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#1407 - Sunday, April 20, 2003 - Editor: Gloria Lee
Spring
is like a perhaps hand
"Spring is like a perhaps hand 
(which comes carefully
out of Nowhere)arranging
a window,into which people look(while
people stare
arranging and changing placing
carefully there a strange
thing and a known thing here)and
changing everything carefully
spring is like a perhaps
Hand in a window
(carefully to
and fro moving New and
Old things,while
people stare carefully
moving a perhaps
fraction of flower here placing
an inch of air there)and
without breaking anything."
~ ee cummings ~
Thanks to Joyce on Allspirit
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Joyce
on NDS
When the Green
Shoots Come
We went out to watch
the comet that night
across the road,
where the break in the trees
opened to heaven.
The nights were warmer by then,
that April night,
and climbing the short fence
between roadway and nature,
you stumbled into grasses
left flattened by snow.
I broke your fall.
And do you remember
how i spun you to the East?
At my feet, the heron's neck
bent at the wrong angle,
and the nylon filament
wrapped feathers and bone, flightless.
I never told you.
For five seasons now,
I've watched the marshes...
the geese, the swans, the coots...
One blue heron...
Wondering if they mate for life
like coyote? quail...loons...
For five seasons since...
Today i am enthralled 
when the green shoots come
to the surface of the field
like an ocean of spring.
There wading through grasses,
the birds lean skyward
and, gathering momentum, rise up
to soar.
Both of them.
The herons.
~~~
14 April, 2003
joyce
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Gill Eardley Allspirit
"There
Will Come Soft Rains"
(War Time)
There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools singing at night, 
And wild plum-trees in tremulous white;
Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.
by Sara Teasdale
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~ ~
Gill Eardly
The "Enclosed Garden of Truth" by Sanai is a wonderful work, and I just found out (thanks Gill) that it is available on line at:
http://www.sacred-texts.com/isl/egt/index.htm
Sanai
was one of the greatest influences on Rumi's work, particularly
this volume, the Walled Garden or Enclosed Garden of
Truth.
On their home page are many classical texts from many different
paths:
http://www.sacred-texts.com/index.htm
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
=GenePoole=
NDS
"There is no place to go, and so we travel!
You and I, and what for, just to imagine
that we could go somewhere else."
-- Edward Dahlberg
<http://www.homeiswhereweparkourhouse.com/index.html>
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Gill Eardly Allspirit
Expedients
Buddhist teachings are prescriptions given according to specific
ailments, to clear away the roots of your compulsive habits and
clean out your emotional views, just so you can be free and
clear,
naked and clean, without problems.
There is no real doctrine at all for you to chew on or squat
over.
If you will not believe in yourself, you pick up your baggage and
go around to other people's houses looking for Zen, looking for
Tao, looking for mysteries, looking for marvels, looking for
buddhas, looking for Zen masters, looking for teachers.
You think this is searching for the ultimate, and you make it
into
your religion, but this is like running blindly to the east to
get
something that is in the west. The more you run, the further away
you are, and the more you hurry the later you become. You just
tire yourself, to what benefit in the end?
Zen Master Yuansou
'Zen Essence' Translated and Edited by Thomas Cleary
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~ ~
Zen
Oleary SufiMystic
Metronomes
Metronomes, I remember them
as a child, measuring beats
in piano lessons for which
I had no ability,
is this metronomed clock
on the kitchen wall
ticking away the magic
first light of morning,
is it pulsing time beats?
are my moments calibrated
by springs, gears and wires?
"You have no sense of time",
I've been critically told,
as if time were something
you could chew and touch,
recognize its contours and
greet as it turned the corner
at the end of the street,
I'm always mucking about in
the thick of the present moment,
this filled to overflowing now,
rich with songs, scents,
the laughter of friends,
dogs to wrestle with,
great food for feasting,
soft glances of lovers,
vibrant colors and patterns,
I have no real past, you see,
even when I remember something
over coffee and birdsong, it's
just a thing that sleeps in
the messy closet in the back
of my mind that I'm dragging
out to look at here and now,
in the richness of this morning,
these bedraggled thin whiskered
memory ghosts dance the jig of
today, out of touch with the
demands of breathing and being,
bloodless and more or less faded,
they remain in my mind only until
the next "wow, what is this?"
bumps them off the screen space
in my moment to moment mind.
~ Zen Oleary
April 20, 2003
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~ ~ 
"A
dash of rain upon
The lotus leaves. But the leaves
Remain unmarked, no matter
How hard the raindrops beat.
Mind, be like the lotus leaves,
Unstained by the world."
Chong Ch'ol
(1537-1594)
From: "Anthology
of Korean Literature
From Early Times to the Nineteenth Century",
ed. - Peter H. Lee, University of Hawaii Press: Honolulu, 1981
Thanks to Joyce on Allspirit
"I have
estimated the influence of Reason upon Love
and found that it is like that of a raindrop upon the
ocean, which makes one little mark upon the water's
face and disappears."
hafiz/bell
Thanks to Terry Murphy on SufiMystic