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Nondual Highlights Issue #2486, Wednesday, May 31, 2006, Editor: Mark

You condemn yourself for being distracted.
You notice the self condemnation.
You return to the breathing.

- Bhanteji, posted to DailyDharma

The fire that iron or gold needs -
would it be good for fresh quinces and apples?
The apple and quince are just slightly raw;
unlike iron, they need only a gentle heat.
But gentle flames are not enough for iron;
it eagerly draws to itself the fiery dragon's breath.
That iron is the dervish who bears hardship:
under the hammer and fire, he happily glows red.

-Rumi, Mathnawi II: 827-830, version by Camille and Kabir Helminski, from Rumi: Daylight, posted to Sunlight

Do not sit long with a sad friend.
When you go to a garden,
do you look at thorns or flowers?
Spend more time with roses and jasmine.

- Rumi, version by Coleman Barks, from Open Secret, posted to AlongTheWay

Leave the familiar for a while.
Let your senses and bodies stretch out

Like a welcomed season
Onto the meadows and shores and hills...
Open up to the Roof.

Like a blooming night flower,
Bestow your vital fragrance of happiness
And giving
Upon our intimate assembly.

Change rooms in your mind for a day.

All the hemispheres in existence
Lie beside an equator
In your heart.

Greet Yourself
In your thousand other forms
As you mount the hidden tide and travel
Back home.

All the hemispheres in heaven
Are sitting around a fire
Chatting

While stitching themselves together
Into the Great Circle inside of
You.

- Hafiz, translation Ladinsky, Hemispheres, posted to Poetic_Mysitcism

Little Summer Poem Touching the Subject of Faith


Every summer
I listen and look
under the sun's brass and even
into the moonlight, but I can't hear

anything, I can't see anything -
not the pale roots digging down, nor the green stalks muscling up,
nor the leaves
deepening their damp pleats,

nor the tassels making,
nor the shucks, nor the cobs.
And still,
every day,

the leafy fields
grow taller and thicker -
green gowns lofting up in the night,
showered with silk.

And so, every summer,
I fail as a witness, seeing nothing -
I am deaf too
to the tick of the leaves,

the tapping of downwardness from the banyan feet -
all of it
happening
beyond any seeable proof, or hearable hum.

And, therefore, let the immeasurable come.
Let the unknowable touch the buckle of my spine.
Let the wind turn in the trees,
and the mystery hidden in the dirt

swing through the air.
How could I look at anything in this world
and tremble, and grip my hands over my heart?
What should I fear?

One morning
in the leafy green ocean
the honeycomb of the corn's beautiful body
is sure to be there.

- Mary Oliver, from West Wind: Poems and Prose Poems

"Twilight" by Helena Nelson-Reed, by kind permission.

More of Helena's wonderful art can be seen at: http://www.fine-art-studios.com/intro.html