All things by immortal power
Near or far,
Hiddenly
To each other linked are,
That thou canst not stir a flower
Without troubling of a star.
– Francis Thompson
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There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life,
and beyond which life cannot rise.
And such is the paradox of living,
this ecstasy comes when one is most alive,
and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive.
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~ Jack London, from `The Call of the Wild`
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My mouth blooms like a cut.
I've been wronged all year, tedious
nights, nothing but rough elbows in them
and delicate boxes of Kleenex calling crybaby
crybaby, you fool!
...
Before today my body was useless.
Now it's tearing at its square corners.
It's tearing old Mary's garments off, knot by knot
and see -- Now it's shot full of these electric bolts.
Zing! A resurrection!
...
Once it was a boat, quite wooden
and with no business, no salt water under it
and in need of some paint. It was no more
than a group of boards. But you hoisted her, rigged her.
She's been elected.
...
My nerves are turned on. I hear them like
musical instruments. Where there was silence
the drums, the strings are incurably playing. You did this.
Pure genius at work. Darling, the composer has stepped
into fire.
...
~ Anne Sexton
(The Kiss)
How can we be so superior
to " our barbarous ancestors"?
The truth will never be complete
in any mind or time. It will never
be reduced to an explanation.
What you have is only a sack of fragments
never to be filled: old bones, fossils,
facts, scraps of writing, sprawls of junk.
You know yourself only poorly and in part,
the best and the worst maybe forgotten.
However you arrange the pieces, however
authentic, a story is what you'll have,
an artifact, for better or worse.
So go ahead. Gather your findings into
a plausible arrangement. Make a story.
Show how love and joy, beauty and goodness
shine out amongst the rubble.
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~ Wendell Berry
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When your consciousness has become ripe in true zazen —
pure like clear water,
like a serene mountain lake,
not moved by any wind —
then anything may serve as a medium for realization.
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~ Yamada Kôun Rôshi
Love is not all: It is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain,
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
and rise and sink and rise and sink again.
Love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
pinned down by need and moaning for release
or nagged by want past resolutions power,
I might be driven to sell you love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It may well be. I do not think I would.
~ Edna St. Vincent Millay
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I wanna go all over the world,
And start living free.
I know that there's somebody who,
Is waiting for me.
I'll build a boat, steady and true.
As soon as it's done,
I'm gonna sail along in a dream,
Of my dear someone.
One little star, smilin' tonight.
Knows where he lies.
Stay, little star, steady and bright,
To guide me afar.
Rush, little wind, over the deep,
For now I've begun.
Hurry and take me straight into the arms,
Of my dear someone.
Hurry and take me into the arms,
Of my dear someone.
~ gillian welch
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Tell no one, only the wise,
For the crowd will sneer at one.
I wish to praise what is fully alive,
What longs to flame toward death.
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When the calm enfolds the love-nights
That created you, where you have created,
A feeling from the Unkown steals over you
While the tranquil candle burns.
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You remain no longer caught
In the peneunbral gloom
You are stirred and new, you desire
To soar to higher creativity.
...
No distance makes you ambivalent.
You come on wings, enchanted
In such hunger for light, you
Become the butterfly burnt to nothing.
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So long as you have not lived this:
To die is to become new,
You remain a gloomy guest
On the dark earth.
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~ Goethe
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for Lewis Thomas, and The Lives of the Cell
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My friend, this body is made of bone and excited protozoa... and it is with my body that I love the fields. How do I know what I feel but what the body tells me? Erasmus thinking in the snow, translators of Virgil who burn up the whole room, the man in furs reading the Arabic astrologer falls off his three-legged stool in astonishment, this is the body, so beautifully carved inside, with the curves of the inner ear, and the husk so rough, knuckle-brown.
As we walk, we enter the fields of other bodies, and every smell we take in the communities of protozoa see, and a being inside leaps up toward it, as a horse rears at the starting gate. When we come near each other, we are drawn down into the sweetest pools of slowly circling smells ... slowly circling energies ... The protozoa know there are odors the shape of oranges, of tornadoes, or octopuses ...
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The sunlight lays itself down before every protozoa, the night opens itself out behind it, and inside its own energy it lives!.
So the space between two people diminishes, it grows less and less, no one to weep, they merge at last. The sound that pours from the fingertips awakens clouds of cells far inside the body, and beings unknown to us start out in a pilgrimage to their Saviour, to their holy place. Their holy place is a small black stone, that they remember from Protozoic times, when it was rolled away from a door ... and it was after that they found their friends, who helped them to digest the hard grains of this world ... The cloud of cells awakens, intensifies, swarms ... the beings dance inside beams of sunlight so thin we cannot see them ... to them each ray is a vast palace, with thousands of rooms. From the dance of the cells praise sentences rise to the voice of the man praying and singing alone in his room. He lets his arms climb above his head, and says, "Now do you still say you cannot choose the road?"
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~ Robert Bly
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I.
Somewhere, out at the edges, the night
Is turning and the waves of darkness
Begin to brighten the shore of dawn.
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II.
I arise today
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In the name of Silence
Womb of the Word,
In the name of Stillness
Home of Belonging,
In the name of Solitude
of the Soul and the Earth.
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I arise today
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Blessed by all things,
Wings of breath,
Delight of eyes,
Wonder of whisper,
Intimacy of touch,
Eternity of soul,
Urgency of thought,
Miracle of health,
Embrace of God.
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May I live this day
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Compassionate of heart,
Gentle in word,
Gracious in awareness,
Courageous in thought,
Generous in love.
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~ John O' Donohue
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