February 2012
3 posts
I intend to confuse things, to unite them, make them new-born intermingle them, undress them, until the light of the world has the unity of the ocean, a generous wholeness, a fragrance alive and crackling. - Pablo Neruda
One of my wishes is that those dark trees,
So old and firm they scarcely show the breeze, Were not, as ‘twere, the merest mask of gloom, But stretched away unto the edge of doom. I should not be withheld but that some day Into their vastness I should steal away, Fearless of ever finding open land, Or highway where the slow wheel pours the sand. I do not see why I should e’er...
”Surrender of all image. Let go of your outside eyes. Be a foolish animal, gaping at the forest. Be clumsy and too much and wide-eyed.” -Tara Sophia Mohr
January 2012
7 posts
I said I will find what is lowly
and put the roots of my identity
down there:
each day I'll wake up
and find the lowly nearby,
a handy focus and reminder,
a ready measure of my significance,
the voice by which I would be heard,
the wills, the kinds of selfishness
I could
freely adopt as my own:
but though I have looked everywhere,
I can find nothing
to give myself to:
everything is
magnificent...
Wheel me down to the shore where the lighthouse was abandoned and the moon tolls in the rafters.
Let me hear the wind paging through the trees
and see the stars flaring out, one by one,
like the forgotten faces of the dead.
I was never able to pray,
but let me inscribe my name
in the book of waves
and then stare into the dome
of a sky that never ends
and see my voice sail into the...
When I lay my head in my mother’s lap I think how day hides the stars, the way I lay hidden once, waiting inside my mother’s singing to herself. And I remember how she carried me on her back between home and the kindergarten, once each morning and once each afternoon. I don’t know what my mother’s thinking. When my son lays his head in my lap, I wonder: Do his...
Soul receives from soul that knowledge, therefore not by book nor from tongue. If knowledge of mysteries come after emptiness of mind, that is illumination of heart.
-Rumi
When we convene again to understand the world, the first speaker will again point silently out of the window at the hillside in its season, sunlit, under the snow, and we will nod silently, and silently stand and go. . Wendell Berry
The snow began here this morning and all day continued, its white rhetoric everywhere calling us back to why, how, whence such beauty and what the meaning; such an oracular fever! flowing past windows, an energy it seemed would never ebb, never settle less than lovely! and only now, deep into night, it has finally ended. The silence is immense, and the heavens still hold a million candles,...
A poet is someone who can pour light into a cup and raise it to nourish your beautiful parched holy mouth. —Hafiz
December 2011
6 posts
in one gust the last leaf decides: gone
Robert Henry Poulin
The Uses of Sorrow
(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)
Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.
-Mary Oliver
The time has come to turn your heart into a temple of fire. - Rumi
Each year, when the cold chalk fingers of deep December wrap our bones
in frosty white, I, too, my love, slide under a downward lid of thickening thought -
that all that blossoms also fades, and falls too fast,
and winter always comes.
Yet, see up there, my love, my sweet? The last full moon of the year rests
grand and weightless high: an ornament strung by invisible hands,
perfectly...
Dance for the span of the universe that you are. All we are, as humans, is a span of flesh and consciousness. We each are a tiny swath of the universe where whatever energy it is that composes the universe is alive in us, as us, coming to life through us. The movement of life expresses itself in every movement we make. Every movement we make shapes that energy, gives it form, and sends it...
This is how I would die into the love I have for you: as pieces of cloud dissolve in sunlight. -Rumi
November 2011
3 posts
The Place I Want To Get Back To
is where in the pinewoods in the moments between the darkness and first light two deer came walking down the hill and when they saw me they said to each other, okay, this one is okay, let’s see who she is and why she is sitting on the ground like that, so quiet, as if asleep, or in a dream,...
Circling the stupa
at Boudha, under the navy cloak of early morning,
is a circadian rhythm of hopes and thanks
in beads and shawls and quick strong legs.
Mandala of candles lit, bells rung, grounds touched, prayers hummed;
from God knows where sent God knows where by the whispered words of the wind.
There is so much we cannot know.
Yet, Rilke says this:
that being here is so...
Geese appear high over us
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye,
clear. What we need is here.
.
~ Wendell Berry
October 2011
6 posts
When death comes like the hungry bear in autumn; when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse to buy me, and snaps the purse shut; when death comes like the measles-pox; when death comes like an iceberg between the shoulder blades, I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering: what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness? And therefore I look upon...
I have phrases and whole pages memorized, but nothing can be told of love.
-Rumi
Our hands imbibe like roots, so I place them on what is beautiful in this world.
-St. Francis of Assisi
Under the harvest moon, When the soft silver Drips shimmering Over the garden nights, Death, the gray mocker, Comes and whispers to you As a beautiful friend Who remembers. Under the summer roses When the flagrant crimson Lurks in the dusk Of the wild red leaves, Love, with little hands, Comes and touches you With a thousand memories, And asks you Beautiful, unanswerable questions.
-Carl Sandberg
“You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”
I didn’t trust it for a moment, but I drank it anyway, the wine of my own poetry. It gave me the daring to take hold of the darkness and tear it down and cut it into little pieces.
—Lalla
September 2011
6 posts
Love flows down.
The ground submits to the sky and suffers what comes. Tell me, is the earth worse for giving in like that? Don’t put blankets over the drum! Open completely. Let your spirit-ear listen to the green dome’s passionate murmur. Let the cords of your robe be untied. Shiver in this new love beyond all above and below. The sun rises, but which way does night go? I have no...
I saw you dancing last night
on the roof of your house
all alone. I felt your heart longing for the Friend.
I saw you whirling
beneath the soft bright rose
that hung from an invisible stem in the sky.
So I began to change into my best clothes
in hopes of joining you,
even though I live a thousand miles away.
And if you had spun like an immaculate sphere
just two more times,
then bowed...
The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are. - Joseph Campbell
Mattie Stepanek was 11 years old when he wrote this poem on the day of 9-11. He died less than two years later due to complications of a rare neuromuscular disease…
We need to stop. Just stop. Stop for a moment… Before anybody Says or does anything That may hurt anyone else. We need to be silent. Just silent. Silent for a moment… Before we forever lose The blessing of songs That grow in...
For the raindrop-joy is in entering the river—
Travel far enough into sorrow, tears turn to sighing; In this way we learn how water can die into air.
When, after heavy rain, the storm clouds disperse,
Is it not that they’ve wept themselves clear to the end?
-Ghalib
It happens all the time in heaven, And some day It will begin to happen Again on earth - That men and women who are married, And men and men who are Lovers, And women and women Who give each other Light, Often will get down on their knees And while so tenderly Holding their lover’s hand, With tears in their eyes, Will sincerely speak, saying, “My dear, How can I be more loving to you;...
August 2011
5 posts
“The bad news is you’re falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute. The good news is there’s no ground.” -Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche
“I love your silences, they are like mine. You are the only being before whom I am not distressed by my own silences. You have a vehement silence, one feels it is charged with essences, it is a strangely alive silence, like a trap open over a well, from which one can hear the secret murmur of the earth itself.”
—Anaïs Nin, Under a Glass Bell
Fact is, silence is the perfect water: unlike rain it falls from no clouds to wash our minds, to ease our tired eyes, to give heart to the thin blades of grass fighting through the concrete for even air dirtied by our endless stream of words.
-Philip Levine (Poet Laureate!)
All day I think about it, then at night I say it. Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing? I have no idea. My soul is from elsewhere, I’m sure of that, and I intend to end up there. This drunkenness began in some other tavern. When I get back around to that place, I’ll be completely sober. Meanwhile, I’m like a bird from another continent, sitting in this...
July 2011
7 posts
We are not free when we are doing just what we like. We are only free when we are doing what the deepest self likes. And there is getting down to the deepest self! It takes some diving. D.H. Lawrence
Everything is Waiting for You
Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime with no witness to the tiny hidden transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely, even you, at times, have felt the grand array; the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding out your solo voice You must note the way the soap dish enables you, or...
“And we pray, not for new earth or heaven, but to be quiet in heart, and in eye, clear. What we need is here.”
- Wendell Berry
From blossoms comes this brown paper bag of peaches we bought from the boy at the bend in the road where we turned toward signs painted Peaches.
From laden boughs, from hands, from sweet fellowship in the bins, comes nectar at the roadside, succulent peaches we devour, dusty skin and all, comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.
O, to take what we love inside, to carry within us...
… the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’ – Jack...
What can I say that I have not said before? So I’ll say it again. The leaf has a song in it. Stone is the face of patience. Inside the river there is an unfinishable story and you are somewhere in it and it will never end until all ends. Take your busy heart to the art museum and the chamber of commerce but take it also to the forest. The song you heard singing in the leaf when...
June 2011
7 posts
We shape our self to fit this world
and by the world are shaped again.
The visible and the invisible
working together in common cause,
to produce the miraculous.
I am thinking of the way the intangible air
passed at speed round a shaped wing
easily holds our weight.
So may we, in this life trust to those elements
we have yet to see or imagine,
and look for the true shape of our own...
“We are simultaneously the divine, the temple, and the worshipper.”
-Daniel Odier, Yoga Spandakarika
Have you ever seen anything in your life more wonderful than the way the sun, every evening, relaxed and easy, floats toward the horizon and into the clouds or the hills, or the rumpled sea, and is gone— and how it slides again out of the blackness, every morning, on the other side of the world, like a red flower streaming upward on its heavenly oils, say, on a morning in early...
full moon filling the eye fully
-gabriel rosenstock
“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.” - Jack Kerouac
“How to be in harmony with the cosmos? Rid yourself of all beliefs; leave metaphysics to the sectarians of the absurd; understand that hope is fear gone bad; confront reality directly; stop upholding the romantic dream of realization; forget sentimental neurosis; play with your own limits; look at your confusion; confront life without the bric-a-brac of the religious and the spiritual – without,...
The soul, like the moon, is new, and always new again. And I have seen the ocean continuously creating. Since I washed my mind and my body, I too, am new, each moment new. My teacher told me one thing, live in the soul. When that was so, I began to go naked, and dance.
-Lalla