July 29, 2010

Ready for Everything


"But only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn't exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being."

- Rainer Maria Rilke
Letters to a Young Poet


I love all the advice Rilke gives to the young poet. I imagine being that young poet (though I am neither young nor really a poet), and soaking in the wisdom of an beloved elder.
r really a poet), ad soaking in the wisdom of an elder.

July 27, 2010

Knowledge


No truth can make another truth untrue. All knowledge is part of the whole knowledge. Once you have seen the larger pattern, you cannot go back to seeing the part as the whole.

~Ursula Le Guin

July 26, 2010

The Zen of Truth

Recognizing truth requires selflessness. You have to leave yourself out of it so you can find out the way things are in themselves, not the way they look to you or how you feel about them or how you would like them to be.

Harry Frankfurt, Princeton philosopher and best-selling author of “Fighting Bull”, in a NY Times magazine interview.

Sitting in meditation, I recognize the truth in what Frankfurt is saying. Truth seems to really only be truth in this moment. It's not really about me, it's about the unfolding of the moment. It isn't about what happened, or what might happen next. That, perhaps, is what I love so much about sitting on the cushion. Truth is revealed.

July 25, 2010

Chatting with Fish



The fish tell him:

"Hey Hafiz,
We see you know the joy of our existence,
We see you have learned how meditation
can free you from Land, Mind, Debts, Alimony-
The Whole Works,
And like us, let you carouse all day in God."

from: The Fish and I will Chat

July 23, 2010

A Morning Offering



I bless the night that nourished my heart
To set the ghosts of longing free
Into the flow and figure of dream
That went to harvest from the dark
Bread for the hunger no one sees.

All that is eternal in me
Welcome the wonder of this day,
The field of brightness it creates
Offering time for each thing
To arise and illuminate.

I place on the altar of dawn:
The quiet loyalty of breath,
The tent of thought where I shelter,
Wave of desire I am shore to
And all beauty drawn to the eye.

May my mind come alive today
To the invisible geography
That invites me to new frontiers,
To break the dead shell of yesterdays,
To risk being disturbed and changed.

May I have the courage today
To live the life that I would love,
To postpone my dream no longer
But do at last what I came here for
And waste my heart on fear no more.

~ John O'Donohue ~

July 20, 2010

All The Hemispheres


All The Hemispheres

Leave the familiar for a while.
Let your senses and bodies stretch out

Like a welcomed season
Onto the meadows and shores and hills.

Open up to the Roof.
Make a new water-mark on your excitement
And love.

Like a blooming night flower,
Bestow your vital fragrance of happiness
And giving
Upon our intimate assembly.

Change rooms in your mind for a day.

All the hemispheres in existence
Lie beside an equator
In your heart.

Greet Yourself
In your thousand other forms
As you mount the hidden tide and travel
Back home.

All the hemispheres in heaven
Are sitting around a fire
Chatting

While stitching themselves together
Into the Great Circle inside of
You.

~ Hafiz ~

July 16, 2010

Here's to Opening and Upward

   

here's to opening and upward, to leaf and to sap
and to your(in my arms flowering so new)
self whose eyes smell of the sound of rain

and here's to silent certainly mountains;and to
a disappearing poet of always,snow
and to morning;and to morning's beautiful friend
twilight(and a first dream called ocean)and

let must or if be damned with whomever's afraid
down with ought with because with every brain
which thinks it thinks,nor dares to feel(but up
with joy;and up with laughing and drunkenness)

here's to one undiscoverable guess
of whose mad skill each world of blood is made
(whose fatal songs are moving in the moon)

e.e.cummings

July 14, 2010

Blooming


And the day came when the risk it took to remain tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.~Anais Nin