Trees do not preach learning and precepts. They preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life
- Hermann Hesse
Thursday, June 3, 2021
Monday, May 17, 2021
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
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
Wednesday, May 5, 2021
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
Wednesday, April 28, 2021
Sunday, April 25, 2021
attentiveness
This is the first, the wildest and the wisest thing I know: that the soul exists and is built entirely out of attentiveness.
- Mary Oliver
beauty
People often say that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” and I say that the most liberating thing about beauty is realizing that you are the beholder. This empowers us to find beauty in places where others have not dared to look, including inside ourselves.
--Salma Hayek
Sunday, April 18, 2021
"I believe in the God of Spinoza."
http://yesteethatsme.com/2019/09/substance-of-god.html
There's a post that's been floating around facebook with muddled attribution--some people make it sound like either Spinoza told people to pat their dogs, or that Einstein did so quoting Spinoza. The whole piece is lovely but it's 100% recent.
Friday, April 16, 2021
Friday, March 26, 2021
Wednesday, March 24, 2021
It takes a long time not to feel like an alien, a long time to search out and discover who you are. But if you go all the way with that exploration it takes you beyond race, beyond colour, beyond class, beyond every kind of category, and you discover you belong to humanity. And that's who you are. If you go all the way with that search, it takes you beyond property, beyond lumber, fish, furs, metal, oil, beyond "resource" industry, beyond commercial food production to where you find you belong to the land. And that's who you are. And when you are that, there is no foreign land. Wherever you are is home. And the earth is paradise and wherever you set your feet is holy land.
--Wilfred Peltier
Wilfred Pelletier (also Peltier), or Baibomsey, meaning "traveller," Odawa wise man, philosopher, author (b on Wikwemikong Reserve, Manitoulin I, Ont 16 Oct 1927; died at Ottawa 2 Jul 2000). https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/wilfred-pelletier
Fresh
To move
Cleanly.
Needing to be
Nowhere else.
Wanting nothing
From any store.
To lift something
You already had
And set it down in
A new place.
Awakened eye
Seeing freshly.
What does that do to
The old blood moving through
Its channels?
--Naomi Shihab Nye
Take Love for Granted
Assume it’s in the kitchen,
under the couch, high
in the pine tree out back,
behind the paint cans
in the garage. Don’t try
proving your love
is bigger than the Grand
Canyon, the Milky Way,
the urban sprawl of L.A.
Take it for granted. Take it
out with the garbage. Bring
it in with the takeout. Take
it for a walk with the dog.
Wake it every day, say,
“Good morning.” Then
make the coffee. Warm
the cups. Don’t expect much
of the day. Be glad when
you make it back to bed.
Be glad he threw out that
box of old hats. Be glad
she leaves her shoes
in the hall. Snow will
come. Spring will show up.
Summer will be humid.
The leaves will fall
in the fall. That’s more
than you need. We can
love anybody, even
everybody. But you
can love the silence,
sighing and saying to
yourself, “That’ s her.”
“That’s him.” Then to
each other, “I know!
Let’s go out for breakfast!”
--Jack Ridl
Insomnia
All over the world, people can’t sleep.
In different time zones, they are lying awake,
Bodies still, minds trudging along like child laborers.
They worry about bills.
They worry whether the shoes they just bought are really too small.
One’s husband died, her son left for college, and she doesn’t know how to program the VCR.
Another was beaten by her husband.
One is planning a getaway.
One holding stolen goods.
One’s on the plaid couch in ICU.
His daughter, it turned out, actually does have a brain tumor even though the doctor said they’d do the MRI just to rule it out.
The woman on the other couch is snoring — which is strangely soothing — evidence that people do sleep.
Some are lying on Charisma sheets.
Some in hammocks.
Some in jail.
Some under bridges.
One is at the North Pole studying the impact of pollution.
A man in Massachusetts thinks about a lover he once had in Dar es Salaam and the jasmine blossoms she strung along the shaft of a silver pin, fastened in her hair at night.
Coincidentally, the lover, now in Rome, remembers looking out the window over the sink when she was washing dishes and seeing him reading in the lawn chair.
And she thought how, perhaps for the first time, she wasn’t lonely.
They’re all up.
Some are too cold.
Some too hot.
Some hungry.
Some in pain.
Some are in hotels listening to people have sex in the next room.
Some are crying.
One the cat woke up and now she’s worried about the rash she noticed in the evening and wonders if her daughter, who’s afraid to swim, should be pushed.
Some get up.
Others stay in bed.
They eat Oreos.
Or drink wine.
Or both.
Many read.
A few make Halloween costumes.
Some check their email.
They try sleep tapes, hypnosis, drugs.
They listen to their clocks tick, smartly as a woman in high heels.
Those who can, cling to their mates, an ear pressed to those neighbouring lungs like a stethoscope, hoping to catch a ride on the steady sleep breath of the other. To be carried like a seed on the body of the one who is able.
Right now, in Japan, dawn is coming.
And everyone who’s been up all night is relieved.
They can stop trying.
In Guatemala though, the insomniacs are just getting started and they have the whole night ahead of them.
It’s like a wave at the baseball stadium, hands around the world.
So here’s a prayer for the wakeful,
for the souls who can’t rest:
As you lie with eyes open or closed,
may something comfort you — a mockingbird, a breeze, the smell of crushed mint, Chopin’s nocturnes, your child’s birth, a kiss, or even me — at 3 am, in my chilly kitchen with my coat over my nightgown — thinking of you.
--Ellen Bass
Skin Tight
The internal organs were growling
According to them
They did all of the work while
Skin got all of the attention
He’s an organ just like us
They groused
Even the heart, which, a
Century ago, was the Queen
Of metaphors, but now
Was reduced to the greetings
Cards section of CVS,
Chimed in
They decided to call skin
On the carpet.
Skin arrived from Cannes
Where he’d been the subject
Of much fuss as actresses
Fed him luxurious skin
Food prepared by Max Factor
Estée Lauder, L’Oreal,
And Chanel
They
Caressed him daily
Sometimes for hours before
They made the red carpet
Shine
He was petted
And preened
Others
Pleaded with him
To erase wrinkles to
Make them look younger
To tighten their chins
Skin tried to appease the
Critics, greeting them with
His familiar “give me some skin”
But his gesture went unheeded
Brain did all the talking
Brain said, “Here’s the skinny
Why do you get
All of the press
Your color
Your texture discussed
Endlessly
Nicole Kidman never
Did an ad about us
Cole Porter never
Wrote a song about us
Nor were we mentioned
In a Thornton Wilder novel
You’ve given us no
Skin in the game”
“What about the nasty
Things they say about
Me,” skin replied
“What about skin deep
For superficiality
Or
Skin trade
To denote something
Unsavory
How would you
Like acne rashes
Eczema
Boils
Pellagra
Leprosy
And
Conditions
That astonish
Even dermatologists
I wear my blemishes
In public while you guys
Hide yours”
“Without me and heart
You’d be nothing,” the brain said
“That’s not true,” protested
The liver, “without me he’d
Be nothing”
“No,” the kidney said
“It’s me who keeps the
Body functioning”
The bladder and
The kidney began
To quarrel with
Gallbladder
The lung twins spoke
Up
“Without us
He couldn’t breathe”
Even the esophagus
And the thyroid
And the pancreas
Joined the outbreak
“What about us?”
The eyes said
“Without eyes you
Can’t see”
Their squabble distracted
Them
When they looked
Up from their dust up
Skin’s
Helicopter was up
He was scheduled to
Address a convention of
Plastic surgeons at
The Beverly Hills
Hotel
Escaping by the skin
Of his teeth
His opponents gave
Chase
But above the roar
Of the chopper
They heard him say
“Don’t worry fellas
I got you covered”
--Ishmael Reed
For a New Beginning
In out-of-the-way places of the heart,
Where your thoughts never think to wander,
This beginning has been quietly forming,
Waiting until you were ready to emerge.
For a long time it has watched your desire,
Feeling the emptiness growing inside you,
Noticing how you willed yourself on,
Still unable to leave what you had outgrown.
It watched you play with the seduction of safety
And the gray promises that sameness whispered,
Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent,
Wondered would you always live like this.
Then the delight, when your courage kindled,
And out you stepped onto new ground,
Your eyes young again with energy and dream,
A path of plenitude opening before you.
Though your destination is not yet clear
You can trust the promise of this opening;
Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning
That is at one with your life’s desire.
Awaken your spirit to adventure;
Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;
Soon you will be home in a new rhythm,
For your soul senses the world that awaits you.
--John O’Donohue
Thursday, February 4, 2021
One of the Butterflies
The trouble with pleasure is the timing
it can overtake me without warning
and be gone before I know it is here
it can stand facing me unrecognized
while I am remembering somewhere else
in another age or someone not seen
for years and never to be seen again
in this world and it seems that I cherish
only now a joy I was not aware of
when it was here although it remains
out of reach and will not be caught or named
or called back and if I could make it stay
as I want to it would turn to pain.
--W. S. Merwin
A Spiritual Journey
And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles,
no matter how long,
but only by a spiritual journey,
a journey of one inch,
very arduous and humbling and joyful,
by which we arrive at the ground at our feet,
and learn to be at home.
--Wendell Berry
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