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#1964 - Friday, November 29, 2004 - Editor: Gloria
PERCEPTION
The question is not
what you look at
but what you see.
- Henry David Thoreau
“A sudden perception
that subject and object are one
will lead you to a deeply
mysterious
wordless understanding.
You will awaken to the truth of
Zen.”
- Huang-Po
“Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare,
life
heightened and its deepest mystery probed?”
- Annie Dillard
“The wise man does not discriminate; he gathers together all shreds of light,
from wherever they may come.”
- (Aglič) Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum
posted on AlphaWorld
The problems in your life are in direct
proportion
to your unwillingness to
swallow absolutely
everything that's on your
Path.
The problem is not in what's
showing up for you.
The problem is in your
resistance to what's
showing up for you.
It's in your shouting out to
the Cosmos, "This
should not be so!"
When you swallow the entire
"you-niverse,"
then you're not resisting
"what is."
If you're patient, though,
then everything that
shows up for you will
eventually become edible.
However, don't expect it all
to taste just like
dessert!
- Chuck Hillig posted
on Along the Way
The Fragile
Vial
Rumi
to say the
nature of a True Person, language
as large as
longing.
The fragile
vial inside me often breaks.
No wonder
every month
with the moon.
For anyone
in love with you,
it's always these invisible days.
I've lost
the thread of the story I was telling.
My elephant
roams his dream of
Narrative,
poetics, destroyed, my body,
a
dissolving, a return.
Friend,
Would you tell mine?
I've made up
so many love stories.
Now
Tell me!
The truth is, you are speaking, not me.
I am Sinai,
and you are Moses walking there.
This poetry
is an echo of what you say.
A piece of
land can't speak, or know anything!
Or if it
can, only within limits.
The body is
a device to calculate
the
astronomy of the spirit.
Look through
that astrolabe
and become
oceanic.
Why this distracted talk?
It's not my
fault I rave.
You did
this.
Do you
approve of my love-madness?
Say yes.
What
language will you say it in, Arabic or Persian,
or what?
Once again,
Bring the
curly ropes of your hair.
Now
story.
A True Man
stares at his old shoes
and
sheepskin jacket. Every day he goes up
to his attic
to look at his work-shoes and worn-out coat.
This is his
wisdom, to remember the original clay
and not get
drunk with ego and arrogance.
To visit
those shoes and jacket
is praise.
The Absolute
works with nothing.
The
workshop, the materials
are what
does not exist.
Try and be a
sheet of paper with nothing on it.
Be a spot of
ground where nothing is growing,
where
something might be planted,
a seed,
possibly, from the Absolute.
Mathnawi V:
1884-1920, 1959-64
'The Essential Rumi' Coleman Barks/John Moyne
posted on AlphaWorld
across the lake
the tree a nest
the nest an egg
inside the blue
the heartbeat of the galaxies
a promise and a key
each step observed.
each land and sea
how nothing ever ever
did not come on through
this narrow lane
how nothing ever ever
did not pass
this empty handed thief
to imagine he's
been asking 'who am I?'
makes me laugh,
makes me cry
with a hammer hitting carefully,
on who can he
rely to be
A fragile jar
so utterly
and plainly obsolete.
this one and only
thought of it?
- Alan Larus
photo: http://www.ferryfee.com/bluesky/all_or_nothing.htm
Evening
Rainer Maria Rilke
Slowly the evening changes into the clothes
held for it by a row of ancient trees;
you look: and two worlds grow separate from you,
one ascending to heaven, another, that falls;
and leave you, belonging not wholly to either one,
not quite as dark as the house that remains silent,
not quite as certainly sworn to eternity
as that which becomes star each night and rises-
and leave you (unsayably to disentangle) your life
with all its immensity and fear and great ripening,
so that, all but bounded, all but understood,
it is by turns stone in you and star.
Translated by Cliff Crego
posted on AlphaWorld
“Truth disappears with the
telling of it.”
Lawrence Durrell (1912-1990) "Clea" [1960], Chapter 2
posted on AlphaWorld