New Year's Poem (Margaret Avison)

NEW YEAR’S POEM

Margaret Avison

The Christmas twigs crispen and needles rattle

Along the windowledge.

          A solitary pearl

Shed from the necklace spilled at last week’s party

Lies in the suety, snow-luminous plainness

Of morning, on the windowledge beside them.

And all the furniture that circled stately

And hospitable when these rooms were brimmed

With perfumes, furs, and black-and-silver

Crisscross of seasonal conversation, lapses

Into its previous largeness.

         I remember

Anne’s rose-sweet gravity, and the stiff grave

Where cold so little can contain;

I mark the queer delightful skull and crossbones

Starlings and sparrows left, taking the crust,

And the long loop of winter wind

Smoothing its arc from dark Arcturus down

To the bricked corner of the drifted courtyard,

And the still windowledge.

          Gentle and just pleasure

It is, being human, to have won from space

This unchill, habitable interior

Which mirrors quietly the light

Of the snow, and the new year.

Frank Herbert

The mind can go either direction under stress - toward positive or toward negative: on or off. Think of it as a spectrum whose extremes are unconsciousness at the negative end and hyperconsciousness at the positive end. The way the mind will lean under stress is strongly influenced by training. (Frank Herbert)

Frank Herbert

The mind can go either direction under stress - toward positive or toward negative: on or off. Think of it as a spectrum whose extremes are unconsciousness at the negative end and hyperconsciousness at the positive end. The way the mind will lean under stress is strongly influenced by training. (Frank Herbert)

Sutta Nipata

Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle,
and the life of the candle will not be shortened.
Happiness never decreases by being shared.

- Sutta Nipata

Wisdom - A Prayer

Come, O Wisdom, come!

Word, spoken in eternity by mouth of the Most High,

O Wisdom of the mind and heart of God!

Come, O Wisdom, come!

Eternal Archetype, all creation's beauty

is fragment of your loveliness!

Come, O Wisdom, come!

Great Logos come to rest in the Virgin's womb!

O Little Wisdom born to us!

Almighty clothed in tenderness! 

Come, O Wisdom, come!

From end to end of time,

the grace of Love Incarnate orders all.

Come, O Wisdom, come!

O Wisdom, let me partake of you and yet still hunger,

and let me drink of you and always thirst.

Come, O Wisdom, come!

O Wisdom that is Love and love's Delight,

teach me to search him through the darkened streets

for whom our hearts long

Come, O Wisdom, come!

O Wisdom,

your words uttered in the beginning

generated a world of beauty and goodness,

giving purpose and value to each creature;

Instruct us in the way of prudence,

that we may nurture the world with justice and joy;

through the Name of the One who is Coming

Come, O Wisdom, come!

God's Grandeur (Gerard Manley Hopkins)

God's Grandeur

(Gerard Manley Hopkins)

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

   It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

   It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed.  Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

   And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

   And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell; the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

   There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

   Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs - 

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent 

   World broods with warm breast and with ah ! bright wings.

Macrina Wiederkehr "A Tree Full of Angels"

Frail and Glorious

Macrina Widerkehr

The waters of baptism flowed over me

and no original sin was seen.

Rather, the Eye of God beheld

a tiny mass of bones and flesh

soul and spirit

infinite possibility

pure process

new, empty, and free,

free to choose

good or evil

light or darkness

life or death

grace or sin.

It was my original union 

I was passing through the baptismal waters

being filled with power like unto God's

and God wept

at the possibility of me.

Then somewhere in between my baptism

and my daily life

My power like unto God's became scattered

I forgot my original union with God.

And as I grew 

I chose

good and evil

light and darkness

life and death

grace and sin.

With my baptism lost

I began to live my life fragmented,

standing on the edge of my baptismal powers

blind to their presence in the depths of my soul.

Yet all fragments are finally gathered up

and God does in us wonders

that others are not able to do.

So, on a day that felt like baptism

God gave me a glimpse of my hidden splendor,

made me aware of that original union

and my powers that had become scattered.

Now my life is ever spent

in calling home my scattered powers.

Eudora Welty

Events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find
their own order the continuous thread of revelation. 
-Eudora Welty

Advent Meditation

November 29, 2010

When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit. —Luke 1: 42

I remember the first time Iplaced my hands on the pregnant belly of a friend and felt her child kick. Startled at the life I felt within, my hand jumped back. My friend laughed and in her eyes I saw such profound joy. I could not help but share in her happiness. In that tiny movement, I felt God. We so easily see a spark of the Divine in infants. It is so much more difficult to notice it in others. What would it look like if we recognized each person as a gift from God, a glint of God’s light come into our lives? We should dance in the street and greet each other as old friends from a Holy memory. It is in others that we can see another part of ourselves, reaching out for unity and kicking from the womb as if to say "I know you! And I am here as well!"

Elaine Warn, Diocese of Montana

O God, who created all peoples in your image, we thank you for the wonderful diversity of races and cultures in this world. Enrich our lives by ever-widening circles of fellowship, and show us your presence in those who differ most from us, until our knowledge of your love is made perfect in our love for all your children; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Barbara Brown Taylor "An Altar In the World"

The great trouble in human life is that looking and eating are two, different operations.  Human beings have a hard time regarding anything beautiful without wanting to devour it.  (Simone Weil “Waiting For God”)

Upanishads: Two winged companions, two birds, are on the branch of a tree.  One eats the fruit.  The other looks at it.  Those two birds, Weil says, are the two parts of our soul.  (Barbara Brown Taylor, “An Altar In The World”

AN ALTAR IN THE WORLD

Barbara Brown Taylor

In biblical terms, it is wisdom we need to live together in this world.  Wisdom is not gained by knowing what is right.  Wisdom is gained by practicing what is right, and noticing what happens when that practice succeeds and when it fails.  Wise people do not have to be certain what they believe before they act.  They are free to act, trusting that the practice itself will teach them what they need to know.  If you are not sure what to think about washing feet, for instance, then the best way to find out is to practice washing a pair or two.  If you are not sure what to believe about your neighbor’s faith, then the best way to find out is to practice eating supper together.  Reason can only work with the experience available to it.  Wisdom atrophies if it is not walked on a regular basis.

Such wisdom is far more than information.  To gain it, you need more than a brain.  You need a body that gets hungry, feels pain, thrills to pleasure, craves rest.  This is your physical pass into the accumulated insight of all who have preceded you on this earth.  To gain wisdom, you need flesh and blood, because wisdom involves bodies – and not just human bodies, but bird bodies, tree bodies, water bodies, and celestial bodies.  According to the Talmud, every blade of grass has its own angel bending over it, whispering, “Grow, grow.”

How does one learn to see and hear such angels?

(pg.14)

AN ALTAR IN THE WORLD

Barbara Brown Taylor

Since at least one of the reasons I remain Christian is because of the seriousness with which Christian tradition honors flesh and blood, I am always surprised at how easy it is for me to become an oaf – usually by saying something obvious about the human body in the presence of those devoted to the soul.  In the case at hand, it was saying something about Jesus’s body that got me in trouble, but I can just as easily descent into oafdom by saying something about my own body or the bodies of other people when we are supposed to be speaking of spiritual things.

For instance, I can say that I think it is important to pray naked in front of a full-length mirror sometimes, especially when you are full of loathing for your body.  Maybe you think you are too heavy.  Maybe you have never liked the way your hipbones stick out.  Do your breasts sag?  Are you too hairy?  It is always something.  Then again, maybe you have been sick, or come through some surgery that has changed the way you look.  You have gotten glimpses of your body as you have bathed or changed clothes, but so far maintaining your equilibrium has depended upon staying covered up as much as you can.  You have even discovered how to shower in the dark, so that you may have to feel what you presently loathe about yourself but you do not have to look at it.

This can only go on so long, especially for someone who officially believes that God loves flesh and blood, no matter what kind of shape it is in.  Whether you are sick or well, lovely or irregular, there comes a time when it is vitally important for your spiritual health to drop your clothes, look in the mirror, and say, “Here I am.  This is the body-like-no-other that my life has shaped.  I live here.  This is my soul’s address.”  After you have taken a good look around, you may decide that there is a lot to be thankful for, all things considered.  Bodies take real beatings.  That they heal from most things is an underrated miracle.  That they give birth is beyond reckoning. 

When I do this, I generally decide that it is time to do a better job of wearing my skin with gratitude instead of loathing.  No matter what I think of my body, I can still offer it to God to go on being useful to the world in ways both sublime and ridiculous.  At the very least, I can practice a little reverence right there in front of the mirror, taking some small credit for standing there un-guarded for once.  This is no small thing, in a culture so confused about the body that most Americans cannot separate the physical form the sexual.  Comment on the beauty of a child’s body and you risk being viewed as a potential predator.  Make an observation about your own and you risk being called seductive. 

(pp 37-38)

AN ALTAR IN THE WORLD

Barbara Brown Taylor

Deep suffering makes theologians of us all.  The questions people ask about God in Sunday school rarely compare with the questions we ask while we are in the hospital.  This goes for those stuck in the waiting room as well as those in actual beds.  To love someone who is suffering is to learn the visceral definition of pathetic: 1) affecting or exciting emotion, especially the tender emotions, as pity or sorrow; 2) so inadequate as to be laughable or contemptible.  To spend one night in real pain is to discover depths of reality that are roped off while everything is going fine.  Why me?  Why now?  Why this?

These are natural questions to ask when you are in pain, but they are just as relevant when you are in pleasure.  Who deserves the way a warm bath feels on a cold night after a hard day’s work?  Who has earned the smell of a loved one, embracing you on your first night back home?  To hold a sleeping child in your arms can teach you more about the meaning of life than any ten books on the subject.  To lie in the yard at night looking up at the stars can grant you entrance into divine mysteries that elude you inside the house. 

The daily practice of incarnation – of being in the body with full confidence that God speaks the language of flesh – is to discover a pedagogy that is as old as the gospels.  Why else did Jesus spend his last night on earth teaching his disciples to wash feet and share supper?  With all the conceptual truths in the universe at his disposal, he did not give them something to think about together when he was gone. Instead, he gave them concrete things to do – specific ways of being together in their bodies – that would go on teaching them what they needed to know when he was no longer around to teach them himself. 

(pp 42-43)

AN ALTAR IN THE WORLD

Barbara Brown Taylor

Duke ethicist Stanley Hauerwas finds most Christians far too spiritual lin the practice of their faith.  Christianity “is not a set of beliefs or doctrines one believes in order to be a Christian,” he says, “but rather Christianity is to have one’s body shaped, one’s habits determined, in such a way that the worship of God is unavoidable.”  In our embodied life together, the words of our doctrines take on flesh.  If one of our orthodox beliefs has no corporeal value, if we cannot come up with a single consequence it has for our embodied life together, then there is good reason to ask why we should bother with it at all.  The issue Hauerwas raises is not whether there is any such thing as purely spiritual holiness, but “whether there is anything beside the body that can be sanctified.”

In far more pungent language, Daniel Berrigan once said, “It all comes down to this: whose flesh are you touching and why?  Whose flesh are you recoiling from and why?  Whose flesh are you burning and why?  (Samuel M. Powell & Michael E. Lodahl, “Embodied Holiness”)

(pp 44-45)

GOOD IS THE FLESH THAT THE WORD HAS BECOME

Brian Wren

Good is the flesh that the Word has become,

good is the birthing, the milk in the breast,

good is the feeding, caressing and rest,

good is the body for knowing the world,

Good is the flesh that the Word has become.

Good is the body for knowing the world,

sensing the sunlight, the tug of the ground,

feeling, perceiving, within and around,

good is the body, from cradle to grave,

Good is the flesh that the Word has become.

Good is the body from cradle to grave,

growing and ageing, arousing, impaired,

happy in clothing or lovingly bared,

good is the pleasure of God in our flesh.

Good is the flesh that the Word has become.

Good is the pleasure of God in our flesh,

longing in all, as in Jesus, to dwell,

glad of embracing, and tasting, and smell,

good is the body, for good and for God,

Good is the flesh that the Word has become.      

(Hope Publishing)

John Donne, Holy Sonnet 14

HOLY SONNET
John Donne

Batter my heart, three-personed God; for You

As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;

That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend

Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

I, like an usurped town, to another due,

Labor to admit You, but O, to no end;

Reason, Your viceroy in me, me should defend,

But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.

Yet dearly I love You, and would be loved fain,

But am betrothed unto Your enemy.

Divorce me, untie or break that knot again;

Take me to You, imprison me, for I,

Except You enthrall me, never shall be free,

Nor ever chaste, except You ravish me.

Conscience (Anna Kamienska

CONSCIENCE

Anna Kamienska

(transl.  Grazyna Drabik & David Curzon)

You are alone with yourself

It’s not true

A whole court is with you

A prosecutor and a counsel for the defense

They quarrel about you

Guilty not guilty

Guilty says the prosecutor

You admit he is right

It’s natural

But the counsel for the defense

Talks quite sensibly too

The head turns from side to side

And only you don’t know

What to think of yourself

Always sentence yourself to death

And grant a reprieve

Finally you get bored

With the game of conscience

Sleep

In the morning God

Will give you back your soul

Freshly mended and laundered

Let’s just hope

You won’t get somebody else’s

"You need to hold the pot to see how it works.........Here hold that."

"I'm afraid to drop it."

"Nonsense.  You've got good hands.  Remember?"

Dorothy stood with the pot in her hands, which held the cool light weight of the shell.  The moment it was between her fingers she felt it three-dimensional.  It was a completely different thing if you measured it with your skin instead of your eyes.  Its weight - and the empty air inside it - were part of it.

A.S. Byatt The Children's Book

ANNUNCIATION
(Anna Kamienska)

He stood wrapped in air
said as angels do
       Have no fear
Then he proclaimed something in a language
I didn't comprehend
Lord how much we don't understand
of the most important things
then I was left alone

No one can know
how lonely it is
when an angel departs
The world is then immense open and empty
you lack voice to describe it
no hand is friendly enough
words are all mute and tethered

From now on even an eternity
is too short for awaiting

(translated by Grazyna Drabik & David Curzon)

THE OTHER WORLD
(Anna Kamienska)

I don't believe in the other world

but also I don't believe in this world
unless it is pierced by light

I believe in the body of a woman
hit by a car in the street

I believe in bodies
stopped in a hurry
in a gesture in mid-pursuit
as something long-expected
was about to happen
as if in an instant
sense was to lift up
its finger

I believe in a blind eye
in a deaf ear
in a lame foot
in a crease at the temple
in red fire on the cheek

I believe in bodies lying
in the trust of sleep
in the patience of old age
in the weakness of the unborn

I believe in a hair from the dead
left on a brown beret

I believe that brilliance
is multiplied miraculously
onto all things

Even the May bug
which fumbles about on its back
helpless as a little puppy

I believe that the rain
stitches sky to earth
and with the rain the angels
visibly descend
like winged frogs

I don't believe in this world
empty
like a railway station before dawn
when all the trains have gone
to the other world

The world is one
especially when it wakes up in dew
and the Lord walks about
among the bushes
of animal and human dreams

(translated by Tomasz P. Krzeszowski & Desmond Graham)

Eckhart Tolle

Inner resistance to whatever arises in the present moment pulls you back
into unconsciousness. Inner resistance is some form of negativity,
complaining, fear, aggression, or anger. This is important because
whenever you complain about what somebody else does you're already
beginning to fall into that trap of unconsciousness.

After

(Karen Enns)

After she was gone and the house emptied of her books

and calendars, her pots, the tins and vegetables,

after the combs had been gathered

from her dresser drawers and the sweater

hanging on the back of her chair

was taken off by someone as a gift or keepsake

and the chair pushed in, I went into her room.

I lay down on her bed and felt the shape of her.

The maple leaves were shaking in the yard,

the sky a clear, steel blue. July.

Only weeks between her thoughts and mine,

there on the bed, the window open and the maple tree.

And I remembered how she always thought of summer sadly

as the slow beginning of less light.

In Memory

(Karen Enns)

We see them at the table pouring tea

or bending down among the roses.

Their tall shadows pass along the sidewalks of a town,

through the openings in trees, the low hedges.

Sometimes we listen for their voices in the evening,

sometimes in dreams or when we read.

We hear them as a conscience, soft, insistent,

as if air were medium enough for the dead.

After all they never ask us to remember,

but leave their doors unlocked at night

expecting us, a lamp left on.

And we imagine winters without solace,

stars, we imagine loss, repentance, mercy.

Love, we wonder at the old poverty,

the heavy stoop. They only watch us

with the tired, clear eyes of chess players,

who have thought out every move behind them,

every move ahead and lost.

Want less, they say, or nothing.

          TOLSTOY           

God knows you don't make it easy.            

SOFYA           

Why should it be easy? 

I'm the work of your life. You're the work of mine. 

Its what love is.

(The Last Station)

May the Blessing of God, bright like the light when the morning dawns and gracious as the dew when the evening comes, be granted you ... to abide with you today and tomorrow and throughout God's vast Beyond. George W. Truett

A RITUAL TO READ TO EACH OTHER

William Stafford

If you don't know the kind of person I am

and I don't know the kind of person you are

a pattern that others made may prevail in the world

and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,

a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break

sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood

storming out to play through the broken dike.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail,

but if one wanders the circus won't find the park,

I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty

to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,

a remote important region in all who talk"

though we could fool each other, we should consider -

lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,

or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;

the signals we give - yes or no, or maybe -

should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

When you were born

you cried

and the world

rejoiced.

Live your life so

that when you die

the world cries

and you rejoice.

To love a person

is to learn

the song

that is in their heart

and

to sing it

to them

when they have forgotten.

The lesson that life constantly enforces is "Look underfoot." You are always nearer to the true sources of your power than you think. The lure of the distant and the difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity is where you are. Don't despise your own place and hour. Every place is the center of the world.

(John Burroughs)

Of the seven deadly sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back - in many ways it is a feast for for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you. (Frederick Buechner)

The value of life does not depend upon the place we occupy. It depends upon the way we occupy that place. ~St. Therese de Lisieux

Shantideva's prayer

This is one of H.H. the Dalai Lama’s favourite prayers, extracted from “A Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life” by Shantideva, a Buddhist master from the monastic university of Nalanda, India and composed in the eighth century of the Christian era.

May all beings everywhere
Plagued by sufferings of body and mind
Obtain an ocean of happiness and joy
By virtue of my merits.

May no living creature suffer,
Commit evil, or ever fall ill.
May no one be afraid or belittled,
With a mind weighed down by depression.

May the blind see forms
And the deaf hear sounds,
May those whose bodies are worn with toil
Be restored on finding repose.

May the naked find clothing,
The hungry find food;
May the thirsty find water
And delicious drinks.

May the poor find wealth,
Those weak with sorrow find joy;
May the forlorn find hope,
Constant happiness, and prosperity.

May there be timely rains
And bountiful harvests;
May all medicines be effective
And wholesome prayers bear fruit.

May all who are sick and ill
Quickly be freed from their ailments.
Whatever diseases there are in the world,
May they never occur again.

May the frightened cease to be afraid
And those bound be freed;
May the powerless find power,
And may people think of benefiting each other.

For as long as space remains,
For as long as sentient beings remain,
Until then may I too remain
To dispel the miseries of the world.

The Bhagavad Gita According to Gandhi

This suggests that evil cannot by itself flourish in this world. It can only do so if it is allied with some good. This was the principle underlying non-cooperation - that the evil system which the British Colonial Government represents, and which has endured only because of the support it receives from good people, cannot survive if that support is withdrawn.

Austerity is my sacrificial fire, says the monk, and my life is the place where the fire is kindled. Mental and physical effort are my ladle for the oblation, and my body is the dung fuel for the fire, my actions my firewood. I offer up an oblation praised by the wise seers consisting of my restraint, effort and calm. (William Dalrymple)

William Dalrymple

Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India

To my surprise, for all the development that has taken place, many of the issues that I found my holy men discussing and agonizing about remained the same eternal quandaries that absorbed the holy men of classical India thousands of year ago: the quest for material success and comfort against the claims of the life of the spirit; the call of the life of action against the life of contemplation; the way of stability against the lure of the open road; personal devotion against conventional or public religion; textual orthodoxy against emotional appeal of mysticism; the age old war of duty and desire. (Introduction xv)

Anna Kamienska

from The Notebooks

* Music teaches us the passing of time. It teaches the value of a moment by giving that moment value. And it passes. It's not afraid to go.

* There is a God of Solitude. He covers me closely, like the air. I study Him blindly, by touch. Only His body is everywhere, elusive, impalpable.

* A state of inner readiness and waiting. I'm open to all annunciations.

* One must live and love, and pray, as one writes. In labour and patience, attentively, slowly.

* I pray in words. I pray in poems. I want to learn to pray through breathing, through dreams and sleeplessness, through love and renunciation. I pray through snow that falls outside the window. I pray with the tears that do not end.

* The sense of loneliness is an error. We are and move in a great crowd of those who are now, were and will be. In that great river.

(translated by Clare Cavanagh)

If you go out and confirm the ten thousand things, this is delusion; if you let the ten thousand things confirm you, this is enlightenment. (Dogen Zenji)

Become a dedicated spirit.

The only question is whether you will respond, whether you will not turn away, whether you will turn towards it - whether, in effect, you will become a dedicated spirit. (David Whyte)

LUMINOUS TEASE

(Rob Brezsny)

Change yourself in the way you want everyone else to change
Love your enemies in case your friends turn out to be jerks
Avoid thinking about winning the lottery while making love
Brainwash yourself before someone nasty beats you to it
Confess big secrets to people who aren't very interested
Write a love letter to your evil twin during a lunar eclipse
Fool the tricky red beasts guarding the Wheels of Time
Locate the master codex and add erudite graffiti to it
Dream up wilder, wetter, more interesting problems
Change your name every day for a thousand days
Exaggerate your flaws till they turn into virtues
Kill the apocalypse and annihilate Armageddon
Brag about what you can't do and don't have
Get a vanity license plate that reads KZMYAZ
Bow down to the greatest mystery you know
Make fun of people who make fun of people
See how far you can spit a mouthful of beer
Pick blackberries naked in the pouring rain
Scare yourself with how beautiful you are
Simulate global warming into your pants
Stage a slow-motion water balloon fight
Pretend your wounds are exotic tattoos
Sing anarchist lullabies to lesbian trees
Plunge butcher knives into accordions
Commit a crime that breaks no laws
Sip the tears of someone you love
Build a plush orphanage in Minsk
Feel sorry for a devious lawyer
Rebel against your horoscope
Give yourself another chance
Write your autohagiography
Play games with no rules
Teach animals to dance
Trick your nightmares
Relax and go deeper
Dream like stones
Mock your fears
Drink the sun
Sing love
Be mojo
Do jigs
Ask id

THERE IS SOME KISS WE WANT

(Rumi, transl. Coleman Berks)

There is some kiss we want

with our whole lives,

the touch of Spirit on the body.

Seawater begs the pearl

to break its shell.

And the lily, how passionately

it needs some wild Darling!

At night, I open the window

and ask the moon to come

and press its face into mine.

Breathe into me.

Close the language-door,

and open the love window.

The moon won't use the door,

only the window.

ALLELUIA - VERSE FOR THE VIRGIN

(Hildegard of Bingen, transl. Barbara Newman)

Alleluia! Light

burst from your untouched

womb like a flower

on the farther side

of death. The world tree

is blossoming. Two

realms become one.

THE AVOWAL

(Denise Levertov)

As swimmers dare

to lie face to the sky

and water bears them,

as hawks rest upon air

and air sustains them,

so would I learn to attain

freefall, and float

into Creator Spirit's deep embrace,

knowing no effort earns

that all-surrounding grace.

I
Do not
Want to step so quickly
Over a beautiful line on God's palm
As I move through the earth's
Marketplace
Today.

I do not want to touch any object in this world
Without my eyes testifying to the truth
That everything is
My Beloved.

Something has happened
To my understanding of existence
That now makes my heart always full of wonder
And kindness.

I do not
Want to step so quickly
Over this sacred place on God's body
That is right beneath your
Own foot

As I
Dance with
Precious life
Today

(Hafiz)

If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, 'thank you' that would suffice. (Eckhart)

Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. (Vaclav Havel)

If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now - when? (Hillel)

If you understand, things are just as they are. If you do not understand, things are just as they are. (Zen Proverb)

There are two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle. (Albert Einstein)

If you bring forth what is within you it will heal you. And if you do not bring forth what is within you, it will destroy you. )Gospel of St. Thomas)

Go to your bosom: Knock there, and and ask your heart what it doth know. (Shakespeare)

The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness, call it intuition or what you will, and the solution omes to you and you don't know how or why. (Einstein)

We do not see things as they are; we see things as we are. (Talmud)

Isaiah Berlin once stated that "Tolstoy was by nature a fox, but believed in being a hedgehog," referring to the greek poet Archilochus: The fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing." (Charles Moore)

The mind is like tofu. By itself it has no taste. Everything depends on the flavour of the marinade it steeps in. (Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi)

May you feel contented and safe
May you feel protected and pleased
May your physical body support you with strength
May your life unfold smoothly with ease
(Sylvia Boorstein)

Deaf Mute in the Pear Tree
P.K. Page

His clumsy body is a golden fruit
pendulous in the pear tree

Blunt fingers among the multitudinous buds

Adriatic blue the sky above and through
the forking twigs

Sun ruddying tree's trunk, his trunk
his massive head thick-knobbed with burnished curls
tight-clenched in bud

(Painting by Generalic. Primitive.)

I watch him prune with silent secateurs

Boots in the crotch of branches shift their weight
heavily as oxen in a stall

Hear small inarticulate mews from his locked mouth
a kitten in a box

Pear clippings fall
soundlessly on the ground
Spring finches sing
soundlessly in the leaves

A stone. A stone in ears and on his tongue

Through palm and fingertip he knows the tree's
quick springtime pulse

Smells in its sap the sweet incipient pears

Pale sunlight's choppy water glistens on
his mutely snipping blades

and flags and scraps of blue
above him make regatta of the day

But when he sees his wife's foreshortened shape
sudden and silent in the grass below
uptilt its face to him

then air is kisses, kisses

stone dissolves

his locked throat finds a little door

and through it feathered joy
flies screaming like a jay

To glimpse our vocation, we must learn how to be sought out and found by a work as much as we strive to identify it ourselves. We must make ourselves findable by being seen; to do that we must hazard ourselves and make ourselves available to the world we want to enter. Finding and being found is like a mutual falling in love. To have a possibility of happiness we must at the beginning fall in love at least a little with our work. We can choose a work on a mere strategic, financial basis, but then we should not expect profound future happiness as a result.

A real work, like a real love, takes not only passion but a certain daily, obsessive, tenacious, illogical form of insanity to keep it alive. Once you have experienced the real essence at the beginning of the affair with a work, the task, as in a marriage, is to keep the work, the company, the initial image with which we fell in love, alive. We want to be surprised again and again by where our work takes us and what kind of person we are becoming as we follow it. Like a love, or a sense of our selves, we can nibble and negotiate at the edges but the central core of the relationship is actually nonnegotiable. A real work cannot be balanced with a marriage in a strategic way, a little bit on that side, a little bit on the other; it can only be put in conversation with that marriage, as an equal partner. All the strategies for making them work together will come from understanding that central conversation. And what is that conversation? What is the thing called the self that drives home from a work and walks through the door into a relationship? Who is it who goes out the door in the morning and leaves a loved, a husband, a wife, a daughter, a home behind and looks to a new future in the day?

David Whyte, The Three Marriage: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship

Even as a child she had lived her own small life all within herself. At a very early period she had apprehended instinctively the dual life—that outward existence which conforms, the inward life which questions. (Kate Chopin, The Awakening)

There would be no one to live for her during those coming years; she would live for herself. There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature. (Kate Chopin, The Story of an Hour)

She was not going through any acute mental process or reasoning with herself, nor was she striving to explain to her satisfaction the motive of her action. She was not thinking at all. She seemed for the time to be taking a rest from that laborious and fatiguing function and to have abandoned herself to some mechanical impulse that directed her actions and freed her of responsibility. (Kate Chopin, A Pair of Silk Stockings)

.....the realm of ten thousand joys and ten thousand woes....(Buddha)

Your rage is only sorrow trying to break through. (Hal Duncan)

I wish I knew the beauty of leaves falling.
To whom are we beautiful as we go?

(David Ignatow)

In the beginning of heaven and earth
There were no words.
Words came out of the womb of matter
And whether a man dispassionately
Sees to the core of life
Or passionately sees the surface
The core and the surface
Are eventually the same,
Words making them seem different
Only to express appearance.
If name be needed, wonder names them both:
From wonder into wonder
Existence opens.

(Tao Te Ching, trans. Witter Bynner)

To cultivate equanamity, the balance in the mind that sustains both natural wisdom and the natural inclination to love. (Sylvia Boorstein)

It means a mind able, through clarity, to choose a wise response. (Sylvia Boorstein)

Steadfast benevolence, sustained by the wisdom that anything other than benevolence is painful, protects the mind from all afflictions. (Sylvia Boorstein)

How we respond to an invitation can mark or maim us for the rest of our days. A life can often be measured against how sure we are in resonding to the initial beckoning image. (David Whyte)

There seems to be a constant visiting dynamic in all stages of life where it appers that we get only the girl, the guy, the work, the job, the sense of self, or a participation in wider creation that we actually feel we are worthy of. (David Whyte)

In the Buddhist tradition the ability to be happy is often translated into english as "equanamity" roughly meaning to be equal to things, to be large enough for the drama in which we find ourselves. (David Whyte)

We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want.
- Lao Tzu

Shaman Psalm (excerpt)

(James Broughton)

Come forth unabashed

Come out unbuttoned

Bury belligerence

Resurrect frolic

Only through body can

you clasp the divine

Only through body can

you dance with the god

In every man's hand

the gift of compassion

In every man's hand

the beloved connection

Trust one another

or drown

Everything is Song. Everything is Silence. Since it all turns out to be illusion, perfectly being what it is, having nothing to do with good or bad, you are free to die laughing.
James Broughton

Everything that ever happened is still happening. Past, present, and future keep happening in the eternity which is Here and Now.
James Broughton

Some artists shrink from self-awareness, fearing that it will destroy their unique gifts and even their desire to create. The truth of the matter is quite opposite.
James Broughton

Perhaps the ultimate avante-garde position: to reach the place where you no longer lean on any object, any reference. Or, as with Krishnamurti, "the stairway without any railing." Then you might reach the sphere of the innate light, the Mother Light, the light of which all other lights are the children. Can you go past your dreams to the pure light of dreaming?
James Broughton