Rebus

You work with what you are given,

the red clay of grief,

the black clay of stubbornness going on after.

Clay that tastes of care or carelessness,

clay that smells of the bottoms of rivers or dust.

Each thought is a life you have lived or failed to live,

each word is a dish you have eaten or left on the table.

There are honeys so bitter

no one would willingly choose to take them.

The clay takes them: honey of weariness, honey of vanity,

honey of cruelty, fear.

This rebus - slip and stubbornness,

bottom of river, my own consumed life -

when will I learn to read it

plainly, slowly, uncolored by hope or desire?

Not to understand it, only to see.

As water given sugar sweetens, given salt grows salty,

we become our choices.

Each yes, each no continues,

this one a ladder, that one an anvil or cup.

The ladder leans into its darkness.

The anvil leans into its silence.

The cup sits empty.

How can I enter this question the clay has asked?

~Jane Hirshfield

Oscar Wilde said that if you know what you want to be, then you inevitably become it--that is your punishment--but if you never know, then you can be anything. There is a truth to that. We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing--an actor, a writer--I am a person who does things--I write, I act--and I never know what I am going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun.

--Stephen Fry

 To use the world well, to be able to stop wasting it and our time in it, we need to relearn our being in it.

- Ursula Le Guin

 Tradition is the handing down of fire and not the veneration of ashes

—Gustav Mahler

The times are urgent; let us slow down.

--Dr. Bayo Akomolafe https://greendreamer.com/podcast/dr-bayo-akomolafe-the-emergence-network 

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.

-- Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

 People aren’t made to float through the air. Unless we know the weight of our bodies, unless we feel the force of gravity, we’ll forget what we are, we’ll lose ourselves without even noticing.

— Madeleine Thien

The Deepest Peace: Contemplations from a Season of Stillness

Many times I have testified of my suffering and written at length on race, gender, sexual orientation, and homelessness. Before I die, I must speak of peace. Life has not been all torment in this dark and mysterious body. And yet torment and peace are not separate. They come together in a world that pulls you toward violence and bends you down to pray for peace. Peace is there all along. In awakening to peace, the teachings of the earth have been beneficial for me…

[I walk in nature.] I see half-eaten birds and the dried bones of an animal unknown to me. It’s clear, in this peaceful desert, that peace is not the opposite of violence. Peace is in violence. It can only be seen by the open eyes of awareness...The experience of peace I’m discovering in the desert had always been with me in the city. I hadn’t let it in. I had made efforts at making peace. But “making peace” requires an idea and then action upon that idea. It’s not the same peace I speak of here. The peace being expressed in these writings doesn’t come from the mind, the lips, or from gentle actions. It doesn’t come from legislation made by governments or peacemaking movements. 

It’s a peace that appears without effort. Like the desert filling up my eyes. It appears like snow, wind, or rain. Peace arrives on its own if I don’t resist it. During years of chanting and meditation, the habit of fighting against what was in front of me rose and dissolved like waves in an ocean. There were times when I asked questions, critiqued, and took action. And there were times when confusion took over, the mind doubled down on itself. The only thing to do during those times was to breathe and be still. The body knows when to do this. Stillness is inherent. After suffering and resistance, the only thing left is contemplation of life and after contemplation, stillness, and after stillness, peace.

--Zenju Earthlyn Manuel