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The Nondual Highlights #2166 - Monday, June 6, 2005 - Editor: Gloria
Monet Refuses the Operation
Doctor, you
say that there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don't see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don't know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and changes our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.
~ Lisel Mueller ~
(Sixty Years
of American Poetry, The Academy of American Poets)
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The Wisdom of Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
"Be empty of all mental content, of all
imagination and effort, and
the very absence of obstacles will cause reality to rush
in."
from A Net of Jewels
If you look for the truth outside
yourself,
it gets farther and farther away.
Today, walking alone,
I meet him everywhere I step.
He is the same as me,
yet I am not him.
Only if you understand it in this way
will you merge with the way things are.
Tung-shan f
rom Awareness - the Way to Love
Better
than if there were thousands
of meaningless verses is
one
meaningful
verse
that on hearing
brings peace.
And better than chanting hundreds
of meaningless verses is
one Dhamma-saying
that on hearing
brings peace.
-Dhammapada, 8, translated by Thanissaro Bhikkhu.
Men
are afraid to forget their minds, fearing to fall through the
Void with nothing to stay their fall. They do not know that the
Void is not really void, but the realm of the real Dharma.
-Huang Po, "Zen Teaching of Huang Po"
From "365 Buddha: Daily Meditations," edited by Jeff
Schmidt
I am
more convinced than ever that I just don't know.
The paradox is that I really do know.
Both must be fully true.
Completely.
So, knowing becomes recognition, honoring.
Not knowing becomes humility.
And humility opens the door to recognition and honoring.
In that there is no paradox. It makes perfect sense, yet it is
only a small shift in
meaning of words that we might generally take to have the same
meaning.
But the nuance, the poetry, the truth of them is subtle,
beautiful.
The poetry and beauty are in the wondering of it all.
I do love wonder. It comes out of the humility which comes from
not knowing,
and the recognition that is beyond understanding.
Emanations
Copyright © 2005 by John MacEnulty
6/3/05, St. Louis, MO
Emanations is now a BLOG at http://emanations.blog-city.com/
