitting grudgingly to it. It comes when we choose to be who we are; to be ourselves, at this present moment of our lives; we choose life as it is, with all its joys, pain, and conflicts. Happiness is living and seeking the truth, together with others in community, and assuming responsibility for our lives and the lives of others. It is accepting the fact that we are not infinite but can enter into a personal relationship with the Infinite, discovering the universal truth and justice that transcends all cultures: each person is unique and sacred. We are not just seeking to be what others want us to be or to conform to the expectations of family, friends, or local ways of being. We have chosen to be who we are, with all that is beautiful and broken in us. We do not slip away from life and live in a world of illusions, dreams, or nightmares. We become present to reality and to life so that we are free to live according to our personal conscience, our sacred sanctuary, where love resides within us and we see others as they are in the depth of their being. We are not letting the light of life within us be crushed, and we are not crushing it in others. On the contrary, all we want is for the light of others to shine."
 - Jean Vanier
Essential Writings



"Everyone has it in them to express themselves that fundamental thing that they know they are inside. That rather beautiful afraid person. Which might get translated into aggression, or silence, or shyness, or all kinds of other things. But inside we know that we are huggable and lovable, and we want to love and be loved. That person is yearning for fulfillment. To be the person they know they can be and that's a constant journey; that's a process."
 - Stephen Fry



"Whatever your eye falls on - for it will fall on what you love - will lead you to the questions of your life, the questions that are incumbent upon you to answer, because that is how the mind works in concert with the eye. The things of this world draw us where we need to go."
 - Mary Rose O'Reilley



The airy sky has taken its place leaning against the wall.
It is like a prayer to what is empty.
And what is empty turns its face to us
and whispers:
"I am not empty, I am open."
 - Tomas Tranströmer



"What does it feel like to be alive?
Living, you stand under a waterfall. You leave the sleeping shore deliberately; you shed your dusty clothes, pick your barefoot way over the high, slippery rocks, hold your breath, choose your footing, and step into the waterfall. The hard water pelts your skull, bangs in bits on your shoulders and arms. The strong water dashes down beside you and you feel it along your calves and thighs rising roughly back up, up to the roiling surface, full of bubbles that slide up your skin or break on you at full speed. Can you breathe here? Here where the force is the greatest and only the strength of your neck holds the river out of your face. Yes, you can breathe even here. You could learn to live like this. And you can, if you concentrate, even look out at the peaceful far bank where you try to raise your arms. What a racket in your ears, what a scattershot pummeling!
It is time pounding at you, time. Knowing you are alive is watching on every side your generation's short time falling away as fast as rivers drop through air, and feeling it hit."
 - Annie Dillard
An American Childhood



Willow flowers, snowflakes, the same . . .
They're feckless.

No matter whose garden they fall in,
They'll always follow the wind away.
 - Yuan Mei



Death as a Way of Life
It began:

1. Life is not fair
2. How can I be happy while others suffer
3. How can I not be happy while others suffer
4. Others will suffer whether or not I am happy
5. It is not the suffering of others that causes my happiness
6. It is not the not-suffering of others that causes my unhappiness
8.

I have been attracted to the idea that naming is a form of violence
but does that mean we should go around calling everyone Hey You
which seems like another sort of violence
even though it is a way of recognizing the other
as other

What can be said on this point?
 - Anna Moschovakis
You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake

"The secret of seeing is to sail on solar wind.
Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail,
whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff." 
 -  Annie Dillard

"The secret of seeing is, then, the pearl of great price. If I thought he could teach me to find it and keep it forever I would stagger barefoot across a hundred deserts after any lunatic at all. But although the pearl may be found, it may not be sought. The literature of illumination reveals this above all: although it comes to those who wait for it, it is always, even to the most practiced and adept, a gift and a total surprise. I return from one walk knowing where the killdeer nests in the field by the creek and the hour the laurel blooms. I return from the same walk a day later scarcely knowing my own name. Litanies hum in my ears; my tongue flaps in my mouth. Ailinon, alleluia!"
 - Annie Dillard
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek


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Design
Here is the day, sun, gulls
backlit and cresting, a jackhammer
going on, suggesting
I'm here but not really
in it, I'm more
representative
of a person in early
ambient fall,
near a fountain, and Thursday
farmers' market
like an architect's model, precise,
small me, stuck on a bench
reading a book, lending the air
of things going too fast.
 - Lia Purpura



Inadequate to the demands
imagination has settled upon me,
I listen to what the landscape says,
And all that it fails to say, and what the clouds say, and the light,
Inveterate stutterer.
 - Charles Wright



"When you walked by a period of life when you could have been really happy, you should have seized it. You should have leaped upon it."
 - Doug Peacock



"Through loyalty to the past, our mind refuses to realize that tomorrow's joy is possible only if today's makes way for it; that each wave owes the beauty of its line only to the withdrawal of the preceding one."
 - Andre Gide



Up Jumped Spring
What's most fantastical almost always goes
unrecorded and unsorted. Take spring.
Take today. Take dancing dreamlike; coffee
your night, creameries your dream factories.
Take walking as a dream, the dearest, sincerest
means of conveyance: a dance. Take leave
of the notion that this nation's or any other's earth
can still be the same earth our ancestors walked.
Chemistry strains to connect our hemispheres.
The right and left sidelines our brain forms
in the rain this new world braves - acid jazz.
The timeless taste her tongue leaves in your mouth,
stirred with unmeasured sugars, greens the day
the way sweet sunlight oxygenates, ignites
all nights, all daytimes, and you - this jumps.
Sheer voltage leaps, but nothing keeps or stays.
Sequence your afternoon as dance. Drink spring.
Holding her hard against you, picture the screenplay.
Take time to remember to get her spells together.
Up jumps the goddess gratified, and up jumped spring.
 - Al Young
for Nana
Coastal Nights and Inland Afternoons



"Know that joy is rarer, more difficult, and more beautiful than sadness. Once you make this all-important discovery, you must embrace joy as a moral obligation."
 - André Gide



"Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm; but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves."
 - T. S. Eliot


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